Riverhead police 2025 crime data show December declines in shoplifting, DWI and assault offenses

The Riverhead Town Police Department closed out 2025 with a lower number of criminal incidents in December than in November, according to the department’s monthly activity reports presented to the Town Board by Police Chief Ed Frost at the board’s Jan. 22 work session.

The reports also include year-end totals and a full-year breakdown of criminal offenses recorded in 2025.

Frost presented two months of reports at the work session because the November report had not been delivered previously.  He told board members the department logged 2,604 total incidents in December, including 106 criminal incidents — “a significant drop from even November,” he said.  

For November, Frost said the department handled 2,653 total incidents and recorded 130 criminal incidents.  In December, Frost said overall incidents totaled 2,604, with 106 criminal incidents.  He told the board that “simple assault was down” and that shoplifting was down as well, saying the department recorded 24 shoplifting incidents during the month.  

Shoplifting trending down

Board members praised the trend. Supervisor Jerry Halpin said it was notable to see shoplifting going down even as the Route 58 retail corridor continues to add businesses.  

Frost attributed at least part of the month-to-month results to both policing strategy and store policy. He said some stores have internal thresholds and “do not call us if it’s under a certain amount of money,” even though, he said, the department will respond.  

The chief also described a visible holiday-season deployment in shopping areas: in the weeks before Christmas, he said, the department assigned extra patrol cars to shopping plaza parking lots. Police coordinated with loss control personnel at various stores that wanted to participate. The stores had extra loss control people on site on a particular date or dates, coordinated with the police department’s crime control and COPE units, Frost said, “on such such a date and flooded their store, “and then we were waiting on on the outside.” He said he hopes this enforcement will deter would-be shoplifters in the future. Measuring the effectiveness of the tactic is difficult, the chief acknowledged, but it will likely be a deterrent.

Role of ‘bail reform’ discussed

Council Member Bob Kern, a consistent critic of New York State’s criminal justice reform legislation that took effect in January 2020, which eliminated cash bail and pretrial detention for almost all misdemeanor and nonviolent felony cases, said the reform measure made punishment for shoplifting “just a slap on the wrist.”

Prior to the reform law, a judge could set cash bail for any offense, including petit larceny (shoplifting or theft under $1,000), provided the judge believed it was necessary to ensure the defendant would return to court. However, before 2020, judges had broad discretion and often took other factors into consideration, such as whether the defendant was a repeat offender.

The 2020 reforms specifically sought to eliminate the use of cash bail for most misdemeanor charges to reduce the number of people held in jail while awaiting trial. The original criminal justice reform amendments were rolled back in July 2020 to restore trial court judges’ discretion in to impose cash bail in a wider variety of criminal cases, nearly all felonies. Only grand larceny in the first degree (theft of more than $1 million) was on the list of charges for which judicial discretion was restored by the rollback legislation.

“If they steal over $1,000, it goes to a grand larceny. So that’s a felony, but they’re still gonna get out,” Frost said. 

Riverhead police have been using a different tactic with repeat shoplifters, Frost said. Police have been taking trespass affidavits from store personnel, and that removes the suspect’s right and privilege to enter the store, Frost said. “Then when they go back…we actually can charge a burglary, which we have done in the past. So that moves up to a felony,” Frost said.

“That’s a good tactic, because the government is doing nothing for us,” Kern said.

“I think everybody realizes bail reform has to be fixed, and we’ll keep putting pressure on the state,” Halpin said.

Criminal incidents in 2025

The department’s 2025 monthly reports include both activity measures (such as incidents, crashes, summonses and arrests) and offense breakdowns drawn from the Incident-Based Reporting (IBR) system, which Riverhead Police fully implemented in May 2024.

IBR criminal offenses reported in 2025 were:

IBR offense	Count
Forcible rape	3
Forcible fondling	5
Robbery	5
Aggravated assault	37
Simple assault	282
Intimidation	104
Extortion/blackmail	2
Burglary/breaking and entering	26
Pocket-picking	2
Purse snatching	5
Shoplifting	409
Theft from a building	11
Theft from a coin-operated machine or device	4
Theft from a motor vehicle	57
Theft of motor vehicle parts or accessories	5
All other larceny	152
Motor vehicle theft	16
Counterfeiting/forgery	2
False pretenses/swindle/confidence game	2
Identity theft	58
Stolen property offenses	14
Destruction/damage/vandalism of property	148
Drug/narcotic violations	54
Drug equipment violations	5
Statutory rape	1
Gambling offenses	2
Weapon law violations	1
Curfew/loitering/vagrancy violations	1
Disorderly conduct	2
Driving under the influence	178
Trespass of real property	61
All other offenses	114
Do not count	5
Total	1,792

Because Riverhead police were not fully on the IBR system until May 2024, a full-year apples-to-apples comparison of IBR offense totals for 2025 versus 2024 is not possible.

Non-criminal incidents in 2025

Riverhead police recorded 31,976 non-criminal incidents in 2025, according to the department’s year-end totals. 

Non-criminal incidents include motor vehicle stops (7,273), responding to aided cases (5,462), automatic alarms (2,613), service miscellaneous (2,197), motor vehicle accidents (1,895, of which 138 involved deer), disturbances (1,716), domestic incidents (782), town code violations (682) and a host of other incidents for which reports are generated —everything from reports of suspicious persons or vehicles, to warrant investigations, fire investigations, vehicle repossessions, civil disputes and school crossing assignments.

Enforcement and court activity also reflected a busy year. Police made 900 arrests in 2025, including 27 juveniles, on 1,026 separate charges, with 472 arraignments recorded in the end-of-year totals.

Police also issued 12,462 summonses last year: 7,997 for traffic violations, 3,949 for parking violations and 516 for town code violations. 

Frost also raised a reporting issue related to overdoses, telling board members he may change how the department classifies and reports fatal overdoses because medical examiner findings can later attribute a death to a cause other than overdose. He said the change could delay overdose reporting until the medical examiner’s determination is received.