Chief O’Reilly flies Cavan flag on streets of New York
Inside Story
PAUL FITZPATRICK spoke to KATHLEEN O’REILLY, daughter of a Kilnaleck man. Based in New York, Kathleen has recently been promoted to the position of Chief of Transit in the NYPD and oversees one of the largest subway systems in the world...
A breezy April day in 2015 and the Cavan footballers are in a spot of bother. After a trip to visit the site of the Polo Grounds on their way back to JFK after five days in the Big Apple, the team bus has broken down.
With the clock ticking, Connie O’Reilly, one of the organisers, knew exactly who to contact. A call to his namesake, Assistant Chief Kathleen M O’Reilly, Manhattan North Borough Commander, sorted what was fast becoming a serious situation.
Within minutes, the players were on their way to the airport, accompanied by the wail of sirens and the flash of lights.
Six years on, Kathleen O’Reilly is now Chief O’Reilly and is responsible for the entire subway system in New York, overseeing 2,500 officers. It is a long way from Drumlara, Kilnaleck, birthplace of her father James Pat, to such lofty heights but the proud Irish-American carries that sense of home with her everywhere she goes.
“I’m a 30-year veteran, I joined the New York City Police Department in April 1991. I was recently promoted, last October, to take over as Chief of Transit,” Kathleen told the Anglo-Celt this week.
“The New York City Transit is the largest mass transit system in north America. The weekly average pre-Covid was 5.6 million riders, it dropped substantially, I think we are at about two million now, but every day we are now increasing more and more.
“There are 472 stations and 665 miles of main line track. We operate 24/7.
“It’s a great honour for me to take over the men and women of the Transit Bureau. There are approximately 2,500 police officers assigned to Transit, which is one of the largest police presences in any subway system in the world.
“Our 2,500 police officers on Transit is larger than most of the other police departments in America so it’s an honour for me.
“Prior to taking over, I was in Manhattan North commanding officer, I was in charge of 12 precincts north of 59th Street, all the way up to Washington Heights. That also encompassed the Polo Grounds. It was a pleasure when the Cavan football team came out to New York and wanted to make a trip to the Polo Grounds, obviously we facilitated that.”
The Polo Grounds is now a ‘housing project’ and is regarded as quite a dangerous area. Chief O’Reilly knows the area inside out from her days on the beat around there.
“I was also a housing cop. The Polo Grounds is now one of our public housing developments. Yes, I was a little concerned for the safety of the team going up there but we were able to provide an escort for our guys. It was great to see them take a look back at the history and see what the Polo Grounds meant to Cavan and its football team.
“The bus had a little trouble and we needed to get them to the airport to make sure they weren’t going to miss their flight. And not only did we have a highway escort take them, we had somebody waiting at the airport to make sure that they wouldn’t miss that plane.”
With ties so strong to the football heartland that is Crosserlough, it’s no surprise.
“My father was born in Kilnaleck and his brother, Charlie, still lives there, he runs a farm. My aunt Bridie was Mother Superior at the convent in Ballinamore for many years before she retired. I’m very proud of her too and very proud of my Cavan roots,” she explained.
“I actually grew up in England. I was born in Queens and then we moved back to England in 1975 and we lived in the small town of Wigan. My mom was born in Louisburgh, Co Mayo, and they had left Mayo for Wigan in the north of England so I lived there for 15 years and then I came back to the United States.
“It was always my dream job to become a New York City police officer and I’ve been lucky to do this dream job every single day, even through Covid.”
Kathleen’s father first went to Scotland for work, learning his trade there as a carpenter, before he moved to New York and met his future wife. They later moved back to Wigan which was where a young Kathleen decided that, one day, she wanted to work for the famous NYPD.
Following a childhood dream
Her inspiration? Cagney & Lacey, the popular 1980s American cop show, set in Manhattan!
“When I would tell people that, my mother used to say ‘can’t you say something more inspiring like you wanted to help people, you wanted to do good?’ and I said ‘Ma, I grew up watching Cagney and Lacey in England, Cagney was the blonde detective and she was always the one locking up the bad guys and I wanted to be her!” she quipped.
“There’s a small paper on the Upper West Side, it’s called the West Side Journal, and they did an article and I said that to their reporter and my mother was disgusted with it that I couldn’t say something more profound. They titled it ‘the Upper West Side Cagney’.
“Even back in St Joseph’s High School in Horwich, near Wigan, everybody in that school knew, ‘O’Reilly? She’s going to be a New York City cop.’
“I talked about it every day and eventually got back and was able to fulfil my dreams.”
It has been a long journey from her fledgling days on the force to now, where she holds one of the most pivotal roles.
