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The path to winning appointment to Long Island’s highly paid police forces has been more than three times tougher for Black would-be officers than for white applicants and twice as tough for Hispanic job seekers in recruitment by the Nassau and Suffolk County departments, a Newsday investigation has found.
With thousands more people seeking jobs than the number needed by the two forces, the investigation revealed that since 2012, each county’s hiring process rejected minorities at rates that exceeded a federally established benchmark used to detect evidence of unlawful discrimination.
Candidates for positions on the 2,400-member Nassau County Police Department and the 2,400-member Suffolk County Police Department compete on written exams and then undergo physical fitness tests, psychological screening, medical evaluations and background reviews.
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Long Island’s two county police departments are among a small minority of America’s largest local law-enforcement agencies that have spurned broad use of body-worn cameras, even as deadly encounters between officers and unarmed Black people increased calls for greater police transparency and accountability.
A Newsday survey of the nation’s 50 largest law-enforcement agencies found just three that had not equipped large numbers of officers with body cameras before 2020: The Nassau and Suffolk police departments and the Portland Police Bureau, in Oregon.
Deployment of body cameras as standard police equipment extends from the nation’s largest force, the 35,000-member New York Police Department, to smaller agencies, including Freeport’s 100-officer department. It has occurred as law-enforcement authorities and the public have come to rely on video recordings to document crimes and police conduct.