Six of the Beach Haven Police Department’s 12 members were recently fitted for new bulletproof vests, a piece of equipment the officers are required to wear while on duty that, depending on the circumstance, could mean the difference between life and death.
“The horrible fact of law enforcement is (the vest) is not just to protect from other people’s guns,” said Beach Haven Police Sgt. Tom Medel. “The primary bullet that it’s designed to stop is the one that we carry (40 caliber), in case we were ever disarmed. It covers a broad range of bullets, but that’s the main reason why we always wear a vest, because no matter where we go, there’s always at least one gun in every situation.”
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| Photo by Jack Reynolds Beach Haven Police Department members prepare for their fittings. |
The danger is “always in the back of your mind, between the bad feelings for cops, the gangs out there, the people that are just bad people – people that, for whatever reason, woke up on the wrong side of the bed that day and want to do harm to somebody,” Medel said. But the increased risk for cop killings nationwide due to ill feelings about their roles mostly stemming from the recent cases regarding Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York City, has really heightened the fear for officers’ loved ones.
“There’s always somebody bigger and badder, no matter who you are,” Medel said. “You never know if you’re going to get disarmed. You could get hit over the head, knocked out. You could get a real bad guy who could figure out how to get (your gun) out of the holster and shoot you with it, if they want to. ... That’s the primary concern. It’s important, we tell every officer, that you do your job to the best of your ability and that you go home to your families at the end of your shift.
“I don’t understand how, just because we wear a badge and a gun, it makes us automatically the bad guy,” he added. “… As police officers you have to make split-second decisions that no jury or anybody else could understand unless you’re in the person’s shoes.”
“I’ve got kids,” Beach Haven Detective Sgt. Jim Markoski emphasized.
Luckily, the new Armor Express Halo IIIA body armor, chosen by the department for its superior protection and comfort, provides the “highest threat level for soft body armor protection,” Robert Leary, director of sales at Atlantic Uniform Co., who provided the fittings, told The SandPaper.
“This Halo IIIA (which costs roughly $900) is a top of the line piece of equipment for the officer. … There are less expensive vests with the same threat level rating that could be purchased, but the biggest problem there is it’s less comfortable for the officer,” said Leary, easily crumpling the ballistic panel from the Halo model into a tight ball before grabbing a less-expensive Quantum IIIA vest (about $700), which is a lot stiffer and more restrictive to movement.
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| Photo by Jack Reynolds Michael Perkins, a provisional officer, is fitted for his first vest. |
However, the Quantum IIIA vest still does the job ballistically, Leary said. That vest is the same one worn by East Orange Police Sgt. Michael Williams, who was shot “pretty much at point blank range” approximately two months ago, Leary added.
“The vest saved his life,” said Leary. “He was in the hospital and out the same day.”
While citizens’ lives are important, Medel said, cops’ lives are equally as important.
“We’re people, too,” he said. “We deserve to be able to go home to our families at the end of the day without fear. We have to be safe. We have to do everything in our power to be as safe as possible.
“That’s the issue that really stands out,” he added. “The people that are pro cop, you know who they are. They’re the ones that listen to what you have to say. They’re the ones that look at you and smile and wave. The people that are anti-cop you don’t know until they’re attacking you, whether it be verbally or physically. We don’t know who the bad guy is; the bad guy knows who he or she is. You never know who you’re dealing with, or what side is going to come out of that person.”
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| Photo by Jack Reynolds The Armor Express Halo IIIA body armor is considered top of the line. |
For safety purposes, the standard vest package comes equipped with two ballistic panels, front and back; a ballistic strike packet to go in the pocket; and a concealable carrier for wear underneath the uniform shirt. The vest needs to provide adequate coverage around the torso and also fit comfortably to allow for movement so that the officer will wear it, Leary said.
“Every vest is custom,” he noted. “There’s no mediums, large, extra larges.”
Vests can wear out over time due to normal activity, including deterioration from heat, sweat and regular movement. The armor usually has a five-year warranty and liability insurance period according to the Rational Replacement Policy, which goes back many years and has been accepted by most manufacturers, Leary explained. This means vests should be replaced just as often.
“It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still wear the vest if you don’t have a new one because whether this vest will stop bullets for five years and two days or 10 years, it’s better than not wearing any vest at all,” Leary said.
Although the BHPD receives some grant money from the federal government specifically for vests, it is not enough to pay for all of them, said Medel. The department’s vest fund currently has enough money to replace about four of the six needed; the force’s other six members will need replacement vests within the next three years.
