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Suffolk Police Chief: Hate Crime Arrests Are “Proof” That Latinos Now Trust Authorities

Posted April 23, 2010 by Ted Hesson
Categories: Hate Watch

On Tuesday, I covered a press conference by the Suffolk County district attorney’s office to announce an indictment against a man and a women who had allegedly targeted Latinos for hate crime robberies, referring to their victims as “papis.” Click here for that post.

At the press conference, Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard Dormer posited that the criminal investigation and subsequent arrests—in which eight of nine victims came forward to the police—served as “proof” that Latinos in Suffolk County aren’t afraid to contact the police about crimes.

The arrests are laudable. For months, the defendants allegedly robbed Latinos (or people perceived to be Latino, as one Middle Eastern victim learned), thinking that their targets were easy marks. Felicia Smith and Sean Allen, who allegedly acted as the “ringleaders” of a group that included four other thieves, expected that Latino victims would avoid the police, not speak English, and carry cash.

The timing of the indictment announcement seemed convenient for the police and the district attorney’s office, to say the least.

The United States Department of Justice is in the middle of an investigation into how Suffolk County police have handled crimes against Latinos and crime reported by Latinos.

In addition, a September 2009 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center chronicled a decade’s worth of crimes against Latinos in Suffolk County, some unreported or uncharged.

The Suffolk police department, for its part, has downplayed the ongoing federal investigation. And when the Southern Poverty Law Center report was released, police officials criticized it for perceived inaccuracies and a lack of departmental input.

Yet Tuesday’s press conference featured a police commissioner intent on convincing the media—and, by extension, the public—that his department’s relationship with Latino residents had changed for the better.

Just one day after Suffolk’s first-ever hate crime murder conviction, in which Jeffrey Conroy was found guilty of first-degree manslaughter as a hate crime related to the 2008 stabbing of Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero, Commissioner Dormer stood alongside District Attorney Thomas J.Spota, insisting that Latino attitudes towards police had changed since the Lucero murder.

When asked whether the alleged victims in the “Papi” robberies were undocumented immigrants, Dormer stressed that it was not the policy of the Suffolk police department to check the immigration status of a victim or crime complainant.

That policy was not always in place, however. The Suffolk police department included the policy in a directive issued 12 days after the Lucero killing, when the national media began to scrutinize Suffolk County and its policies in regards to immigrants.

Even with the directive, Suffolk County lacks a more global and public policy in regards to questioning residents about immigration status.

In stark contrast to Suffolk’s policy, in 2003, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg issued Executive Order 41, a public decree that forbids workers in a range of city services—including police work—from asking residents about immigration status.

Suffolk County has no comparable public decree. I had to file a Freedom of Information Request to obtain the documents related to Suffolk’s policy, and it’s unreasonable to assume that Suffolk residents would do the same.

Still, Dormer saw the robbery collar as evidence that Latinos now felt comfortable approaching Suffolk police about crimes.

“This is proof of the pudding,” Dormer said at Tuesday’s press conference. “Victims coming forward…this didn’t happen in Patchogue.”

The latter part of that statement is certainly true. This didn’t happen in Patchogue.

As we learned through testimony in the Jeffrey Conroy trial, Conroy and his friends attacked Latinos with little consequence before Lucero was killed.

Testimony and written statements by the defendants showed that on more than one occasion, police decided not to follow up on reports of violence against Latinos.

Jeffrey Conroy was convicted of attempted assault against Octavio Cordova on November 3, 2008. Cordova chose not to press charges, and police let Conroy and his friends go home.

That was five days before the Lucero killing.

Fellow defendant Nicholas Hausch, who testified at Conroy’s trial as part of a plea deal, spoke of how he and some friends had shot a Latino man with a BB gun in the early morning hours of November 8, 2008. The police questioned Hausch’s friends about the crime while Hausch hid nearby, but no one was arrested.

Later that evening, while hanging out at the Medford train station hours before the Lucero killing, Hausch told some friends the story of the previous night’s BB gun attack: “They were shocked that I got away with it,” he recalled on the witness stand.

At Tuesday’s press conference, Commissioner Dormer effectively asked the public to forget example like these, which point towards discriminatory policing. Instead, the focus was on the current indictment, and that eight of nine victims had come forward to report crimes to police.

Flanking Dormer and Spota at the press conference were two Latino leaders, both of whom you may remember from the previous day’s press conference after the Jeffrey Conroy verdict: Fernando Mateo and Rev. Allan Ramirez.

Mateo, the president of Hispanics Across America, doesn’t live on Long Island, but has served as the Lucero family spokesman since the killing.

In the past, Mateo has been a visible and effective fundraiser for GOP politicians like former president George W. Bush, for whom he reportedly raised over $100,000 in 2003. He also founded the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers in 1998.

Mateo praised the police work by the department, saying that police had “opened their doors to the Hispanic community so they can feel comfortable coming forward and reporting crimes.”

Ramirez, who also represented the Lucero family during court proceedings, spoke at the conference as well. He is the pastor of the Brookville Reformed Church, in the Nassau County Village of Brookville.

For decades, Ramirez has been an outspoken Latino advocate on Long Island, and in the wake of the Lucero killing, he has blasted Suffolk elected officials and police for their immigration policies and rhetoric. In November 2009, he led a protest outside of Newsday’s Melville office regarding the newspaper’s immigration coverage.

Amid Dormer’s “proof” that police relations with the Latino community had improved, Ramirez departed from the prevalent message and condemned not only Suffolk officials, but also the police department.

Saying that anti-immigrant sentiment was still present in the community and the police department, Ramirez said, “The cancer of racial hatred so prevalent in Suffolk County has reached epidemic proportions.”

In a press conference that tried to sell the public on the allegedly improved relationship between Suffolk Latinos and police, Ramirez’s remarks registered as a strong dissent.

Looking at the 30-count indictment against the alleged robbers, it’s clear that the county devoted a lot of time and manpower to the case. That eight of nine victims came forward to report the crimes is also important.

But after a decade of policies and political rhetoric aimed at Latino immigrants, it will take more than one case to prove that the department is performing adequately.

For an outline of what changes the Suffolk police department should consider making, check out these recommendations put together by the Long Island Immigrant Alliance.

Tags : hate crimes, immigration status, robberies, suffolk

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