Long Island civil rights and police reform advocates say ending federal oversight of Suffolk police will hurt transparency

The U.S. Justice Department’s announcement that it will end its oversight of the Suffolk County Police Department will lead to less transparency and more tensions with Long Island’s Black and Latino communities, civil rights advocates and police reform activists told Newsday on Wednesday.

The DOJ announced on Tuesday it was ending its monitoring of Suffolk because the department was in substantial compliance with a 2014 agreement to halt discriminatory policing, but advocates said many of the same issues still remain, especially in minority communities.

"I think it is a mistake," said Cheryl Keshner, founder and coordinator of the Long Island Language Advocates Coalition, which works to assure people with limited English proficiency have equal access to law enforcement, courts, social services and health care. "Some improvements have been made over the years because of community oversight and the Department of Justice’s influence. But that doesn’t mean the problems have been corrected."

Serena Liguori, a member of the task force that drafted Suffolk’s police overhaul plan, called the DOJ announcement "a very intentional dismantling of transparency in policing."

"To say the Department of Justice will not oversee Suffolk police signals, ‘We don’t care about public safety anymore,’" said Liguori, the director of New Hour, a social services agency that works with incarcerated women.

Others say the DOJ’s decision won’t have much of an impact because its oversight of Suffolk County was lackluster — or worse.

"The resources applied to monitoring Suffolk County were minimal," said Hempstead civil rights attorney Frederick K. Brewington. "If there has been real change in police accountability, it begins with the public."

'Substantial compliance'

In an 11-page report released Monday, the Justice Department said it was ending its oversight of Suffolk police because the department has maintained "substantial compliance" in bias-free policing, language assistance and community engagement. The DOJ stopped monitoring other key provisions of the settlement in May 2024, saying the county had made substantial reforms in how it investigates and tracks hate crimes and how it accepts complaints about officer bias from the public.

Keshner said the DOJ’s conclusions about language assistance whitewash problems. Forms for domestic violence victims, she said, are not translated into other languages. Officers sometimes favor people proficient in English, she added, even if they are an abusive spouse or an unfair landlord.

The announcement to end Suffolk oversight comes several months after the Trump administration issued a memo in April instructing lawyers in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division not to file any new complaints.

Another DOJ memo ordered lawyers to notify agency leadership of any settlements or consent decrees reached in the last three months of the Biden administration. The Trump DOJ said it may wish to reconsider the agreements, which lay out plans for reforms and are enforceable by courts.

In May, the Justice Department said it would begin dismissing lawsuits against police in Louisville and Minneapolis, and that it would also investigate the Louisiana State Police and departments in Mount Vernon, Phoenix, Trenton, Memphis and Oklahoma City.

'Politically motivated'

Lou Civello, president of the Suffolk Police Benevolent Association, echoed the Trump administration when he said DOJ settlements and consent decrees were politically motivated efforts to "satisfy an agenda in Washington."

"For years, Suffolk County taxpayers were forced to foot the bill for so-called ‘reforms’ that made it harder for police to do their jobs, and in many cases, made our communities less safe," Civello said in a statement.

The Suffolk and Nassau police departments, among the biggest in the nation with approximately 2,400 officers each, have long been the subject of complaints alleging racial bias, which resulted in DOJ monitoring and court-ordered reforms.

The settlement agreement was the result of a federal investigation into Suffolk’s relationship with the county’s Latino community that was sparked in part by the 2008 murder of Marcelo Lucero, an immigrant from Ecuador, by a group of teenagers in Patchogue. Advocates said Suffolk police had harassed Latinos and ignored reports of assaults and other crimes against the Latino community.

Suffolk officials eventually entered an agreement with the DOJ in 2014 to reform police policies. Federal monitoring was supposed to last three years, but it continued because the police department failed to make the necessary reforms.

'Not a lot of trust in minority communities'

Immigrants are already anxious because of the Trump administration’s continuing crackdown, said Joselo Lucero, Marcelo’s brother and a former crime victim advocate for the Suffolk District Attorney’s Office.

The lack of federal oversight, he said, will further discourage immigrants from reporting hate crimes and assaults. Federal monitoring, he said, would ensure those crimes are appropriately investigated and prosecuted.

"It is my personal opinion that the Department of Justice should continue oversight of hate crimes," Lucero said. "There are a lot of things happening on Long Island right now. There is not a lot of trust in minority communities."

The federal mandate, Keshner said, pushed the department to improve services to minority communities. She fears those efforts will be abandoned without DOJ reinforcement.

"It does matter, because even if the Justice Department was not overseeing Suffolk police as they should, it was still some kind of a check," Keshner said. "The DOJ should have been monitoring more closely, but just being there was a check on the Suffolk County Police Department."

Brewington, however, said DOJ’s oversight was less important than public pressure. Success in making policing more equitable on Long Island, he said, is a reminder of a statement from the Sixties: "Power to the people," Brewington said.