Ticketing dangerous drivers saves lives. Is there enough enforcement on Long Island?

During his daily commute to Ronkonkoma over the years, Melville resident Jeff Redelman has seen a steady rise of drivers speeding, following too closely and weaving between lanes. But he said he hasn't seen enough drivers pulled over.

"There's never any enforcement," he said, adding he notices far more police whenever he travels upstate to visit his daughter in Binghamton.

Experts generally agree police enforcement is an essential part of ensuring traffic safety, along with better infrastructure, road design and education.

A Newsday analysis found for years, police in Suffolk County have issued significantly fewer dangerous-driving tickets than other parts of New York when adjusted for traffic, though their numbers have been rising. In Nassau County, police ticket drivers at a higher rate, but enforcement there still hasn’t fully recovered since the COVID-19 pandemic, when ticketing plummeted statewide.

In 2024, law enforcement in Suffolk wrote about 94,000 safety-related tickets — the most in any year since 2017 — but relative to total miles driven that is still around 21% less than Nassau, 32% less than the Lower Hudson Valley counties of Westchester and Rockland, and 22% less than upstate. In Nassau, police wrote about 84,000 safety-related tickets, which is more than Suffolk and similar to upstate relative to miles driven, but 10% below Nassau's own ticketing rate in 2019.

County numbers include town, village and city police departments, as well as tickets issued by state troopers, as reported to the Institute for Traffic Safety Management and Research, which collects data. Because official traffic volume data is only available at the county level, it is difficult to compare ticketing rates between individual police departments.

Commissioner Kevin Catalina of the Suffolk County police — the largest police department in the county, whose roughly 2,500 officers patrol the five western towns — said he has made traffic enforcement a priority since taking the lead of the department earlier this year. He's expanded the highway patrol 30% and told all officers that traffic enforcement is important for career advancement, he said.

"When I came to Suffolk County, I wanted to best protect the people who live here and one of the first things that really jumped out at me was roadway safety,” Catalina told Newsday at the Yaphank headquarters, noting traffic fatalities usually far outnumber homicides.

Suffolk regularly leads the state in total traffic fatalities, and although deaths have been falling after surging during the pandemic, total crashes have remained roughly steady and serious injuries have  increased, both in Suffolk and statewide.

Catalina said he doesn’t believe Newsday’s comparison of ticketing in Suffolk to other areas is appropriate because every place has a unique roadway system and a different balance between traffic safety and broader public safety needs.

“I think what we need to do is compare Suffolk County to Suffolk County,” he said, adding that his department's year-to-date ticketing numbers in 2025 are up more than one-third above the same period in 2024 for speeding and aggressive driving. "I think we're certainly going in the right direction."

Catalina also praised his department's Street Takeover Task Force, formed last year to crack down on street racing. A task force member, Officer Brendon Gallagher, was seriously injured after a crash in January when he tried to stop a Brentwood man going over 100 mph.

Christopher Mercado, a former NYPD lieutenant and now an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who worked with Catalina in the city, said while each region's "distinctions, needs and dynamics" are different, comparisons are useful.

"We’re in a data-driven era of transparent policing. Any municipality is subject to comparison with any other," he said. "Do I think Suffolk could do more? Absolutely. Do I think that Catalina is the right person for that spot? Absolutely."

Capt. Timothy Gleason, of the New York State Police’s Troop L, whose roughly 150 troopers patrol state parkways in both Nassau and Suffolk, declined to compare his department’s ticketing rate to others, saying, “It's not about a number. It's about being out there and being visible."

Nassau police did not make anyone available for an interview.

In a written statement, Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder said, "Public safety remains the top priority."

He did not address a question about why ticketing in Nassau remains below its pre-pandemic level, but said, "Our police officers will continue to enforce the vehicle and traffic law to keep our roads safe, however lasting change requires the joint effort of all motorists."

Newsday compared counties' ticketing data and traffic volume estimates from the state transportation department, which extrapolates from data collected from traffic tubes laid out on roadways. The estimates are designed for statewide accuracy and may be less precise for small counties and local roads, but they are commonly used in traffic research and policy-making. Newsday's analysis looked at tickets for speeding, aggressive driving, driving while impaired, cellphone use and seatbelt use. It excluded ticketing for violations less directly related to safety, such as vehicle equipment, registration, insurance and parking. It looked at a broad range of safety categories to account for the fact some areas may have low levels of one type of safety-related ticket, like aggressive driving, but high levels of another, like speeding.

New York City has higher ticketing relative to traffic than anywhere else statewide, but was excluded from the analysis because it reports data slightly differently and because experts said its transportation system is unique in the state.

Preliminary 2025 data show an increase in ticketing in Suffolk, but it still lags behind the Lower Hudson Valley and the rest of the state; ITSMR cautions these figures are preliminary and subject to change so Newsday didn't include them in its analysis.

Kacie Dragan, a public health professor at Columbia University who has researched the relationship between ticketing and traffic injuries for New York City’s Vision Zero Task Force, said Newsday's method “makes sense.”

Ticketing's role in road safety

As Newsday has reported in its ongoing Dangerous Roads series, advocates say traffic safety requires a holistic approach — from better road designs that protect pedestrians and cyclists to better driver education, or legal changes like creating tougher consequences for drug test refusals and hit-and-runs.

