After Syracuse.com article, Sheriff Conway says he welcomes body cameras if county provides money

UPDATE 6:15 p.m.: In a dizzying day, county exec forces sheriff’s hand on body cams: We’ll pay for them

Syracuse, NY — After a Syracuse.com story Friday reported the Onondaga County Sheriff Office has no body cameras and no plans for them, Sheriff Gene Conway called a news conference to say he would welcome the cameras if the county provided money for them.

Conway said that he always supported the idea of body cameras, but hadn’t asked for money to implement them since being rebuffed from a pilot program in 2017.

As of now, the sheriff said he has no projections for how much a body-camera program would cost or how many deputies it would take to run.

Still, the sheriff said he was pleased to see County Executive Ryan McMahon pledge money for body cameras, as first reported in Friday’s story on Syracuse.com.

“As evidence of my support of the concept of body cameras, I’d like to see that money next week,” Conway said at the news conference. “I welcome that money next week. Could not wait to get started. But it will be money that fully funds a body camera program for the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office.”

County Executive Ryan McMahon told Syracuse.com that he’d offered to allocate money for a body-camera program in a letter to the sheriff in February. Conway said Friday that was news to him, and that he first read of McMahon’s offer in Friday’s story.

McMahon told Syracuse.com that his February letter asked Conway to send his office a plan for outlining how the sheriff’s office would make the program happen. Weeks after the letter was sent, county officials said Conway had yet to respond.

Even with McMahon’s pledge for money, a body-camera program couldn’t get off the ground until April 2022 at the earliest, Conway said, unless his office got an infusion of money before the next budget cycle.

That’s why Conway said he would welcome that extra money now, so long as it was specially set aside to fully fund a body-camera program. He vowed to release incremental updates on a body-camera rollout as soon as money was approved.

But the sheriff wouldn’t commit to putting general budget money toward cameras over other priorities, including hiring deputies to fill vacancies, buying more cars and replacing ballistic vests.

When asked directly where body cameras ranked on the list of expenditures, Conway did not give an answer.

Conway said the reason deputies didn’t have body-cameras was because there was not enough money in his budget. But deputies in Erie, Monroe and Albany counties -- three of the biggest Upstate counties -- wear body cameras. One of the three counties had them for six years. Conway said that Onondaga County has not had the money when those counties did.

The story by Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard published Friday morning found that:

• At least 10 of 15 Onondaga County law enforcement agencies including the Syracuse police and three of the four biggest Upstate counties’ sheriff’s offices have body cameras.
• New York State Police started equipping some troopers April 1 and plans to roll out the cameras to the rest of the officers this year.
• The county executive, district attorney and head of the legislature’s Public Safety Committee all want Onondaga County deputies to wear body cameras.
• Conway did not reply to the request from County Executive Ryan McMahon to create a proposal for body cameras.
• Body cameras are not a priority for the sheriff’s office over other expenses, according to Conway, who did say the cameras are important but expensive.
• Nearly half of the country’s more than 15,000 law enforcement agencies had body cameras as of 2016, according to a report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the most recent estimate available.
• Conway said he hasn’t asked for funding for the cameras since McMahon took office in 2018.

Staff writer Douglass Dowty can be reached at ddowty@syracuse.com or 315-470-6070.