Former East Meadow cop chosen to lead community council

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“We’re going to have greater outreach into our communities than ever before,” Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder said when he was confirmed to the position late last month.

Ryder was referring to the creation of the Commissioner’s Community Council, a police task force with a subdivision in each of the county’s 19 legislative districts.

Roughly two weeks after his announcement, Ryder and Legislator Thomas McKevitt, a Republican who represents the 13th District, chose retired NCPD officer John Nikiel, 63, of East Meadow, as chairman of the district’s Community Council.

“It’s important for the community to have day-to-day interaction with the police,” Nikiel said, emphasizing that, as chairman, he aimed to help cultivate a better relationship between the Police Department and his community.

Nikiel and his wife, Margaret, moved from Glen Cove to East Meadow in 2001. Their daughter, Cassandra, 17, had just been born, and they wanted to live in East Meadow, Nikiel said, because of the reputation of its school district. He has always lived on Long Island, “but I used to tell people I was born in a foreign country, because I was born in Brooklyn,” he said with a laugh.

He was a police officer for 30 years, working in highway patrol, and retired in 2004. He is also the chairman of the community council for the 1st Precinct, to which he was appointed in 2016 under then Acting Commissioner Thomas Krumpter.

“[Nikiel] knows exactly what the policies of the Police Department were in the past,” McKevitt said. “I think it’s key that now, as a resident and citizen, he could look at what the department does through that perspective.” McKevitt explained that the department’s actions can seem elusive when it is safeguarding an investigation to protect the public. Because of his experience, Nikiel will have a better understanding in such circumstances, and quell residents’ fears and frustrations.

Nikiel said that the establishment of the community council comes at an opportune time in the department’s history. He began his career in 1974, and recalled carrying spare change to report crime via pay phone. “If you see something today, you could report it immediately,” he said. “We’re in the information age, and information has to be a two-way street.”

Often, he noted, residents report a crime on social media rather than contacting the police. He added that some residents don’t understand how the police operate, and don’t report a crime because they worry that it is irrelevant or that no action will be taken. Even when a seeminly petty crime is reported, however, police may open an important investigation. “What may seem like an insignificant problem to you may be indicative of something larger,” Nikiel said.

McKevitt said that the top priority in the 13th District, which includes East Meadow, Salisbury, North Bellmore, North Merrick and North Wantagh, is combating the opioid epidemic. According to the county, East Meadow had the 11th-highest rate of overdose deaths among Long Island communities in 2015, the seventh-highest in 2016 and the third-highest in 2017.

While that number is high in part because of the deaths logged at Nassau University Medical Center, McKevitt said that opioids are still penetrating East Meadow neighborhoods. And in such a tightly knit community, residents more often report suspicious behavior, like people going in and out of a house at odd hours of the night.

“And if people feel uncomfortable calling the police,” Nikiel said, “they could call me.”

In addition to his contributions to the Police Department, Nikiel has contributed to a number of local quality-of-life projects, as co-chair of the East Meadow Neighborhood Committee, alongside Yvonne Amato. Their most recent accomplishment was working with a developer to establish Qdoba and Starbucks on Hempstead Turnpike.