Major changes proposed for police precincts

Four Nassau County police precincts, including the 1st Precinct in Baldwin and the 5th Precinct in Elmont, will be transformed into Community Policing Centers (COP) in an effort to save Nassau County $20 million annually, County Executive Ed Mangano announced at a press conference Monday.

Under the Community Policing plan, the new centers will not handle administrative paperwork or criminal processing, but will still have officers on duty at all times.

There are currently a total of eight police precincts in Nassau County. The other two precincts that will become Community Policing Centers are the 6th Precinct in Manhasset and the 8th Precinct in Levittown.

The 2nd Precinct in Woodbury, the 3rd Precinct in Williston Park, the 4th Precinct in Hewlett and the 7th Precinct in Seaford will remain as normal precincts.

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

Problem Oriented Police (POP) are community police officers and each precinct used to have 4 or 5 “POP Cops” at one time, though staffing changes and layoffs reduced that number. Mangano’s plan would reassign 48 officers from desk jobs to POP units and special patrols.

By eliminating more than 100 civilian desk jobs and cutting built-in overtime benefits, Mangano said the county would save up to $20 million annually.

According to a press release from Mangano’s office, COP corrects an imbalanced workload, as currently three police precincts perform twice the workload of the other five.

The NCPD analyzed the distribution of workload over the past six months and found that the most common reason for visiting a precinct building is to obtain a traffic accident report and that residents not subject to arrest do not normally visit the buildings.

Mangano announced that the department will make traffic accident reports available on the Internet as well as at precincts and community policing centers.