Angel Nieves, Pet Security Consultant

Angel Nieves is like Andy Sipowicz or Lennie Briscoe. A retired New York Police Department (NYPD) detective who gave 20 years to the job, he is now a Pet Security Consultant .

As a police officer he arrested murderers and drug dealers; now he tracks down a different type of bad guy — with the same meticulous care. He’s always either on the phone or on the computer, adding details to the cases... he keeps in a huge file at his home office. However, some of the cases he works on have to be turned over to law enforcement, so Angel gathers as much information as he can and turns it over to his friends in blue.

“I used to save people from animals. Now I save animals from people.”

Once bitten in the face by a pit bull that needed to be gotten under control at a street fair, Angel only blamed the owner, who should have understood his dog better. The dog should not have been in such a busy place, which made it necessary for Angel to take the dog from the owner to get it under control. He grew a goatee for a while to cover the bite mark on his chin. Today, the scar is a reminder, not of bad animals, but of how easily animals can get into bad situations — and that’s what he is working to prevent.

Angel grew up in the notoriously rough Harlem neighborhood of New York City — a Puerto Rican kid in the primarily black projects — where he earned his first degrees in street smarts and self-defense. He spent a lot of time at his grandmother’s house nearby, where she had chickens, roosters, rabbits, dogs and cats. He sometimes stole animals from slaughterhouses and took them to her. He also used to keep pigeons in a coop on the roof of an abandoned building. He spent summers at his family’s farm in Puerto Rico, and though it was quite a change from the city streets, he continued to nurture his dedication to animals there.