Views Diverge on Southold Public Safety Law

When the Southold Town Board holds a special meeting July 29 to discuss a proposed local law to guide the town’s actions during immigration enforcement actions, there are likely to be many divergent views at the table.

According to documents expected to be discussed at Wednesday’s 8 a.m. special meeting obtained by The Beacon, Town Attorney Ben Johnson has cautioned that passage of a local law could confuse the public and not be enforceable, while urging the town to heed threats from Congressman Nick LaLota to withhold funding from towns that adopt the law.

Pictured Above: Immigration agents during the Feb. 4 raid in Greenport. |. photo courtesy a Greenport resident.

He issued the letter after five community members on the committee drafted their own set of recommendations, key among them adopting legislation “to ensure public safety amid new and unprecedented challenges affecting our community.”

“Anything short of legislation denies the public’s clear awareness of the town’s official policy and the ability to hold the town accountable to ensure the enactment of the legislation’s tenets,” wrote the five members.

The town formed the task force in mid-February after a series of immigration enforcement actions rocked the Village of Greenport on Feb. 4, resulting in the detention of three fathers without criminal records working in the community.

Residents of a small residential street in the village described a chaotic scene that morning in which unmarked vehicles were speeding throughout the neighborhood as parents brought their children through the icy streets to their bus stops, and the presence of vehicles belonging to immigration agents near the school. One quarter of the student population didn’t come to school that day.

Around that time, just after the killing of two American citizens by immigration agents in Minneapolis, Minn., the Latino advocacy organization OLA of Eastern Long Island proposed town and village governments here pass a local law drafted by OLA board member and former New York State Assemblyman Fred Thiele to guide how town police and community leaders will communicate with the public and interact with immigration officials during such raids.

Both East Hampton Town and East Hampton Village have passed versions of the OLA law, leading to threats from U.S. Congressman Nick LaLota to withhold discretionary funding from towns that adopt the local laws.

Mr. LaLota visited both Southold and Riverhead towns in mid-July, bringing with him big checks for police cars and radios for Southold and for connection to public water for PFAS contaminated wells in Calverton, an act interpreted by many immigrant advocates as a subtle form of intimidation. The Riverhead Town Board has refused to discuss the merits of the local law with OLA representatives.

The makeup of Southold’s task force includes Town Board members Brian Mealy and Jill Doherty, Greenport Village Trustee Lily Dougherty Johnson, Southold Town Police Chief Steven Grattan, Police Advisory Committee Vice Chair Kevin Foote and Anti-Bias Task Force member Carolyn Peabody, along with several community members, though we have been unable to locate a full list of members. The group met five times over the past five months to discuss public safety during immigration raids.

After the dissenters made their recommendations on June 9, Southold Town Attorney Ben Johnson drafted a June 24 letter to committee members outlining the points on which the group reached consensus. The letter notably did not recommend passing the OLA law.

“Questions remain open — among them, what practical effect a law without an enforcement mechanism would have, beyond potentially confusing the public as to what is and is not enforceable, and certain constitutional questions that remain unresolved,” according to the letter.

Mr. Johnson’s letter also directly references Mr. LaLota’s June 17 letter to local municipalities, stating that “because that funding is discretionary and the District has historically drawn on it, the Congressman’s position places real dollars at stake — and a codified local law, being a more identifiable official action than an internal Department practice, may heighten that exposure.”

The five dissenters on the task force include Greenport Village Trustee Lily Dougherty-Johnson, Kristie Lutz (representing the Greenport community), Anti-Bias Task Force Member Carolyn Peabody, Magda Rodriguez, and Sonia Spar, who served until recently as the town’s Spanish-Speaking Community Service Liaison.

While four of the five dissenters declined to talk to the press ahead of the July 29 meeting, Lily Dougherty-Johnson said the task force “had some frank and open conversations, but I don’t think at this point we have reached consensus.”

She said the group did reach consensus that “communication could be better,” and the public could benefit from more information on how to tell the difference between Southold Town Police and immigration agents.

