Long Island police forces still overwhelmingly white, despite 30% increase in Hispanic officers

The number of Hispanic police officers on Long Island has increased 30% in five years, a jump lauded by officials as one of the more promising developments in their four-decade effort to diversify law enforcement. 

But even with that rise, the representation of people of color at police agencies across Long Island lags well below their share of the population, according to a Newsday analysis, illustrating the depths of the lack of diversity among the longtime, overwhelmingly white sworn forces.

The Nassau and Suffolk police departments say they have been trying to hire more Black and Hispanic candidates since the 1980s, when the U.S. Justice Department accused them of discriminatory hiring practices in civil rights lawsuits. That led to federal oversight agreements — still in place — and sparked calls by elected officials, police chiefs and experts about the importance of employing officers who resemble the community.

A Newsday review of the latest racial and ethnic breakdown of Long Island's nearly 7,000 sworn officers shows that both counties still have a way to go before police reflect the makeup of Long Island's 3 million residents.

The recent increase in Hispanic officers provides the first signs of a shift in diversity hiring, helped by a mandate in Suffolk that 1 of every 10 recruits is fluent in Spanish. But the number of Black officers remained flat at a time when overall interest in joining the police reached historically low levels in both counties.

The top police officials in both counties, in interviews with Newsday, expressed satisfaction with their ongoing efforts to diversify but frustration over the slow results from a hiring process with which they say they have limited involvement.

Suffolk Police Commissioner Kevin Catalina said the goal is to be "representative of the population we serve," and he acknowledged that they're not.

"I expect to do a lot better," he said in an interview.

Nassau Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder said they’re "happy with the work that we’re putting into it," but not the results.

"We’re not ecstatic to see the outcome. We’d like to see the outcome better," he said in a separate interview. "But some of those things are just not in our control."

The police departments' efforts to diversify are hampered by a multistep Civil Service hiring process, run by different county agencies, that eliminates minority applicants at greater rates than whites at every stage, according to a 2021 Newsday investigation. The purpose of Civil Service departments is to ensure equitable, merit-based hiring.

The demographics of the 1,000-plus officers hired since the Newsday investigation show little has changed.

In the two counties' most recent hiring cycles, white applicants made up 64% of the beginning pool in Suffolk and 68% in Nassau. But among those who made it through the process to get hired, 79% of Suffolk's recruits and 84% of Nassau's hires were white.

That means the Nassau and Suffolk police departments were twice as likely to hire a white applicant compared with a Hispanic applicant, and three times as likely than a Black applicant. 

To become a police officer, applicants in both counties first take a written exam and are ranked in order of their score. Would-be officers then must also pass a physical fitness screening that includes situps, pushups and a 1½-mile run; a background investigation; and a psychological screening examination.

The police departments’ actual involvement in those steps is limited.

A private company creates and grades the written tests, Civil Service officials determine whether a candidate’s background is disqualifying and outside psychologists gauge the candidates’ mental wherewithal to be a police officer.

The only aspect the police departments enjoy complete control over is recruiting a diverse field to take the test, which they have largely succeeded in doing.

Figuring out how to end up with a diverse field at the end of the process is a decades-old riddle no one has solved on Long Island.

"While there may have been some gains, there’s a long way to go," said civil rights attorney Frederick K. Brewington, of Hempstead, who represents Jhisaiah Myers, a Black New York City police officer who sued Nassau in 2022 alleging discriminatory police hiring practices.

"Becoming a police officer in Nassau County was a dream that was denied to me," Myers, 39, of Freeport, said at a news conference in 2022. Brewington declined to make him available for comment for this story, citing ongoing litigation.

His federal lawsuit is currently seeking class-action status. Myers said at the time that he filed his lawsuit he is seeking "justice for myself and so many other Black candidates who have been wrongfully denied the chance to pursue their dreams, just like me."

Police officials told Newsday they are most frustrated with the lack of improvement in hiring Black officers in recent years and have sought creative workarounds such as targeted recruiting and mentoring programs to make the multistage hiring process fairer.

"We all want to know the same thing: How?" Ryder said. "If somebody can give me the answer, that’s what we’re looking for. What is the answer? I don’t know."

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Justice Department declined to comment why four decades of federal oversight of the testing process in both counties has not led to more officers of color.

Suffolk swore 33 recruits into its police academy in December, including Michelle Canela Hernandez, a 21-year-old from Freeport who embodies the makeup of a recruit that has long eluded officials.

A Hispanic woman with no police officers in her family, she's been thinking about becoming an officer to make a positive impact on her community. Noting the importance of adding more diverse officers to Long Island's police force, she is hopeful her presence can inspire other women.

