EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: NJ STATE POLICE SUPERINTENDENT PATRICK J. CALLAHAN
/EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: NJ STATE POLICE SUPERINTENDENT PATRICK J. CALLAHAN
By Daniel Del Valle and Rick Vanderclock
In April 1995, Colonel Callahan enlisted in the State Police as a member of the 115th Class. He served as Recovery Bureau Chief in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy and worked with state and federal partners to develop and implement long-term recovery effort strategies. Colonel Callahan also served as the Commanding Officer of the Emergency Management Section and Assistant State Director of the Office of Emergency Management. He was the chairman of the Command and Control Subcommittee of the Emergency Management Section when New Jersey hosted Super Bowl XLVIII, working to develop and implement all operations undertaken by the Public Safety Compound.
Colonel Callahan then served as the Deputy Superintendent of Operations, supervising and directing the operational activities of the 1,800 enlisted members assigned to Field Operations as well as the operational duties and responsibilities of the Traffic and Public Safety Office, Victims Services Unit, Fatal Accident Investigation Unit, Highway Traffic Safety Unit, and the Criminal Investigations Offices within Field Operations.
On October 31, 2017, Colonel Patrick J. Callahan was sworn in by Gov. Chris Christie as the 14th Colonel of the New Jersey State Police.
Colonel Callahan earned his Bachelor of Arts Degree from Villanova University and a Master of Administrative Science from Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Colonel Callahan is the son of retired State Police Major Mick Callahan, who served as Division Staff Section Commanding Officer under Colonel Clinton Pagano, the 9th Superintendent of the State Police.
Colonel Callahan resides in Warren County with his wife Linda, two sons and two daughters.
Rick Vanderclock of the Blue Magazine was honored to have the opportunity for an exclusive interview with the colonel.
THE BLUE MAGAZINE: Colonel, could you tell us about what led you to become a state trooper? I know your father was a trooper. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Patrick J. Callahan: I had never wanted to do anything else since I could talk and walk. I think that's because I was around my father, I was around troopers my whole life. He was a trooper for 29 years and retired as a major. Going to graduations and events and troop B picnics, helping him shine his leather for inspections or, sadly, sometimes before trooper funerals. That smell of Kiwi and Brass always takes me back to the kitchen table. I have a great one I gave him for Christmas one year was a picture of him in uniform and me in uniform and the simple phrase underneath that said, my father didn't tell me how to live, He lived and let me watch him do it. And that's the truth to this day, that he took so much pride in this organization, wanting to be part of something bigger and better than himself. That was just contagious. My grandfather was a Linden police officer for 32 years, so I saw that in him, as a young boy, too. And I saw this incredible desire to simply give and to put others before yourself, which is really what this, this profession is about. My dad’s role was that was an easy one for me. To be blessed enough to come through that gate at Seagirt and have my father hand me my badge, you know, almost 30 years ago, and then to be in this spot is just a surreal and humbling experience to be the 14th colonel of the state police.
THE BLUE MAGAZINE: Is the agency exactly where you would have liked it to be when you took charge seven years ago? I know you've implemented mental health. You have a mental health unit, what do you call it exactly?
photo credit: njsp
Patrick J. Callahan: Peer advocacy, peer advocate.
THE BLUE MAGAZINE: I know that you were instrumental in starting that. Can you tell me about that?
Patrick J. Callahan: I think the division as a whole is in a good place again. We need law enforcement as a whole to continue to evolve as technology and artificial intelligence evolve. We started with horses and Harley-Davidsons 103 years ago although technology helps us, it's still the women and men of the agency that are our greatest asset from a mental health perspective.
THE BLUE MAGAZINE: I want to talk to you about the migrant crisis at the border wall. These migrants are being shipped across the entire country and New Jersey is no different. How do the state police prepare potentially for a terror attack, maybe pre 9-11? The news is saying that right now is a heightened threat level and things are not looking good. My question is, are the state police prepared for any type of terrorist attack?
Patrick J. Callahan: That knocking on wood. And I'll separate the migrant crisis from a terrorist attack. I went down to Arizona in November to meet with the sheriff of Cochise County and their efforts to try and protect the border from a human trafficking standpoint, as well as from the influx of fentanyl from the Mexican cartel. It is a huge undertaking that they've taken on down there. We went down there to kind of create that link and that bond, knowing that things that happen on the border of California, Texas, and Arizona do impact us here. I know that the mayor of New York City at the end of December put in his executive order to kind of limit and try and control when buses arrived. That would have an impact here in New Jersey. And it has had a minimal one. What we're doing to circumvent that, what has happened is those migrants have been bused to train stations in New Jersey and then get on trains to New York City. Our primary function right now is to let New York City know that they're becoming more common. We haven't had really a lot in the last few months, a total of 78 buses have arrived at New Jersey transit train centers.
Over 90% of them have boarded trains. The other ones have been picked up by family or friends, whether they have stayed in New Jersey or not. We don't know. We are seeing a little bit of an impact on food pantries and churches, enrollment in schools, but not really. It's been a very minimal impact as far as the influx. But from a planning standpoint, we do have to be prepared. We have to be prepared. If five of those buses decide we're not going to New York City, we're going to drop them. You pick a place on a rest area on the turnpike, and for over the past 18 months, we've had a migrant arrival working group planning to identify reception centers. How do we process these migrants? What are their immediate needs? What are the wraparound services, and how do we look and plan in order to get them situated? Not really an impact in New Jersey so far, but we're planning for that. And from a terrorist standpoint our troopers are embedded in the Joint Terrorism Task Force with the FBI. We have troopers in New York City, in the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative. We have troopers embedded in Philadelphia's Joint Terrorism Task Force, because here we are stuck between two major cities.
