NYPD on 9/11: The 23 Killed, the Toll Since, and the Rebuild

Twenty-three NYPD officers were killed responding to the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, and at least 241 more had died of 9/11-related illnesses as of 2024.¹ The attacks also remade the department itself, pushing the NYPD into intelligence and counterterrorism work on a scale no American city police force had attempted before, and into a long legal fight over how far that work could go.

The 23 Officers Killed That Day

The dead came from across the department, but the Emergency Service Unit, the NYPD’s tactical rescue teams, lost the most: 14 of the 23 served in ESU squads that went into the towers early. The others came from precincts, the Transit Bureau, the Bomb Squad, Traffic Control, and the Police Academy’s video production unit.²

Sergeant John G. Coughlin, Emergency Service Squad 4
Sergeant Michael S. Curtin, Emergency Service Squad 2
Police Officer John D’Allara, Emergency Service Squad 2
Police Officer Vincent G. Danz, Emergency Service Squad 3
Police Officer Jerome M. Dominguez, Emergency Service Squad 3
Police Officer Stephen P. Driscoll, Emergency Service Squad 4
Police Officer Mark J. Ellis, Transit Bureau, District 4
Police Officer Robert Fazio, 13th Precinct
Sergeant Rodney C. Gillis, Emergency Service Squad 8
Police Officer Ronald P. Kloepfer, Emergency Service Squad 7
Police Officer Thomas M. Langone, Emergency Service Squad 10
Police Officer James P. Leahy, 6th Precinct
Police Officer Brian G. McDonnell, Emergency Service Squad 1
Police Officer John W. Perry, 40th Precinct
Police Officer Glen K. Pettit, Police Academy Video Production Unit
Detective Claude D. Richards, Bomb Squad
Sergeant Timothy A. Roy, Traffic Control Division Bus Unit
Police Officer Moira A. Smith, 13th Precinct
Police Officer Ramon Suarez, Transit Bureau, District 4
Police Officer Paul Talty, Emergency Service Squad 10
Police Officer Santos Valentin Jr., Emergency Service Squad 7
Detective Joseph V. Vigiano, Emergency Service Squad 2
Police Officer Walter E. Weaver, Emergency Service Squad 3

Officer Moira Smith of the 13th Precinct was the first officer to radio in a report of the attack after witnessing the first plane hit the North Tower. She had received the NYPD’s Distinguished Duty Medal in 1991 for saving lives after a subway crash, and was last seen evacuating civilians from the South Tower. She was posthumously awarded the NYPD Medal of Honor, the department’s highest decoration.³⁴

Officer John W. Perry of the 40th Precinct was at One Police Plaza that morning filing his retirement papers. A New York University School of Law graduate who planned to practice medical malpractice law, Perry left the paperwork and went to the World Trade Center. Witnesses reported he was in a tower lobby helping civilians evacuate when the building collapsed, reportedly trying to assist a woman who had fainted moments before.⁵

On September 9, 2005, all public safety officers killed on September 11 were posthumously awarded the 9/11 Heroes Medal of Valor by President George W. Bush.⁴

What the NYPD Did on September 11

More than 2,000 NYPD officers were on scene at the World Trade Center by 9:15 a.m.⁶ The Aviation Unit put helicopters over the towers to assess conditions, and a sixth ESU team stood by for a rooftop rescue that was ultimately judged impossible.⁷ Officers evacuated civilians, shut down the subways, managed traffic, and secured the site.

A 2002 McKinsey and Company review grouped the department’s work into 16 tasks and found that it performed 10 of them effectively, including the broader evacuation of Lower Manhattan and securing the subway system. The review also found significant breakdowns: about 10 percent of officers went directly to the site instead of designated mobilization points, emergency vehicle congestion blocked access, a workable site credentialing system was not in place until September 16, and there was no “single strong operational leader,” unclear roles among senior leadership, and confusion from the number and movement of command posts.⁷

Even so, the 9/11 Commission found that all but roughly one hundred of the thousands of people who worked below the impact zones in both towers escaped, often with help from emergency responders.⁸

Communication between the NYPD and FDNY was one of the most scrutinized failures. A separate McKinsey review of the FDNY found the two departments “rarely coordinated command and control functions” and “rarely exchanged information” that day. No senior NYPD chiefs were present at the FDNY’s incident command post. FDNY commanders in the tower lobbies had no access to reports from the NYPD helicopter above, which had a vantage point on the structural condition of the buildings.⁹

