Syracuse, NY – An Onondaga County sheriff’s deputy should have turned on his body camera before a confrontation in which he shot and killed two teenage passengers in a fleeing car, experts told Syracuse.com.
That failure reveals a vague sheriff’s office policy that leaves too much ambiguity regarding camera use, said several trainers and academics.
The best departments train officers to activate cameras on the way to every scene so they don’t forget in case a confrontation erupts, according to experts who served in law enforcement. The sheriff’s policy is less precise, saying only that cameras should be used during “law enforcement related activity.”
The way Wednesday morning’s incident unfolded calls into question the sheriff’s office rollout of cameras that the department dragged their feet for years to acquire.
Cameras are intended to increase police accountability. It’s common practice in other departments, including the New York State Police, New York City Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, to turn on cameras on the way to a scene or before getting out of a cruiser.
One expert said he might use this incident in training sessions to illustrate mistakes to avoid.
Having a camera and not activating it only raises more questions.
“The only way they’re useful is if they’re on,” said University of South Carolina criminal law Professor Seth Stoughton, a former Tallahassee police officer.
The deputy, who has not been identified publicly, had time to activate his body-worn camera while making a 3.3-mile drive to confront the suspects at a mobile home park. He knew that two vehicles at the park matched the description of those seen in security camera footage from a burglary earlier that morning, Onondaga County Sheriff Toby Shelley said in a news conference Wednesday.
The deputy “knew he was going after, most likely, the suspects from that burglary. And he knew that there were six suspects,” Shelley said.
Shelley said the deputy “most likely didn’t have time to put that body camera on” once he arrived at the scene and started to get out of his vehicle. The sheriff said that’s when one of the suspect vehicles drove at him and he fired three shots in self-defense, killing two passengers, ages 15 and 17.
“What do you mean, he never had time?” Stoughton asked. “It is possible for someone to either forget or to literally not have time. But I’m always skeptical. It takes less than a second to do.”
The body camera is activated by tapping twice on a large button on the front of the device, according to the instruction manual.
Lueth Mo, 15, and Dhal Apet, 17, were shot and killed by the deputy Wednesday morning after the stolen car they were in nearly ran over the deputy, the sheriff said. Lueth and Dhal were passengers in the vehicle. The driver was apparently not hit by gunfire and has not been found.
The shooting happened near the Midler Meadows mobile home park on North Midler Avenue in DeWitt.
The deputy involved in the shooting was investigating a burglary at a smoke shop on East Molloy Road when someone called 911 to report suspicious activity at the mobile home park, Shelley said.
The deputy went to the trailer park to investigate. Moments after arriving, Shelley said, one of the suspects’ vehicles tried to run over the deputy. The deputy pulled out his gun and fired three times, killing the two teenagers, the sheriff said. The deputy was not injured.
A private security camera, which captured the incident on video, showed the deputy didn’t have time to get out of the way, Shelley said. That video has not been made public. The deputy’s body camera was not active, Shelley said. Through a spokesman, the sheriff declined comment for this story.
“In this case, if the officer is justified, you’d want to capture this incident,” said retired Bergen County, N.J. police chief Brian Higgins, now an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.
It’s more difficult for the public to know if the officer acted reasonably without seeing the body camera footage, said Chuck Wexler, head of the Police Executive Research Forum.
“Had there been body-worn camera video, people would have been able to decide for themselves what the sheriff is saying,” said Wexler, whose group collaborated with the U.S. Department of Justice to write guidance for police-worn body cameras nationwide. “Absent body-worn cameras, it makes it more difficult. That was the point of body-worn cameras to begin with.”
The Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office body-worn camera policy requires deputies to begin recording “upon engaging in any law enforcement related activity” in a way that “maximizes the camera’s ability to capture video footage of the deputies’ activities.”
That’s a “squishy” policy that gives deputies too much discretion as to when to activate the camera, said Daniel Zehnder, a camera consultant and trainer who worked 22 years in the Las Vegas Police Department. Because the policy is so loosely defined, it’s not clear whether the deputy complied with it, Zehnder said.
Police agencies should train their officers to activate cameras the moment they are dispatched to a call, he said.
In the heat of a life-and-death confrontation, a cop may be unlikely to remember to activate a body-cam. That’s why turning the camera on early is so important, experts said.
“Officers need to anticipate that when they jump out of the vehicle, they may be focused on something besides their body-worn camera,” said Michael Scott, a former police officer and clinical professor of policing at Arizona State University.
Shelley’s defense of the deputy – that he didn’t have time to activate his camera after exiting the police car – flies in the face of best practices, Zehnder said. Police officers should be trained not simply to turn on their cameras, but when, he said.
“Make it a bright line. As soon as you’re dispatched for a call for service, turn the camera on,” Zehnder said.
Scott, the Arizona State expert, seconded Zehnder’s recommendation.
“I think ideally the best time to turn it on is when the officer begins responding to the call,” he said. “That also captures everything that the officer is likely to see approaching the incident.”
Stoughton and Higgins each agreed that sooner is better than later.
“It’s entirely possible he didn’t have time at the time” of the shooting, Stoughton said. “That brings us back to the first question: Why did he not turn it on before?”
Such early camera activation is common practice. Syracuse police require an officer to activate the body-worn camera “upon being dispatched and prior to commencing any self-initiated activity.” New York City police instruct officers to “begin recording prior to arrival at incident location.” And state police require activation “immediately before exiting a patrol vehicle.”
Even after the deputy fired the fatal shots, there may have been a chance to preserve body-camera footage of the shooting, experts said.
The sheriff department’s Axon 3 body cameras are equipped with an industry-standard feature that continuously records video all the time. When the device is activated, the camera’s default settings automatically begin saving video 30 seconds before activation. It’s unclear if that function was available to the deputy in this case.
The sheriff’s office was one of the last police agencies in Onondaga County to get body-worn cameras. Then-Sheriff Eugene Conway said in 2021 that acquiring the cameras was not a priority.
That prompted County Executive Ryan McMahon and the legislature to provide funding for cameras and force the issue. The sheriff’s office outfitted every road patrol deputy with body-worn cameras. The office spends $300,000 to $400,000 a year to maintain them.
Cameras are considered so important that deputies are required to submit a written explanation if they don’t activate their camera to record an incident. Deputies can be disciplined if their explanation is inadequate, according to the nine-page body cam policy.
That creates an expectation that the cameras will help document critical situations, Zehnder said.
“The use of force may have been perfectly justified,’’ he said. “Unfortunately, when the camera’s not on in today’s world, it doesn’t matter what the officer says. It matters what’s on the camera. That’s what people want to see, and agencies just cannot afford to have circumstances like this happen.”
More Syracuse.com coverage:
2 families grieve teens’ deaths from a deputy’s gun: ‘They did not deserve to die’
State Attorney General opens investigation into teens fatally shot by deputy in DeWitt
See sheriff’s explanation of why deputy fired shots that killed two teens (Video)
2 teens killed in DeWitt by deputy who fired at vehicle which nearly ran deputy over, sheriff says
Two people killed by police in shooting in DeWitt, authorities say
Two teens fatally shot by deputy identified; they attended Henninger High School
Staff writer Douglass Dowty can be reached at ddowty@syracuse.com or (315) 470-6070. Staff writer Tim Knauss can be reached at tknauss@syracuse.com or (315) 470-3023.