East Meadow's Crime Watch Committee has kept the community safe for decades

We became very active in the community because things started to happen.”

Norma Gonsalves, founder and chairperson, Crime Watch committee

Want to see the newest report?

To check out the latest crime reports from the Crime Watch Committee, go to

Facebook.com/CEMCO1976

For nearly 40 years, a group of dedicated community members have acted as the neighborhood eyes and ears of the Nassau County Police Department. Crime Watch, a subgroup of the Council of East Meadow Community Organizations, was created in 1985, after a string of burglaries plagued East Meadow and Salisbury, and it is still alive and alert today.

The council was already in its ninth year when Norma Gonsalves, its founder and a former longtime county legislator, decided to go a step further in the community’s crime-prevention efforts. The main goal of the council was to unify the two areas of town that make up the East Meadow School District — East Meadow and Salisbury — and Gonsalves knew she could call on residents for help.

“The goals of the organization are no different now than they were in 1976,” Gonsalves, now 88, said. “We became very active in the community because things started to happen.”

East Meadow was seeing roughly 35 burglaries a month in the 1980s, Gonsalves said, and she couldn’t understand why. When she learned that Levittown and Uniondale, which border East Meadow on the north and south, respectively, had civilian patrol groups, she knew that was what she and her neighbors needed to do.

When she approached inspectors from the NCPD’S 1st Precinct, however, she recalled, they didn’t want to hear about a patrol group.

“He said, ‘You’re not going to be anything more than vigilantes,’” Gonsalves said of her conversation with an officer at the time. “I said, ‘Trust me, if I’m in charge, there’s no vigilantes.’”

The 3rd Precinct was more amenable, so with its support, the East Meadow civilian patrol was created.

“We had cars patrolling up and down it didn’t matter where in East Meadow or Salisbury — we were there,” Gonsalves recounted. “We were all patrolling the area.”

Gonsalves received grants from the state to purchase radio equipment, and a dispatch center was set up in the basement of what was then the Nassau County Medical Center. Volunteers patrolling the neighborhoods would call in if they saw anything, and the dispatcher would call the police. Nearly 60 residents used their own cars, identified with special placards, to drive around day and night, in alternating shifts.

“People were very willing to step forward to do the patrols,” Joe Parisi, current president of the council, said. “They were instructed to never engage with anything that looked funny, just phone it in.”

The group accomplished what it set out to do, and as crime trended downward, fewer people were patrolling. In 2005, after 20 years of pounding the pavement, the civilian patrol dispersed.

“We had accomplished what we had to,” Gonsalves said.

What remained was the Crime Watch committee. Made up of seven people, with Gonsalves as the chair, they get together with officers from the 1st and 3rd precincts, along with Problem-Oriented Police, every two months to discuss what has been going on in the area, and Gonsalves shares any questions or concerns she may have with the officers, who, in turn, report the committee’s findings.

The committee shares its findings with the community on Facebook.

“The civilian patrol, during that course of time, really built up the relationship with the police,” Parisi said. “Now the committee meets with them and they have a rapport.”

Committee members had kept their eyes on the Coliseum Motor Inn for years before it was shut down in June. Through the years, they played a part in getting the motel to install more lights and change its locks in order to maintain safety.

“We never said to anybody to shut them down,” Parisi said. “All we were looking for was to protect the community and have the problems corrected — that’s the point of the committee.”

Now the group is keeping an eye on identity theft, elder scams, catalytic converter theft, and the trend lines for residential and commercial burglaries.

“Our job is to be visual to the point where we know what’s going on,” Gonsalves said. “We are the eyes and ears of the police department.”