Hipster Cop Retires. The Nickname Still Applies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/nyregion/hipster-cop-retires-the-nickname-still-applies.html

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In the history of the New York City Police Department, members have stood out for heroic arrests and exemplary leadership, but there has been only one Hipster Cop.

He is Detective Rick Lee, 51, who became an internet sensation as the nattily attired plainclothes detective assigned to patrol the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in Manhattan in 2011.

On Friday, the Hipster Cop became a hipster civilian, as Detective Lee officially retired from the department after a 25-year career.

But while he may become plain old Mr. Lee, he expects that his nickname will not be retired along with him. Even after his fame subsided after the 2011 protests ended, Mr. Lee has been regularly recognized, usually by younger people who tend to follow social media. He does not expect this to change.

“I still get ‘hipster cop’ yelled at me in the street,” he said. “It’s definitely the Twitter, Facebook crowd, people who live their lives online.”

Mr. Lee gained the hipster moniker on blogs and social media for his debonair style in the middle of the chaotic weeks of protests, mostly around a makeshift camp set up in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan.

With his cool demeanor, he became an instant celebrity, an internet meme, and one of the few recognizable figures in the protests.

“I found the whole thing funny,” he said. “It kind of generated its own life.”

That life included scores of profiles and interviews, including one in GQ magazine about his fashion sense, which began when he was a teenager and that eventually developed into more of “an English country look” with a penchant for vintage clothing.

A slim man with a shaggy-chic hairstyle and cool-nerd eyeglasses, Mr. Lee stood out at Zuccotti Park, which was then dominated by demonstrators in casual or rumpled clothing and police officers in blue uniforms.

The detective would pad around chatting with cops and demonstrators alike, and used his sudden style popularity to become a crucial liaison between the department and protesters.

“How I dressed knocked a lot of walls down, and people found me more approachable,” said Mr. Lee, who as a plainclothes detective followed a longstanding department tradition of sharply dressed detectives but “updated it” with certain twists, he said. He wore tweed suits in the winter and seersucker or linen in the summer.

On more casual days, he favored cardigan sweaters, glasses and skinny ties to go along with his skinny trousers.

He said he always found the term hipster, in its contemporary meaning, imprecisely applied to him, as if lumping him in with “bearded dudes in Williamsburg with flannel shirts and construction boots.”

But in the classic sense of the term, it did apply because “a hipster in its purest form is someone who dresses out of the norm,” added Mr. Lee, who lives on Staten Island.

He joined the Police Department at age 25 and worked as a patrolman, mostly in the First Precinct, in Lower Manhattan, for eight years before getting assigned to the precinct’s Community Affairs division, which helps mediate with the public.

That command includes SoHo and TriBeCa, and over the years, Mr. Lee met many celebrities, like Robert De Niro and David Bowie, a fashion favorite. At the annual Tribeca Film Festival, he routinely helped coordinate city permits and security.

In the weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Mr. Lee worked at ground zero with officials from the city’s Office of the Medical Examiner identifying and processing recovered human remains. He said that he still got coughing fits from breathing in debris at the time.

But it was at Zuccotti Park where he rose to prominence, as an affable but firm intermediary between protesters and police officials.

Regarding the demonstrators, Mr. Lee said, “I became friends with a lot of them, just seeing them every day.”

Often his message was “Let’s work this out before the guys with the hats and bats come in,” he recalled.

And he has never stopped being known as the Hipster Cop. Take, for example, a New Year’s Eve party a couple of years back.

“There was a guy looking at me and he said, ‘You’re him,’ and I just said, ‘Yeah, it’s true,’” he recalled. “He worked in I.T., and he said, ‘You have no idea how huge you are in this field.’”

Mr. Lee said he was disappointed that the department never approved a recommendation made by his commanding officer that he be promoted from third-grade to second-grade detective before he retired.

“I’m kind of upset about that,” he said, adding that the promotion would have motivated him to delay his retirement for another two years to help him increase his pension.

Nevertheless, Mr. Lee, who is single, said he would use his retirement to enjoy his Shetland sheepdog, his two nieces and a nephew. He hopes to finally enjoy the Tribeca Film Festival as an attendee, as well as visit far-flung places that work kept him from.

“I’ve never been to California,” he said.