Nassau County burglary rate and arrests up in 2012

Nassau County police have arrested 70 burglars in the first seven weeks of 2012, a marked increase from recent years, said Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano at a press conference on Feb. 23.

The positive crime data comes at a time when the Nassau County Police Department is under intense scrutiny while the county decides whether to approve a bill that would see four police precincts shut down and turned into community policing centers.

Acting Police Commissioner Thomas Dale said that the uptick in burglary arrests is due in large part to a shift in priority after intelligence-based policing models discovered an upward trend in burglaries near the end of 2011.

“In anticipation of this increase in burglaries, our first step was to develop accurate and reliable intelligence,” Dale said. “As we notice changes in burglary trends in different locations throughout the county, we have been immediately redeploying our personnel to follow the bad guys.”

In a presentation detailing the crime statistics in recent years, NCPD Chief of Department Steven Skrynecki noted that while major crimes, such as homicides, are down nearly 10 percent since Mangano took office in 2010, residential burglaries are up by less than one percent, though there was a significant spike in burglaries between last year and this year.

Skrynecki said that while the number of burglaries in the first seven weeks of 2012 is up significantly from the first seven weeks of 2011, those numbers are skewed by the extreme difference in weather.

According to Skrynecki, in the first seven weeks of 2009, there were 209 residential burglaries, in 2010 there were 216, while in 2011, there were only 100 residential burglaries.

“This year, at that time, there are 218 [residential burglaries]. The anomaly here is last year,” Skrynecki said. “Clearly, we’d like to take total credit for that, but we think that nature had a little play in that with the blizzards of last winter.”

Despite the significant increase in burglaries from last year, Skrynecki said, the NCPD is outpacing recent years in burglar arrests.

A large portion of recent burglaries, Mangano said, is associated with prescription drug abuse.