Nassau Police Use Racist Shorthand To Identify Officers: Report

A report recently released by the New York Civil Liberties Union showed that the Nassau County Police Department used an old, racist short-hand system to identify officers in its internal database.

According to files obtained by the NYCLU through Freedom of Information requests, the NCPD uses a single-letter system to denote the races of its officers: B, H, I, W and Y, where "I" stands for Indian— for Native American officers— and "Y" means "Yellow," for Asian-American officers.

Nassau police officials told Newsday that the designations were part of a 25-year-old computer system, and that it would immediately change the system.

The police department is also much less diverse than Nassau County itself, the report found. Of the 396 sworn personnel the department provided information for, 91 percent were men and 82 percent are white. Only 18 percent of the officers on the force are people of color, while 37 percent of the county is.

The police department was also very reluctant to comply with the NYCLU's FOIL requests, the organization said. It had to make multiple requests and appeals before getting information that it had a legal right to.

According to the NYCLU, the NCPD also did not provide information on stops, enforcement of low-level offenses or statistics related to officer training, claiming that it would need to create a new data-retrieval program to do so.

"It’s unacceptable that one of the largest police departments in the country, with more than 2,000 officers serving a population of more than 1.3 million residents, cannot produce statistics on some of the most basic law enforcement interactions," the report reads. "Nassau County must ensure that its police department has systems in place for collecting and publicly reporting information on police practices. At minimum, departments should be able to report on stops, uses of force, and the offenses people are being arrested and ticketed for."

The report put together by the NYCLU was part of a larger project to compile data on police departments across the state. You can read the entirety of the New York Civil Liberties Union report here.

Photo: Patch