Identity Theft Poses Problems For 108th CC
BY THOMAS COGAN

Captain Joseph DeBartolomeo, executive officer of the 108th Police Precinct, again took the place of the ailing commander, Deputy Inspector Thomas Kavanagh, at the November community council meeting at Sunnyside Community Services. He began by saying that the commander was feeling better and should soon return to duty. He quickly got to the crime report and said that since mid-October, the crime rate had declined another 13 to 14 percent, though grand larcenies were up and were likely to increase during the holiday shopping season.

Speaking of the season, Don McClellan, treasurer of the 108th Precinct Community Council, said the Christmas party for local children would be held Saturday afternoon, December 15 from 2 to 4 p.m. in the basement of a local church. The children are to be chosen from a list of the needy. When asked what church is to be used, McClellan said that information would be disclosed presently but at the moment must be held back.

At question time, a woman brought up the matter of identity theft, with good reason. She said that recently, 100,000 patient records were stolen from the database of St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan and hers was one of them. She feared her insurance numbers would be used to defraud her if any thief got hold of them. The captain urged her to keep strict control over her records and report any suspicious activity regarding them. He said, as a general assurance, that the leading credit card companies send them information on stolen cards. McClellan advised the woman to change all her passwords and personal identification numbers (PINs). Detective Glenn Yule, now assigned to Patrol Borough Queens North but, he confessed, unable to stay away from activities of the 108th Precinct, told the woman she should maintain close touch with the rating services (Equifax, Trans-Am and Experion), who would be able to bar anyone else from opening accounts in her name.

Woodside resident Al Volpe had several issues to bring up. The first was Doughboy-Windmuller Park, the parkland along Woodside Avenue in the 50s streets, which was cited at the October meeting for an assault incident that went unsolved. Volpe wanted to know what might have happened there in the weeks since. Officer Juan Toro said special attention had been paid to the parks and no further incidents had been reported. The second issue was parking, or the lack of it, in Long Island City. Volpe said he had gone to a favorite restaurant in Hunters Point the previous Saturday and found that several nearby parking spaces had been put out of bounds by a construction site, leaving him the choice of cruising the streets in search of a space or simply parking where it was now illegal to do so. He found it infuriating that the parking spaces were not only illegal during work hours but on weekend off-hours too. A woman pointed out to him that construction companies are required to impose a 24-hour prohibition on parking spaces around their sites because of the assumed instability of the buildings under construction.