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Salute to cops of the month

An eight-year NYPD veteran who has spent all of her years patrolling East Flatbush was awarded recently for plucking a very bad apple branching out to the detriment of the community tree.

Police Officer Sophia Hinkson-Lowe calls East Flatbush her “home away from home” — so much so that when she was alerted to an armed burglar driving around the 67th Precinct recently, she jumped into action.

As he honored her with a “Cop of the Month” award at a recent community council meeting, Deputy Inspector Corey Pegues, the commanding officer of the 67th Precinct, said that Officer Hinkson-Lowe was on routine patrol in late October when she heard a call of a burglary in progress on Kings Highway.

As she sped toward the scene, she had been alerted that the thief, who was armed, had fled in a car.

Hinkson-Lowe was scoured the area, found the car and pulled the vehicle over.

The thief was disarmed and arrested without incident.

“Officer Hinkson-Lowe managed to arrest a violent felon and get a gun off the street,” Pegues explained.

Also credited for taking a gun off the street was Police Officer Scott Hoffer, a member of the precinct’s Conditions Unit.

Pegues explained that Hoffer was on routine patrol when he heard a report about shots being fired at the corner of East 93rd Street and Winthrop Avenue — inside the precinct’s Impact Zone, a high crime area that the NYPD has seen fit to deposit extra cops.

As he drove over to the scene, Officer Hoffer saw a man walking away from the shooting scene “at a fast pace,” Pegues explained.

The officer approached the fleeing man to question him, the man pulled a gun and “throws it on the ground.”

“He [Hoffer] raced into a dangerous situation and arrests a man with a gun without using his own gun,” Pegues said. “Just because he threw out one gun doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have another one.”

The suspect was taken into custody on gun possession charges and was investigated for the shooting, officials said.

Pegues said that both officers helped the precinct again lead the city in gun arrests. By early December, 168 gun arrests had taken place in East Flatbush.

Upon receiving her award, Officer Hinkson-Lowe credited her fellow officers, as well as members of the Brooklyn South Task Force, for assisting.

“He was a really bad guy,” she said, adding that he was “really calm” when he was being taken into custody.

“People were coming from all over,” she said. “I couldn’t have done it without them.”