Valley Stream native Tommy Shevlin will take the reins from James McDermott as the new acting president of the Nassau County Police Benevolent Association Jan. 1. Shevlin, 45, a state-certified counselor, is fighting the stigma of mental health and the culture of silence surrounding trauma and mental illness among his fellow officers.
Shevlin is now a counselor at the Nassau County Police Department’s Employee Assistance Office, which provides counseling and other mental health services to officers. Years back, when Shevlin was a patrolman, he had found himself at the office as a client for alcohol addiction recovery.
“I realize that as a union, you’re trained to save people’s jobs, but we’re not trained to save their lives,” said Shevlin, who has seen his friends and colleagues suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety, and sometimes take their own lives.
Now, as the PBA president, he must help pull his fellow officers out of an altogether different kind of crisis. Shevlin will inherit a divided police union, whose disagreements spilled out publicly over contract negotiations last December. Dean Losquadro, second vice president under McDermott, led the opposition and shot down passage of a new PBA contract negotiated by McDermott and County Executive Laura Curran.
The plan, if it had passed, would have provided members with a 15 percent pay raise over 8 ½ years, but would have mandated officers to work five additional shifts a year and make them contribute to their health care insurance, irrespective of their time of hiring.
“They didn’t put enough time and effort into taking care of things on the day-to-day, and what really is important to the membership,” said Shevlin, who said the union leadership had lost touch with membership and their interests. Officers want to have a life outside the police department, modern training and better health insurance.
Now, the members of the largest county police union have been without a contract since 2017, though the membership did reach an agreement with the county in June to wear body cameras, for which officers will be paid an additional $3,000 a year.
Shevlin said he plans to turn a new leaf for the PBA come January. “There was a lot of personality conflicts. Self-interest got in the way and clouded judgment,” Shevlin said. “There were a lot of broken relationships in the past four to five years with other unions, with politicians, with the commissioner.”
Shevlin plans on “restoring those broken relationships” by getting back to what he said he believes is the union’s original purpose: to work for members, protect members, make their jobs better and safer, and secure their financial futures for them and their families. Shevlin said he is confident he will come to the negotiation table with the county with a stronger and reconciled union behind him.
To that end, a key issue on Shevlin’s agenda is longevity pay, which refers to added compensation based on length of service. The PBA’s protracted court wrangling with Curran, whose term will end Dec. 31, and who refused to grant longevity pay to officers, may soon be settled with future negotiations with incoming County Executive Bruce Blakeman.
While protecting the interests of PBA members is Shevlin’s guiding principle, the police union’s historic apolitical stance may prove increasingly harder to maintain. Recent nationwide protests against racial injustice and police brutality, seared into the mind of many Americans, have sparked a deep public interest locally in how the police union’s collective-bargaining contracts will help or hurt the county’s police reform efforts.
Police unions have a direct hand in guiding procedures for disciplinary actions, officers’ rights and the wider police culture, all of which have been part of the conversation in reducing racial disparities and justice in policing.
When asked about the police reform advocates pushing for greater accountability measures such as an independent civilian complaint review board or an inspector general to investigate alleged police misconduct, Shevlin responded:
“We are up with the times. We have police reform. I don’t see the need for any additional measures because we don’t have an ongoing problem here with our community. We don’t have police brutality cases or ongoing widespread complaints. Every police department is different with different dynamics and different relationships . . . We have strong relationships with our community and live in the communities we serve.”
