Deputy Inspector Richard Meyer did his best impression of Jerry Maguire Tuesday night. No, Inspector Meyer didn't ask the nearly 50 people gathered at Sterling Glen in Plainview to show him the money. Instead, Meyer used a different quote in asking residents to help his officers put a stop to a recent spate of residential burglaries: "Help me, help you."

"My job is to help you protect yourself," said Meyer at Tuesday night's Second Precinct community forum. Although the forum was not scheduled specifically because of the latest Plainview/Syosset area burglaries, its timing made the rise in home break-ins the center of discussion.

According to Meyer, it is now known that these burglaries are being committed by a single group of professional thieves. However, in regard to exactly how many Second Precinct burglaries have been attributed to this group, Meyer said that statistic was uncertain.

The Second Precinct first noticed this one group of burglars when they hit up seven homes last Labor Day weekend. "There's always going to be some traffic, but when it spiked on Labor Day weekend of last year, that got my concern," said Meyer.

At first, local police thought the crimes were linked to local burglars. But those leads dried up as Meyer's officers chased the criminals from their preferred hot zone, south of South Oyster Bay Road and north of Woodbury Road, to the east side of the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway. Despite an increase in officers on the case, the burglars' movement and spreading out made them difficult to catch. At their height last November, this one group was responsible for nearly 15 Plainview/Syosset burglaries alone.

"They love this area. I don't know why," said Meyer. "But they do."

Then Meyer got a break when several of the burglars were caught, and the city police came to him with a report about who these criminals really were. According to Meyer, the Plainview/Syosset burglaries - which have been concentrated most recently around Manetto Hill Road and Central Park Road - are the work of 60 or so professional burglars who drive in from Corona, Queens to rob suburban homes. "These guys are just professional burglars. That's what they do, and they decided to work here," said Meyer.

According to Meyer, this one group, which consists mainly of Hispanics between the ages of 16 and 20, has also been known to work in Connecticut and Westchester. After scouting out a house, three or four of them drive from Queens to Plainview, where one, usually a female lookout, will drop the others off on a street corner, said Meyer. The dropped-off burglars then work their way through backyards to the targeted houses, which they break into with abandon, sometimes using tools from the shed to break in. "They go through the side, the rear. They'll smash windows and doors. Alarms will not deter them," Meyer said.

Stopping these burglars wasn't made any easier by the large geographical area they were covering, or by limited precinct resources, said Meyer. But eventually progress was made. The Corona burglars disappeared around the winter holiday season, and Meyer's officers got the number of burglaries in the entire precinct in one month down to seven.

But with five burglaries in April, eight in May and four so far in June, the Corona burglars are back in full swing and Meyer is turning to the community for help. "I need everyone to tell me where they are so I can get them," he said. "I can't have an officer on every corner. It's impossible."

Meyer urged residents to keep a lookout for suspicious persons and vehicles in the neighborhood and to call 911 if they see anything. Most of the burglaries occur between 7 and 9 p.m. There has not yet been a Corona burglary earlier than noon or later than midnight. Several times, the non-confrontational burglars ran away after mistakenly breaking into houses where people were home, Meyer said.

Highlighting the fact that alarms will not keep these burglars away, Meyer also suggested residents hide their valuables in places that cannot be found in three minutes, which is how much time the burglars have on average until the authorities arrive at the house.

"Look at your house from a burglar's point of view," Meyer said. "If I had to break into my house, what's the quickest way, what's the fastest way, what's the safest way - because that's how they're going to do it."

Meyer, who is also the Second Precinct commanding officer, spoke about the precinct to give attendees an idea of what he deals with and how handling the Corona burglars fits into his resources. The largest precinct in the county with 109,000 residents, the Second Precinct has 119 patrol officers. Meyer said when he started working here 31 years ago, there were 205 patrol officers, but he called that a "matter of economics" that was out of his hands.

Meyer also fielded attendees concerns and addressed the problem of grand larceny, mostly from parked cars. "It's unbelievable how many women just leave their handbags in their cars," he said. "Someone walks by, sees the handbag, breaks into the car, and takes it."

Meyer stressed to those in attendance the importance of calling 911 as soon as residents see suspicious activity in the neighborhood in order to assist the precinct in catching those responsible for these burglaries.