Third Precinct to Remain Open as Mangano Announces Shift

In an effort to cut back on spending, Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano and Police Commissioner Thomas Dale announced Monday that four of the county's eight police precincts will be restructured.

Four precincts will remain intact while the remaining for will be transformed into new Community Policing Centers, Mangano said.

“I think the county is facing the same realities as the villages and the towns and the state is facing that there is limited resources and the redistribution of resources is not something we want but something we are forced to accept,” New Hyde Park  said. “I think this is not a one-time solution, I think that we’re going to be grappling with these problems on an ongoing basis. We’ve seen the numbers on the pension costs and other factors that are going into this and it’s not a pretty picture for the financial picture for this part of the country, specifically Nassau County.”

According to a release from the county, the Second Precinct in Woodbury,  in Williston Park, Fourth Precinct in Hewlett and Seventh Precinct in Seaford will continue to operate as regular precincts, while the First Precinct in Baldwin, Fifth Precinct in Elmont, Sixth Precinct in Manhasset and Eighth Precinct in Levittown will become community policing centers.

Residents had expressed concern that the village would be left  if the Third Precinct, the largest in the county, .

The plan also eliminates more than 100 desk jobs and slashes “costly” built-in overtime benefits, Mangano said. A total of 48 police officers will be reassigned from desk jobs to Problem Oriented Police (POP) positions.

“I want to make sure that the residents remain safe and it sounds like if the number of patrols are still the same and the number of POP officers are increasing – if that is true – those are good things in terms of future safety of residents in my community,” Petruccio said, adding that the recent restructuring of the county police department “has effectively left us intact. We had already prior to this. I’m hoping that this will result in the reinstatement of our POP officer because we had a wonderful POP officer in Nick Mosesso so I’m hoping that positive comes out of this.”

While the number of precincts and desk jobs will shrink, Mangano said the number of patrol cars will remain the same.

“Keeping residents safe is my number one priority,” Mangano said. “This plan keeps all 177 patrols cars in their current neighborhoods, assigns more cops to POP and opens four new Community Policing Centers throughout the county while increasing efficiencies.”

According to Nassau County Communications Director Brian Nevin, the timeline to complete the entire process will take approximately six months.

The plan also corrects a workload imbalance that had been seen throughout the eight precincts, as three police precincts presently perform twice the workload of the remaining five precincts.

“This plan saves taxpayers significant dollars while streamlining duplicative work, redistributing workload and assigning more officers to POP and special patrol,” Dale said. “... Residents should know that response time will not be impacted as police officers will remain in their current neighborhoods and additional officers will be assigned to our neighborhoods.”

James Carver, President of the Nassau PBA, told 1010 WINS' Mona Rivera that he is going to fight the plan.

“We currently have eight police precincts and they're trying to tell everybody that having four police precincts is a better way to police Nassau County, well they're dead wrong on this,” Carver said.