Nassau County’s Democratic legislators will continue to push for an investigation into alleged falsification of crime statistics despite resistance from the Republican side of the aisle.
“At the end of the day, it looks like (Nassau County Legislature Presiding Officer) Peter Schmitt will not permit hearings to held on this,” said Nassau County Legislator Wayne Wink (D-Roslyn). “We have to continue to press the legislature to hold hearings of the public safety committee to determine how this happened and to prevent it happening again, “and also to determine possible criminal activity in falsifying documents.”
In an Aug. 2 letter, Wink, David Denenberg (D-Merrick) and Joseph Scannell (D-Baldwin), the Democratic members of the county Legislature’s Public Safety Committee, called on Schmitt to hold an “immediate” hearing on the “manipulation and erroneous reporting of crime statistics” recently revealed in the county police 5th and 6th Precincts.
“The distressing revelations regarding the misclassification of crime statistics are completely unacceptable and cast serious doubt upon the Administration’s basic factual justification for the precinct closures,” the three Democrats wrote in the letter. “Such improper minimization of crime statistics is especially troubling given the fact that both the 5th and the 6th precincts were selected to be shuttered under the County Executive’s precinct consolidation plan.”
The 6th precinct was merged into the 3rd Precinct, the county’s largest police precinct, as part of the precinct closure plan.
The legislators also questioned whether similar “abuses of reporting” occurred in the 4th, 1st and 7th precincts.
Schmitt spokesman Ed Ward said last week Schmitt would schedule a hearing “if warranted” after administrative procedures are completed.
“Basically his feeling is this is the job the [police] commissioner was hired to do,” Ward said.
Earlier this week, Wink said the Democrats will keep applying pressure to find out exactly what happened.
Wink said the Democrats are particularly concerned about how misrepresented crime statistics factored into decisions to turn the 5th precinct in Elmont, the 6th precinct in Manhasset and the 8th precinct in Levittown into “community policing centers.”
Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano and newly appointed county Police Commissioner Thomas Dale presented a consolidation plan in January to reduce the number of county police precincts from eight to four.
“When we’re basing our decisions on faulty and in this case, fraudulent information, where does it end?” Wink said. “There’s a lot more to come on this, but at this point it appears the county is reluctant to scrutinize what’s transpired so far.”
The county police department last week confirmed published reports that Inspector Thomas DePaola of the Manhasset-based 6th Precinct has been demoted to captain in the office of chief of patrol for allegedly improperly classifying crimes over the past 18 months.
A police source said DePaola was reduced in rank for allegedly classifying crimes as petit larcenies that should have been recorded as grand larcenies. Internal department allegations against DePaulo included not recording crimes in which victims did not request arrest of alleged perpetrators.
Approximately 170 crimes are expected to be reclassified after an audit of the statistics.
“It should also be noted that major crime reports were unaffected during this investigation and the crimes that were misclassified or not captured are being readjusted to reflect accurate crime data,” Inspector Kenneth Lack of the NCPD information office in a statement.
