Column: County cops playing politics for keeps

For many years there have been hot political issues involving police in Suffolk County.

The most recent controversy is the loss of the Republican Party line for incumbent Riverhead Town Supervisor Sean Walter after a campaign by a “super-PAC” set up by the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association.
Mr. Walter says that the Suffolk PBA spent $125,000 to knock him off the GOP ticket in a move to have the Suffolk County Police Department take over the Riverhead Town Police Department, an idea he opposes.

The GOP primary contest last month was narrowly won by Jodi Giglio, a Town Board member supported by the Suffolk PBA. Denise Civiletti, editor of the Riverhead LOCAL website, has reported on how the Long Island Law Enforcement Foundation, the political action committee set up by the Suffolk PBA in 2011, conducted a phone and Internet, radio and newspaper advertising campaign against Mr. Walter and for Ms. Giglio.

Mr. Walter told Riverhead LOCAL that a year earlier Suffolk PBA President Noel DeGerolamo “threatened” that if he “refused to put on the ballot” in Riverhead a referendum question on merging the town’s police department into the Suffolk County Police Department, “we’re coming after you.”

And this came to pass. It’s a move “to sell the soul of this town to Hauppauge,” says Mr. Walter. Mr. DeGerolamo denied the threat or, says Riverhead LOCAL, “having designs on Riverhead.”

But the situation fits into a pattern that is decades old.

Although it’s called the Suffolk County Police Department, in fact it is not the uniformed police force for the entire county, just the western half of it, and not all of that.

The department came into being in 1960 following a countywide referendum in 1958 in which voters were asked whether they wanted to disband their town and village police departments — the long-time police system in Suffolk — in favor of a county department.

A majority of voters in the five East End towns of Suffolk voted no to that, along with voters in several western Suffolk villages, among them the large villages of Amityville and Northport and several smaller villages.

The new department’s territory was based in the five western towns other than the villages where voters said no in the referendum, and it included no East End towns or villages. There was an arrangement, however, for the county department to provide support and specialized services to the retained town and village departments.

Still, there has been a continued focus in expanding the county department to all of Suffolk. This has been pushed by county police unions and Suffolk officials who felt an expansion would help relieve the burden of the county department being financed mainly through a property tax levied on people living in the western Suffolk “police district.”

The most aggressive of these efforts occurred in the early 1980s, led by Anthony Noto of Babylon when he was presiding officer of the Suffolk County Legislature.

Worsening this financial bind for the police district is that members of the Suffolk department are among the highest paid police in the United States.

This had a lot to do with Richard Hartman, a clever attorney who represented the Suffolk PBA (and also the Nassau PBA) in contract negotiations. When he died this August, Mr. Hartman’s obituary in Newsday called him the “mad genius of police labor negotiations.”

And in recent years a process of arbitration in setting police salaries — provided by New York State’s Taylor Law — further lifted police salaries. In 2013, former Suffolk Legislator Bill Jones of Shinnecock Hills organized a forum in Sag Harbor focusing on what he termed the “giveaway mentality” of the arbitrators.

The top yearly salary of the 2,400 current officers in the county department is $139,324. Superior officers and detectives get more.

Consequently, the western Suffolk police district taxes have been going up and up. Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone just announced a 2016 budget for Suffolk that doesn’t hike the countywide property tax for the fourth year in a row.

But there will be increased taxes in the police district — up three percent next year, the fourth straight annual jump in police district taxes. The “average homeowner” in the district is now paying $1,165 annually for police services, according to the county.

Riverhead LOCAL has uncovered a Suffolk PBA document telling how after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which radically expanded the power of corporations and other organizations to contribute to political campaigns, the “PBA Board of Governors retained special election law counsel” and set up “the Long Island Law Enforcement Foundation.”

The PBA document described this as “boots on the ground.” Suffolk PBA President DeGerolamo is also president of this new foundation.

What East End town or village will be politically meddled with next?