The targeted killing of two police officers in Brooklyn on Dec. 20 lent a somber air to an otherwise celebratory moment, the promotion of three supervisors in the Hoboken Police Department this past Monday. In a well-attended ceremony at City Hall, Charles Campbell was promoted to Captain and Brian Brereton and Danilo Cabrera became lieutenants.
“After what happened in New York City this weekend,” Mayor Dawn Zimmer said to the officers assembled, “we understand that when you put on that uniform, you become a target of crazy people who think they will become a hero by hurting you.”
“On behalf of the people of Hoboken, we appreciate the work that you do for us every day,” she added.
“Sometimes the greatest moments happen during the toughest times,” remarked police chief Ken Ferrante, noting trying times when each of the men had been at their best. For Campbell, said Ferrante, that moment came on Sept. 11, 2001, when he led a group of Hoboken police officers dispatched to New York to help.
No Hoboken police officer has been shot in the line of duty since 2003, but this past July, a Jersey City patrolman was shot and killed while responding to reports of a robbery at a Walgreens on Communipaw Avenue. That incident also appears to have been a targeted killing.
Ferrante said all of his officers would be on heightened alert and operate in two-man units until the funerals of the slain NYPD officers were over and protests inspired by the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown had subsided. Those protests have yet to find their way to Hoboken.
Hoboken police already receive active shooter training multiple times a year, but Ferrante said he was considering holding the program in diverse locations like hospitals and the Stevens Institute of Technology campus.
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