The expansion accelerated dramatically following World War II with the rapid suburbanization of the county. It reached 1,000 officers in six precincts by 1950. A seventh precinct was opened in 1955 and an eighth followed five years later. In the early 1970s, with crime and civil disorder in neighboring New York City and other cities a major concern, the force was boosted to its greatest strength, nearly 4,200 officers. Since then, it has declined to around 2,600, making it still one of the largest county police agencies in the United States.
The NCPD's guiding philosophy is that it is a "service-oriented" police department, promoting the concept of the community as client, and the police as provider. (For many years, for example, officers would come to a citizen's home to take a crime report or complaint, rather than ask the citizen to come to the precinct.) Sociologist James Q. Wilson used the Nassau department as the exemplar of this approach in his classic 1968 study, Varieties of Police Behavior.
Commitment to technology and innovation
The department has historically been quick to embrace new technologies. The Marine Bureau began in 1933 with the gift of an 18-foot Chris Craft mahogany speedboat from the residents of Manhasset Bay. The Aviation Bureau followed a year later with the gift of a Stinson airplane from wealthy county residents. The aircraft was grounded by World War II, but the air unit was revived in 1968 with the purchase of four helicopters to assist in pursuits and medical evacuations. The Highway Patrol unit, which covers the Long Island Expressway and the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway and includes motorcycle officers, was founded in 1935. All police vehicles are now equipped with computer keyboards, and, since 1973, air conditioning.
In addition to these units, the department also maintains many features, such as a Detective Bureau, a crime lab, a police academy, a mounted unit, an arson/bomb squad, a hostage negotiation team, a citizen-based auxiliary police program, and an Emergency Services Section (ESS), that are usually found only in the police departments of large cities. The department has also adopted its own system for computerized tracking of crime information known as NASSTAT.
Traffic safety is a major department priority, given Nassau's relative lack of public transportation and its perpetually clogged roads and highways. A unique feature of the department is its Children's Safety Town, an actual village built to 1/3 scale that includes paved streets, two intersections equipped with traffic signals, an overpass, two tunnels, a simulated railroad crossing and 21 buildings. Managed by the department's Traffic Safety Unit, it allows the NCPD to teach traffic and bicycle safety to grade schoolers under controlled conditions.
In 1989, concerned about the
increasingly heavy weaponry being
carried by the criminal element, the
NCPD was among the first police
departments in the country to trade
their venerable .38 six-shooters for the
15-round, nine-millimeter SIG P226
automatic.
In 1995, the NCPD became the largest police department in the country to that time, and the first in New York State, to allow its officers to work a steady 12-hour shift, rather than a rotating 8-hour shift commencing at a different time each week. In early 2007, the NCPD announced that 207 marked patrol vehicles would be equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) devices, allowing "live" views of the location of all active units.
In late 2006, the department undertook "Operation Gotcha," deploying a new technology that scans the license plate numbers of passing vehicles directly into a mobile crime computer, allowing the immediate apprehension of drivers operating vehicles with expired licenses, suspended registrations or with outstanding arrest warrants. The technology allows the scanning of literally thousands of plates in a single shift.
Emergency Ambulance Bureau
NCPD Ambulance
In addition to police officers, the department also employs hundreds of civilian Ambulance Medical Technicians (AMTs), emergency telephone operators and school crossing guards.
Unlike most jurisdictions, where emergency medical response and ambulance transport are functions performed primarily by the fire department, in Nassau, the police, private ambulance companies, and local fire departments share this responsibility. Nassau is one of the few police agencies in New York State that trains all of its police officers to provide emergency medical services. Police ambulances, however, are manned by tan & green-uniformed AMTs rather than police officers.
After finding the abandoned bodies of a number of newborn children, Nassau AMT Timothy Jaccard and several of his colleagues in the Emergency Ambulance Bureau founded the AMT Children of Hope Foundation,[6] to give these children proper funerals and dignified burials.
Famous cases
The Nassau County Police have investigated a number of nationally well-known crimes and incidents, including the hunt for "Honeymoon Killers" Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck in the late 1940's, the Weinberger kidnapping of 1956 (on which the 2002 Robert DeNiro film City by the Sea was very loosely based), the crash of Avianca Flight 52 in Cove Neck in 1990, the Joey Buttafuoco/Amy Fisher imbroglio, and the shootings committed aboard a LIRR commuter train by Colin Ferguson in 1993. One of the NCPD's few large-scale, high-profile security events was the 1998 Goodwill Games , which took place largely in Nassau County. Nassau officers also participated in the recovery effort at the World Trade Center Site September 2001.
Also, the NCPD Mounted Unit can be seen every year at the finish line saluting the winner of the Belmont Stakes.