"I always believe in the quote, ‘Be the change you wish to see,' " she said.

Slight uptick in diversity hiring

The state Division of Criminal Justice Services, which oversees law enforcement statewide, tracks the number of female, Black and Hispanic officers employed by departments annually.

Newsday obtained 25 years’ worth of self-reported diversity data for Long Island’s nearly four dozen agencies via a series of Freedom of Information Law requests.

A Newsday analysis of the latest data, obtained from the state in September, shows that among Long Island’s nearly 7,000 officers there were 673 Hispanic officers, a 31% jump from 515 in 2020, and 843 female officers, a 15% increase from 730. The 262 Black officers represent only a 1% rise from 249 in 2020.

Officials attribute the increased diversity to Long Island’s changing population, their targeted recruiting and creative measures they’ve done to help prepare applicants.

In Nassau, Ryder said candidates are connected with the department’s ethnic fraternal organizations to provide the applicants guidance throughout each step of hiring, mimicking the sort of direction that a child of a police officer receives from a parent advising about the various steps. 

In Suffolk, officials prioritized supervision over the background investigation process to eliminate bias. They also enhanced their recruiting operation to maintain contact with applicants throughout the yearslong process.

"Just recruiting numbers and walking away from it and saying we succeeded is not my goal," Catalina said. "My goal is to get people into the police department."

On that front, the New York Police Department has succeeded. Of their nearly 35,000 officers, 34% are Hispanic, 17% Black and 12% Asian, according to statistics posted on the city's Civilian Complaint Review Board website.

'System is not working'

Despite some progress in diversifying police departments, the officials lamented how their sworn forces still remain a long way from resembling the communities they are sworn to protect.

Hispanic people make up 10% of Long Island officers, less than half their 22% share of the Nassau and Suffolk populations, according to the most recent census estimates. Black people represent 4% of police compared with 9% of the public. By contrast, the NYPD demographic breakdown is much closer to being representative of its residents. 

Civil rights advocates share the frustration, pointing to the 2021 Newsday investigation that found navigating the hiring process to become a Nassau or Suffolk police officer has been more than three times tougher for Black applicants compared with whites, and twice as difficult for Hispanic applicants.

"More attention obviously needs to be paid to the whole process," said Elaine Gross, founder and president of Erase Racism, a Syosset-based civil rights group, in an interview.

George Siberon, executive director of Hempstead Hispanic Civic Association, took part in a county-run committee convened by then-Nassau executive Laura Curran to evaluate police hiring. He said in an interview people of color being eliminated at greater rates at each step was "the central issue for us."

Siberon said he is frustrated to see only limited results in Nassau’s diversity numbers.

"Five years ago we said the system is not working, what can we do to fix it?" Siberon said. "And here we are, five years later, and we’re asking the same thing."

Ryder said his department has done what it can to address concerns. In addition to connecting candidates to the department’s fraternal groups, Ryder said Nassau also now allows candidates who fail the physical fitness exam a second chance on another day.

Newsday reported in 2021 that Nassau failed minorities in the physical fitness stage at higher rates than white people in the most recent hiring cycle at that time, most notably eliminating Black applicants twice as frequently as their white counterparts.

Experts at the time questioned whether white applicants were better prepared for the strict pushup and situp technical standards, as they were more likely to have family in law enforcement.

Ryder said he hoped the mentoring program and allowing candidates who failed a second opportunity, as they do in Suffolk and New York City, would help individuals who showed the potential to be good officers regardless of race or ethnicity remain in contention longer for jobs.

"That’s being fair," he said.

Freeport, Hempstead hiring hurts Nassau

Changing other aspects of police hiring is outside the police department’s control, Ryder said.

The counties contract with an outside testing company to produce and grade the test, a process overseen by the U.S. Justice Department since the 1980s.

In Suffolk, the top scorers on the written test are put into a pool and selected for processing by a lottery system.

In Nassau, the candidates who passed the written test are ranked and chosen for further evaluation in order of their score. Ryder said some of the village police departments hire minorities from the list before Nassau gets the opportunity because Civil Service laws allow them to bypass top scorers to hire their village residents.

That has helped Freeport and Hempstead, two Nassau County villages with mostly Black and Hispanic residents, employ two of the most diverse police departments on Long Island.

Using the residency preference, the villages regularly bypass hundreds of applicants to reach their own residents, Newsday found. For those called by the village, it's impossible to gauge how much longer they would have to wait before Nassau reaches their name on the list of thousands of passing test scores.

Of the 235 officers employed by Freeport and Hempstead, 40% are Black, 10 times the typical Long Island police department. (Combined, the two departments also have 14% females and 13% Hispanic officers, which is slightly above the average Long Island agency.)

