Suffolk police and federal government ask judge to end 40-year-old consent decree over police hiring

The U.S. Department of Justice and Suffolk County are seeking to end a 40-year-old consent decree related to hiring practices that resulted in a police force with too few people of color and women.

The consent decree has been in place since 1986, following a 1983 lawsuit against Suffolk County filed by the federal government that alleged "Suffolk County was engaged in a pattern or practice of employment discrimination against women, Blacks and Hispanics with respect to job opportunities in the Suffolk County Police Department."

Suffolk denied those allegations at the time, while acknowledging the police department had a "substantial disproportion" of women and Black and Hispanic people on the force.

Suffolk Police Commissioner Kevin Catalina did not respond to a request for comment.

The decree called for Suffolk to implement procedures to give women and Black and Hispanic people an equal opportunity for employment in the police department as white people, as well as requiring regular reports documenting its efforts. The decree stopped short of setting targets for the number of women or Black or Hispanic officers hired by the department.

Former Suffolk police officers who were involved in recruitment said the consent decree has had little impact on SCPD’s hiring of minority officers, particularly Black officers.

"It’s like a dog with no teeth," said Damon Barney, a retired SCPD officer who worked in recruitment. "If you’re not doing anything to enforce it, why bother getting rid of it anyway? What is the motivation of getting rid of something you’re not bothering to enforce?"

Of the 2,681 sworn SCPD officers, just 70 were Black, or 2.6%, according to the most recent numbers from the state Division of Criminal Justice Services. Suffolk County’s population is 7% Black, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Hispanics are 13.7% of SCPD and women are 13.2%, compared with 24% and 50% of the county’s population, respectively.

"I’m a little disappointed in that nothing has changed over these years and any renewed efforts would have to start from scratch again," said Kenneth Williams, a retired SCPD officer who was head of recruitment in the 1990s.

The motion filed Monday says Suffolk County has "complied with the decree in all material respects" and asks the court to dissolve the decree.

The attorney representing the Suffolk County police union didn't respond to a request for comment. The union was also a party to the consent decree.

"The problems they found in 1986 are still afoot in that county, except the government has changed and the attitudes about these kinds of cases has changed," said Randolph McLaughlin, a civil rights attorney and professor of law at Pace University.

The Department of Justice declined to comment on this story, but the department recently has been undoing past litigation and action taken by the federal government against police departments. In May 2025, the Justice Department announced it was dismissing lawsuits, closing investigations or reversing findings against at least nine local police departments across the country.

"This Department of Justice has turned its back on the civil rights of various communities to be free from improper police practices and hiring," McLaughlin said.

Newsday reported earlier this year that police departments on Long Island had made gains in recent years in hiring Hispanic and women officers. Data from the state shows between 2020 and 2025, the number of Hispanic officers on Long Island police forces increased 31% and the number of female officers was up 15%. The number of Black officers working on Long Island only increased 1% in that time.

Suffolk County Police Department also increased the number of minority officers on the force between 2020 and 2025, according to state data. The number of Hispanic officers increased by 44%; the number of female officers increased by 24%; and the number of Black officers increased by 9%. The entire department grew by 11% during that time. Despite those increases, the number of minority officers is still not proportionate to the population of the county.

Earlier this year, Catalina told Newsday the goal is to be "representative of the population we serve," and he acknowledged they're not.

"I expect to do a lot better," he said at the time.

However, the proportion of Black officers employed by Suffolk County has hardly changed in a quarter of a century, according to state data. In 2000, SCPD employed 64 Black officers, or 2.4% of the force. In 2025, the department employed 70 Black officers, or 2.6% of the force.

A Newsday investigation published in 2021 found Black candidates for policing jobs on Long Island were rejected at a rate three times higher than white candidates and Hispanic candidates were rejected twice as often. In the four years after the 2015 hiring exam, SCPD only hired 16 Black cops out of 1,419 applicants, that investigation found.

Williams, the former head of recruitment at SCPD, said nothing in the consent decree forced the county to actually hire more minority officers.

"Nothing would ever come from that," Williams said of the decree. "There were no quotas, even no milestones they had to meet, no targets. It was a toothless tiger, which is what DOJ was all this time."