Dans Hamptons

We’ve always had crime. And it is not as if in the last year or two we’ve suddenly had a major surge and it requires a new approach. If anything, crime has leveled off at a very low rate after plummeting by half in the nineties.

What has happened in the past year or two, however, is a change in the way we deal with crime. In the past, if someone committed a crime, they were arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned. If the crime were considered heinous enough, the incarceration could be for life or the man or woman even put to death. If the crime were not heinous, a jury would decide the amount of time to be spent in jail, during which time, it was hoped, people could be rehabilitated and eventually let out, either without restriction or with the guidance of a parole officer. We called it, back then, a civilized society.

With all this in mind, I would like to note what has happened here in the Hamptons just in the past week. I am not complaining about it. I am just asking you to note how criminal behavior today is being treated differently than how it was just a few years ago.

On Tuesday, about a dozen immigration officers with guns and flashlights surrounded a house on Morris Park Lane in East Hampton at four o’clock in the morning, awakened the residents and took away half a dozen men and women in handcuffs who do not have the proper paperwork to be here in America. Many were taken in their nightclothes. Their crying children were left behind. Numerous other homes in East Hampton were also similarly invaded on the same night in what immigration officials say was a coordinated crackdown. The Town Police were not informed.

An immigration official said the officers had the names of particular illegal immigrants who had committed crimes and were specifically looking for those particular people, but they also arrested anyone else they came upon whose papers were not in order, an arrangement he called an “ancillary” result of the raids. All together, 35 people were arrested and are currently being held in detention centers in New York City and elsewhere.

Chief of Police Sarris said that the morning after the raid an unusually large number of missing persons reports were filed. When many reports were looked into, it was found they were connected with the immigration raids. He also said for the immigration people to come in like this without informing local police was troublesome to him, because it had the potential of creating what he called “turmoil.” But he also said the Immigration people have the right under the Homeland Security Act to do what they did, the way they did it.

On Wednesday, Suffolk County considered a bill that would break up the clumps of level one, two and three sex offenders who seem to only be able to live in a few particular communities in the county because in only those communities are there stretches of town that do not have either schools, playgrounds or daycare centers built on them within 1000 feet of their residences. There is a requirement that sex offenders are not permitted to live within that number of feet of these places. The bill to solve this clumping problem would have the sex offenders moved around among County owned trailers that currently exist sprinkled throughout the different communities. Thus, the problem of sex offenders could be spread equally and democratically between all the towns and hamlets. And also, the trailers could be moved around. So sex offenders wouldn’t be settling very long in any one place. They’d just be gypsy-like.

One legislator said it put him in mind of the Busch Beer commercial where you have the bullet train come speeding through town with all the townspeople out waving as it roars by.

On Friday, residents of Southampton who live up near the railroad station in that town reacted in horror to the idea of a town shelter being built on railroad property there so that the day laborers, many of whom come here by train, would have a sheltered place to stand or sit during the winter without freezing to death while waiting to be picked up.

It was pointed out that a Catholic school was less than a half a mile from the station and how would you like your schoolgirl or boy to have to walk along in front of grown men loitering on a sidewalk hoping to find work? The Mayor, who had made the proposal, backed away from it when faced with this stiff opposition.

On Friday, a man named Duane Moore, who is a level three-sex offender and who is registered as such in Southampton, has agreed to move from the house he just bought for $400,000, even though he bought it after proper consultation with the Village Police. It has been found that the house is within 1000 yards of a playground, a recently added condition of the County Sex Offender law that was apparently unknown to the Village Police at the time of the approval.

Mr. Moore says he has a bank that has pre-approved a mortgage loan for him, but is having difficulty finding anything available to buy within his budget. He also noted that he can’t find anybody to rent a house or apartment to him outside the 1000-foot limit because as soon as people find out his designated level as an offender, the letters go out. The Village Police say they have not given him a deadline to move yet, because they realize the circumstances of how this happened and want to give him a little time.

Sex offender designations, as you know, are for the rest of your life.

And did you hear last week that there is a woman physician in the area who is dating a sex offender? He sits in her lobby sometimes. Children shouldn’t have to sit in the same room with him. Isn’t there anything that can be done?

I could go on and on with this, just from the news within the last week here in the Hamptons. What are we coming to?

I recall that after 9/11 people said that we would have to make compromises with our freedoms to deal with terrorism. Somebody hits you, you hit back so they won’t hit you again. We have Guantanamo, we have Abu Ghraib, we have people being held without charge and we have people being held for what they might do in the future based upon what they did in the past. And now it seems to be spilling over into other aspects of our lives.

I could print here the words that are on our Statue of Liberty as you come through New York Harbor, but if I did, people would just say Dan is soft on criminals. But you know what? Those are the words on our Statue of Liberty and we are supposed to take pride in them. We are a wonderful country of freedom and law.

THE STUFF THAT THE UNITED STATES IS MADE OF