“When I started in 1991 I was assigned to the housing developments in Harlem. It was kind of the tail end of the crack epidemic so there were drugs on every street corner. Most of the residential buildings in Harlem were not occupied, many of them were burned out.
“My first trip up to my command, I could barely get there because there were double parked cars and some of those cars were on fire on the street. There was a lot of chaos, a lot of disorder in the early ’90s."
Cleaning up the city
“When Commissioner Bratton came in, it was ‘take care of the small things and the big things will correct themselves’. You started with the small things, broken windows… we cleaned up the city.
“Now, coming towards the tail end of my career, we’ve cleaned up the city, we’ve made the city the safest city in America and all of a sudden now it seems like it’s trickling back down to the bad old days.
“We’re committed to making sure that doesn’t happen but the deck is stacked against us. There are a lot of bail reform laws that were just recently passed in New York City that hurt us.
“We don’t want to arrest our way out of problems by arresting innocent people but we want to keep the real bad people – and that’s a very small element of criminals, they are the worst of the worst in New York City - they should not be released on bail, they should be remanded and held and that’s not the case today.
“So that’s been hampering us as is the hashtag ‘defund the police’. They take money out of the police budget, take it out of homeless outreach and out of school safety and they are two critical components of what we do.
“We are seeing a resurgence of homeless and mentally ill people. Inevitably, that falls on our doorstep, especially in Transit. Where do people in crisis seek refuge? The subways. We do our best to assist our partner services to get these people the help they need but it’s sad times to see the city that we cleaned up coming back to the bad old days…
“We are having a mayoral election soon and many of the candidates are talking about what they want to see and we all hope that what they want to see is law and order and not disorder on the streets.
“It’s a very difficult job at this time and I commend any young officer that gets sworn in today.”
There is a sense of things coming, if not full circle in New York then certainly part of the way.
“I’ve enjoyed my time in the Police Department. Obviously things are challenging right now, not just in light of Covid but in light of the protests in recent times with high-profile policing incidents. It doesn’t have to happen in New York City – every time there is a high-profile incident involving policing, the protests always end up on our doorstep.
“We are always prepared for it, we are currently gearing up for the verdict next week in the trial of Officer Chauvin so we’ll see what happens with that. I’ve just left Police Headquarters, I was in a meeting this morning for three hours with the Police Commissioner, gearing up for how our response is going to be.
“We obviously allow for peaceful protest, that’s what we do as an agency, but at the same time we can’t allow criminal behaviour, unruly disorder to rain havoc on everyday New Yorkers who just want to get to and from work, riding the subway or walking the streets.
“That’s our goal for the coming weeks and it’s a big task but I know the men and women of the New York Police Department are up to it.” Chief O’Reilly sees her role now as “giving back”.
“The New York City Police Department has been extremely good to me. I’ve gotten two Masters degrees.
“I went to John Jay College of Criminal Justice to get my Masters degree. I was afforded a scholarship to the Naval Post Graduate School out in Monterey, California and I received my Masters in Homeland Security. I was afforded an opportunity to go to Harvard for their Senior Executive State and Local Government programme for three weeks one summer and I was also able to go to the Police Management Institute at Columbia University.
“Throughout my career I’ve been very blessed in being afforded these opportunities and now I’m at the point in my career where I have to make sure I take care of my people and make sure they get the same opportunities. It’s been this way since I went back to the Manhattan office and took the helm in 2014, it’s time for me to give back to the men and women who supported me throughout my career.
“They support me, quite frankly, every single day and I’m just blessed I’m supported with some tremendous human beings.”
That was reflected in an article posted on the NYPD’s official social media channels on her appointment which stated that “officers and supervisors who have worked under her leadership appreciate Chief O’Reilly’s frontline, boots-on-the-ground approach". She has been honoured as the NYPD Holy Name Society Person of the Year and the NYPD Gaelic Football Person of the Year, both in 2019, and her links to the various Irish societies are strong; she regularly marches with Cavan or Mayo as well as the Police Department on St Patrick’s Day.
She travels the nation with the NYPD American football team, too, and hopes to return to Ireland next year with them. A trip to Kilnaleck might even be on the cards.
“When I was growing up in Wigan, I spent almost every summer in Cavan. We’d go to Cavan for a couple of weeks and we’d go to Mayo to my Mom’s home place. I spent many a summer on the farm with Charlie, milking the cows, taking the eggs in from the hens… That’s when I didn’t let the hens loose on the farm which aunt Bridie used to get very upset with us about.
“I have very pleasant memories of riding on the back of Uncle Charlie’s tractor and taking the milk to the creamery which they did back then. I have very fond memories.”
Fighting crime and keeping people safe on the New York underground may seem light years away from the more sedate pace of rural Cavan a few decades back but this proud Breffni woman has never forgotten her roots.