About Martin
Martin Alperen's career moves between street-level policing, courtroom work and emergency management consulting. He has combined roles in law enforcement, government service and private practice over more than three decades. That variety shows in the types of cases and matters he has handled and the courts where he is admitted to practice.
He holds a J.D. and an M.A.; the master's degree in homeland security was awarded by the Naval Postgraduate School. Those academic credentials came after early service on a police force and before a long stretch of litigation and government work.
Alperen began his career as a police officer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, working uniformed patrol and undercover operations in 1980. He moved into prosecution and trial work in the mid-1980s, serving as an Assistant District Lawyer in Kings County, Brooklyn in 1985. He later handled insurance coverage and negligence defense as a staff lawyer in New York City in 1986, then opened a private practice in Massachusetts in 1987. In the late 1990s he returned to public service in the U.S. Virgin Islands as an Assistant Lawyer General, where he served as a criminal trial lawyer and led the Civil Asset Forfeiture Unit.
In the 2000s Alperen combined community roles and private work. He served as president of St. John Rescue, Inc. in 2002 and continued self-employed legal work in California and elsewhere. By 2009 he was working on homeland security and emergency management planning at the University of California, San Francisco Police Department, first as a volunteer and later as an analyst. He volunteered in the misdemeanor division of a San Francisco district lawyer's office in 2011 and also began offering homeland security and emergency management consulting that year under the name Martin J. Alperen, J.D., M.A. In 2016 he established the Law Office of Martin Alperen and has practiced as a sole proprietor since then.
Across his career Alperen has handled criminal trials, civil asset forfeiture matters, insurance coverage and negligence defense, and emergency management planning. He is admitted in multiple jurisdictions, including the U.S. Virgin Islands, New York, Massachusetts, California and Colorado, and in several federal courts, among them the Southern District of New York, the District of Massachusetts and the District of the Virgin Islands. His practice combines litigation experience and emergency management expertise.
He operates the Law Office of Martin Alperen as a solo practitioner and maintains a practice handling criminal defense, civil asset forfeiture and matters that touch on emergency management and homeland security law.