Nassau County Police Department

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Shoulder patch of the Nassau County Police Department. It features the arms of the Dutch royal House of Orange-Nassau, after which the county is named.

Nassau County Police Department provides county police services to Nassau County, New York.

1 History
2 Commitment to technology and innovation
3 Emergency Ambulance Bureau
4 Famous cases
5 Personnel issues
6 Cultural references
7 References
8 External links

[edit] History

In 1925, concerned about rising crime rates, the County Board of Supervisors voted to create the Nassau County Police Department, replacing a scattered system of constables and town and village police departments. (Some jurisdictions declined to join the police district, however, and maintain their own independent police forces to this day.) Consisting initially of Chief of Police (later Commissioner) Abram Skidmore, 55 officers and a fingerprint expert, the force grew to 450 officers by 1932 and reached 650 officers by the time Skidmore retired in 1945.

The expansion accelerated dramatically following World War II with the rapid suburbanization of the county. It reached 1,000 officers in six precincts by 1950. A seventh precinct was opened in 1955 and an eighth followed five years later. In the early 1970s, with crime and civil disorder in neighboring New York City and other cities a major concern, the force was boosted to its greatest strength, nearly 4,200 officers. Since then, it has declined to around 2,600, making it still one of the largest county police agencies in the United States.

Nevertheless, the department's reduced size has been a source of controversy, with the village of Mineola exploring the idea of seceding from the police district and establishing its own police force.^[1] On Dec. 5th, 2006, however, the village's voters decisively rejected the proposal, 2936 to 1288.^[2]

The NCPD's guiding philosophy is that it is a "service-oriented" police department, promoting the concept of the community as client, and the police as provider. (For many years, for example, officers would come to a citizen's home to take a crime report or complaint, rather than ask the citizen to come to the precinct.) Sociologist James Q. Wilson used the Nassau department as the exemplar of this approach in his classic 1968 study, Varieties of Police Behavior.

[edit] Commitment to technology and innovation

The department has historically been quick to embrace new technologies. The Marine Bureau began in 1933 with the gift of an 18-foot Chris Craft mahogony speedboat from the residents of Manhasset Bay. The Aviation Bureau followed a year later with the gift of a Stinson airplane from wealthy county residents. The aircraft was grounded by World War II, but the air unit was revived in 1968 with the purchase of four helicopters to assist in pursuits and medical evacuations. The Highway Patrol unit, which covers the Long Island Expressway and the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway and includes motorcycle officers, was founded in 1935. All police vehicles are now equipped with computer keyboards, and, since 1973, air conditioning.

In addition to these units, the department also maintains many features, such as a Detective Bureau, a crime lab, a police academy, a mounted unit, an arson/bomb squad, a hostage negotiation team, a citizen-based auxiliary police program, and an Emergency Services Unit (ESU), that are usually found only in the police departments of large cities. The department has also adopted its own system for computerized tracking of crime information known as NASSTAT.

Traffic safety is a major department priority, given Nassau's relative lack of public transportation and its perpetually clogged roads and highways. A unique feature of the department is its Children's Safety Town, an actual village built to 1/3 scale that includes paved streets, two intersections equipped with traffic signals, an overpass, two tunnels, a simulated railroad crossing and 21 buildings. Managed by the department's Traffic Safety Unit, it allows the NCPD to teach traffic and bicycle safety to grade schoolers under controlled conditions.

In 1989, concerned about the increasingly heavy weaponry being carried by the criminal element, the NCPD was among the first police departments in the country to trade their venerable .38 six-shooters for the 15-round, nine-millimeter SIG P226 automatic.

In 1995, the NCPD became the largest police department in the country to that time, and the first in New York State, to allow its officers to work a steady 12-hour shift, rather than a rotating 8-hour shift commencing at a different time each week.^[3] In early 2007, the NCPD announced that 207 marked patrol vehicles would be equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) devices, allowing "live" views of the location of all active units.^[4]

In late 2006, the department undertook "Operation Gotcha,"^[5] deploying a new technology that scans the license plate numbers of passing vehicles directly into a mobile crime computer, allowing the immediate apprehension of drivers operating vehicles with expired licenses, suspended registrations or with outstanding arrest warrants. The technology allows the scanning of literally thousands of plates in a single shift.