Put another way, 20% of Long Island’s 261 Black officers work for two agencies in Freeport and Hempstead that together employ just 3% of Long Island’s entire police force.

"The majority of my residents in those communities are minorities, and they live in that community, and they take them first, and they’re great cops, great young kids, and we don’t get the opportunity," Ryder said. "And that hurts us in the numbers right off the bat."

Although Nassau police officers rank among the highest-paid county employees with sizable overtime opportunities and pension benefits, the village jobs also are attractive alternatives for new officers because they offer higher starting salaries than Nassau's $40,596.

Ryder said it's also especially difficult for veteran New York City police officers to join Nassau's force because they'd have to take such a significant pay cut.

"A lot of these guys come married with kids, they were city cops rolling over leaving a $80,000-a-year job, $90,000-a-year," Ryder said, noting the starting salary is low enough that "I've said they're getting by by food stamps."

To combat that, Nassau has begun allowing officers who are on probation to hold a second job to supplement their income, Ryder said.

"Financially it's a struggle when you start off as a Nassau County police officer," Ryder said. "The end game is good, but the beginning is tough."

Nassau police's recruitment website says the average salary reaches $141,108 after 11 years. Overtime pay often raises that figure significantly higher. Newsday reported last year that about 70% of the county employees who made more than $300,000 in 2024 work for the police department.

Suffolk also has struggled to hire Black officers, Catalina said.

He said he sent two staffers to a law enforcement recruitment and retention conference at the University of Virginia in October and charged them to come back with ideas on how to increase the number of Black officers.

"Our goal is to get Black officers into the Suffolk County Police Department," he said.

Suffolk's police recruitment website says the starting salary for a police officer is $50,000 and reaches $189,801 after eight years. Sizable overtime payouts also regularly inflate veteran officer salaries, Newsday has found.

The two county departments, which employ about three-quarters of Long Island's sworn police force, have veteran staffs despite hiring more than 1,000 new officers in five years.

The average age of an officer is 39 in Nassau and 40 in Suffolk. Nassau officers have been on the job 11 years, on average, said Det. Tracey Cabey, a department spokesperson. Suffolk could not produce that same figure.

Police applicants down significantly

Interest in becoming a police officer also is at an all-time low in both counties. The recent Nassau and Suffolk police exams attracted a third fewer candidates than their previous exams before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ryder and Catalina attribute the drop in applicants to the negative connotation of policing that emerged in the wake of the murder of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis during an arrest in May 2020. They both believe the reputation and support of police officers has improved since then.

Declining interest in becoming a police officer is not an issue specific to Nassau and Suffolk. A year ago New York City lowered the requirement for college credits to 24 from 60 to attract more police applicants. 

Despite the decline in interest, the candidate pools in both counties represented the most diverse applicant group yet, with the numbers largely in line with population shares. But, Catalina said, "recruiting somebody is not necessarily success. What you want is to get them hired."

That remains an issue in both counties. Nassau and Suffolk have hired a combined 500 recruits off the current police applicant list. Those new officers are about 75% white.

Critics contend the counties are not doing enough. "They simply have not made the strides that should have been and would have been expected," Brewington said.

Gross said she is not surprised fewer Black people applied to be a police officer.

“If the word on the street is that Blacks don't get selected or that Blacks get weeded out, and if people think that the process is discriminatory, then to some degree it's not surprising that fewer people might put themselves out there,” she said.

But the police commissioners insist they see reason for hope, pointing to the rise in Hispanic hires. Ryder pointed to the diversity of their teenager explorer program, while also noting that the impact of the police department’s fraternal groups providing guidance to candidates is not yet fully realized.

Nassau Police Officer Victoria Ojeda, president of the Hispanic Society, said seeing a Hispanic candidate join the force after seeking advice throughout the process is "the same feeling as watching your own child." 

Ojeda knows that feeling, too. Nassau hired her stepson in 2023. She hopes that’s a sign of a cultural shift in which minorities want to be police officers, compared with her parents discouraging her from doing so.

Catalina believes in the power of officers inspiring others to join. Witnessing an officer chase someone as a child led him to become one. He hopes more focused recruitment efforts in which Suffolk officers meet regularly with the community will help drive interest.

He said they will be better about remaining in contact with people who show interest in becoming an officer. Doing so, he hopes, will prepare would-be officers to navigate the process.

"We’re going to look for candidates that you know, almost like a college football coach would, right?" he said. "Like how you see a great running back, and you want that running back to come to your team, right? You’re going to continue to reach out to that running back and make sure that he picks your team over somebody else’s.

"Well, we're going to do that."

Newsday's Virginia Huie contributed to this story.