Wrong move to try to reopen Nassau police precincts

When Nassau County announced it could save money with a plan to consolidate the county’s police precincts from eight to four in 2012, the Police Benevolent Association was apoplectic. The union claimed crime would go through the roof, overtime costs would skyrocket and police response times would slow.

Eventually, the county reduced its number of open precincts to six and created two community policing centers in place of the closed precincts. Rather than increasing, overall crime in Nassau declined 31 percent from 2012 to 2017, and significant financial savings were realized.

The public couldn’t really see a difference, since residents can receive all the services at community policing centers they do at precincts, from reporting crimes to getting copies of police reports to being fingerprinted for job applications. And police response times did not suffer, since the minimum manning levels of the officers who respond stayed the same in all of the department’s individual patrol sectors.

So why are Nassau County Executive Laura Curran and the county legislature going to war over reopening precincts? Politics, pure and simple.

During her 2017 run, Curran promised to reopen the Sixth Precinct in Manhasset and the Eighth Precinct in Levittown, but that was a pledge that excited the police unions a lot more than the public. Why? Money.

The county’s serpentine police contracts stipulate the staffing at “precincts.” Two more of them would require more detectives, and with the county already short of detectives, the change would cost a fortune in overtime.

The county has a shortage of detectives because patrol officers often refuse the promotion. Thanks to the relative pay rates and available overtime, they often can make more money on patrol than as detectives. Fixing that would mean increasing detective pay significantly in the new contracts Curran and the unions must negotiate. The last deal ended in 2017.

Now, as Curran tries to get her budget approved, county legislators are demanding that the Sixth and the Eighth reopen, and they’ve set aside $1.3 million to do it, though Curran’s office says that won’t be nearly enough. and the additional precincts would do little to improve policing. Led by Republican Presiding Officer Richard Nicolello, the legislature cynically and unanimously added the precinct reopenings to Curran’s 2019 budget, along with money for the new union contracts and more bus routes, to be funded by the magic wand of increasing the projections of sales tax revenue for 2019. Curran vetoed the changes last week, setting up a political battle this week as she tries to get enough Democrats to side with her to make an override impossible.

Neither the legislature nor Curran should have promised to reopen the two precincts, and her best move now would be to admit it’s simply unnecessary and unaffordable. Instead, she’s saying she still plans to reopen them and hiding behind the fact that she never said when she would do it.

That’s a weak stance for a county executive who is going to need to be very strong indeed to fix what’s wrong with her county’s finances and its politics. — The editorial board