A 24-hour soda machine outside the police station used to bring in “a decent amount of money,” which would be used to purchase vests, but the machine was taken back by Pepsi because the department was not buying enough soda from the distributor, said Markoski. A new machine, which was put in the lobby after Superstorm Sandy, “pretty much just pays for itself.”
But this year, the local department does not have to worry about where it will get the money for vests. Jeffrey Heinel, a financial firm stock broker from Lawrenceville who owns two properties in Beach Haven, has offered to pay for the six new vests.
Heinel has been donating money to the BHPD the past few years “for whatever they need, are short of and don’t have funds for, as long as it falls into the basic category of ‘is this something that would save a police officer’s life?’” he said.
“That’s my prerequisite for my gifts,” Heinel explained. “I don’t want to buy sofas for their lounge. That’s not money well spent, is it? If this is going to save a cop’s life, then it’s a practical and much needed donation, correct?”
The BHPD is “very much in debt” to Heinel “for helping us out with these,” Medel said.
“I was absolutely dumbfounded when the gentleman said that he would pay for all of them because you never want to ask somebody for help,” explained Medel. “We’re not in the business for asking other people for help; we’re the people that give the help.
“Every day you sit there, and you never know. Granted we live on sunny Long Beach Island, but any time you listen on the news and when something happens in some remote place or some resort area, people go, ‘I never thought it could happen here.’ So you never can let that be how you’re running your department, because it always can. ... We can’t tell you how grateful enough we are to the guy who purchased these vests.”
Until now, Heinel, who has purchased new radios and defibrillators among other equipment for the department, has remained anonymous to the public regarding his donations. The recent negative attention surrounding police officers encouraged him to speak with The SandPaper about why he believes “cop’s lives matter,” and to “push back a little bit.”
“I’m not some guy that failed the police test 20 years ago and has always wanted to be a cop. That’s not the reason I give the money,” he said. “I give the money to aid that of what it is they do on an ongoing basis so that we can afford to be in communities like this. One of the reasons I continue to hang onto the property (in Beach Haven) is the comfortability that I got regarding the community. It’s a phenomenal community. I think the police do a fantastic job.
“We all live in a community where we rely upon the police,” Heinel continued. “We rely upon them to provide us with safety and a certain standard of living. I only wish there were more people that understood that. These people, not only are they responsible for our well-being in a community, but they’re also responsible for the standard of living that we’ve got. You have many people down there (in Beach Haven) that have multimillion-dollar houses, and one of the reasons we are afforded such luxuries is the fact that they (the police) do such a good job. Can you imagine for a moment if they weren’t as proficient in doing what they do, what our real estate values would be in Beach Haven? They’d be significantly less, wouldn’t they? I can name six or seven communities along the Jersey Shore where crime is prevalent, and the houses aren’t worth near that of what they are in Beach Haven. I’m sure you can probably name those towns, too.”
Heinel said he often donates to the communities he has interactions with and has even purchased service dogs for quadriplegics as well as soldiers coming back from the Middle East with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I try to spread my charitable givings around evenly so that the dollars go to work immediately,” he said. “I don’t like giving to charitable organizations where my money goes to just simply support the overhead. In this particular instance I get to see exactly how my money’s used, and I get to see exactly 100 percent of it go to work as opposed to administrative salaries for people who supposedly are collecting money to do good things.”
Heinel also expressed his dismay for the number of people with investment properties on LBI, who, he claims, “give nothing back to the community.”
“I’m a big believer in that you can’t just take everything and not give a little bit of it back,” he said. “I have the good fortune of making enough money so that I have the luxury of being able to do this. For years this has been anonymous, but the police need to be shown in a different light. They’ve had a bad light shown on them in the past year and a half, and this is not who the police are. They’re your next-door neighbors who are putting on uniforms and going out every single day to protect people like you and I so that you have the freedoms that you have. … Enough’s enough. These guys don’t deserve this. And again, I’ll underscore the catchphrase: police lives matter. We seem to have forgotten that as a country. We’ve forgotten that in the last two or three years. ...
“I don’t have a dog in this race, other than I just want to do the right things for the places in which I live,” he added. “What if you were the spouse of a Beach Haven police officer and your husband was shot and the vest that he was wearing didn’t protect his life? Tell me what you’d be feeling, when if someone would have stepped up and simply made a contribution to the community, a life would have been saved? I can’t give you a better reason as to why I do these things.”
— Kelley Anne Essinger
This article was published in The SandPaper.
This article was published in The SandPaper.
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