Enforcement against dangerous driving surges in Suffolk, drops in Nassau

After lagging behind other state regions for years, police in Suffolk County significantly increased enforcement against dangerous driving violations in 2025, new statewide data show. Meanwhile, in Nassau County, enforcement for those offenses dropped last year and is significantly below its pre-pandemic level.

The Suffolk County Police Department handed out around 76,150 tickets for speeding, aggressive driving, impaired driving, distracted driving and seat belts in 2025 — a 26% increase from 2024 and the department's highest number in at least a decade. Several village and town police departments also increased ticketing for those core safety violations, according to official data from the Institute for Traffic Safety Management and Research at SUNY Albany.

But ticketing for those same categories declined in Nassau County in 2025. Its largest department, the county police, gave out around half the number of core safety-related tickets in 2025 as it did in 2019, the last year before ticketing fell nationwide as COVID-19 spread.

The new ticketing data comes after Newsday reported last year that between 2016 and 2024, police in Suffolk County had issued significantly fewer dangerous driving tickets than other parts of the state when adjusted for traffic. However, the new data indicates Suffolk County caught up in 2025 and surpassed several other regions and Nassau, relative to miles driven.

Suffolk County Police Commissioner Kevin Catalina said in an interview he has tried to refocus his department’s attention since taking its lead last year. He has increased the size of the highway unit by about 30%, he said, and told all officers that ticketing for dangerous traffic violations is important if they want to advance in their careers.

"We're always going to be concerned about violent crime, and one violent crime victim is one too many, but everybody is affected by roadway safety," he told Newsday. "I don't think anybody's gonna be happy about getting a ticket. ... But I think the vast majority of people understand why they got a ticket when they did. And I think ultimately that changes behavior."

Nassau County Police Department did not make Commissioner Patrick Ryder for an interview about the data and traffic enforcement priorities, although it provided internal data for a handful of violations from 2022 onward. That data omits the pandemic years, but it shows the same general trends as state data analyzed by Newsday for the years given.

Christopher Mercado, a former NYPD lieutenant and now an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the data show Suffolk County Police Department is "heading in the right direction."

"Good commanding officers will take community needs into consideration," he said, adding safer roads are a "quality of life" issue.

Mercado said he was surprised by Nassau's decline in ticketing for dangerous driving, saying it calls into question its "data-smart policing strategy." 

Newsday's Dangerous Roads series, launched a year ago, has explored various aspects of the traffic safety crisis on Long Island, where more than 2,100 people were killed over a decade and a crash causes death, injury or significant damage every seven minutes on average. Experts generally say enforcement plays a role in reducing crashes and deaths, but other factors are also important — like road design, driver education and vehicle technology.

Total miles driven by all vehicles in both Nassau and Suffolk fell in 2020 but had nearly rebounded by 2023, the most recent year countywide data is available.

Meanwhile, Suffolk County police said there were 88 crash fatalities within their jurisdiction last year — the lowest number since 2020, when there were 81.

Nassau County police recorded 44 fatalities on the roads they patrol in 2025, up from 35 in 2024 but down from 46 in 2023, Newsday previously reported.

Both counties have consistently ranked among the top three counties in the state for total road deaths in recent years.

The statewide ticketing data published by the traffic safety institute at SUNY Albany, known as ITSMR, comes from the Department of Motor Vehicles, which in turn gets the data from police departments. The ticketing data for 2025 is preliminary but unlikely to change much, officials at ITSMR said.

Their data may differ slightly from internal departmental data, according to the institute's website, because tickets submitted to the DMV after the DMV has given it the OK to finalize the data for a calendar year will not appear in that year’s totals.

Ticketing for dangerous driving vs. other categories

Besides the Suffolk County Police Department, other smaller departments in Suffolk like the Southampton Town police, Southampton Village police and the Suffolk County sheriff also significantly increased ticketing for dangerous driving in 2025. Meanwhile, ticketing for dangerous violations by the departments in Riverhead, Southold and East Hampton Town remained more or less steady.

Southampton Village police more than doubled their safety-related ticketing from roughly 1,000 in 2024 to 2,400 in 2025 — the most in at least a decade.

Chief Suzanne Hurteau attributed this to the creation of a dedicated traffic enforcement team and an overall increase in staffing levels.

"Our goal is not simply to issue summonses, but to promote safer driver habits, reduces crashes, and improve safety for motorists, pedestrians, and our residents," she said in a statement.

While ticketing for dangerous driving behaviors surged in Suffolk County last year, ticketing for other traffic violations less-directly related to safety increased only modestly. As core safety-related tickets increased 23% countywide from 2024 to 2025, all other police-issued tickets, which include things like vehicle equipment, registration, insurance and parking, only increased 4% in Suffolk.

Catalina said he cares most about enforcement related to disobeying traffic signals, driving aggressively, distracted driving and cellphone use.

"Those are the things that get people hurt," he said. "The quality of summons enforcement is good. I like what I see."

Among state police, who patrol the Island's parkways, ticketing for core safety violations has remained roughly steady over the past decade in both of Long Island's counties.

Nassau's lower numbers

Meanwhile the Nassau County Police Department handed out around 27,000 core safety-related tickets in 2025 — about 47% lower than the roughly 51,000 given in 2019 and about 7% lower than the roughly 29,000 given in 2024.

Ticketing fell nationwide during the pandemic amid concerns about the risk of COVID-19 transmission and protests over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Many police departments have since rebounded, but not Nassau County Police Department, the data show.

Newsday did not find evidence that drivers in Nassau County are committing fewer violations today than they did pre-pandemic. In fact, serious traffic injuries and deaths increased from around 800 in 2019 to around 940 in 2024, countywide  — a figure that includes roads policed by state and local departments.

The Nassau County Police Department grew by about 9% between 2019 and 2024, from roughly 2,360 officers to 2,560, according to official data.

Meanwhile, the department recently stepped up enforcement against e-bikes and e-scooters, although some biking advocates have questioned the ban's legal basis in county statutes.

Issues of safety and bias

Last year, Suffolk County police created a Street Takeover Task Force to crack down on street racing. A member, Officer Brendon Gallagher, was seriously injured after a crash in January 2025 when he tried to stop a Brentwood man going over 100 mph. Catalina told Newsday last month the Task Force would remain active "as long as I’m here."

Most traffic stops don't involve high-speed chases, but they are still "probably one of the most dangerous things [for] a cop to do other than a domestic violence call," Mercado said. "Number one, the fact that vehicle is mobile. And number two, there's no idea who we're pulling over."

If implemented in a biased way, traffic stops can also hurt relationships with communities and lead to legal liability.

Suffolk County settled for $3.75 million a class-action lawsuit in 2023 brought by Latino residents over harassment in traffic stops and other interactions, and it underwent a decade of federal oversight beginning in 2014. A consultant it hired found last year that race is not a significant factor in its traffic stops, though an advocacy group has challenged those findings.

Ben Hansen, a professor of economics at the University of Oregon who studies police ticketing, said nationally, allegations of police misconduct are more common around pretextual stops — things like broken taillights — than around core safety-related violations.

Newsday's Arielle Martinez contributed to this story.