Kevin Walsh always wanted to be a police officer.
“I always wanted to be a cop, from the time I was very young,” the retiring Onondaga County Sheriff said. “Sarto Major, who was the sheriff from the late 1950s to the early ‘60s, went to the same church I went to in Skaneateles. My father and he were friends. I used to see him from time to time going out on some sort of an emergency, and that kind of engendered a desire to be involved.”
But that doesn’t mean he always wanted the sheriff’s position.
“It probably wasn’t until my later years [that I wanted that position],” he said. “The opportunities were there and the timing was right.”
Now, Walsh has a new opportunity — to retire and be a full-time grandpa. Walsh is stepping down as sheriff after three terms and some 20 years in the position. His successor, former DeWitt Police Chief Gene Conway, was sworn in last week.
Walsh first joined the sheriff’s department back in 1966 after leaving the Army and worked his way up through the ranks, ultimately retiring as a captain in 1986. He first ran for sheriff in 1994 when John Dillon decided to step down. At the time, he was head of public safety at SUNY ESF and had recently served three terms on the Onondaga County Legislature.
“I was chairman of the Public Safety Committee for three terms, during which time we built the justice center and the 911 center,” he said. “I got very interested and very involved in that, particularly the project to build the justice center. We traveled across the country looking at various models and how they were run and construction and all of those other things.”
Now, Walsh, a Skaneateles native and current North Syracuse resident, said the Onondaga County Justice Center is a model for jails across the country.
“We’ve gotten a lot of national recognition,” Walsh said. “The justice center is a national model for how things should be run. This is known to be a well-run facility.”
He pointed to the use of direct supervision, where one deputy is responsible for up to 60 inmates.
“Not only does it work, it’s reduced inmate-on-inmate assaults and thefts. It’s reduced deputy-to-inmate violence. We rarely have a deputy injured by an inmate. We rarely have to use force in the facility,” he said. “Whenever there’s any indication there’s a problematic inmate, we send in a fully equipped team, and it’s disarming for the inmate. He no longer has to stand up and prove how macho he is. There’s six people there and they’re videotaping him.”
He also noted the justice center’s training programs, which help people reassimilate into society.
“We’ve created training programs that have given people an opportunity to get jobs on the outside. Our janitorial training program has won national awards,” Walsh said. “People come in here in the worst physical and mental condition that they’ve ever been in in their lives, in some cases. And we’ve turned some of those people around, seen a reduction in the number of people that come in annually. The first year about 15,000 people were processed through there. The last few years, it’s been about 12,000 a year.”
That’s just one of the things Walsh counts among his accomplishments. He alsorestructured the department’s personnel, taking deputies from behind their desks and putting them back on the street to fight crime. He is credited with founding the Sheriff’s Office Abused Persons Unit and the Rape Prevention Program. He instituted community policing in targeted neighborhoods, expanded the DARE program and started sheriff’s bicycle patrols. He founded the Air-1 Task Force, which lead to the replacement of an aging airship with a new state-of-the-art helicopter that provides invaluable services in law enforcement, fire and emergency services. In addition, during the past nine years, Walsh has obtained more than $110 million in federal, state and other reimbursements and grants for the sheriff’s office.
But Walsh said he’s most proud of the men and women who serve under him.
“The men and women that we’ve been able to put out there and the job that they do every day, the quality of the work they do – it amazes me sometimes to see the things they do for the little credit they get,” he said. “It’s not just the police officers who tend to be much more visible, but the civil department does a public service every day that goes unheralded. The men and women in the jail do a tremendous job. It’s not something they get a lot of applause for in the public, but it’s a job they do every day that’s so important to this community.”
Since he took office, Walsh said he’s seen a number of changes, most notably in the technology available to the department.
“Our communications are so much better,” he said. “When I took office, we didn’t have computers in the cars yet. We now have computers in the cars and officers do their reports right there. They can be transmitted right there very quickly down to the records center. It’s changed this business greatly.”
Cars also have ticket printers, patrol rifles and video cameras, and many have license plate readers. The county also hosts the servers for counties statewide to search criminal databases.
Walsh said 911 services in the county have also improved greatly.
“Years ago, we had these dead spots all over the county,” he said. “Now there are virtually no dead spots. We can talk with the fire departments, we can talk with the ambulances, we can talk with the feds or the state or the military — we have this interoperability so we can communicate with each other.”
Unfortunately, not all of the changes have been positive.
“During my years with the sheriff’s office, and we’re looking at almost a half a century, I’ve seen the population shift from the city of Syracuse out into the suburbs. Now we’re policing 458,000 people in Onondaga County, two-thirds of them outside the city of Syracuse, and we’re doing it with less personnel,” Walsh said. “We’re down almost 60 positions on the police side of the house alone, so it’s getting harder and harder to give the kinds of response to calls that people have grown to expect. When we were at full strength, we were able to put out a lot more patrols and respond to things a lot faster.”
The staff cuts come at the same time society is becoming more volatile, Walsh said.
“We’re seeing a societal change, too, in terms of the amount of violence we’re seeing,” he said. “Years ago, it was not uncommon to see most calls handled by one officer. It’s very rare now. We almost always have to have backups because of the volatility that seems to be out there.”
Despite those changes, Walsh said the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Department is doing a good job of staying on top of the issues the county faces.
“A lot of long-term people have made this community their home and have made this organization as strong as it is,” he said.
Ultimately, despite his love for the department and the job, Walsh decided it was time to retire because he wanted to be closer to his family.
“I am 3,000 miles away from my grandchildren,” the sheriff said. “I’m 70 years old. My wife said, ‘That’s it.’ She probably would have preferred that I retire four years ago, but there were still a number of things I wanted to see through, at least make sure they were able to continue.”
Among those projects was Air 1, the sheriff’s helicopter that assists on Medevac missions and accident, fire and other emergency scenes. The county has repeatedly trimmed funding from the program over the last few years, though Walsh said he believes the future for the program is brighter.
“I think the new sheriff coming in may have an easier road with the legislature to keep that going and get the funding back where it should be,” he said.
Walsh said he was reluctant to tell his successor how to do his job.
“I’ve tried my darnedest to avoid giving any kind of advice to him, unless he asks for it and he hasn’t,” he said. “My only advice would be that there are some excellent people in this office, and just to be open to what they have to say and give them the opportunities to do what they do so well. If he does that, he’ll be very successful.”
