Assaults on Latinos Spur Inquiry
By ANNE BARNARD
Published: January 12, 2009

Federal authorities have opened a criminal investigation into reports of a string of assaults against Latinos on Long Island, and are weighing whether to begin an inquiry into the Suffolk County Police Department’s handling of such crimes, a spokesman for the Justice Department said on Monday.

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Latinos Recall Pattern of Attacks Before Killing (January 9, 2009)

The spokesman, Scot Montrey, said the department was seeking to file criminal civil-rights charges against people accused of attacking Latinos. He declined to say which or how many incidents were under investigation.

In a separate action, he said, the department’s special litigation division is reviewing whether an investigation of police practices is warranted.

The announcement came just over two months after Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant, was killed in Patchogue, in Suffolk County, during an assault that prosecutors said was a hate crime by teenagers who regularly beat up Latinos. Seven male teenagers have been charged.

After Mr. Lucero’s death, Latino residents and their advocates charged that mostly white gangs of youths had been carrying out similar attacks against Latinos for several years, and that the local authorities had failed to see the pattern or to adequately investigate the crimes.

On Friday, The New York Times and the public radio station WSHU separately reported on numerous other assaults that appeared to involve far more teenagers than those already charged. Each news organization interviewed 11 men, only some of them overlapping, who gave detailed accounts of assaults by groups of teenagers in Patchogue.

The Suffolk County police commissioner, Richard Dormer, has acknowledged that the police appeared to have missed a pattern, and ordered an audit of all reports in the Fifth Precinct, which includes Patchogue. But he has denied that the department discriminated against Latino victims in its investigation of crimes.

“We welcome the D.O.J. looking into these incidents, many of which had not been reported until recently,â€