East Hampton Police Saw Fewer Overdoses, Made More DWI Arrests in 2023

The East Hampton Town Police Department saw a spike in DWI arrests in 2023, a 30 percent increase over 2022, hitting a five-year high in the number of intoxicated drivers caught on local roads, according to Chief Michael Sarlo.

It is the second year in a row that the department has reported a leap in the number of DWI collars, after steep declines during the pandemic and a more gradual trend in lower numbers of arrests that had led into it.

Sarlo on Tuesday, March 12, gave the East Hampton Town Board his annual update on the Town Police operations, spotlighting trends in crime and departmental policy and enforcement. In 2023, that included deploying body cameras for its 46 uniformed officers for the first time.

The past year saw a 20 percent increase in the number of arrests over 2022 — which itself had been up nearly 71 percent over 2021 — though the total number is still below prepandemic levels.

Town officers made 592 arrests in all, up from 487 in 2022 and just 284 in 2021.

There were 163 DWI arrests last year, up from 115 in 2022 and just 70 in 2021, but still well below the 2017 high of 214, when Uber was not yet a ubiquitous presence.

Sarlo said that the increases in overall arrests and DWIs, in particular, are attributable more to a return to focused enforcement by officers than by trends in criminal behavior.

There were fewer larceny and identity theft crimes reported in 2023, after broad leaps in both categories of crimes in 2022, but otherwise the year was uneventful, the chief reported. The department continued its steadily increasing heavy call volume, responding to more than 18,000 calls.

Sarlo noted that the mid-sized department’s officers spend an inordinate amount of time responding to and investigating calls due to automated alarms, the vast majority of which are false alarms.

“It’s a lot of running around and a lot of work for the officers, that doesn’t really show up in the [statistics] in terms of crimes or arrests,” he said. “It takes up a lot of our time. But that’s our gig.”

The town department is currently down four officers from its full staffing level, Sarlo told the board, and is looking to fill the gap with new officers from the Suffolk County Police Academy by next fall. The department had been hamstrung by three officers who were on leave for injuries sustained on the job and only recently received approval to be discharged with disability pensions so the department could fill their payroll spots with full-time replacements.

Sarlo said that the department is working on improving crime prevention outreach within the community in 2024.

“We feel there are many areas where we can share information with the community that is extremely valuable in building relationships between the police department and the community and also help deter crime by making our citizens aware of how to avoid identity theft, scams, how not to fall victim to fraud and be more aware of opioid trends,” he said. “We want to get more officers out into the community to do crime prevention, which can be anything from going door-to-door to make notifications to the public about larcenies out of vehicles or participating in drug take back days. We’re trying to find more training to continue to push the department forward.”

Sarlo said that the number of drug overdoses has been greatly reduced in the community since 2019, a trend at least partly attributable to the deployment of anti-overdose drugs like Narcan, which all of the department’s officers now carry and are trained to administer.

The department recently conducted Narcan training for East Hampton High School students. The department will distribute more than 100 of the Narcan injection kits to students this spring, with an eye toward the potential that a student could be pressed into action at a party, or even at home, where accidental overdoses can escape the bounds of what drug overdoses are usually perceived as.

“More kits in people’s hands makes the community safer,” Sergeant Ken Alversa told the Town Board on Tuesday. “As we tell everyone who does the training, you need to get the picture of the stereotypical drug addict out of your head … or you are going to miss saving a life. Little kids accidentally get into medicine cabinets and overdose in this country every day and elderly individuals who suffer from dementia take too much of their medication and can overdose. So you need to look at the signs and the symptoms of an overdose … and not the person.”

The department this spring will hold its first “Citizens Police Academy” in some 20 years, Sarlo said. The citizens academies, which many departments nationwide hold, are an in-depth, multi-week training program designed to teach community members about how police departments and individual police officers are trained to conduct themselves and hands-on methods of various responses to the sort of emergencies they are facing.

The town is currently accepting applications for the citizens academy. Sarlo said a dozen people have signed up already.

“It’s an extensive program, people are going to have to make a significant time commitment, but it’s extremely interesting and people usually walk away with a tremendous appreciation of the training investment and professionalism of our department,” the chief said. “And we also take a lot away from the questions and feedback we get from the community members who join us in this.”