Thread: Suffolk cops' forms ask crime victims' residency

Suffolk cops' forms ask crime victims' residency statusBY REID J. EPSTEIN | reid.epstein@newsday.com
February 3, 2009
For almost three months, Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy and Police Commissioner Richard Dormer have said repeatedly that Suffolk police do not ask crime victims to disclose their immigration status.

But forms that Suffolk police have used since 1999 instruct officers to ask whether a crime victim is a temporary resident or foreign national - a question lawmakers and immigrant advocates say discourages Hispanic crime victims from calling police.

"We have been repeatedly told that it is not a policy to ask people their status if they are a victim of a crime," said Assemb. Phil Ramos (D-Central Islip), a former Suffolk detective. "Now the police officer on the street who is required to fill out this form is compelled to ask that question."

Eugene O'Donnell, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, said it is "counterproductive" for police departments to ask for victims' citizenship or immigration status.



"You don't want crime victims and people who have information about crime to not report that to law enforcement," O'Donnell said.

The issue of police collecting information on victims' immigration status has been central to the controversy over the Nov. 8 killing of Ecuadorean immigrant Marcelo Lucero in Patchogue.

After the killing, for which seven teenagers are accused, investigators charged the Lucero defendants with a series of earlier assaults against Hispanic men, in some of which cases the victims said they had been afraid to report to police.

Dormer first said Thursday he did not know incident report form PDCS-1099b included the residency question, and said that he issued orders prohibiting officers from asking victims' immigration status.

Dormer's Oct. 20 order states: "The fact that an individual is suspected of being an undocumented alien alone shall not be the basis for contact, detention or arrest." It makes no mention of a victim's citizenship or immigration status.

"My order should supersede this, and it does," Dormer said.

The next day, he issued a statement saying the question on the incident report is meant to help police identify crime trends and does not pertain to immigration status.

"There is a difference between residency and citizenship," he said in the statement. "And, in fact, the incident report contains no references to victims' immigration status. As I have stated repeatedly, crime victims and witnesses to crimes are not asked about their immigration status."

Dormer did not address whether the form's question would discourage Hispanic victims from reporting crimes. Levy did not respond when asked for comment yesterday.

On the incident report, the item in question is one of a series of data points about the crime's victim. It asks the "residential status of victim," with choices of "Temp. Res., Foreign Nat.," along with resident, commuter, tourist, student, military, homeless and other.

Officials in the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association said officers are expected to answer each question listed on the incident report.

"It wouldn't make sense to me to have a form with a question that you don't intend to ask," said Noel DiGerolamo, the police union's second vice president.

Ramos, who retired from the Suffolk police force in 2002 but said he'd never before seen the residency question on an incident report, said the incident report form indicates a schism between what Levy and Dormer have said and how police have acted. "The real question is why is the public being told something different?" he said.

Dormer said the department asks the residency question to comply with the state's uniform crime reporting system. Nassau Police ask a similar residential status question, but without mention of citizenship or foreign nationals. The New York Police Department began to prohibit asking about crime victims' status in the 1980s, O'Donnell said.

The state Department of Criminal Justice Services does not mandate that local police collect data on victims' citizenship or immigration status, though the question does appear on the department's incident report template, department spokesman John Caher said.

Still, the question of citizenship is one that many police departments across the state do ask, according to John Grebert, the executive director of the New York State Association of Chiefs of Police. "If you want to track exactly where your crime is, something like that could be pretty useful," Grebert said.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/crime ... 1658.story

They ask me. You also can't have people making false claims without knowing who to go back to.