Monroe County (NY) Law Enforcement

Monroe County Law Enforcement

Several of Rochester's suburbs are patrolled by their own police departments. The towns of Irondequoit, Brighton, Greece and Gates are exclusively covered by town forces. Ogden and Webster and Ogden have their own police departments but are overlapped by the Sheriff's road patrol. Most expressways outside the City are patrolled by State Troopers. The villages of Brockport, Fairport and East Rochester round out the list of localities with individual police forces.

Until summer of 1994, the Town of Wheatland had its own police force. In a controversial move, the Town Board decided to dissolve the department and utilize the Sheriff's patrol units for town police services.

The larger departments' patrol areas are divided into beats. Greece refers to a car beat as a "sector". Being a large town with a population of nearly 90,000 plus many businesses, malls and stores, Greece has three major patrol divisions called "precincts". Each precinct is responsible for 3 sectors. Gates generally uses the term "district" to describe their beat areas, while Irondequoit calls theirs "posts".

The second largest police force in Monroe County is responsible for patrolling the largest geographical area. The Monroe County Sheriff's Office (MCSO) provides road patrol and other police services to all towns and villages that do not have their own police departments. MCSO overlaps some departments as described above. By law, the Sheriff is also responsible for the operation of the County Jail. You may hear members of other police agencies refer to MCSO as "The Jail".

The MCSO road patrol is administered from three Zones, designated as A, B and C. Zones are further broken down into Districts which cover major portions of the towns. Car numbers have no real relationship to Zone/District assignment. The accompanying chart lists which cars are assigned to what zones.

The Monroe County Sheriff's Office has a few special units of its own. There is a County bomb disposal squad, a SWAT team, a SCUBA squad and the traffic enforcement unit, which is called STAR (Sheriff's Tactical Accident Reduction). The main focus of STAR is DWI enforcement.

The Conservation officers who are assigned Sheriff's car numbers are really State officials. Various suburban police departments operate specialized units such as SWAT and other teams. Several departments have police dogs, which are often identified by car numbers starting with "K9". Some of these dogs are trained to detect explosives.

A few local police agencies have been forced by budget cuts to curtail some services. In some cases, the result has been elimination of special units that duplicate services provided by the Sheriff's Office.

The Sheriff's Office has itself become the victim of budget politics during 1992. The Parks & Marine Unit has been severely curtailed. MCSO now operates 3 Marine Patrol units Monday through Thursday and adds a fourth boat only on weekends. The loss of most of its part-time deputies has resulted in drastic cutbacks in County park patrols. As of the summer of 1992, the Seneca, Ontario Beach and Durand Eastman parks were covered by a single 2-officer car, with the other 11 parks to be patrolled by the remaining three Park deputies.

In January, 2003, the Sheriff's Office completely renumbered their radio units. Some specialized units now have 4-digit numbers.

UNIT NUMBER GROUPS

80- 89  County Administration
90-100  Public Safety Communications

101-499 City of Rochester PD 500-699 Sheriff's Office 700-749 Irondequoit PD 750-789 Brighton PD 790-839 Greece PD 840-869 Gates PD 870-875 Greece PD 876-899 Ogden PD 900-914 East Rochester PD (911 = OEC) 915-939 Fairport PD 940-959 Webster PD 960,961 Lake Ontario State Parkway PD 96?-979 Brockport PD 980-982 Medical Examiner 983 President (?) of Rural/Metro 985 Public Safety Commissioner 986 OEP Director 987 unknown 988 Probation Department 991-993 FBI 995-997 Secret Service 5500-5599 Sheriff's Office 5800-5899 Sheriff's Office

Monroe County MDT

Monroe County's law enforcement Mobile Data Terminals (MDT) can not be decoded or monitored using any currently available hobbyist software or hardware. They are not the usual Motorola MDC-4800 units that are popular with most other public safety agencies.

The Monroe County MDT system is a 9600 bps encrypted network sold by Coded Communications. Details concerning their products and our local system are available via the WWW.CODED.COM website.

Although our County spent $4.5 million on this system, it is not the fastest available and lacks certain updated features. The latest Coded MDT system operates at 19.2 kbps and offers image transfer. This would allow police agencies to exchange and verify such information as fingerprints and suspect photos.

Thanks to NF2G.com