Community Cares Trying to Better Lindy for the Future

It’s overwhelmingly foggy and the rain has faded to a light drizzle at Village Square Park in Lindenhurst. Despite it being 1 p.m. on a school day, a group of teenagers is hanging out on the benches.

Three months ago at this same spot on the northeast corner of an intersection in the heart of this village on Long Island’s South Shore, the members of the Lindenhurst Community Cares Coalition were moving forward with a “clean-sweep” to clean the area up of drug-related paraphernalia and other trash.

“We had about two people send us complaints of hypodermic needles on the streets,” said Judith Raimondi, the head of the coalition. “On the third we got, I said, ‘All right, let’s do this.’”  

The attending members, parents and kids alike, broke up into four teams and scoured the area for a half-mile in each direction, filling multiple medical waste containers with items they found on the streets, including eight hypodermic needles.

The coalition, a group of community members who want to prevent underage drinking and substance abuse in the area was founded in the spring of 2013 by Raimondi, 45. After attending a drug forum in the nearby town of West Babylon, Raimondi said she wanted to bring that same activist mindset over to Lindenhurst.

“The camaraderie and the concern and the questions they were asking were exactly what I wanted to start in Lindenhurst,” Raimondi said. “I’m all about what we can do to move forward and not live in the problem” of teenage drug use.

Suffolk County Police say they’re generally seeing an increase in the possession and use of prescription narcotics such as Percocet, Vicodin and other form of oxycodone. These common painkillers are all opioids and share many similarities with heroin, including the propensity to cause dependence, addiction and death.

“Drugs are the biggest crime lately. That’s what everyone’s been complaining about,” said Suffolk County Police Officer Margery Marotta, an officer with 18 years’ experience on the force. Marotta is a member of the Community Oriented Police Enforcement unit in the police department’s First Precinct, which covers the village of Lindenhurst.

Law enforcement statistics show that heroin-related deaths in the county hit an all-time high of 83 in 2012. That year, the number of drug-related arrests rose to 1,266 from 2011. In the First Precinct, drug overdoses nearly doubled from five in 2011 to nine in 2012 and drug arrests are averaging around 150 per month.

Lindenhurst, originally named “Breslau” when it was founded in 1873 by German settlers, is an upscale South Shore community. With a median income of $86,000 and an average property value of $350,000, the quality of life is quite high, and the concerns over drug use may seem out of place.

The recent surge in concern may have its roots in how the community drew together after Hurricane Sandy hit over a year ago. With efforts such as the volunteer-operated Camp Bulldog at Shore Road Park, which provided hot food and supplies to the disaster-stricken community, the residents of the town banded together to fill a void that municipal services seemingly could not.

“The services could not be there so they had to take charge themselves,” said Peggy Kennedy, a prevention specialist at the Suffolk County Prevention Resource Center. “I think that sense of empowerment is still there.”

The Lindenhurst coalition has turned to the Suffolk County Prevention Resource Center for help moving forward. The center is a subdivision of the New York State Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services.

“We lead them on the path to the conversations that need to be had, the difficult conversations on substance abuse prevention,” said Pamela Mizzi, director of the center.

The center is housed on the third floor of Carone Hall at South Oaks Hospital in Amityville, a few doors down from the hospital’s administration suite. In the small office, littered with milk crates filled with binders of statistical and research data, Mizzi explained that the center lacks the resources to take action directly, such as starting a coalition. Instead, it fulfills an advisory role, guiding a coalition to find what it needs.

Robin McKinnon, one of Kennedy and Mizzi’s colleagues, said that access to prescription drugs is a major reason these problems have been increasing over the years.

“Access is a big problem,” McKinnon said. “The youth have access that allows them to start using you, access that could be stopped by community awareness.”

McKinnon added that media acceptance of drugs and their use, exemplified on a show like “Breaking Bad,” in which the main character, Walter White, was a chemistry teacher who turned to making meth to support his family, and “House,” in which television’s favorite doctor suffered from a Vicodin addiction, can lead viewers into overlooking the life-threatening consequences drugs may present.

These factors leading some youth to think that recreational drug use is an okay thing to do, she said. When the Center’s staff talks to kids who are using and asks them to describe what their drug dealer looks like, they no longer describe a shady character who looks unkempt and suspicious.

“Now they’re drawing their best friend,” McKinnon said. “Drugs are being exchanged by people who look just like you, so people think it’s more acceptable.”

The coalition is still in its infancy, Raimondi said, but its members are done with just talking and want to start to tackle the issues. After the street cleaning in September, they discussed how to proceed further.

“We can take this to whatever level we like to,” Raimondi said. “It’s about getting more of the community involved.”

Their first major step is to start neighborhood watches throughout the village, assisted by local COPE officers. Participants in these watches do not act like as vigilantes but instead maintain a close eye on their neighborhoods for suspicious activities and contact the authorities if they spot any.

At the coalition’s September meeting, almost every resident in attendance signed up for a neighborhood watch group. On Nov. 7, they took the first step towards starting the watches, placing signs on their blocks with a time for their first block watch meetings.

Neighborhood watches implement the public health theory that if an issue in the community such as increasing crime levels is causing widespread concern, the community residents can’t just stand idly by but must take direct action themselves. The modern American neighborhood watch movement is believed to have begun after the 1964 rape and murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, New York. After Genovese’s death, criticism rose that multiple witnesses of the crime had done nothing to stop it or to apprehend the killer.

Mara Roske, a 22-year Lindenhurst resident, said she “had a lot of success” running a small-scale neighborhood watch prior to the coalition’s organization. She attended the Lindenhurst Community Cares meetings in order to share her expertise.

“This is my home, and I’ll be damned if these people push me out of here,” Roske said.