What is the Current OLA Law?

The OLA law has undergone several iterations as the New York State Legislature debated and ultimately passed several measures that overlapped with the original OLA draft.

The final draft, released in March, focuses on the way in which information about immigration enforcement activities is circulated within local communities, requiring local law enforcement officers who respond to an incident involving federal officers to report the incident to the town supervisor or mayor’s office, and requiring that office provide copies of the report to members of its town or village board and make those reports available to the public, “consistent with the State Freedom of Information Act.”

The latest OLA draft law makes no reference to whether towns can enter so-called 287-G agreements to work collaboratively with federal law enforcement, as those agreements were banned in the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act, passed as part of the state budget in late May.

The state has since given 12 local law enforcement agencies, including Nassau County Police, until Aug. 25, 2026 to terminate these arrangements, which has been a major point of contention in Nassau County Supervisor Bruce Blakeman’s attempt to unseat Kathy Hochul as Governor.

Dissent in Detail

In Southold, the five dissenters said in the Executive Summary of their June 9 report that “nothing was presented to us that would lead us to conclude that the Town of Southold cannot or should not adopt the draft legislation tailored to the specific conditions of Southold Town. Additionally, the presentation and discussion of specific Southold Town Police public safety policies dovetail with points outlined in the OLA law, which further indicate that adopting the OLA law should cause no hardship to the town.”

“Indeed, East Hampton Town has already adopted a locally tailored version of the law based upon the proposed legislative template, including provisions that extend beyond the fundamental elements of the original proposal,” they added. “This provides a clear East End example that adoption and implementation are both practical and achievable for Southold Town.”

The dissenters identified numerous issues with immigration enforcement in Southold, including agents speeding on residential streets in civilian and unmarked vehicles and wearing masks and not displaying identification or showing a warrant, “so it’s unclear if they are official agents or imposters.” They added that many people are afraid to go to school or work, impacting both families and the local enconomy.

“Public trust is eroding, and people may be afraid to call 911 in an emergency, hesitant to report crime or reluctant to get critical medical care,” they said, adding that if the Southold Town Police “is on scene during immigration enforcement, they can be seen to be colluding with these agents, and it could endanger Southold Town Police officers.”

After the Feb. 4 raid, many Greenport residents said they were concerned that the Southold Town Police Department’s 806 patrol car, assigned to Greenport, was seen heading west out of Greenport before the raid. Town officials have said since that this was due to a normal shift change, during which patrol cars are taken back to police headquarters in Peconic.

The group recommended, as the OLA law spells out, that town police report any verified immigration actions to the town supervisor and mayor, who would then alert their boards and school and hospital administrations, and create education tools to help the public identify Southold Town police officers and differentiate them from ICE.

They also recommended coordination with schools, hospitals and clinics to “ascertain their planned protocols for emergency response to immigration enforcement attempts to enter their premises, the hiring of more police officers and reassignment of more officers to Greenport, additional de-escalation training and limiting access to license plate recognition technology.

“There needs to be an effort by the town to say ‘this is important. All of our community members deserve safety,” said Ms. Dougherty-Johnson. “Obviously, Southold Town has no control over when ICE comes, but we do have a police force meant to keep our whole community safe. There’s not a really clear plan. Let’s say someone does call 911 (during an immigration raid) and they say ‘we can’t help you.’ We need to know what they’re going to do. We’ve seen kids not go to school because they’re scared. This is definitely affecting our community.”

Mr. Johnson’s letter said there is consensus on additional de-escalation training, better communication protocols and increased public outreach, education and awareness of police department policy.

But, he also wrote, “data presently available does not support increased policing in the Village of Greenport, already the most thoroughly patrolled sector in town. His letter adds that “requesting identification from individuals engaged in law enforcement activity is already standard practice under basic policing principles and existing department policy.” It also states that, rather than create an additional committee, the town’s Police Advisory and Anti-Bias Forces “are already constituted, enjoy established relationships with the Department and the community, and together are well suited to provide the ongoing stakeholder communication and representation the community representatives seek.”

