The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey welcomed 71 recruits from the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD) academy’s 123rd class during a June graduation at St. Joseph High School in Metuchen, New Jersey. The new recruits, who represent a class benefiting from one of the PAPD’s most intensive outreach programs intended to identify the most highly qualified recruits drawn from a broad spectrum of backgrounds, join the agency as it bolsters its security initiatives and capabilities amid an evolving threat landscape.
The recruits received their official PAPD shields and identification at a ceremony held at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in Lower Manhattan earlier in the week, a reminder of the department’s enduring mission and sacrifices made by their predecessors, including the 37 PAPD officers who were killed on 9/11. Among the graduating class are two descendants of officers who responded to the 9/11 attacks at the World Trade Center. Sean Krueger and Keith Walcott Jr. received their PAPD shield and badge identification numbers from the very heroes who inspired their paths to law enforcement: Krueger’s grandfather, retired PAPD Sergeant Conrad Krueger, who survived the South Tower collapse; and Walcott’s father, retired PAPD Deputy Chief Keith Walcott Sr., who responded to both the 1993 and 2001 World Trade Center attacks.
The rigorous recruitment effort targeting qualified candidates brought in officers from a broad spectrum of backgrounds, including African American, Hispanic/Latino and Asian recruits. The class brings a wealth of linguistic diversity, with nine languages spoken —including Spanish, Korean, Bengali, Albanian, Turkish, Haitian Creole, Ukrainian and Chinese (including the Cantonese, Fujianese and Mandarin dialects), in addition to English. A quarter of the class are women, the highest female representation of any PAPD class. Almost half of the class enters the force with prior experience in law enforcement, and 13% are military veterans.
The incoming class arrives six months after the Port Authority’s Board of Commissioners approved the agency’s 2025 budget, which included a record investment of more than $1 billion in safety and security operations. This funding is designed to enhance the agency’s overall security posture and support new initiatives to address both traditional and emerging threats, including cyber and terrorism-related risks…