Beneath manicured emerald grass and six feet of earth, in the shadow of a city a river away, New York City Patrolman John Smedick has rested for more than 137 years. In a somber ceremony, the New York Police Department will tomorrow formally recognize the murder of Smedick as a line-of-duty death, consecrating his honor in a city where heroism is defined all too often by the tragedy of sacrifice.

Six years ago, a compilation of a vast collection of materials, such as scattered newspaper accounts and trial transcripts, attorney notes and recollections, were delivered to the police commissioner. Upon receipt of these materials, the process for formal recognition of Smedick in the Hall of Heroes in Police Headquarters in downtown Manhattan began. With the help of modern-day advocates such as retired NYPD Sergeant Mike Bosak and retired Detective John Reilly championing a cause most have abandoned, Patrolman John Smedick now takes his rightful place among this most respected roll call, proving that even after 137 years, those who make the ultimate sacrifice for this city are never forgotten.

On the night of July 23, 1868, Smedick was on foot patrol when a man stepped from the shadow of a coal box and leveled a Colt Navy revolver at him. Two shots from the vengeful (and possibly deranged) assailant, and the officer slumped to the pavement. He was 32 years old.

Smedick, a husband and father of two, would find the city he protected so long ago unrecognizable if he patrolled it today. The Manhattan street corner where he died, East 32nd Street and First Avenue, was then a collection of storefronts and is now part of New York University Medical Center. The Metropolitan Police Department’s 21st Precinct, to which Smedick was assigned, is now a part of the NYPD’s 17th Precinct. The police department itself has changed and grown – 851 members strong in 1857, 36,000-plus in 2005.

In an era long-since abandoned, patrolmen made their names on the streets. Today the surname of an officer is written upon his uniform shirt, as conspicuous as the shield above it. The long blue frock coat worn by the 19th-century patrolman has given way to a shorter version, designed not for fashion but for comfort while riding in radio cars, themselves a fantasy of science-fiction in the days Smedick walked his beat.

Crime in New York in 1868, the year of Smedick’s death, was an established part of the city’s fabric. Descriptive guidebooks were published to warn first-time visitors of areas to avoid and to educate far-away readers with no intention of a metropolitan excursion as to exactly what they were missing. According to one book, “The Secrets of the Great City” by Edward Winslow Martin, pickpockets and muggers, street toughs, prostitutes, hoodlums, murderers, gamblers, and thieves created a sub-culture of lawlessness that was countered by a police force conceived just over a decade before.

Nearly a century and a half before the reforms of Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg and decades from the indelible imprint of Fiorello La Guardia, New York during Smedick’s life was still the city shaped by Peter Stuyvesant and William Marcy Tweed. The lush recess of Calvary Cemetery is now divided by the Long Island and Brooklyn-Queens Expressways. John Smedick’s final resting place within the cemetery is no more than a hundred yards from the resting place of the man who prematurely put him there, each gravesite in view of the other.

In addition to Smedick, 102 other heroes will also be honored tomorrow. The reasons for the initial omissions from this honored roll call are varied. Most of them, like Smedick, seem to be the result of clerical errors or lack of information at the time the original memorial was conceived. Yet their deaths, encompassing a time period spanning from the mid-19th century to the 1970s, are no less tragic and their sacrifice no less mourned. Each one, like John Smedick, left loved ones behind. Each one, like John Smedick, has a story.

Mr. Coll is a detective in the NYPD Emergency Service Unit. He completed his Master’s degree in history in 2001, writing his thesis about the murder of Patrolman John Smedick.