An off-duty Texas police chief got a taste of fighting crime in the Big Apple – apprehending a violent thief who interrupted his Fifth Avenue shopping excursion.
Sean Ford, chief of the Sunset Valley Police Department in Austin, Texas, had just come out of Gucci’s flagship store around 3 p.m. Friday when he saw two men scuffling in the street.
“They started fighting. I didn’t know what was going on at first. I thought it was maybe a mugging,” Ford told The Post.
Police said 46-year-old Roman Mercado, a career criminal with about 50 priors dating back to 1984, had just swiped four bottles of perfume from nearby Abercrombie & Fitch worth $118 and tried to flee without paying. When one of the retailer’s employees chased after Mercado and confronted him, he began lashing out and throwing punches.
A crowd of people gathered around the fight, which moved a few blocks north to outside The Plaza Hotel, but they were all snapping photos instead of stopping it.
So Ford told his family to call 911 and then stepped in to break up the beat-down.
“It started getting a lot more violent. The guy was really swinging at him, so I decided it was time to get involved,” Ford said.
“I just took his arm behind his back and told him I was a police officer and that he needed to stop struggling and stay where he was at.”
The veteran cop, who has been working as a police officer in Texas since 1995, held him until reinforcements from the NYPD showed up.
Mercado was cuffed and carted off to Midtown North. He was arraigned Saturday for petit larceny – less than a month after he faced similar charges for stealing a set of headphones.
The responding officers, including one of the sergeants from the precinct, all made sure to thank Ford for his spur-of-the-moment action – even sending out a tweet that gave him credit for nabbing Mercardo.
“It was typical NYPD, what we think about them from all over the country,” an appreciative Ford said. “They really treated us well.”
And this wasn’t his first time helping out his “brothers in blue,” coming down with a team from Texas in the months following the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
“I have a lot of respect for the NYPD ever since 9/11,” Ford said.