Heroin map leaves East End off the chart
Each red pushpin on the Natalie’s Law map marks the location of an arrest for possession or sales of heroin, but eastern Suffolk arrests are not being indexed. Click image to enlarge.
Heroin has been making headlines regularly on Long Island for the past three years as the drug’s availability in cheaper, easily administered forms has exploded.
Cheap heroin is here on Shelter Island. In December 2009, a 26-year-old Islander was charged with heroin possession with intent to sell. Some 78 packets of the drug with a street value of $2,300 and other paraphernalia were recovered by the Shelter Island Police Department.
But that arrest and others reported by East End police departments are not being registered on a new county map that was created to help Suffolk’s communities track the problem.
The apparent oversight may soon be addressed, according to Suffolk County legislators Ed Romaine and Wayne Horsley, who are working to bring East End and other county drug arrests online in response to inquiries made by this newspaper.
On Monday, Mr. Romaine sent a letter to Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard Dormer asking him “to take immediate steps” to notify the nine village and five town police departments to report heroin related arrests to the county police “so that the SDMI can reflect data for all of Suffolk County.”
The Suffolk County Legislature in December 2008 adopted “Natalie’s Law,” named for 18-year-old Natalie Ciappa of Massapequa, who died of a heroin overdose in June 2008. The law created the “County-wide Heroin Activity Alert Program.” Like a sexual offender registry, the program provides a public informational tool: an online map tracking heroin arrests. The goal, as explained in the legislation, is to “provide parents, schools and the wider community with a valuable resource to help prevent our county’s youth from falling prey to this deadly drug.”
The map pinpoints locations of arrests for the sale and possession of heroin but it also sends another message to the public: heroin-related crimes stop at the Brookhaven Town border.
IMPLEMENTING NATALIE’S LAW
Natalie’s Law authorized the Suffolk County Police Department and the county’s Department of Information Technology to establish and implement the Suffolk County Drug Mapping Index (SDMI), viewable at gis.co.suffolk.ny.us/SCDMI/ and shown above. While the law called for mapping arrests “within Suffolk County” and providing a resource for the “wider community,” only arrests made within the Suffolk County Police District are being mapped. Arrests in villages outside the district and within the East End’s town police departments, including the Shelter Island Police Department, are not being mapped.
The Reporter asked Suffolk County District Attorney spokesman Robert Clifford and County Legislator Ed Romaine about the lack of data on East End arrests. In response to that inquiry, Mr. Clifford contacted Natalie’s Law author, Legislator Wayne Horsley of Babylon, and told the Reporter that Mr. Horsley is working with the County Executive’s office on getting data from village police departments all over Suffolk as well as the East End police departments. “The reporting responsibility is a police function,” Mr. Clifford responded. In other words, the police departments would be responsible for the logistics and costs of reporting the arrests to the county.
BRINGING IN THE EAST END
“Heroin is sweeping this county,” Mr. Romaine said. Natalie’s law, which Mr. Romaine co-sponsored, “is a helpful tool,” he added, but it does not provide a means for funding data collection outside of the Suffolk County Police District.
“What I can do is write the three towns in my district and ask them if they will participate with the county on the map index,” he said. He added that “it’s going to be an expense that Shelter Island may not be able to handle.” Shelter Island Police Chief Jim Read confirmed Wednesday that his department had no directive to report to the county and no information on the costs and logistics of reporting.
Asked if the reporting could be facilitated through the East End Drug Task Force — a multi-jurisdictional drug enforcement unit funded and supervised by the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office — Mr. Romaine responded, “Let me see what I can do.”
In addition to the Suffolk County Police Department, Natalie’s Law is implemented by the county Department of Information Technology. Legislator Horsley is reaching out to that agency to find a logistical solution for entering data from outside of the Suffolk County Police District.
Bryan Galgano, spokesman for Legislator Horsley, said that the Natalie’s Law map is being fine-tuned to allow residents to view heroin activity within individual towns and communities. But he added that the lack of East End data “wasn’t something on our radar” until this newspaper’s inquiry.
Including the entire county in the Natalie’s Law index will require jumping over some jurisdictional hurdles. “We can’t direct another level of government to act,” Mr. Galgano said. “What we want to do is meet with the individual police departments to see if there is a way to work together to bring them on the mapping index.”
Asked about the map sending a message that the East End has no heroin crimes, Mr. Galgano said, “Hopefully we can work together and rectify that.”
