First of an occasional series
NJSACOP Legends & Pioneers
Chief Peter J. Siccardi
Over the past one hundred years, the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police has neither lacked for big personalities, nor for individuals with a record of impressive accomplishments. Many Chiefs are still warmly remembered with love and respect in their hometowns, some recalled with awe( and perhaps with a bit of lingering intimidation), and still others with a mixture of all of the above.
But there is one New Jersey Police Chief who during his time was a towering figure on the local, state, and national stage. Although as the decades passed his memory began to fade, his important( if unacknowledged) legacy remains undimmed. His name was Chief Peter Siccardi.
From 1921 until his retirement in 1939, Peter Siccardi served as Chief of the Bergen County( Traffic) Police Department. Bracketed between those years was a record of leadership, accomplishment and innovation that brought Chief Siccardi to the heights of his profession. Time moved on, and took with it much of the remembrance of what Chief Siccardi meant to law enforcement. Luckily, not everyone forgot.
In 2010, Chief Siccardi’ s grandson, Mr. Wayne Tiso, set out to properly memorialize a beloved member of his family. His efforts led to a small ceremony which included family members and members of the Ft. Lee and Bergen County Police Departments. The coverage of this event in turn led the NJSACOP to rediscover one of our legends. Peter Siccardi was born in 1885 to French and Italian immigrant parents in New York City. As a boy he moved with his family to Ft. Lee, NJ. As a very young man he joined the Ft. Lee Police Department, and in 1912 became the agency’ s first motorcycle officer. An article in the June 21, 2010 Bergen Record picks up the story:
At the time, The Bergen Evening Record called the borough‘ a resort for New Yorkers on a holiday.’‘ Hours were long, streets were hot and dusty, and many of the pleasure-bent New Yorkers who came to Fort Lee were tough – very tough citizens’ according to an article in the newspaper in 1935.
The first motorcycle officer in Fort Lee, Siccardi earned a reputation among the tough New Yorkers as a vigilant traffic cop, prompting at least talk of taking him out.‘ One of our residents recently overheard a conversation in one of the New York garages, in which it was planned to knock out Officer Siccardi and his motorcycle,’ according to an Evening Record article in 1935.‘ The plan was to have two speeding autos, one coming behind the other, and when the motorcycle got after one the other was to put on speed and run him down.’
By an odd twist of fate, Officer Siccardi had an accident on his motorcycle without the“ assistance” of angry New Yorkers, which put him out of commission for a year. He returned to law enforcement as a translator and detective with the Prosecutor’ s Office before moving on to the Bergen County Sheriff’ s Office. In 1916 he joined the Bergen County Police Department( then known as the Traffic Police), and in 1921 was named the department’ s first chief. It is here that he begins his remarkable career as a police executive.
From the very start of his tenure as chief, Peter Siccardi was a dominant figure in the NJSACOP, and his interests were not merely local; he advocated for making State Chiefs Meetings more convenient for Chiefs in South Jersey so as to encourage their membership in the Association.
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