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NEW JERSEY COPS ■ FEBRUARY 2014
From left: NJ Transit Officer Jobs and K-9 Titan with
Officer Dietz
From left: NJ Transit Officers Trump and De Marshall
“There are also some things we do regularly that other
departments don’t do at all such as crowd scanning and behavioral assessment,” he added. “We didn’t focus on one more than
another; all of our training was rolled all into one to make a
complete product. You use all those tools from your arsenal to
make sure you can identify a behavioral assessment problem.”
The public proved to be one of the department’s greatest
assets, and its “See Something, Say Something” campaign overwhelmed the metropolitan area. Like the Seahawks’ defense
crushing Payton Manning’s passing, NJ Transit officers presented a dominant presence that ensured a smooth and
uneventful day.
“There wasn’t an hour block where you didn’t hear a commercial about (the campaign) that week,” said Truppa. “That’s
very unique to policing in this area.”
Special teams
The Local, which is used to working with more than 400 New
Jersey municipalities surrounding its jurisdiction, spent the
week working alongside law enforcement agencies from
Amtrak, the FBI, TSA screeners, the Federal Air Marshalls and
the State Police, which headed the operation.
NJ Transit officers are issued unique pieces of technology
such as radiation detectors for their duty belts that can detect
miniscule levels of radiation in people passing by. “We have so
many pieces of technology, but a lot are tools we use already,”
confirmed Truppa.
Despite no specific terror threats during the game, recent suicide attacks on a trolleybus and a train station in Russia that
killed more than 30 people within weeks of the Winter Olympics
had raised worries among authorities prior to the Super Bowl.
To preempt such scenarios, an Emergency Operations Center command post was setup in an “undisclosed location.”
“Nobody was left unaware,” explained Charles Phillips, Local
304 President, who was stationed in the command post all
week. “Representatives from each agency were represented
with supervision that kept communications open,”
Kickoff
At 1:41 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday, the first train left from
Secaucus to the Meadowlands, and a level of excitement passed
through the officers.
“The day was finally here,” Truppa exclaimed. “We had all our
training and preparations put in place. We were able to get that
excitement focused and we were ready to rock and roll. There
wasn’t any anxiety or nervousness for the PBA members. The
guys were trained well and were ready to put it into play.”
For a normal game during the regular season, roughly 8,500
fans pass through NJ Transit to watch the Jets or Giants at
MetLife in East Rutherford. The unofficial record of people
moved to the stadium was for a U2 concert in June 2011 when
21,000 spectators passed through the system. To put this into
perspective, on Super Bowl Sunday, 28,000 passengers went to
the stadium and approximately 35,000 – 40 percent of the total
crowd – took mass transit back to Secaucus or to the Port
Authority in New York.
This well-oiled machine is all the more impressive when you
note the funnel that was created for getting to the stadium. On
any other day, passengers are able to get to the Meadowlands
directly from areas such as Hoboken. To keep all venues of entry