LINDEN, N.J. – Twenty-five years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a small group of officers still serving with the Linden Police Department carries a distinction that is becoming increasingly rare within the department: they were there in the aftermath.
Dozens of Linden police officers traveled to Ground Zero and the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island in the days and weeks after the attacks, joining thousands of responders involved in recovery operations. A quarter-century later, the department says only a handful of those officers remain on active duty.
Dozens of Linden Officers Answered the Call After 9/11
The attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon and United Airlines Flight 93 killed 2,977 people and had an especially profound impact across the New York metropolitan area.
In the aftermath, approximately 40,000 responders and other workers participated in rescue, recovery and cleanup operations at the World Trade Center site and Fresh Kills, according to the department.
Linden officers were among them.
The department said it is difficult to determine exactly how many of its officers participated, but estimates that dozens assisted during the days and weeks following Sept. 11.
Those assignments brought local New Jersey officers into the massive operation to recover victims, search debris and process material removed from Lower Manhattan.
For years afterward, there was a visible reminder of which Linden officers had served there.
They wore pins given to them in recognition of their service following the attacks. As careers ended and officers retired, however, fewer of those pins remained on the uniforms of active Linden officers.
“Today, 25 years later, only a handful of our Officers are left who can still wear them,” the department said.
Ground Zero Pins Carry Memories of Where Officers Served
For Linden Police, those pins have taken on greater significance as the number of active officers who participated in the response has declined.
“Those pins are more than a piece of metal,” the department said. “They are a reminder of where these Officers went, what they witnessed, and the service they provided during one of the darkest periods in our nation’s history.”
The department’s remembrance focuses not only on the 2,977 people killed in the attacks but also on the lasting toll among those who worked at Ground Zero and other recovery sites.
First responders and recovery workers have continued to suffer illnesses associated with their exposure during the aftermath, and many have died in the years since.
“The sacrifice of the first responders who answered the call that day – and those who continue to suffer from its aftermath – can never be forgotten,” Linden Police said.
A Local 9/11 Legacy Becomes Part of Department History
For younger officers joining the department today, the Sept. 11 response increasingly belongs to an earlier generation of Linden police.
For the handful who remain, however, the anniversary marks something they experienced personally — leaving their own community in Union County to join a regional response to an attack just miles away in New York.
Their shrinking numbers also mark the passage of time inside the department. Twenty-five years after dozens of Linden officers answered the call, the pins still worn by a few remaining veterans preserve a direct connection between today’s police force and the response that followed Sept. 11, 2001.