COL. CALLAHAN WITH HIS FATHER RET. MAJOR F.M "MICK" CALLAHAN
PHOTO CREDIT: COL. CALLAHAN
The most densely populated state in the nation is New Jersey. So that is a daily seven-day-a-week effort to make sure that we are not only communicating but what measures are we taking? I think our homegrown violent extremists are probably our greatest concern, those lone wolves that people will call them because they're not in a network. Sometimes networks are easy to identify. This is a disgruntled person may be inspired online for whatever purpose. That's the deal with the Internet now you don't have to go out to a meeting. That meeting comes right to you and like-minded, hateful people connect. That's why we have to be very mindful of what's happening on social media, and what's happening online. The last thing I want to see happen is a tragedy occur, and then somebody goes, oh, we saw that coming because he posted this last month, or he was known for this, or he was identified a few years ago. And I think that's where we need to make sure that we're on top of our game to make sure that we keep everybody safe.
THE BLUE MAGAZINE: It must have been extremely challenging for you to be the colonel during COVID-19. I don't know what that must have been every single day. You used to have meetings with the governor. You guys gave a TV interview daily briefing every day. Did you find that extremely hard, or was it? How did you get through those days?
Patrick J. Callahan: I was set up here because I couldn't go home as I was trying to protect my family. Of course, I didn't go home that much anyway, but it was a block that was never in the state police academy. There was no playbook. The last Spanish flu was in 1918. The state police was started in 1921. What I've said since and then reflecting upon it, was that it was exhausting and energizing at the same time because I watched, beyond the state police. I mean, we were, an emergency management embedded here. It was phenomenal to watch when the challenge came up, what we did, and that was hospital bed capacity expansion to work with the Army Corps of Engineers and to go out and identify mothballed hospitals and say, we need to turn this into a hospital and to watch that in short order. 2000 hospital beds were created almost overnight, field medical stations popping up to care for people and mortuary affairs. We had decedents and corpses. We didn’t know what to do with the hospitals and funeral homes. They couldn’t handle it. Ordering body bags, ordering refrigerated trailers to hold. Each one of them held 82 corpses.
To watch? Yeah. Renting a warehouse in central Jersey at 10,000 square feet. Refrigerated warehouse. Nobody wanted decedents who had had COVID right around food and what was kept refrigerated. But we found a nursery that facilitated winter from bulbs from Holland. So, these bulbs, you know, tulips and daffodils, we said, rather than, you know, keep bulbs in there. Can we keep corpses in there? And we partnered with this nursery that was a bizarre thing to go see. Working with the National Guard and troopers, building shelves, and having people because we wanted to and needed to care for them because they had passed away and we needed to treat them with respect, uh, our missing persons, if we didn't know the identification of that person, our missing persons would fingerprint them and try to assist us. Some nuances testing vaccine sites. Some things just kept coming and coming. During that time, we also had 17,000 Afghanistan refugees come during a pandemic. That same week they came, we got hit with Ida, a tornado in the south, flooding that killed 30 people in the north.
THE BLUE MAGAZINE: That's not easy to manage all that at once.
Patrick J. Callahan: Because we had troopers that were again, not leading it, but helping coordinate the planning, the logistics, the operations, understand that our decisions were life-saving decisions and that we were trying to literally build that airplane in flight while it was on fire.
THE BLUE MAGAZINE: Crazy, history is going to look back and say, you did a great job, Colonel, because that was a very trying time for this whole country.
Patrick J. Callahan: I was proud of them. I was proud of all of us across all the departments. The Commissioner of Health, Judy Persichilli, even now is one of my closest colleagues. My first call to her was when we had a pastor coming into Newark airport that we think had this thing called COVID. I called her, and I think we both hung up. She hung up thinking, what the hell does Pat know about public health? And I hung up, going, what does she know about emergency management? Then we soon came to know a lot about both.
THE BLUE MAGAZINE: Would you give me an example on how you rely on faith on a daily basis? Could you explain some of that?
Patrick J. Callahan: Good question. I'll start with how it's evolved over time. My faith, especially in the workplace. I think back to during COVID. March 13th, 2020, I was asked by a reverend to come on a prayer call. That call goes every single day of the week, seven days a week, at 8:00 in the morning, Christmas, Father's Day, Wednesday and August. I have been on that call every single day since March 13th of 2020. I am the only law enforcement officer on the call. I am the only Caucasian on the call. It has opened lines of communication. We call it the Interfaith Action movement; I consider those people my brothers and sisters. Um, but it has guided me in my faith through some pretty hard times through family struggles, through health issues. Uh, I think of George Floyd. I had been on that call for three months when he was murdered. And I think, what if I had tried to get on the day after he was murdered and tried to explain law enforcement's perspective.
That's my faith, because I know sitting here today, that each spring that those trees out front are going to bud, that those clouds will part and the sun is there, and that daffodils will pop out of that ground and surround a wall of honor. That's what makes me put my feet on the floor and put one step in front of the other in what is the noblest profession on the face of the earth.
