Summer is here and with New Yorkers heading to the beach to beat the heat, the NYPD Community Affairs Bureau hosted a beach safety event with the NYPD Scuba team in Far Rockaway on July 18.
NYPD Community Affairs Bureau Det. Tanya Duhaney said the NYPD had organized the event for the last three years because too many people drown on local area beaches.
“We just wanted to give beach safety to the young kids that tend to come out here,” Duhaney said. “Often they [come] past the time of a lifeguard, or late at night just hanging out with friends. We just wanted them to know certain things about the water.”
Young people with the NYPD Explorer program hailing from all five boroughs listened closely as NYPD Det. Robert Rodriguez explained to the crowd what to look out for when visiting the beach with friends and family.
Twenty-two-year NYPD veteran Det. Robert Rodriguez has been a member of the NYPD scuba team for about 18 years and said his department liked to reach out to the community and teach them about water safety.
The scuba team, established in 1966, is on-call 24/7, and its responsibilities include counterterrorism and water search and rescue missions, among others.
“Our job, unfortunately, a lot of the times is to do recovery work,” Rodriguez said. “A lot of times, [it’s] just inanimate objects like guns and things like that, but a big part of our job is recovering bodies. Unfortunately, we’ve already had a few this year and we just want to educate the public.”
Rodriguez said the first thing to do when spending a day on the beach was to check the safety boards posted along the boardwalk and ask lifeguards about the water conditions. Lifeguards on city beaches are on duty from 10 a.m to 6 p.m during the summer season, and beachgoers should never enter the ocean after hours, as tempting as it might be to cool off on a hot summer’s day.
“The sign right there to the entrance of the beach, it tells you today that there are…
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