‘No arrests’: In New York, some police can drink, drive and avoid charges

Sammy Sussman pored over more than 10,000 police disciplinary files to report this article, which is part of a series by The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.

An Orchard Park police officer found the man in the shoulder of a six-lane road, standing near his crumpled black BMW, arguing with his girlfriend.

It was 11 p.m. on a Saturday in 2021, in the suburbs of Buffalo. The BMW had slammed into a Jeep, smashing its left taillight. White high heels were toppled on their sides on the pavement, outside the BMW’s passenger door.

The man’s speech was slurred and his gait was unsteady, the officer, Andrew J. Kowalski, would later note in a report. His eyes were glassy, and he smelled strongly of alcohol.

The officer asked who had been driving. The couple looked at each other.

“We’re State Police,” the woman said. Her boyfriend, Ronald W. Wilson, was an off-duty investigator and had the identification to prove it.

Kowalski did not give Wilson a sobriety test. One of his supervisors called the State Police, per procedure, and a sergeant with the agency drove the couple home.

Days later, Wilson admitted in an affidavit that he had been behind the wheel. But he was not charged with driving while intoxicated—he received a traffic ticket for following behind another car too closely, court records show. When the State Police investigated him months later for violating department policy, he admitted to drinking six cocktails and a shot that night, according to disciplinary records. He was suspended without pay for 35 days. Wilson, 49, is still with the State Police.

The case exemplifies the lax approach some New York police departments have taken with officers caught drinking and driving, protecting them from the punishments faced by ordinary citizens. It is just one incident buried in a trove of over 10,000 disciplinary files that detailed misconduct at roughly half the state’s law enforcement agencies. The files, confidential under state law until 2020, were collected over the past two years by The New York Times and New York Focus, a nonprofit newsroom, through public records requests.

They indicate that sometimes, drunken driving was treated as an HR issue, not a crime.

In at least 17 cases from 2013 to 2023, the records show, responding officers did not take basic steps to confirm if their fellow officers had driven drunk, despite significant indications that they had.

Some officers, the records show, collided with guardrails, parked cars and other motorists. Others crashed their official vehicles or fled the scenes of accidents. One hit a moving police car with its lights on. Yet responding officers did not follow standard procedure for potential drunken-driving cases, like performing sobriety tests.

None of the officers were arrested at the scene, and only one later pleaded guilty to driving while ability impaired, a traffic violation. With a few exceptions, they all returned to the job following short suspensions.

Some officers even drove drunk to duty—one to a police station; another, to a structure fire; a third, to a crime scene.

The trove is not a comprehensive accounting of every officer who drove drunk, and does not include files from the New York Police Department, which began releasing its records in 2021. Some experts said documented cases were very likely an undercount, speculating that many drunken-driving incidents were never internally investigated.

And not every department failed to criminally investigate incidents of drunken driving. Officers who seriously injured themselves or others usually faced prosecution.

But the 17 cases provide a window into how officers in New York State have avoided accountability in court despite relatively clear evidence—sometimes, their own admissions—suggesting they had broken the law.

This is the first in a series of articles examining the trove of documents. (See: How we obtained 10,000 police disciplinary records.)

The Times provided case summaries to departments; most did not comment or declined to discuss specific cases.

The State Police — which, as the largest agency included in the records, accounted for more than half the incidents — said it had conducted internal investigations whenever it learned of allegations of wrongdoing, and that those who violate its code of conduct can face disciplinary action, including termination. It also noted that local departments were responsible for opening criminal investigations into some of the incidents. Those departments declined to comment.

“All members are expected to enforce New York’s DWI laws consistently and impartially,” Beau Duffy, a director of public information with the State Police, wrote in a statement.

Wilson, Kowalski and the Orchard Park Police Department did not respond to requests for comment.

In June, Kowalski, 40, was awarded Erie County’s DWI enforcement award.

Having a few drinks, then a ‘few more’

Experts were not surprised that officers gave colleagues special treatment on the road.

“If I go 85 on the freeway, I’m not going to get a ticket,” said Donald Meier, a former chief of police in Coxsackie, who resigned in 2014.

“Have I let people go occasionally? Of course,” he added. “We all have.”

But Meier, as well as former police chiefs and officers who reviewed some of the files, were taken aback that officers responsible for crashes had avoided arrest.

An off-duty deputy sheriff from Jefferson County was hospitalized after an ATV accident in 2022. The responding trooper, Thomas E. Miller, was told by a firefighter that the deputy sheriff was intoxicated, according to disciplinary records, but Miller apparently did not investigate the claim. He also “improperly muted” his body-worn camera “for an extended period,” a supervisor wrote in a disciplinary letter.

Miller, 46, was suspended for five days and remains with the agency. He did not respond to requests for comment. There is no record of charges against the deputy sheriff; it is unclear if he was disciplined.

