NY State Police Lag Behind Agencies Nationwide On Camera Use

A highway shoulder is where New York state troopers spotted Luke Patterson, walking by himself around 2 a.m. after his car became disabled.

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By the end of the encounter in rural New York, the 41-year-old chef would be killed by a trooper’s gunfire.

Authorities say the trooper shot him when he made a sudden movement toward the cruiser after behaving strangely. The man’s family said he had been having psychiatric problems but posed no threat to anyone.

Unlike many other police shootings across the U.S., no video of the May 23 confrontation exists to help determine what happened.

That’s because New York remains one of only five states where the primary state law enforcement agency is not equipped with dashboard cameras, according to a nationwide Associated Press survey.

Four of those states — Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New York and Massachusetts — are in the Northeast.

Hawaii’s primary state law enforcement agency also does not have dashboard cameras, but it doesn’t have a state-level highway patrol, so it has far fewer interactions with citizens.

“We don’t know what happened, other than what they say happened,” said Luke Patterson’s father, Mark Patterson.

The New York agency lacks body cameras too. It says it once employed VHS and later digital cameras on a limited number of vehicles, but it didn’t have the funds to maintain the VHS equipment and the digital cameras required “costly maintenance.”

“It’s astonishing that the New York State Police have no video accountability,” said Christopher Dunn, legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

While use of dashboard cameras is common, the AP survey found most primary state law enforcement agencies do not have body cameras.