[edit] Emergency Ambulance Bureau

In addition to police officers, the department also employs hundreds of civilian Ambulance Medical Technicians (AMTs), emergency telephone operators and school crossing guards.

Nassau County police officers and Ambulance Medical Technicians (AMTs) work skilfully as a team to aid a victim at the scene of an accident.

Unlike most jurisidictions, where emergency medical response and ambulance transport are functions performed primarily by the fire department, in Nassau, the police, private ambulance companies, and local fire departments share this responsibility. Nassau is one of the few police agencies in New York State that trains all of its police officers to provide emergency medical services. Police ambulances, however, are manned by green-uniformed AMTs rather than police officers.

After finding the abandoned bodies of a number of newborn children, Nassau AMT Timothy Jaccard and several of his colleagues in the Emergency Ambulance Bureau founded the AMT Children of Hope Foundation,^[6] to give these children proper funerals and dignified burials.

[edit] Famous cases

The Nassau County Police have investigated a number of nationally well-known crimes and incidents, including the Weinberger kidnapping^[7] of 1956 (on which the 2002 Robert DeNiro film City by the Sea was very loosely based), the crash of Avianca Flight 52 in Cove Neck in 1990, the Joey Buttafuoco/Amy Fisher imbroglio, and the shootings committed aboard a Long Island Rail Road commuter train by Colin Ferguson in 1993. One of the NCPD's few large-scale, high-profile security events was the 1998 Goodwill Games, which took place largely in Nassau County. Nassau officers also participated in the recovery effort at the World Trade Center site in September 2001.

[edit] Personnel issues

Nassau officers (along with the neighboring Suffolk County Police Department) have become known in recent years for their exceptionally high rate of pay, especially as compared with the nearby New York City Police Department. According to the department web site, Nassau officers with six years seniority earn a base salary of $85,282 annually,^[8] not counting benefits, overtime and night differential, which together lift most officers over $100,000 per year. As a result, many NYPD officers have joined the Nassau force.^[9]

Police pay has become a subject of hot political debate in Nassau recently, especially since the election of Thomas Suozzi as county executive in 2001. Suozzi took over at a time of major fiscal stress and has been demanding that the police do their "fair share" to help the county get its fiscal house in order. For his part, Nassau Police Benevolent Association President Gary DelaRaba has resisted, insisting he will not give back gains won in previous contracts. So far, police pay and benefits have escaped any significant reduction.^[10]

Hiring on the Nassau force has also long been a bone of contention, with African-Americans, Hispanics and other groups, often supported by the U.S. Department of Justice, claiming the hiring process is biased toward white males. The county has denied any intentional discrimination, and there have been repeated recruiting drives aimed at convincing more minorities to take the police exam, which itself has been repeatedly redesigned with the aim of supposedly making it fairer. White candidates have disputed this, claiming the test is now biased against them.^[11] These controversies have led to numerous lawsuits, which have repeatedly delayed hiring over the last two decades and account in part for the force's shrinking size.

Another major point of contention between the county government and the police union in recent years has been inadequate police academy training facilities. After being located for several years in a converted elementary school in Williston Park, the academy facilities were "temporarily" relocated for a decade in trailers on the grounds of the county jail in East Meadow. In May of 2006, the Suozzi administration announced the academy would move into yet another converted school, this one in Massapequa, by the end of the year.^[12]The first class of recruits to train in the new facility entered in early January 2007.

The department is headed by a civilian commissioner, appointed by the county executive. Commissioner James H. Lawrence, a former NYPD bureau chief, appointed by County Executive Suozzi, is both the second Nassau Police Commissioner to be drawn from the ranks of the NYPD as well as the second African-American to hold the post. (Abram Skidmore, the first Commissioner, was formerly a lieutenant in the NYPD.)

[edit] Cultural references

Living in the shadow of the camera-ready NYPD means almost no films or television programs feature the NCPD. One of the few is 1985's Compromising Positions, starring Susan Sarandon, Raul Julia and Edward Herrmann.