The draft OLA law includes the creation of a task force specifically to address public safety during immigration raids. OLA Executive Director Minerva Perez has been critical of Southold’s task force since not long after it was created, telling us in March the creation of a task force to decide whether to pass the law “is not interesting.”

“That for us can be a little bit of a shell game. I’m not interested in shell games. I’m interested in actual concrete action,” she said at the time. In the law, she says, “we’re talking about a task force established with a plan as to who’s doing what, not a task force to study if you need a task force.”

Krupski’s Take

Town Supervisor Al Krupski said July 24 that he has read the letter from the dissenters and he appreciates their feedback.

“I’m glad they’re so engaged and part of the task force,” he said. “It’s good to have people who care so much spending the time trying to make the community a better place.”

He said he expects at the meeting the “Town Board will have a discussion about the next steps, and then we want to open it up to the public” for comment.

“We want to get input from the public,” he said. “People need time to digest it. It was helpful for us that East Hampton passed a version of something. That gives us a benchmark.”

When asked about Mr. Johnson’s skepticism about whether the town should pass a local law, Mr. Krupski said “that’s going to be up to the Town Board to decide. There has to be a benefit. We’re not going to pass a local law just to get a headline. Period. We have to do what we have to do to protect the public. We’re responsible as police commissioners, and if we’re going to be changing our operations, we want it to be consistent.”

Cigars and Alcohol?

Members of the public, outraged by the ICE killings on the national stage, turned out demanding Southold Town to do something to protect its residents at several Town Board meetings this winter, both before and after the chaos in Greenport on Feb. 4.

Since the task force began meeting, there has been muted public engagement, though rumors have spread through the community that there were cigars and alcohol present at the initial meeting, held in the wood-paneled former Southold Savings bank board room that is now a conference room in the Southold Town Annex — a space that can be intimidating to those who see it for the first time.

Ms. Dougherty-Johnson confirmed that one of the task force members, a licensed counselor and corporate strategist, had brought cigars and beer to the meeting, along with snacks, and that the member packed the supplies into a box that included miniature bottles of Scotch at the end of the meeting.

“It was hard for me to tell if they were saying ‘we’re showing you this is a good old boys club,'” she said, adding that she could understand that this type of thing might not seem odd in a corporate mediation session. “The alcohol and cigars were a little weird, but maybe that’s how he does things.”

She added that the presence of the cigars and alcohol also caused her to question “Are we taking this seriously?”

She added that she never saw an agenda for the task force meetings, and was unsure if anyone was taking minutes, while members were never quite sure who was on the committee.

The dissenters’ letter concurs with that assessment, saying the task force’s “limitations were reinforced by unclear membership, roles and voting procedures, as well as the absence of structured discovery and expert consultation, which together reduced transparency and constrained fully informed, collaborative decision-making.”

“So much of this has been behind closed doors, and it deserves public discussion,” said Ms. Dougherty-Johnson. “If it’s not a local law, let’s at least make sure we do have polices and are actually following them, and that they’re publicly known and communicated.”

Mr. Johnson responded to that criticism in his letter, saying the “feedback is received in the constructive spirit in which I trust it was offered. Convening and engaging a group of this size on matters of this complexity is genuinely difficult, and coordinating the schedules of so many dedicated volunteers and officials requires a measure of patience.”

The Town Board meeting will be held on Wednesday, July 29 at 8 a.m. in the Southold Town Hall Annex basement meeting room.

We have yet to see wood paneling, bottles of Scotch or cigars in the sparse basement meeting room, but unless the door to downstairs is held open for the meeting, you may need to buzz your way in due to recently adopted security precautions in this building.

Here’s the meeting notice and Zoom login info.

Read Our Ongoing Coverage of Local Immigration Issues

Keep Independent News on the East End

The Beacon is able to provide all of our content online free of charge thanks to support from our readers. Be a vital part of keeping our community informed!

Advertisement