SAY HOWDY TO NYC’S SHERIFF
Pandemic shines light on smaller cop force
Raids. Checkpoints. Latenight busts. It’s all been part of the job for the lawman tasked with enforcing the city’s COVID restrictions.
The pandemic crackdown by the New York City Sheriff’s Office raises the question: Is there a new sheriff in a town that barely knew it had one?
The answer: No, Sheriff Joseph Fucito is not a newcomer. He’s worn the badge for the past six years, serving until now in a civil law-enforcement role that hasn’t carried the notoriety of the sheriffs of Wild West folklore.
That changed when, thanks to an expanded role ordered by Mayor de Blasio, Fucito emerged from obscurity as leader of a force that’s normally more focused on assignments like chasing cigarette tax scofflaws and carrying out eviction orders as a division of the city Department of Finance.
In recent months, the sheriff’s office has been the primary city agency enforcing the rules set up to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Fucito’s force first stepped into the pandemic fray earlier this year while the NYPD was busy grappling with massive street protests over the police killing of George Floyd and a spike in city shootings.
Since August, sheriff’s deputies have shut down 41 illegal largescale gatherings, including underground parties featuring DJs, alcohol and maskless revelers. They have also stopped more than 9,000 vehicles at bridge-and-tunnel entry points to check on travel origin and warn of quarantine regulations, passing out nearly 64,000 masks in the process.
De Blasio has called the deputies working for Fucito “heroes” of the city’s outbreak response. Still, even the mayor concedes that before the pandemic, “people didn’t know a lot about the sheriff’s department.”
Indeed, the sheriff’s office doesn’t carry the cachet of the NYPD, which has 36,000 officers and is omnipresent in the city.
But it has an annual budget of about $40 million and a force of 150 officers who carry guns, drive marked patrol cars and can lock people up.
Fucito didn’t respond to multiple interview requests from The Associated Press.
According to a city website, he was appointed to the post in 2014 after rising through the ranks since 1988, “when he became, at 18, the youngest deputy sheriff in the city’s history.”
His current top rank earns him $213,000 a year.
The sheriff’s office has publicized its work on social media. A tweet late last month announced the shutdown of an “illegal bottle club” that hosted about 400 people in Midtown, resulting in “health and alcohol beverage control law” charges against the organizers.
The high noon moment for the sheriff’s office came earlier this month at Mac’s Public House on Staten Island, a conservative borough that has seen resistance to COVID-19 restrictions.
That night, deputies came to arrest a bar co-owner, Danny Presti, for allegedly serving patrons in defiance of city and state closure orders. They said Presti got into his car, struck a deputy and kept driving for about 100 yards with the deputy hanging onto the hood, resulting in fractures to both legs.
Presti, 34, was charged with third-degree assault, reckless driving, menacing and resisting arrest and was released without bail.
His lawyer, Louis Gelormino, has denied the charges, suggesting that the sheriff’s office being the agency to bust his client shows the case isn’t serious.
“In my mind, NYPD makes arrests in this city when it comes to criminality,” Gelormino said. “They want no part of it. Neither do the state troopers.”
A union for the deputies responded by saying that the officers had been put in the impossible position of having to enforce “ad-hoc” coronavirus protocols they understood were hurting businesses.
“But taking their anger and frustrations out on our members is completely unacceptable,” the union said in a statement.
The sheriff’s work isn’t likely to end soon.
“Keeping New York infection rates low is one of the most critical public safety and health initiatives facing the city,” Fucito said at a mayoral briefing. “And we must continue to do our part, to keep each other safe.”