A new commanding officer has taken over the N.Y.P.D.’s First Precinct, whose headquarters are in Tribeca. Captain Brendan Timoney introduced himself to the community at Community Board 1’s full board meeting on March 27, two weeks after his first day at the precinct on Tues., March 12.
Timoney is taking over from Captain Edward Winski, a veteran of almost 20 years on the police force who had been the First Precinct’s commanding officer since May 2010. Winski was rotated to the Midtown Manhattan South district.
Timoney had previously served as executive officer of Manhattan’s Ninth Precinct for just under two years, which covers East Houston to East 14th St. and from Broadway to the East River. A 15-year veteran of the police force, he is also the nephew of former First Deputy Commissioner John Timoney who left the N.Y.P.D. in 1996, and went on to head police departments in Philadelphia and Miami.
At the Community Board 1 meeting last week, Captain Timoney said he joined the New York police force in 1998 in the 52nd Precinct in the Fordham section of the Bronx and stayed there for about five years.
In 2003, he was promoted to sergeant and ended up in the Midtown North Precinct in Manhattan, where he said he worked with “quality of life conditions, peddler conditions, and dealt with the narcotics units.”
Timoney was then promoted to lieutenant in 2008 and served as the administrative lieutenant in the 43rd Precinct, in the Parkchester and Soundview sections of the Bronx, before moving to the Ninth Precinct in 2011 with a promotion to the rank of captain.
Now he is settling into his role as commanding officer of the First Precinct, which consists of a single square mile but covers a district rich in residential, commercial and tourist attractions in Tribeca, the Financial District, Battery Park City, the Seaport and Soho. It has some of the lower crime statistics in the city, with a crime rate that had dropped by over 50 percent between 2001 and 2012. In the first two months of 2013, the overall crime statistics in the First Precinct rose by about five percent compared to the same time last year.
