New York State Will Investigate Suffolk County Police Department's Handling of Hate Crimes

By Dan Rattiner

Posted 01/23/09

The New York State Department of Justice in Albany has taken the extraordinary decision to look into how the Suffolk County Police Department handles hate crimes in and around central Long Island.

The Suffolk County Police say everything is just fine in their county, and there are no more hate crimes there than in Nassau County or in Queens or anywhere else. And they have the statistics to prove it.

Or do they?

Hundreds, if not thousands, of Hispanics who live in this part of Suffolk County say that local young whites harass them and beat them up all the time. They do not report it, they say, because the police will not enforce the anti-hate crime laws in town. And they think that the Hispanics, many of whom are here in this country illegally, do not want them too either. The police seem to think it's just what's going on. Occasionally, Hispanics say, if they get particularly bloodied and if they get up the courage to complain about it to the police, the police write it all down but then just through their report in the trash. And so that is how this part of Suffolk County doesn't have a disproportionately large number of hate crimes.

A representative of the Suffolk County Police Department, commenting about the organization LatinoBias.com, which, after a town meeting, sent many of these reports of inaction to Albany, described that organization as just a bunch of crackpots.

The Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, on an occasion three weeks ago, when asked by a reporter to comment on the Hispanic man who was stabbed to death in a parking lot two nights before, said, "If this happened in Nassau County, it would be a one day story and that would be it." He was suggesting that media coverage of the event was excessive.

Albany, however, thinks otherwise.

Typically, according to the Hispanics, this is what happens.

It gets dark in and around Patchogue, Bay Shore and Sayville, where a lot of stuff seems to be going on. The local young white kids and other bigots go out and beat up the Hispanics for fun. Who us? Have a problem?

The murder happened three weeks ago. A group of six high school teenagers went out to have some fun with "Mexicans," as they refer to all south-of the-border people in the high school and found two "Mexicans," actually Ecuadorians, and brothers, in a parking lot in downtown Patchogue, where they attacked them. One got away and ran to tell the police who were a few blocks away. The other died after being stabbed by a teenager who, it was reported, boasted to the others as they went out that night he was going to "get a Mexican."

Unfortunately, this happened on a night when Patchogue Village officials were not out hoping to prevent trouble. Concerned about how the County police are policing their town, and without a police department of their own, they have heard of so many calls to the police that go unreported that they stand in parking lots, armed only with cell phones, hoping to help.

They missed this one. It might have saved a life. Change is about to come to this part of Long Island, I believe.