Chief of Police Michael Coppola (ret.)
Michael J. Coppola is a retired Chief of Police for the Palisades Interstate Parkway Police Department, a Bi-State agency, headquartered in Alpine, New Jersey. During his tenure, he founded the country’s first CJIS Compliant cloud hosting company, CJIS Solutions which provided cloud hosted products aimed at increasing efficiency and reducing the cost of IT services for law enforcement agencies.
Prior to graduating the NJ State Police Academy in April of 2000, he started his long public safety career as an EMT in 1991, EMS Tour Chief in 1992 and Firefighter in 1993. He is a world-renowned public safety photographer having thousands of photographs published in various news outlets both print and online around the world. He’s the owner of Public Safety Pictures which is a photography dedicated to providing positive public imaging of the Fire and EMS fields.
On September 11th, 2001, Michael Coppola was at the World Trade Center shortly after the attacks photographing the incident. During the collapses, he became trapped in a nearby building with a friend who was with him. He escaped after almost a half hour and assisted in rescuing several members of the FDNY command post staff. He continued to go back to the site to assist in searching for survivors in the weeks that followed. Many of his photos can still be found on the Public Safety Pictures website.
In 1997, he began law enforcement service as Police Dispatcher in 1997. He joined the NJ State Park Police in December of 1999 until transferring to the Palisades Interstate Parkway Police in October of 2001 just after the 9-11 attacks. Michael Coppola rose through the ranks from Patrol in 2001 to 2004 where he was made Detective. Then, Detective Sergeant in 2006, Detective Lieutenant in 2009, Officer In Charge in 2012 and making Chief in 2014 until he retired in 2018.
During that time, he served as a TAC Officer, CJIS Instructor, Internal Affairs Officer, Bias Crimes Investigator, Domestic Violence Investigator, Fleet Maintenance, Network and CJIS policy administrator, Certified Accident Reconstructionist and has conducted hundreds of death investigations. He created the largest law enforcement and bi-state Marine Operations unit and served on the NJ State Department of Transportation Traffic Incident Management Steering Committee as well as the Bergen County Chiefs of Police Technology and Communications committee. He was responsible for creating a Health and Wellness program for his officers and was one of the first agencies to implement mobile video recorders as far back as 2005.
Immediately after retirement, Michael Coppola continued to grow CJIS Solutions to be not only the longest serving, but also the most detail oriented CJIS Compliant cloud providers in the United States today.