05/23/2012
By Colleen Reynolds
A dustup involving Southampton Town’s homeless sex offenders has flared over the past week, with the Suffolk County Department of Social Services accusing police officers of harassing those staying at a pair of county-owned trailers by conducting multiple predawn identity checks over the past three months.
Department of Social Services Commissioner Gregory J. Blass, in a phone interview last week, criticized Town Police for intimidating the sex offenders who take shelter in the county trailers in Westhampton and Riverside by arriving at the unreasonably early hours of 2 and 4 a.m., for example, and rousing the offenders to check their IDs.
Continued intimidation, he warned, will lead to a breach in the county’s ability to track the homeless sex offenders.
“Checking for identification at the predawn hours may be their way of monitoring where they are, but if they persist in this unwarranted excess by doing it in the predawn hours, they will discourage the homeless registered sex offenders from using these emergency shelter trailers,” Mr. Blass said. “And if they do that, we will not know where the homeless sex offenders spend the night.”
Town Police Chief William Wilson Jr. said this week that his officers are not bullying or harassing anyone, but are simply fulfilling their responsibility to verify the residency of the homeless sex offenders for public safety purposes.
Mr. Blass, whose department is responsible for providing emergency housing to all of the county’s homeless, said his department cooperates fully with the police and that the trailer security guards share with officers the logs that document which offenders are present each night and what incidents, if any, occur. He said the police have made one too many predawn ID checks, saying they have done this about six to eight times since about February.
“If the police wake them up all the time just for the sake of checking their IDs and not relying on the security guards and the logs they have prepared, which are done honestly and professionally, then the system we have starts to fall apart, and they will avoid these trailers,” Mr. Blass said.
He added that his department recently enacted a new policy because of what he views as pre-dawn raids. The new policy, Mr. Blass said, requires police to have a warrant before entering the trailers. He said one officer ignored the policy last week.
The county is required by law to provide shelter to homeless sex offenders, while the Town Police are required to verify that the homeless sex offenders are living where they say they are living. If sex offenders do not register a change of address within 10 days of a move, they can be charged with a felony. The Westhampton trailer, located near the Suffolk County Police shooting range on Old Country Road, currently houses about eight offenders, while the Riverside trailer, which sits just outside the Suffolk County Jail, houses about 18.
Town Police Detective Sergeant Lisa Costa this week defended the police department’s recent action, adding that she was surprised by Mr. Blass’s stance. She explained that the police usually refer to a list of names provided by a trailer security guard.
“That did not suffice on its face for us conducting our felony investigations,” she said, adding that if police have to press charges against the homeless sexual offenders, they must have firsthand knowledge of where they are living and officers cannot rely on the lists provided by the guards.
Two recent arrests involving convicted sex offenders led to the recent instances, Det. Sgt. Costa said.
In one case, a Level 3 sex offender—the most severe classification leveled on sex offenders, which indicates high risk of repeat offense—living in Flanders, [name withheld], 56, was arrested in Riverside on May 12 after police said he forced a woman into the woods at knife point and attempted to assault her. Mr. [name withheld] was convicted of first-degree rape in 1983, according to the State Division of Criminal Justice Services sex offender registry.
In the other case, a 52-year-old sex offender, [name withheld], was arrested on May 9 through a joint investigation of the Southampton Town Police, Suffolk County Police and the U.S. Marshals. Mr. [name withheld], a Level 2 sex offender—a classification that denotes a moderate risk of repeat offense—had registered his address as the Riverside trailer, but authorities said he was not living there. Det. Sgt. Costa said his actual place of residence was undetermined, but that he was located and arrested in Amityville. Mr. [name withheld] was convicted of second-degree rape in 2003, the registry states.
“An occasional verification of an address for the common good and safety for the surrounding community clearly outweighs an inconvenience of waking someone up,” she said. “We are not trying to bully. We are not trying to infringe upon their sleep or their rights. We are simply trying to just get the job done.”
None of the homeless sex offenders living in the trailer could be reached for comment this week.
Mr. Blass said all of the recent attention on the Southampton Town Police Department, pointing to the Suffolk County district attorney office’s ongoing investigation of department record-keeping and other internal issues, have prompted the pre-dawn identification checks at the trailers. He said police officials are simply trying to deflect attention away from them.
“It seems a stretch to call the grand jury investigation and this upsurge in these predawn raids to monitor those already being monitored a coincidence,” Mr. Blass said.
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