Gleason and Stuart Cameron, a former Suffolk County police chief and acting commissioner who now heads Old Westbury’s department, said besides patrolling, officers help make roads safer by educating drivers at public events and identifying problems in crash-prone areas for traffic engineers to address. But they both said ticketing, especially for the safety-related violations Newsday looked at, is important because it can take bad drivers off the road and deter others.

“We try to emphasize this to the troopers — you'll never know what you've just prevented by issuing a ticket,” whether through the impact on the driver, a passenger or passing motorist, Gleason said. 

Ben Hansen, a professor of economics at the University of Oregon, said effective patrolling “can create a safe driving culture.”

Hansen studied the effect of a sudden decrease in ticketing in Oregon when 30% of the state police were laid off in 2003 amid budget cuts. Roadway deaths and injuries rose significantly on state highways in the years afterward, even when accounting for changes in weather and traffic trends. On average in Oregon, “a highway fatality can be prevented with $309,000 of expenditures on state police,” the study, published in 2014, found.

Dragan, the Columbia professor, said police ticketing was a critical component of New York City’s Vision Zero program, which she said was very effective at reducing traffic injuries from its beginning in 2014 until the pandemic, when ticketing dropped and injuries rose.

“The leading explanation for that, both based on our conversations with … the NYPD and DOT, and our analysis of the data, is that enforcement really declined in New York City during the pandemic,” she said.

But over-ticketing, too, can be problematic, Mercado said.

Though it is illegal in New York and more than two dozen states for departments to assign officers quotas, police departments like the NYPD and others nationwide are periodically accused of using informal ticketing or arrest quota systems to raise revenues.

Suffolk police have faced accusations of racial profiling, settling for $3.75 million a class action lawsuit in 2023 brought by Latino residents over harassment, and it underwent a decade of federal oversight beginning in 2014. A consultant it hired found race is not a significant factor in its traffic stops, though an advocacy group has challenged those findings.

Catalina said he believes his officers are conducting traffic stops “correctly and fairly," and the department regularly assesses conduct through body-cam footage. He also said the department is working with a data technology firm to start a new, real-time analysis tool to ensure patrols are planned where crashes are highest.

Hansen said nationally, allegations of police misconduct are more common around pretextual stops —  things like broken taillights —  than around core safety-related violations.

​​​​​​Biases and fairness have always been a challenge in law enforcement, he said. “But if you remove all that enforcement, the disadvantage is all of society loses, because then we end up driving faster.”

Local governments in both Suffolk and Nassau have automated enforcement programs in the form of red light cameras and school bus-arm cameras, which issue hundreds of thousands of notices of liability each year — more than the total safety-related tickets issued by police on the Island.

These automated ticketing programs, which  are not included in Newsday's analysis, also exist in New York City and some counties and cities upstate. They are each limited to a single type of violation at certain locations and do not result in license points, since they do not establish who was behind the wheel.

Cameron, the former Suffolk chief, said red light cameras can be useful but are no replacement for in-person tickets.

“I don't think there's any substitute for getting pulled over by a police officer and having that interaction,” he said.

Expanding traffic enforcement

Police departments on Long Island are regularly among the highest-paid in the state. Suffolk County's budget last year expanded the department by about 95 officers and County Executive  Edward P. Romaine has proposed raising its allocation from $647.9 million to $663.1 million in 2026; the department uses additional grants for traffic-enforcement overtime, DUI checkpoints and commercial vehicle enforcement.

Commissioner Catalina said he has added 23 officers to the highway patrol this year, for a total of 107 officers who specialize in traffic enforcement, although most of the department's roughly 2,500 officers write tickets.

Asked whether more ticketing could prevent crashes in Suffolk, Catalina said he'd "like to have 20,000 police officers in Suffolk County, if they allowed me to, but we don't have that ability and I think we're doing a fantastic job with what we have."

He said many officers are personally motivated to do traffic enforcement because they care about the community, but he's also made clear it's important for career advancement.

“We’ve said to our rank and file that if you expect to advance in Suffolk County Police Department into an investigative unit, when you come up here for an interview, we want to see DWI enforcement,” he said.

Mercado, the former NYPD lieutenant, said traffic stops are "one of the more dangerous interactions" police have with citizens, along with mental health and domestic violence calls.

Nassau police did not provide an explanation for why its ticketing for dangerous-driving violations has not fully rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. The department's force grew by about 8% between 2019 and 2024, from roughly 2,360 officers to 2,560, and other village departments in Nassau have also expanded, according to FBI data. Nassau police did not answer written questions about the size of its highway patrol. 

Hansen, the economist, said research shows regular ticketing changes driving behavior.

"The most important thing is that it be more frequent, that you stop people more often, and that people develop a habit" of following traffic laws, he said.

April Acquila, who lives in Mount Sinai, said too many drivers speed by the hamlet's school complex on North Country Road. She wants more crosswalks and sidewalks — but that's not all.

"If more police patrolled the area, that would help," she said. "They would have a field day with speeding tickets."

Newsday's Anastasia Valeeva contributed to this report.