Within the NYPD, radio technology itself did not fail, but channel congestion made transmissions difficult to understand: only 42 percent of officers surveyed could clearly make out radio traffic. Overloaded or damaged cell networks made things worse.⁷ The 9/11 Commission called the existing city plan, which rotated command between departments depending on the type of emergency, a “prescription for confusion.”¹⁰

Why Hundreds More Officers Have Died Since

The rescue, recovery, and debris removal effort at Ground Zero ran nine months, from September 11, 2001, through May 30, 2002.¹¹ NYPD officers were the overwhelming majority of the “protective services” responders at the site, averaging 72 days of work there. In September 2001, they made up 57 percent of personnel working directly on the pile and 41 percent of those in the surrounding area. From October 2001 through June 2002, more than half worked both day and night shifts.⁶

Twenty-nine percent of protective service workers who arrived on September 11 were caught directly in the dust cloud from the collapses.⁶ Recovery crews worked in heat that could melt the soles of their boots, with prolonged exposure to pulverized concrete, asbestos, heavy metals, and other toxic debris.¹² Shortages of personal protective equipment, especially gloves and respirators, were documented in the McKinsey review.⁷

The long-term toll has grown each year. As of 2024, at least 241 NYPD officers had died from 9/11-related illnesses, more than ten times the number killed on the day itself.¹ Across all responders and survivors in the World Trade Center Health Program, the most commonly certified conditions are chronic rhinosinusitis, gastroesophageal reflux disease, sleep apnea, asthma, and various cancers; the most prevalent certified cancers are non-melanoma skin cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer, lymphoma, and thyroid cancer. As of March 31, 2024, nearly 6,900 program members across all categories had died.¹³ In a single ceremony at One Police Plaza in May 2019, 47 names were added to the NYPD memorial wall, including 15 officers who had died from 9/11-related illnesses that year.¹⁴

Health Care and Compensation for NYPD Responders

Two federal programs created by the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, signed into law on January 2, 2011, handle most of the care and compensation available to NYPD responders and their families.¹⁵

The World Trade Center Health Program, run by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, covers medically necessary treatment for certified 9/11-related conditions with no co-payments, deductibles, or out-of-pocket costs.¹⁶ NYPD officers qualify as “general responders” if they took part in rescue, recovery, or cleanup operations and meet specific location, time period, and hours requirements between September 11, 2001, and July 31, 2002.¹⁷ A 2015 reauthorization extended funding through 2090 to account for cancers and chronic illnesses that take decades to appear.¹⁵

The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund pays for economic losses caused by physical injuries from exposure to toxins at the crash sites. Since reopening in October 2011, it has awarded more than $16.8 billion to over 71,000 claimants, with nearly $2 billion in 2025 alone. Eligible claimants include first responders and anyone who took part in rescue, recovery, and cleanup at the World Trade Center between September 11, 2001, and May 30, 2002. You do not need to be currently ill to register.¹⁸

There is a separate step officers often miss. The NYPD’s police union requires officers who worked at Ground Zero to file a “Notice of Participation” with the Police Pension Fund to protect eligibility for accident disability pension benefits. The deadline to file that notice has been extended to September 11, 2026.¹⁹

How the Department Rebuilt Itself

The most far-reaching change was the creation of a municipal intelligence and counterterrorism operation without precedent in American policing. Under Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who took office in January 2002, the NYPD stood up a counterterrorism unit of 1,000 officers and created a new Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence position, filled by David Cohen, a 35-year CIA veteran who had run the agency’s global espionage operations as Director of Operations from 1995 to 1997.²⁰ One attorney involved in later oversight litigation described the shift as moving from a law enforcement model focused on illegal activity to an intelligence agency model focused on gathering information.²¹

The NYPD created new civil service titles for intelligence research specialists recruited from academia and the military, expanded its presence on the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force from 17 to 120 officers, built linguist programs in Arabic, Urdu, Pashto, and Farsi, and posted senior officers with foreign police agencies overseas.²² It launched the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, which deployed closed-circuit cameras, license plate readers, and chemical, biological, and radiological sensors south of Canal Street before expanding to Midtown. Operation Nexus sent detectives to private businesses to watch for suspicious transactions, running more than 25,000 visits by recent count. NYPD Shield coordinated information sharing with private security. The Hercules Teams provided heavily armed tactical deployments at high-profile sites. The Domain Awareness System, developed with Microsoft, pulled camera feeds, license plate reads, environmental sensors, and department databases into a single real-time platform.²³

Between 2002 and 2013, the NYPD, working with federal partners, played a role in defeating or averting at least 15 terrorist plots targeting New York, including planned attacks on the Herald Square subway station, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Federal Reserve Building.²²

