Military and Police Experience
Drafted into the Army after graduating Brooklyn Automotive Trades High School in 1944, he served as an military policeman and a criminal investigator with the Army in Europe for two years.
Ward entered the NYPD on June 1, 1951 as a patrolman, becoming the first black officer assigned to Brooklyn's 80th Precinct, where he faced resentment from both white residents and white fellow cops. He wasn't assigned a locker at the precinct, forcing him to dress at home and ride the subway to work in his uniform for three years.
During the next 15 years in uniform, he rose through the ranks to Lieutenant, serving in the Patrol Division, Juvenile Aide Division, Detective Division, and Legal Bureau. His rise was aided, in part, by his after-work studies at Brooklyn College and Brooklyn Law School that earned him undergraduate and law degrees—invariably with top honors.
He eventually served as special legal counsel to Police Commissioner Howard R. Leary. Ben left the uniformed ranks to become executive director of NYPD's Civilian Complaint Review Board in 1966.
Two years later he was named a Deputy Police Commissioner of Trials, serving as chief hearing officer in all departmental disciplinary matters.
Later he became Deputy Commissioner of Community Affairs with responsibilities for the Youth Aid Division and the Auxiliary Forces Section.
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Famous quotes containing the words military, police and/or experience:
“In all sincerity, we offer to the loved ones of all innocent victims over the past 25 years, abject and true remorse. No words of ours will compensate for the intolerable suffering they have undergone during the conflict.”
—Combined Loyalist Military Command. New York Times, p. A12 (October 14, l994)
“I guess a career in the police didn’t really prepare you for this, did it?”
—Bob Hunt (b. 1951)
“And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)