fter 16 years in uniform, as both on patrol and as a CPU coordinator, Joanne Dowd can still say that the best advice she ever received came not from somebody connected to the NYPD but from her father: “He worked for the Transit Authority in their engineering department, but before that he was a Marine and there was one thing he was really insistent about. ‘You never leave anybody behind,’ he always said. He didn’t, and I’d like to believe I never have.”

The 40-year-old Dowd has been working at the ideal since reporting directly to the 19th Pct. following her Academy graduation in October 1990. Oh, and when she’s not doing that, there’s the small business about being a wife and the mother of four children from 14 to 2. “Hard?” she laughs. “That ship sailed a long time ago. Who has time to think about if it’s hard? You get up and you do it.” And yet there have been several moments when, the Astoria native admits, “hard” seemed like the least of it. “Without question the worst was 9/11. When the first reports came in, a sergeant and eight of us went down to give a hand. We really thought at first it was just an accident. But on the way down there, the second plane hit. The sergeant sensed right away what was going to happen with all the stress on the towers and the gas and smoke in the air. He made sure we knew before getting on the scene that we were involved in a lot more than an accident and that things were likely to get a lot worse before they got better.”

And what was it like when they got there? “Absolute mayhem. At first we were just trying to get people out of the area. Then, when I was standing at the corner of Church and Vesey, the ground started to move under me. It was the second tower going down, and I went down with it, blowing out my knee. Two guys from the 23rd Pct. picked me up and got me further uptown.”

Despite her knee, Dowd remained on duty for the rest of the day, finding people in the lethal smoke issuing from the Twin Towers and guiding them to safety. “It was absolutely horrendous. Maybe the biggest thing we had going for us was that there wasn’t time to sit back and start thinking about what we were in the middle of. You just kept going. One practical problem led you to another.”

The practical problems included the knee she damaged. “You can’t compare yourself to what other people lost that day,” she says. “And I don’t think anyone who was there will ever downplay the mental trauma of what took place. But that knee started me on a round-robin of doctors and surgeons and insurance people who would cover this but not cover that and too bad if it had to come out of your pocket.”

Making matters worse was an aggravation of the leg injury during an assault call. “This guy was beating up his girl friend on 88th Street. He was pretty drunk, and when we grabbed him, I lost my footing, and bang went the knee again.

"Ask me what I’d change around here if I were commissioner for a day, and I’d zero in on the medical assistance programs we have. I’ve learned what they’ll do and not do the hard way.” As for the specific command where she has been working, Dowd has detected some disturbing signs in recent years of bad times coming. “The veterans talk about 20 years ago being bad, and I don’t think we’re back to that point yet. But compared to what’s been going on the last few years, you can’t be too comfortable. Guns, for example, are beginning to show up an awful lot lately. They seem to be all over the place.”

And then there’s the two-ton gorilla in the 19th Pct. — the banks.

“Obviously, as long as you have that much money concentrated in one area, the potential for a major problem is always there. But what’s made it worse, I think, is the banks themselves. They’re all competing with one another to look customer-friendly, and one of the casualties of that is less visible security because they’re afraid people will be put off by some place that doesn’t look happy, happy, happy. Take something as simple as the paid detail guy who used to stand around as a deterrent. A lot of banks have just eliminated that role because they’re afraid it’ll make potential customers think twice about opening an account. In my opinion that’s cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

According to Dowd, it all falls within a larger syndrome in 2006 New York City. “You can talk about this problem and that problem, whether this kind of felony is spiking or that one’s fading. But what worries me more than anything is the complacency of people lately. Sometimes you’d think nothing ever happened to the Twin Towers. Murders are down? ‘Oh, great! They’ll never rise again!’ That kind of thing. I just don’t believe it’s that easy. And if there’s another disaster or things get bad again, everybody will act amazed!”

Between her duties on East 67th Street and her home in Lynbrook, L.I., Dowd also finds the time for running a charity boxing evening for assisting cops who are ill or in other dire straits. The initiative has drawn as many as 3,000 people to the Seventh Regiment Armory to see a card of cops, firemen, and assistant prosecutors mixing it up with one another. “We’ve taken in as much as $78,000,” she says. “Maybe it’s just another way of saying that we can’t leave anybody behind.”

— Donald Dewey