Ten years ago next Thursday, a gang of teenagers attacked Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero on a Patchogue street in a fatal hate crime that sparked international outrage because of its casual brutality. Although local officials said the killing was an aberration, court records later showed that “beaner-hopping,” as it was known among these teens and the day laborers they pursued, was a regular pastime.

Even worse, investigators found, Suffolk police had shown little interest in looking into the attacks.

An indictment unsealed two months after Lucero’s killing revealed that in the 13 months before his death, the same teens, in small groups with shifting members, had gone on a spree of violence, assaulting at least 12 other Hispanics, including three men who said they reported the attacks to police but received little follow-up.

Those men were not alone. Scores of Hispanics came forward to say they had been harassed or beaten and that police were, at best, indifferent. The Suffolk police department said it was unaware Hispanics had been targeted, as did then-Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, who frequently spoke out against illegal immigration.

‘There wasn’t just neglect of the Latino community, there was open hostility.’ -Jonathan M. Smith, ex-U.S. Department of Justice attorney

The complaints had a disturbing similarity: Hispanic men, walking alone usually at night, were set upon, assaulted and frequently robbed. When they reported the attacks to police, they said, officers minimized the incidents or merely filed reports and frequently failed to follow up.

“There wasn’t just neglect of the Latino community, there was open hostility,” said Jonathan M. Smith, a former U.S. Department of Justice attorney who was involved in the case and who now runs a nonprofit civil rights group in Washington.

Lucero’s death and the pattern of attacks spurred the U.S. Justice Department to launch an investigation. In December 2013, it entered into a monitoring agreement with the county that was designed to overhaul police performance in five broad areas and to last three years.

Last month, after more than four years in which Suffolk police failed to reach substantial compliance in any of the target areas, it achieved that goal in two, according to a Justice Department report: combating hate crimes and investigating complaints against its officers. In the other target areas, which include eliminating biased policing, improving translation services and relating better to the community, police showed meaningful progress but still fell short of success, despite years of fits and starts.

The Department of Justice’s progress report for SCPD

Both Suffolk Police Commissioner Geraldine Hart and Chief of Department Stuart Cameron said in an interview that they regarded the Justice Department’s continued monitoring as a positive.

“The goal is not to get the DOJ out of here, the goal is to keep making the department better,” Cameron said.

Despite the progress, the Justice Department’s latest 18-page report included a conclusion that could have been written after Lucero’s death:

“Our conversations with community members continue to reveal a persistent mistrust of SCPD.”

The Justice Department has cited that mistrust repeatedly in earlier reports.

Cameron said it is partly because of cultural differences since many immigrants come from countries where they don’t trust police and because many residents don’t differentiate between county and federal agents.

Still, the Justice Department conclusion was notable for reasons beyond the community’s lingering suspicion. First, the department urged police to build bridges not just for their own sake, but to improve crime fighting by establishing a trust that would lead to tips and cooperation within immigrant communities.

Second, the assessment comes amid Trump administration policies and rhetoric pointed at immigrants living in the country illegally and heightened law enforcement efforts against the vicious Salvadoran gang MS-13. These have led to hundreds more immigrant detentions on Long Island, including more than 30 that have been successfully contested in court.

As the crackdown has brought quiet to streets in immigrant communities, it raises the question of whether it also has fueled a mistrust that undermines the improvements attained through the Justice Department agreement.

“My sense is that the progress has been largely lost,” Smith said. “All the hysteria around MS-13 has driven a deeper wedge.”

‘We are looking for every opportunity that we can, even outside the parameters of the DOJ agreement, to go even further and make sure that we are doing what we can to connect with the community.’ -Geraldine Hart, Suffolk police commissioner

Hart said the department received a $1 million grant to fund gang prevention programs and that the department is utilizing social media for community outreach and has even sent commanding officers to people’s homes.

“We are looking for every opportunity that we can, even outside the parameters of the DOJ agreement, to go even further and make sure that we are doing what we can to connect with the community,” she said.

Suffolk District Attorney Timothy Sini served as police commissioner during a spree of violence attributed to MS-13 from January 2016 through October 2017 during which at least 16 youths were killed in Suffolk alone. Sini said the department had built bridges to the community by cracking down on MS-13. Making arrests and ramping up policing yielded tips from residents that helped solve murders and prevent other gang crimes — including the attempted abduction of a teenage boy MS-13 had targeted for death.

“Do we have a perfect operation? Of course not,” he said.

“I think that, by and large, the police department before me and after me does a tremendous job. And I think it can always improve,” he said.

