The NYPD has added a new chapter to its Hall of Heroes, unveiling a set of bronze plaques in the lobby of One Police Plaza on Tuesday that now bear 103 additional names. For the first time, the memorial includes 60 members who died during the COVID-19 pandemic, as families and colleagues gathered inside the department’s lower Manhattan headquarters to honor both sworn officers and civilian staff.
According to the New York Daily News, the new plaques recognize civilian employees, school safety officers, traffic enforcement agents and crossing guards alongside traditional line-of-duty deaths. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said that “these officers and civilian members continued to show up for this city at a moment when uncertainty affected everything about daily life,” and the outlet reported that most of those honored died either of 9/11-related illnesses or complications from COVID-19.
Detective Islam remembered
One of the names now etched into the Hall is Detective Didarul Islam. The Associated Press reported that he was killed in a Midtown office shooting on July 28, 2025, while on duty. CBS New York covered his funeral in the Bronx and noted that he was posthumously promoted to detective during the service, a final honor that drew officers from across the city.
Why the additions matter
The decision to include pandemic-related deaths widens the Hall’s scope at a time when New York is still confronting the long, uneven fallout of earlier disasters. The federal World Trade Center Health Program reports that more than 130,000 responders and survivors remain enrolled for monitoring and care, with thousands of later deaths tied to World Trade Center exposures. Former Chief of Department Joseph Esposito, who died in January 2024 after a battle with cancer that his family linked to work at Ground Zero, has been cited in local reporting as a high-profile example of that lingering cost.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani joined NYPD leaders to pull back the curtain on the new bronze panels, which officials said “will forever grace the lobby of 1 Police Plaza,” according to the New York Daily News. The additions now stand alongside decades of names already inscribed in the Hall of Heroes, forming a permanent roll of honor inside the department’s headquarters.
For the families and former colleagues who filled the lobby, the ceremony offered public acknowledgment of losses that arrived both suddenly and slowly: the immediate dangers of front-line police work and the quieter, long-term health effects tied to 9/11 and the pandemic. The newly mounted plaques are intended to serve as a daily, visible reminder of those sacrifices to anyone who walks through One Police Plaza.
