Nassau County Police Department’s 3rd precinct Deputy Inspector Robert Musetich has been appointed commanding officer of the 6th precinct, which will reopen this year, County Executive Laura Curran said at a press conference Thursday.
Musetich will be designated to his new command Friday, she said.
He will oversee the reconstruction of the 3rd precinct headquarters, said Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder.
“There’s a lot of work to do on the infrastructure,” Ryder said. “You don’t move into something that’s old.”
To prepare for the reopening, resource transfer between department buildings has been completed and building renovation and data organization is underway, Ryder said.
An intelligence analyst is dissecting crime numbers and reporting that applies to the 6th precinct, he said.
“All of that has to be done so we can accurately report and continue to fight crime,” Ryder said.
The 8th precinct is also reopening this year, after county legislators unanimously amended the 2019 budget to include the two precincts.
Curran initially left funding for the precincts out of the budget and in mid-November nearly sued the county Legislature when it passed amendments to include them.
However, she soon announced the precinct reopenings amongst remarks on how she pressed for such moves in her run for office.
“Community policing really is in our DNA,” Curran said Thursday. “It’s really in our blood, and so to be able to reopen these precincts as proper functioning precincts is a really big deal for us.”
Ryder and Curran capitalized on the progress the police department made in 2018 at the press conference held to recap the year.
There were 435 burglaries last year, a “historic low,” Ryder said, and a steep decrease from 2009’s statistic of 1,476.
Nonfatal overdoses were down from 310 in 2017 to 235 in 2018.
Violent crime, which includes murder, robbery, rape and assault, is down 33 percent since 2010, Ryder said.
“I’d like to proclaim that we are the safest county for its size in the country,” he said.
The Nassau County Police Department is the 13th largest in the United States, Curran said.
