Suffolk Relaunches Heroin Arrest Tracking Website

A website designed to map the location of heroin arrests on eastern Long Island has been revamped to make it more user-friendly and is expected to include data from smaller police departments that were previously left out, Suffolk County officials announced Tuesday.

The newly relaunched Suffolk County Drug Mapping Index

The Suffolk County Drug Mapping Index debuted in March 2009 under Natalie’s Law, named for Natalie Ciappa, an 18-year-old heroin addict from Massapequa who fatally overdosed at a house party in June 2008. It was designed to alert the public to heroin arrests in their community, but Suffolk County police and lawmakers grew concerned in the months after the website launched that the format was ineffective. In addition to the new design, the website will now include heroin arrests from village and town police departments within the county—an omission that was corrected after it was pointed out by a newspaper reporter.

“The re-launched site allows residents to monitor ‘heroin hotspots’ by hamlet and police precinct,” said Legis. Wayne Horsley (D-Babylon), who proposed Natalie’s Law. “With the simple click of a button a visitor to the site will be able to see the number of heroin related arrests in their community and compare data from the year before.”

The website is updated monthly by the Suffolk County Department of Information Technology with data provided by Suffolk County police, although previous programming errors left the site without updates for a six-month span last year. Heroin-related arrests are mapped out to illustrate heroin arrest location, frequency, level of offense, and defendant’s age.

The planned addition of the village and town police department figures comes after a reporter with the Shelter Island Reporter, a local weekly newspaper, asked why heroin arrest statistics for the East End community were not included on the website. The five East End towns have their own police departments and were not originally asked to submit their heroin busts for the drug map, Horsley said.

“Heroin does not stop at the end of Brookhaven,” Horsely said, acknowledging the need to correct the prior omissions. Calls to the Riverhead, Southampton, Easthampton, Southold and Shelter Island police departments were not returned.

The Shelter Island Reporter began questioning the drug map’s inclusiveness after an alleged heroin dealer was arrested on the island, tucked between the North and South forks, in December 2009, and the arrest was not included on the website.

Still, as of the announcement late Tuesday afternoon, the East End town police department heroin arrest data was not included on the new website. A Horsely spokesman said the town and village police departments will start appearing on the new website in the coming months.

The Nassau County Drug Mapping Index, which was created the same week as Suffolk’s, always included village police and the two city police departments, Long Beach and Glen Cove, according to a Nassau County police spokesman.

Horsley said: “At the end of the day a law is not going to defeat the emerging heroin epidemic in suburbia, but Natalie’s Law does constitute a necessary tool allowing law enforcement and families to identify who we are fighting and where they are.”