A Three-Part Series from the POAM Podcast Archives
This September marks twenty-five years since the morning of September 11, 2001. A morning that took nearly 3,000 lives, among them 343 New York City firefighters, 37 Port Authority police officers, and 23 NYPD officers, and changed the work of policing forever.
Over the next three weeks, POAM will share three recordings from our podcast archives, made when two men who lived through that day spoke at our annual conference in Grand Rapids: retired NYPD Detective Sergeant Joe Blozis and New York City firefighter Tim Brown back on the 10th anniversary in 2011.
Week 1: Joe Blozis: The World’s Largest Homicide Scene
Joe Blozis had just finished an 18-hour shift with the NYPD Crime Scene Unit when the call came. He spent the next eight months processing what he calls the world’s largest homicide scene, an investigation that ran through May 2002 and, through DNA identification, still brings closure to families today. What he wanted every officer to remember: “There was no New York City Fire Department. There was no New York City Police Department. We were all one.” And of the fallen: “You’re not a badge number. Somebody out there loves you. You’re a person.”
Read About and Listen to Joe’s Story
Week 2: Tim Brown: Surviving Both Collapses
Tim Brown was assigned to the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center when the first plane passed over the roof of his building. In the lobby of Tower One, his best friend, Captain Terry Hatton of Rescue One, wrapped him in a hug and said, “I love you, brother. I may never see you again.” Terry and his entire team made it to the 83rd floor and never came back. Tim survived both collapses and lost 93 friends that day. What stayed with him was the sight of ordinary office workers, four and five at a time, stopping to carry strangers to safety. “There’s the American spirit,” he said. “I knew in my heart at that moment that we would be okay.” In the years since, Tim helped win federal health care legislation for responders sickened at Ground Zero because “those terrorists are still killing us.”
Listen on September 4th, 2026
Week 3: One Conversation Together
The final recording is different. Later that same day, after the conference sessions ended, Joe and Tim sat down together – one NYPD, one FDNY – and kept talking. No podium, no prepared remarks. Just two men who lived through the same morning from different sides of it, trading the details only the other one could fully understand. Twenty-five years on, it is the closest thing to hearing that day the way the people who worked it still talk about it with each other. It is exactly what both men meant when they said there were no separate departments at Ground Zero. There was one team.
Listen on September 10th, 2026
“There Was No NYPD, No FDNY. We Were All One.”
That sentence of Joe’s is the thread that runs through all three recordings. Between Tim’s account of office workers carrying strangers to safety and Joe’s eight months on the pile, what these conversations preserve is not the scale of the loss, it is the completeness of the response.
How September 11 Changed Michigan Policing
“September 11 changed policing in every corner of this country, including here in Michigan,” said POAM President Jim Tignanelli. “The way we train, the way agencies talk to each other, the way we plan for the unthinkable. None of it looks like it did in 2001. But the most important lesson those two men left with our members is that on the worst morning in American history, there were no separate uniforms. There was one team. Twenty-five years later, that is still the standard, and we have not forgotten the price that was paid to teach it.”
Never Forget
On this 25th anniversary of September 11th, we remember our brothers and sisters lost that morning; the police officers, firefighters, EMS personnel, court officers, and federal agents who ran toward the rubble, and all of the responders taken in the years since by illnesses carried home from Ground Zero, a toll still growing today.
A quarter century has passed. Our promise has not changed.