The County Where Cops Call the Shots
Fiscal conservatives and liberal activists both want to curb the power of police unions in Suffolk County. Can they do it?
SMITHTOWN, N.Y. — Rob Trotta, a cranky Republican county legislator on Long Island who worked as a cop for 25 years, might be the unlikeliest voice for police reform in America. He’s full of praise for the rank and file. The phrase “defund the police” makes his skin crawl. When he talks about race, he sounds like he’s stuck in the 1980s.
Yet Mr. Trotta has railed for years about the political influence of police unions in Suffolk County, Long Island, a place where the cops are known to wield exceptional clout. He’s a potent messenger, since he can’t be smeared as anti-cop. He wore a badge and walked a beat. Mr. Trotta’s small, quixotic battle is part of a much larger struggle in the United States to wrestle power away from police unions that for too long have resisted meaningful reform.
Since the killing of George Floyd, the push to rein in the police has gained public support across the country, as liberal activists demand sweeping changes to policing and greater accountability for officers who commit crimes. But the headwinds are stiff. Few other occupations demand the deference and trust that police officers say they require to do their jobs. They even have their own version of the American flag — it’s black with a blue line running down the center, representing the idea that the “thin blue line” they embody is all that separates civilization from anarchy.
There’s some truth to that. The news is full of stories of the sacrifices police officers make, most recently the officer who lost his life responding to a mass shooting in Colorado. That’s one reason the growing criticism of the police has been met with a passionate counter-movement, called Blue Lives Matter. But there are also far too many cases of police officers who abuse their positions and are protected by powerful police unions.
What began as national calls for reform last summer are now in the hands of local communities to bring about. There are more than 18,000 policing organizations in the United States. In the state of New York, police departments have been scrambling to adopt a reform plan by April 1, the deadline set by Gov. Andrew Cuomo for communities that want to remain eligible to receive state funding.
In many cases, reform plans are rolled out by the same politicians who once cozied up to police unions to get elected. But momentum for change is building, as both fiscal conservatives and liberal activists take aim at the outsize political power of police unions.
Nowhere is that dynamic more clear than in Suffolk County, N.Y. It’s a place where the residents are well off, crime is relatively low and the Police Department has made national news for a huge corruption scandal. Yet the police union still holds great sway. It’s sometimes said that the county doesn’t run the police; the police run the county. Now people in the county are watching the reform process play out, to see whether that’s still true.
Suffolk County is home to some 1.5 million people, many of them current or former New York City police officers. Last year, the county hosted what was billed as the largest “Back the Blue” rally in the country. Donald Trump gave a speech there in 2017, encouraging officers to rough up suspects and drawing cheers. But what really stands out about Suffolk County is the compensation that police officers receive and the money their unions spend on local elections.
In 2019, more than 1,200 officers — nearly half the force — took home over $200,000 a year. Even an officer who was criminally charged for falsifying time sheets walked away with a payout of $291,868. Eye-popping a sum as that might seem, it’s par for the course in Suffolk County. Another superior officer left with $624,082, including unpaid vacation days and sick time.
With so much money at stake, the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association doesn’t leave elections to chance. It has not only a PAC, but also a super PAC that spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on local elections. That super PAC is generally funded by contributions from law enforcement. Last September, it also collected tens of thousands of dollars from Long Island businesses, including two $10,000 checks from construction and maintenance companies, which super PACs are allowed to do. State law forbids the police from soliciting political donations from the public. Thus far, police benevolent associations have operated outside those restrictions.
With those generous salaries, the citizens of Suffolk County have paid for what should be world-class law enforcement. Instead, it got a police chief, James Burke, who went to prison in 2016 for running the department like a mafia boss. That scandal, which led to the conviction of the powerful district attorney, Thomas Spota, who was scheduled to be sentenced this month, and the head of his anti-corruption unit underscored how easy it can be for cops and politicians to get in bed together and turn law enforcement into a system of political favors and personal vengeance. Police officers testified that they feared for their families’ safety or that they’d be framed for crimes if they blew the whistle on their boss. It’s hard to imagine a starker illustration of the need to reinvent policing.
Steve Bellone, the Suffolk County executive who appointed Mr. Burke, says he was fooled by Mr. Burke and Mr. Spota and turned against them when he discovered their “criminal enterprise.” He vows that a new day has dawned. He touts a new district attorney who set up a conviction integrity bureau to investigate wrongful convictions. On March 11, the county unveiled its long-awaited plan for police reform.
Mr. Trotta watched the rollout on Zoom at his office desk in Smithtown. He pointed out his fellow county legislators on the screen and rattled off how much the police union had spent to help each one get elected. He said some elected officials visibly stiffened when police union representatives walked into county meetings. A member of the union sat on the reform task force.
“I can’t stress to you enough how afraid of the union these people are,” he said of his fellow legislators.
“This is a good thing,” he said, gesturing at the meeting on his screen. “But it’s not getting at this,” he declared, holding up printouts about the union’s political donations. “The root of the evil is the money.”