“No militia, no way!” was a recurring chant outside Nassau County’s Theodore Roosevelt Executive and Legislative Building on Monday, when local politicians and advocates joined forces to criticize Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman’s recently introduced Provisional Special Deputy program.
The plan aims to deputize gun-owning property owners in Nassau to become provisional special deputy sheriffs, who would assist Nassau police in times of emergency. Applicants must be 21 to 72 years old, a citizen of the United States and Nassau, consent to a full background check, drug testing, have a doctor’s letter saying they are fit for duty and a valid pistol license.
But the county executive’s opponents wasted no time criticizing the move, with Minority Leader Legislator Delia DeRiggi-Whitton (D-Glen Cove) leading the charge. A constituent emailed DeRiggi-Whitton, likening the plan to both the Wild West and the “brownshirts” of Germany, a paramilitary Nazi group that helped Adolf Hitler rise to power in the 1920s and 30s. Others have called the plan creating a “militia.”
DeRiggi-Whitton spoke about the constituent concerns, but did not make the claim herself.
Blakeman, Nassau’s first Jewish executive, responded on Thursday demanding DeRiggi-Whitton’s resignation.
“Equating these men and women who would be willing to devote their time to protecting our county, calling them brownshirts?” Blakeman said. “This is not only a personal insult to me, as a Jew, but it is a personal insult on humanity. It’s an insult to those men and woman, civic-minded individuals, who stepped up and said they would serve in an emergency.”
But Blakeman’s opponents have not backed down, as seen by Monday’s hour-long protest denouncing the plan.
“We are so fortunate to be protected each and every day by the best trained, best resourced and most qualified law enforcement in our nation,” Legislator Arnold Drucker (D-Plainview) said. “This ill-conceived idea may in fact endanger the lives of our law enforcement as well as other residents with the likelihood of accidental shootings and misuse of firearms because of confusion of identification and authority in these contrived instances of public emergencies. Yet this is another disturbing example of our county executive veering so far out of his lane by diverting his attention on issues that don’t exist.”
Other legislators pointed to the potential liability issues of these deputies.
“It’s a very real issue,” Legislator Scott Davis (D-Rockville Centre) told the Press. “In Suffolk County last week, there was a $20 million settlement – and that’s with professionally trained police officers. That $20 million is on the shoulders of the taxpayers.”
According to Legislator Seth Koslow (D-Merrick), the Republicans of the legislature support Blakeman’s initiative.
“In my short time here in the legislature, I’ve seen that the Republican legislators get their marching orders and they stay in lockstep,” Koslow told the Press. “I intend to talk to my colleagues and figure out what their positions are. I said it before, and I’ll say it again, no one is supporting this. There’s not one person in my district that’s told me they know someone who supports it.”
Legislator Carriè Solages (D-Elmont) likened the idea of armed citizens on patrol to George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old African-American man, in Florida in 2012.
“I’m a parent of a young Black man who sometimes wants to wear a hood,” Solages said. “God forbid, a young man wearing a hood is out about minding his business during this so called state of emergency that’s not defined properly under law. God forbid an overzealous George Zimmerman type of person chooses to think that that young man is a danger. In addition to a loss of life, that would cause our entire county and our nation to be set back in terms of race relations.”
Others at the protests backed up DeRiggi-Whitton’s initial claim of this initiative being reminiscent of Nazi Germany – or the Wild West.
“Bruce Blakeman has been really trying to make himself out as a leader on we what we used to call the alt right,” Lucy Zentgraf, a Queens-based organizer, told the Press. “We have this kind of very fringe, fascist tinged politics, which is based entirely around hate and discrimination. We saw just back in February, his push to ban trans women from county sports facilities, which was this incredibly out of nowhere move. Blakeman has really decided I think, in this election year, that he’s going to be really brash, bold, and really scary. We’ve seen everywhere from the American West to Nazi Germany to Italy in the 1920s, brown shirts, black shirts, and auxiliary police. These are people who are given tons of authority with no accountability who enact and reinforce this racialized violence that our country was built on.”
Blakeman responded to the rally, claiming that this is little more than additional help for police and further criticizing the claim that these deputies would be brownshirts as offensive. He added that many of the applicants are retired police officers and other first responders.
“They would not be going out on patrol,” Blakeman said. “Primarily, their task would be to guard and protect government buildings, hospitals, utility plants, sewage treatment plants, churches, mosques, and synagogues, and things of that nature so that we could free up our police officers to do other work. This a database, and it’s nothing more than that. They will be trained; they will have firearms training, training on penal laws, and training on the use of deadly force.”
Nassau resident Sabine Margolis has started a petition against the initiative.