On the operational failings exposed in 2001, McKinsey’s NYPD review had called for pre-assigned command roles, a visible operational leader identified early in any major incident, clear reporting lines, strict radio discipline, override capability for critical transmissions, redundancy in the 911 system, better intelligence sharing with federal agencies, and a comprehensive disaster response plan codifying procedures across all functions.⁷ Nationally, law enforcement agencies adopted the National Incident Management System to meet federal preparedness mandates, and many cities built fusion centers to consolidate intelligence sharing across jurisdictions.²⁴

The Surveillance Controversy and the Court-Ordered Limits

The same intelligence apparatus credited with disrupting plots generated one of the most contentious civil liberties fights in the department’s history. Under Cohen and Kelly, the NYPD’s Intelligence Division conducted systematic surveillance of Muslim communities in New York and New Jersey, mapping neighborhoods, monitoring mosques, infiltrating student groups, and running undercover officers and informants. The program used 28 “ancestries of interest” as proxies to target Muslims.²⁵ NPR reported that undercover officers known as “rakers” were tasked with “mapping the human terrain” of ethnic neighborhoods, while “mosque crawlers” monitored activity inside houses of worship.²⁶

A December 2011 CIA inspector general’s report revealed that the CIA had embedded four officers within the NYPD with “irregular personnel practices” and little formal documentation. At least one CIA officer engaged in surveillance on U.S. soil believing there were “no limitations” on those activities.²¹ An NYPD commanding officer acknowledged the program had produced no terrorism leads.²⁷

Three major lawsuits followed. Hassan v. City of New York, filed in 2012 in New Jersey, was the first; a federal appeals court in Philadelphia compared the NYPD’s actions to historical mistreatment of Jewish Americans, African Americans, and Japanese Americans.²⁵ Raza v. City of New York, filed in June 2013, was resolved through a joint settlement with the long-running Handschu v. Special Services Division case, approved by a federal district court in March 2017.²⁷

The settlements imposed significant limits on NYPD intelligence operations. The modified Handschu Guidelines now explicitly bar investigations where race, religion, or ethnicity is a substantial or motivating factor. They require “articulable and factual information” before opening a preliminary investigation into political or religious activity, impose time limits with six-month reviews, and restrict undercover officers and informants to situations where less intrusive means are insufficient. A civilian representative was placed inside the NYPD to monitor compliance and report directly to the court. The department’s 2007 report “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat” was ordered removed from the NYPD’s website.²⁷ By April 2018, the NYPD had settled all three lawsuits, agreeing to more than $1 million in damages and legal fees in the final case and committing to develop new Intelligence Bureau policies with input from Muslim community members.²⁸

1
Fox29. 241 NYPD Officers Have Died From 9/11-Related Illnesses
2
NYC.gov. NYPD 9/11 Tribute
3
New York State Senate. Moira Smith
4
Officer Down Memorial Page. Police Officer Moira Ann Reddy Smith
5
SILive.com. John Perry Obituary
6
National Center for Biotechnology Information. WTC Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program Study
7
NIST. McKinsey NYPD After-Action Report
8
9/11 Commission. 9/11 Commission Report Executive Summary
9
NYC.gov. McKinsey FDNY Report
10
CBS News. Communication Breakdown on 9/11
11
ABC7 New York. 9/11 Memorial Museum Commemorates 24 Years
12
9/11 Memorial and Museum. Honoring Four Women at Ground Zero
13
CDC. WTC Health Program At A Glance
14
ABC7 New York. 47 Names Added to NYPD 9/11 Wall
15
CDC. WTC Health Program Laws
16
NYC.gov. WTC Health Program
17
CDC. WTC Health Program Eligible Groups
18
VCF.gov. September 11th Victim Compensation Fund
19
NYC PBA. WTC Resources
20
The New York Times. Ex-CIA Spy Chief to Run Police Intelligence
21
The Guardian. NYPD-CIA Collaboration Surveillance
22
MikeBloomberg.com. Counterterrorism
23
NYPD Shield. NYPD Shield Initiatives
24
Office of Justice Programs. Post-9/11 Evolution of Large Urban Law Enforcement Agencies
25
Center for Constitutional Rights. Settlement Reached in NYPD Muslim Surveillance Lawsuit
26
NPR. NYPD Intelligence Unit Seen Pushing Rights Limits
27
ACLU. Raza v. City of New York
28
The Washington Post. NYPD Settles Third Lawsuit Over Muslim Surveillance