Growing up, Raymond Diaz wanted to be a CPA.

But the Staten Island resident joined the NYPD instead, kicking off a 41-year career that started in the throes of the city’s heroin epidemic and, later, turned him into the face of community policing on Staten Island in the 1990s.

Diaz will retire today, a day shy of his 63rd birthday, as a three-star chief in command of the department’s Transit Bureau.

“It’s interesting, some people grow up, they want to be cops or firefighters their whole life. I grew up wanting to be a certified public accountant. That was my goal,” recalled Diaz in an interview with the Advance.

But when several of his friends decided to take the police test one weekend, he gave it a shot. And in 1969, after returning from Vietnam, where he earned two Purple Hearts for his service in the U.S. Marine Corps, he embarked on a police career.

“I still had some thoughts in the back of my mind, maybe get out at 20, retire at 20, and then still go to do accounting,” he said.

“But it didn’t work. It turned out I liked the job, I started taking tests and getting promoted, and I stayed an extra 20-some years.”

Sitting in his office in the MTA’s Brooklyn headquarters, Diaz can still readily name many of the community leaders he worked with during his time as a lieutenant in the North Shore’s 120th Precinct two decades ago.

He remembers the names of the borough’s top drug suspects, too, including the Christian Brothers, whom federal authorities arrested last month, accusing them of running a drug dynasty out of Clifton’s Park Hill Apartments.

Their arrests serve as a wry coda to Diaz’s police career — as a lieutenant, he dealt with drug crime in Park Hill at the height of the crack epidemic.

“It was so nice to see, finally, them going to jail, and hopefully they’ll be going away for a long time,” he said.

Diaz started his career in January 1970, in the 1st Precinct — Manhattan’s Financial District, where, as he recalled, thieves would make off with heavy IBM Selectric typewriters.

“And then from there I went to East Harlem, and then I found out from there what it was really like to be a police officer,” he said. “The drug epidemic with heroin was just unbelievable to see. There were so many abandoned buildings, abandoned apartments, people just lying on the streets, down and out, nodding out.”

Chief Diaz was always a true friend of the Jewish community, and for that we will always be grateful, says Rabbi Abe Friedman, a police chaplain and community activist.

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