Vincent Ching: NYPD Officer Vincent Ching on ‘Serving the People’

This past April marked Vincent Ching’s sixth year as an NYPD officer in the 19th Precinct, a job which he describes as all about “giving back to my community, serving the people.”

“My phone is always available; I have people reach me on my days off. My department number is always on. Anything that serves the public safety, I give them all the advice that they can.”

“He’s always smiling, this guy,” fellow officer Anthony Nuccio says of Ching. “He’s always got a positive outlook.”

A native New Yorker, Ching grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn and attended John Dewey High School in Gravesend. He says he always wanted to become an NYPD officer. However, from the very beginning, his ambitions encompassed more than one career path.

Before joining the NYPD, Ching taught gym class at a new middle school in Jamaica, Queens. There, he went above and beyond the role of gym teacher, developing the school’s basketball team with the goal of motivating students to academic success.

“I was always wearing basketball shoes, so [the kids] thought it was cool. A lot of kids there, they love basketball, and the only way that I saw to make them come to school consistently and preform well in the classroom was, let me add sports in to the mix.”

“I set a level of criteria that they had to meet in order to be on the basketball team,” says Ching. He describes the rewarding process of seeing students’ growth both on and off the court. “[It] was the best thing that I would wake up to, knowing that most of my time in the day would be spent with the kids.”

While he currently works in crime prevention and apprehension on Madison Avenue, Ching says one of the most rewarding moments in his career happened when he was a beat cop, fresh out of the academy.

It was Easter Sunday of his first year as a policeman. Ching and his partner were getting breakfast before their morning shift when they got a call saying a woman was in labor in her car just two minutes away. They rushed to the scene, doing their best to help as they waited for medical professionals.

“[The woman] was obviously distressed and so was her husband,” says Ching. “We tried to calm both parties down, and at same time we’re just making sure the newborn didn’t have any issues. It’s a stressful situation — nobody expected this to [happen] in a car seat.”

“I was there when a new life was given. A newborn had just gotten its first breath! It was rewarding.”

Ching says that after his career in law enforcement is over, he would love to go back to teaching. In the meantime, while he enjoys his current role in the 19th Precinct, Ching has other aspirations he hopes to fulfill during his time as a police officer. One passion in particular derives from his love of Donut, his pet Shiba Inu.

“I would love to get into the K-9 unit. Having a dog as a partner, I feel like that’s one of the coolest things you could do on this job.”