Talk:Patchogue, New York

message: Removed the final clause ("is perhaps the only...") from Overview section's sentence:  "The Lighthouse Mission feeds more than a thousand poor people each week, provides spiritual support, provides school supplies, and is perhaps the only organized body in all of Long Island to spare a thought for those who live below the poverty line."  Seems way too partisan. Peter 23:30, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  (Untitled) <!-- heading added by JBC3 -->

message: I transcribed the first of the pronunciations of the town name into IPA, but to do the second I need to know what the person who wrote the layman's pronunciation meant by "ä".  Can you give some example words that use the sound as you intended? For example, is it the a sound in (American pronunciations of) "apple"? The o sound in "hot"? keɪɑtɪk flʌfi (talk) 15:21, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  IPA attempt 

message: 
 
--JBC3 (talk) 20:07, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Photo and map requests met 

message: Looking at the photos one might think Patchogue consists of only one building - a post office - and lots of water --JimWae (talk) 04:56, 23 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Photos 

message: If notable residents dont need to be alive, then one of the most important was Gil Smith. Born 1843, died in 1940, he was known as The Wizard of the Great South Bay and is one of the most notable shipwrights of his day. His designs focused mainly on catboats. Wikipedia is sadly lacking information about this man. 24.188.207.20 (talk) 04:25, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  residents 

message: Who lives in Patchogue? According to the US Post Office at http://zip4.usps.com/zip4/citytown.jsp CANAAN LAKE, NY and NORTH PATCHOGUE, NY are not acceptable addresses - USE PATCHOGUE 
Noting in the lede other adjoining places that also go by the name of Patchogue prevents a plethora of edits such as: this --JimWae (talk) 18:26, 28 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Post Office in lede 

message: There doesn't appear to be any discussion in this article about a history of racism in the city. I don't know how to search to see if there used to be one and it was scrubbed by the Patchogue chamber of commerce or what. Most certainly there should at least be a mention of the killing of Marcelo Lucero, which Newsday described as making Patchogue "the national epicenter of violence against immigrants". 
Here's the story as I understand it:
:On the day Obama was elected in 2008, a group of seven white teenagers went "beaner hopping" (hunting) for Hispanic residents of Patchogue to take their anger out on. They shot one man with a BB gun, beat up a couple more, and then finally killed Marcelo Lucero. This was not an isolated event, but the culmination of years of harassment which the local police had ignored. Eventually, the federal Department of Justice stepped in to investigate. They found that the Patchogue city police were actively discouraging Hispanics from filing hate-crime reports and that the reports that were filed were not being followed up on.
:Eight years later, Donald Trump, a presidential candidate who has often been protested by the Hispanics community for inciting racial-hatred, opened the wound in Patchogue again by choosing to give a campaign speech at a location not far from where the murder occurred. He was described by some commentators at the time as picking the site deliberately since, although it has made significant racial progress, Patchogue is unfortunately still best remembered as being the location of vile hate-crimes against immigrants. 
:After being informed of the site's racially charged history, told by residents that his choice was inappropriate, and asked to choose another location to speak, Donald Trump went ahead with his plans to speak at Patchogue. His speech did not mention the history of hate-crimes or the murder, but did state that, as President, Trump would build a wall separating the United States from Mexico to "keep them out" and he would make the Mexicans pay. His audience responded enthusiastically. Many protesters gathered outside the building, blocked by an unprecedented level of police and security. (Including secret service snipers on the roof). Fortunately, the protest was peaceful, with some handing out "love" signs to passersby and others silently keeping a vigil to remember Marcelo Lucero. 
I am not an expert of Patchogue so I will not edit the article myself. (Of course, anyone who is an expert is free to use some or all of my words above, if they want.) 
Here are some articles I found helpful to understand the situation:
* CBS
* NBC
* New Yorker
* The Patchogue Patch
* The Patchogue Metro Focus
* Newsday
* Long Island Press
Perhaps the most in depth discussion of the context and surprising historical connection between hate-crimes and political campaigning was a twenty minute video from MSNBC (Rachel Maddow).
The killing of Marcello Lucero is so obviously an important story to Patchogue that it's weird to not see it mentioned at all. It's certainly not for lack of sources. There are not only news articles, but books, court records from the DOJ investigation, and a documentary film. Good grief, there's even a play that was shown in Patchogue and commented on by the convicted murderer.
Can someone who actually is an expert on Patchogue please fix this article? Thanks!
Ben (talk) 10:05, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi ben, thanks for your detailed comments. I don't know anything about Patchogue; this article is only on my watchlist because of this nonsense, which I found while fighting vandalism on some other articles. I also don't know much about US race relations (as I live in Australia), so I don't feel comfortable tackling this issue at all. While this article has been subject to some pretty weird vandalism, I've skimmed through the page history back to November 2008, searching for instances when significant amounts of text were added or removed, and I can't find any evidence of any attempts to remove (or even add!) text about racism in Patchogue. However I did come across this series of edits (which happened to have been made shortly after Marcelo Lucero's murder) that replaced some legitimate text with graffiti. I've put back some of the removed text, but a lot was either out-of-date or read like boosterism. Wikipedia used to have an article on Marcelo Lucero and his murder, but it was deleted in July 2009 as a biography of a person known for one event after this discussion. If you'd like to work on his article, I could put the deleted versionin your userspace as a (very barebones) starting point. I'm sorry I can't assist any further, but I hope this helps a little. Graham87 16:21, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, Graham. I don't feel qualified to work on Marcelo Lucero's page as I only know about him in reference to Patchogue. I had hoped an expert on Patchogue would have been watching this page and would have responded by now to my proposed edits. If no one steps up, should I just add it in myself? Ben (talk) 01:50, 26 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure, go ahead. Graham87 05:44, 26 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Racism? What racism?