SUFFOLK CLOSEUP
By Karl Grossman
Suffolk County Sheriff Errol D. Toulon, Jr., who was elected in 2017 and began serving in 2018, has brought a host of reforms and new programs to the Sheriff’s Office.
The position of Suffolk sheriff goes way back—to 1683. It’s one of the oldest law enforcement posts in the County. Sheriff Toulon is the 67th person to hold it.
Sheriff Toulon is first African-American to have been elected to a nonjudicial countywide office
Suffolk County Sheriff Errol D. Toulon Jr. in the history of Suffolk County. Earlier, he ran for the Suffolk Legislature (and there were some calls to police about a black man going door-to-door when he campaigned).
The Sheriff’s Office is a big operation—with 1,200 employees, 275 of them deputy sheriffs. It operates two correctional facilities, one in Riverhead and one in Yaphank.
Sheriff Toulon has long experience. He spent 22 years as a uniformed member of New York City’s Department of Corrections at Riker’s Island, rising to the rank of captain, and then was named deputy commissioner of operations for the department. His father had been a warden at Riker’s.
A Lake Grove resident, Sheriff Toulon in 2012 became assistant deputy Suffolk County executive for public safety.
He is highly educated with degrees that include a master’s in business administration and a doctorate in educational administration.
He was raised in The Bronx (for two years he was a batboy for the New York Yankees).
He has overcome serious health problems: beating Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1996 and pancreatic cancer in 2003.
From his swearing in as Suffolk County sheriff by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, he has been engaged in non-stop action. This has included initiatives outside and inside the Sheriff’s Office.
Among them, he established a Sandy Hook Promise School Safety Initiative because of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut, the deadliest mass shooting at an elementary or high school in U.S. history. It has now reached 22,000 Suffolk school children with a focus, explains Sheriff Toulon, that includes youngsters become aware of “signs of a peer in distress.”
He launched the Human Trafficking Initiative, a first at any jail in the nation, in which identification is made of, and special help given, to inmates who have been victims of trafficking.
Sheriff Toulon has been extremely concerned about gang activity in the county, notably because Suffolk, he notes, has the nation’s “third largest” M-13 gang. He journeyed to El Salvador to meet with officials there and develop a “partnership” with its government in combatting gangs. The Sheriff’s Office teaches Suffolk students about gangs through the national Gang Resistance Education and Training program.
He has instituted a Senior Rehabilitation Pod Program, also believed to be the first program of its kind in the country, through which inmates over 50 are separated from younger inmates and provided programs specifically geared for them.
He assembled a task force named Deconstructing the Prison Pipeline to study the causes of and seek to better deal with of juvenile delinquency.
For young inmates there is a program titled Choose Your Path which offers vocational training, schooling, counseling, pre-release and post-release transitional services, and mental health support. They spend 40 hours a week in the program.
And there are more.
Sheriff Toulon has coordinated closely with such entities in the county as BOCES, the Suffolk Department of Labor, the School of Social Welfare at Stony Brook University and the Suffolk Department of Health Services.
Among his key goals are seeking “to get to kids before they get to me” and “to work with persons incarcerated so they can change their lives….We don’t give up on anybody.”
Suffolk Legislator Bridget Fleming of Noyac, with background also in the criminal justice system in New York City—for years she was an assistant district attorney in the Manhattan DA’s office—describes Sheriff Toulon as a “reform superstar.” Vice chair of the Suffolk County Public Safety Task Force, she says that in “thoughtfulness and compassion, he is truly a visionary” and “very extraordinary in the history of corrections in Suffolk County.”
Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.