Implement Suffolk agreement

As a result of the racially motivated murder of Ecuadorean Marcelo Lucero in 2008 in Suffolk County, the Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York have reached a deal. This deal calls for the Suffolk County Police Department to implement further improvements and new policies and procedures to ensure that there is no discrimination in how police officers deal with Latinos.

Back then, the attackers said that they weren’t scared of being punished by police for their actions, since they knew that victims were afraid of reporting crimes due to their immigration status.

How many crimes went unpunished? These types of changes must be based on common sense and implemented by elected officials who care about the well-being of all their residents, no matter their immigration status. Having this type of federal government intervention implies that local authorities allowed the most vulnerable communities to be on their own for way too long —even when it came to matters of life and death.

So far, the deal is tentative and the county’s legislature must approve it. The approval process must be quick and effective —not only for Suffolk’s Latino and immigrant communities, who urgently need to regain their trust in the authorities, but for thousands of locations throughout the country with growing immigrant and Latino communities that are neglected and systematically discriminated on a daily basis.

Therefore, we applaud the decision by the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney to take action on this issue and be able to implement positive changes during the past five years. The deal is an opportunity for further improvement. Also, the Justice Department will monitor implementation for one year to ensure that it complies with the law.

Suffolk police must seize this opportunity to go beyond the guidelines that the federal government set and to become an example to others, since doing the bare minimum required doesn’t show that they are eager to regain the Latino community’s trust.