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Today marks the end of an illustrious 33 years of service to this great city. A son of Brooklyn and lifelong New Yorker, Michael Kemper lived out his childhood dream of becoming a New York City cop. He soared through the ranks of this storied police department - and bids us farewell as the NYPD Chief of Transit.

I marvel at the ability of our Transit cops to spot wanted criminals in a sea of faces - which is what these Manhattan Transit officers did while assigned to a Queens subway station for the day, spotting a repeat felon who mugged a fellow rider at knifepoint a boro away in Manhattan. Great awareness and a meaningful apprehension!

Either this 30-year-old man had to repeat every grade in school, or he was using a child’s student MetroCard to beat the subway fare…our guess is the latter. Whether it’s jumping the turnstile, crawling under it, or in this case, using an unauthorized MetroCard, your Transit cops are confronting all manner of fare evasion in our subways. Today, that proactive work resulted in the removal of this firearm, and the arrest of a repeat Transit offender who was also wanted on an active warrant.

Transit cops assigned to train patrol confronted a man urinating in between train cars last night, only to learn he was wanted for a bank robbery (at Capitol One) just last week. The headlines almost write themselves: •from hold-up to not holding it in •urine a wee bit of trouble •nature calls, but so does a jail cell •a case of #1 to close out the case of Capitol One Glad to report that although the parolee fought our officers for several minutes - at the edge of the subway platform nonetheless, everyone emerged largely unscathed. Great work by our Train Patrol Force team.

Our NYPD officers are hitting record numbers in apprehensions, yet these shoplifters just keep resurfacing. It's an absolute disgrace that storekeepers have to keep essentials like baby formula under lock and key. Retailers are practically turning their stores into fortresses, chaining up household items such as laundry detergent. Such drastic measures shouldn't be their burden to bear. It's time we recognize that it's not just shoplifting, but a chronic issue caused by a small group of pests wreaking havoc in our city. Time for stronger measures.