Suffolk officials unveil 'data transparency hub' on police website

The Suffolk County Police Department on Tuesday released a long-sought online cache of data on crime statistics, traffic and pedestrian stops and officer demographics in what officials said was an effort toward transparency.

County Executive Steve Bellone and Police Commissioner Rodney K. Harrison announced the police department's new "Data Transparency Hub," saying it fulfilled a promise of the department's police reform plan adopted last year and will give police brass new insights that could spur more reforms.

The statistics were previously accessible by filing a public records request in what could routinely be a lengthy and onerous process and critics said the information should have been released long ago.

The new data can be found on the police department's website — suffolkpd.org. It includes data on crimes, including hate crimes, the number of traffic and pedestrian stops and the demographics of those stopped, as well as the demographics of the department's officers.

"This data hub will create greater transparency between the department and the communities that it serves, while also providing the department with powerful statistical insight," Bellone said during a news briefing with Harrison and other officials at police headquarters in Yaphank.

"When you say transparency and accountability, that is what data is. When you want to be able to say that you're making progress, you need to be able to measure it," Bellone said. " What data does, it gives you the ability to ask questions. It gives you the ability to say 'why is this happening? What is underneath these numbers? What's driving them?'"

Lynda Perdomo-Ayala, chair of the Suffolk County Human Rights Commission said the public release of the data is "long, long, long overdue."

"We should have had it a long time ago," said Perdomo-Ayala. "People are looking at officers who are stopping people and profiling them and saying there's one bad apple, there's two bad apples in the group. And some people are like, there's a whole orchard of bad apples."

Newsday has sought and received similar data, though Freedom of Information Law or FOIL requests, in the past.

A Newsday review of police data in 2020 found that Suffolk police stopped Black drivers four times more often than white drivers, and Hispanic drivers twice as often.

Newsday also reported last year that Black and Hispanic applicants to the Long Island's two largest police departments, including Suffolk, were rejected at much higher rates than their white counterparts.

Harrison, the former NYPD chief of department who became police commissioner in December, called the transparency hub a "work in progress" and said there are plans to add data on Internal Affairs investigations, the department's Language Access program and 911 calls. But said he didn't have a timeline for when that data would be public.

Harrison said the data includes the race and ethnicity of drivers, location of stops and disposition of stops and statistics on hate crimes and hate incidents between 2018 and the present, by hamlet, and will include the type of crime allegedly committed and any motive.

Bellone spokesman Derek Poppe said the county spent $300,000 on new website dashboards, server and user licenses and other online maintenance for departments, including the police department, across county government.

The Suffolk County Police Reform and Reinvention Task Force Draft Report was created in response to the June 2020 order by then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo for local governments to reform and modernize their law enforcement agencies in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Suffolk's plan called for beefed-up oversight and review of traffic-stop data, including creation of a traffic-stop dashboard accessible to the public, in order to minimize bias against Black and Hispanic motorists. The police department had committed in 2014 to collect information on driver stops and searches in an agreement stemming from a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into whether the county had failed to equitably police the Hispanic community.

"Those concerned about being accountable are not going to publish data," Bellone said Tuesday. "It's easier not to publish data. It's easier to just sort of review it internally. This is about making it public because you have leaders here, and you have leadership here, that is committed to that process of excellence and getting better at what we do each and every day."

By Nicole Fuller

nicole.fuller@newsday.com@NicoleFuller

Nicole Fuller is Newsday's senior criminal justice reporter. She began working at Newsday in 2012 and previously covered local government.