But those in the immigrant community who have experienced waves of detentions still feel wary, said Patrick Young, program director of CARECEN, a nonprofit immigrant-rights group that provides counseling and legal services. “People are just frightened of them now,” he said of police.

Suffolk history

The county’s relationship with its burgeoning Latino population is one filled with twists, turns and points of friction.

A 1983 federal civil rights lawsuit cited the county for discriminating against women and minorities, including Hispanics, in hiring and promotion. Suffolk, along with Nassau, which was also named, agreed to a federal consent order that required it to pay $500,000 in damages, create a new hiring test and employ job-seekers who were discriminated against in past tests.

The consent decree is still in effect. As of October, roughly 10 percent of Suffolk’s sworn officers were Hispanic, according to police statistics.

Three years after that lawsuit, the county’s relationship with its Hispanic population took a different direction. In 1986, Democrats in the Suffolk County Legislature, responding to a newly passed national law that required employers to verify the legal status of employees, pushed the county to accept people fleeing civil wars in Central America. It officially designated the county a place of sanctuary for refugees, who had begun to settle in Brentwood and surrounding communities, where there were plenty of jobs for unskilled workers.

Then, as the population of immigrants grew to more than 7,000, attitudes shifted. By 1993, the sanctuary resolution was reversed.

By the mid-2000s, Levy’s rhetoric was grabbing headlines. He said foreign women who had children in the United States were having “anchor babies” and once joked at a roast that he’d have to deport “the guys back there in the kitchen.”

Early in his administration, Levy proposed deputizing county police as immigration agents, which would have allowed them to question people about their immigration status and detain and deport them, an idea that was criticized at the time by Jeff Frayler, then-president of Suffolk Police Benevolent Association.

"Right now, we’re giving a significant portion of the minority community reasons to distrust the police," he told Newsday.

In an interview, Levy, a lawyer who also writes a column for the Conservative online publication Newsmax, disputed persistent criticism that he stoked intolerance, saying it was a myth “perpetrated by the media.”

He said his statements reflected the concerns of taxpayers dealing with immigrants living here illegally in overcrowded housing and competing for work as cheaper labor.

“You had house after house with dozens of people in them, and no one was doing a darn thing about it,” Levy said. “People were seeing their neighborhoods turned upside-down, and it wasn’t racial. It was density.”

Challenged at the time on his rhetoric and policies, Levy stood firm. “The public is in agreement with me,” he declared.

He was right. When Levy ran for re-election in 2007, he won with 96 percent of the vote, as a Democrat endorsed by Republicans.

A deadly attack

On Nov. 8, 2008, Lucero’s murder changed the political landscape.

Lucero, 37, was set upon near the Patchogue train station by seven teenagers he had never met in an assault that was shocking not just for its randomness, but because of the casual way in which the teenagers described attacking local Hispanics, according to police statements.

It was nothing more than a pastime, one of the teens, Anthony Hartford, 17, told police. “The last time I went out jumping beaners was Monday, Nov. 3, 2008 . . . I don’t go out doing this very often, maybe only once a week.”

Jeffrey Conroy, 17, who later was convicted of fatally stabbing Lucero, asked police, “Is this going to be a problem with wrestling season?” Another teen in the group asked if he would have to miss the Giants game.

There had been talk within the Hispanic community of unprovoked attacks before Lucero’s killing. After his death, the stories became public.

‘This was a kettle ready to boil over.’ – The Rev. Dwight Lee Wolter, who presided over Lucero’s funeral at the Congregational Church of Patchogue

The Rev. Dwight Lee Wolter, who presided over Lucero’s funeral at the Congregational Church of Patchogue, set aside a room in his church with a translator, where Hispanics could come forward to tell their stories to officials. More than 50 people showed up, and they gave such searing accounts of abuse — not just by roving gangs, but by landlords and employers — that the translator couldn’t stop crying, Wolter said. Woven throughout their accounts were reports of police indifference.

“This was a kettle ready to boil over,” Wolter recalled.

Many of the beating victims came in with yellow pieces of paper, copies of police reports they had filed. The assaults were each listed as an “incident,” never a hate crime, Wolter said.

The year before, in 2007, only one anti-Hispanic hate crime had been reported in Suffolk County.

“It was a different attitude, or they just never followed up,” Lucero’s brother, Joselo, said in a recent interview of the police.

All seven teenagers charged in connection with Lucero’s killing were convicted of charges from first-degree assault to first-degree manslaughter as a hate crime. Their sentences ranged from five to 25 years.