By Michael Malaszczyk
There are no updates to Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman’s controversial deputy sheriff initiative, according to a spokesperson for his office.
“No change,” a spokesperson said bluntly when asked if Nassau residents could expect to hear further information about the plan, who then indicated that 25 deputy sheriffs are ready to go.
The plan was introduced in March when Blakeman placed an ad in Newsday asking for volunteers with gun licenses “for the protection of human life and property during an emergency.”
Blakeman said these deputy sheriffs would be trained and their primary role would be to assist Nassau County police during emergencies. He has said they would be trained, though the specifics of that training are unknown.
Nassau Sheriff Anthony LaRocco will oversee the deputy sheriffs.
Applicants must be 21 to 72 years old, citizens of the United States and Nassau, consent to a full background check and drug testing, have a doctor’s letter saying they are fit for duty, and have a valid pistol license.
“They would not be going out on patrol,” Blakeman said in May. “Primarily, their task would be to guard and protect government buildings, hospitals, utility plants, sewage treatment plants, churches, mosques, and synagogues, and things of that nature so that we could free up our police officers to do other work. This is a database, and it’s nothing more than that. They will be trained; they will have firearms training, training on penal laws, and training on the use of deadly force.”
Since its introduction, the sheriff’s program has been a contentious issue. Blakeman’s opponents in the Legislature joined a rally in May to oppose it, expressing concerns for both safety and potential litigiousness.
“It’s a very real issue,” Nassau County Legislator Scott Davis (D-Rockville Centre) said at the May rally. “In Suffolk County last week, there was a $20 million settlement – and that’s with professionally trained police officers. That $20 million is on the shoulders of the taxpayers.”
Nassau County Legislator Carriè Solages (D-Elmont) likened the idea of armed citizens on patrol to George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old African-American man, in Florida in 2012.
“I’m a parent of a young Black man who sometimes wants to wear a hood,” Solages said. “God forbid, a young man wearing a hood is out minding his business during this so-called state of emergency that’s not defined properly under law. God forbid an overzealous George Zimmerman type of person chooses to think that that young man is a danger. In addition to a loss of life, that would cause our entire county and our nation to be set back in terms of race relations.”
Others at the rally took it a step further and likened deputizing private citizens to the “Brownshirts” of Nazi Germany, which helped Adolf Hitler rise to power in the 1920s. That was a step too far for Blakeman, Nassau’s first Jewish county executive, not to respond.
“Equating these men and women who would be willing to devote their time to protecting our county, calling them brownshirts?” Blakeman said. “This is not only a personal insult to me, as a Jew, but it is a personal insult to humanity. It’s an insult to those men and women, civic-minded individuals, who stepped up and said they would serve in an emergency.”