Some officers admitted during internal investigations to drinking heavily.

During one such investigation, Vincent Delforte, an officer with the Canandaigua Police Department in the Finger Lakes region, described having nine drinks before attending a basketball game in 2013 with other off-duty officers. He had a “few more beers” during the game, he wrote in a memo; more drinks at two bars on the way home; and three more at his house before going to bed around 1:45 a.m.

Several hours later, Delforte arrived for his shift, according to his disciplinary record. Around 8:45 a.m., he was tested for “residual alcohol”; his blood-alcohol level was above the legal limit. By the time a sergeant “realized that PO Delforte should be given a ride home,” he had already left, according to the sergeant’s memo. Criminal charges were not filed.

Delforte, 55, who retired from the department in June, did not respond to requests for comment. He was suspended for three days for “unbecoming conduct,” lack of fitness for duty and operating a vehicle while intoxicated, according to a settlement agreement. For six months, he was breath-tested before every shift.

Records reveal troublesome cases

In New York, a driver whose blood-alcohol level exceeds 0.08 percent can be charged with driving while intoxicated. For first-time offenders, the crime is punishable by up to one year in jail, a minimum of a six-month license revocation and nearly $1,000 in fines, but many avoid jail time, defense attorneys say.

Under national guidelines, an officer who believes a driver is intoxicated should conduct basic sobriety tests, such as asking the driver to walk in a straight line, and can request a blood-alcohol test. In New York, if a person refuses, or if tests can’t be performed, visual signs of impairment are enough to lead to a license suspension, fines and jail time.

But often, the records show, these basic measures were skipped.

In 2024, D.J. Granville, 48, the chief of narcotics in the Erie County Sheriff’s Office, struck seven parked cars while driving the wrong direction down a one-way street, according to the accident report and as first reported by the Investigative Post. His sister-in-law, a lieutenant in the Buffalo Police Department, responded to the scene; he was not given a sobriety test, the report shows. But lawsuits filed by the vehicle owners claimed he had been driving “impaired.” He pleaded guilty to reckless driving and leaving the scene.

In 2021, Drew Forsythe, 53, the chief of police in Greece, drank at an awards gala and then crashed into a guardrail shortly before 1 a.m., according to disciplinary files, and as reported in local news outlets. Officers from his department did not perform sobriety tests, per the files, and drove him home. The local district attorney investigated; the chief resigned and pleaded guilty to driving while ability impaired.

Neither provided The Times with comment, citing ongoing lawsuits.

Many of the records were frank, written when files were internal and not publicly accessible.

Francis Archetko, a sergeant with the Rochester Police Department, appeared intoxicated to officers in 2018 when they found him around 3:30 a.m., pounding on the door of a home in a neighboring county after driving there, according to disciplinary proceedings. His blood-alcohol level was measured at 1.5 times the legal limit.

Records show that a responding sergeant from the Ontario County Sheriff’s Office called Archetko’s captain and said there would be “no written reports, no arrests” unless the homeowner pressed charges. No arrest was made. Archetko, 44, was suspended for three days and returned to work.

A representative for the Rochester Police Department said his actions were “outside of our jurisdictional limits to investigate criminally.” The Ontario County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment.

Until state law changed, the incident remained concealed.

“The lack of charges do not diminish the fact that he drove drunk,” an internal investigator for the Rochester Police Department wrote in the records. He added: “Had Sgt. Archetko been arrested, it would have been advertised in the media.”

Intoxicated in public, and promoted

When departments have evidence their officers broke the law, they should treat the incident as a criminal matter before conducting an internal investigation, experts in policing said.

“If you are suspected of committing a crime, you should be treated like everyone else,” said Geoffrey P. Alpert, a professor of criminology and the author of a textbook on police misconduct investigations. “The administrative hearing comes afterward.”

Under a 1967 Supreme Court decision, Garrity v. New Jersey, departments can order officers to answer questions during disciplinary hearings at the threat of firing. But those statements are protected, meaning they cannot be used in criminal proceedings.

Records show that the State Police sometimes arrested officers in serious cases, like those in which ambulances were called. But in other cases, the records make no mention of criminal investigations.

“We believe in due process for our members in disciplinary matters and accountability when allegations are substantiated,” Liz Benjamin, a representative for the Police Benevolent Association of the New York State Troopers, wrote in an email.

Sometimes disciplinary meetings came weeks—even months—after an incident.

Trooper Steven L. Lisowski was caught on security cameras driving himself “and a female companion, in a marked State Police van,” under the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge in 2017, according to a disciplinary letter. After removing a bag of empty beer bottles and a cooler from the vehicle, he drove to the station. The incident was not criminally investigated.

Weeks later, during his disciplinary interview, he estimated that he had drank “four to five beers” that afternoon. “I do not feel I was impaired at all,” he said in the interview, per a transcript. Lisowski, 48, was suspended for 10 days, and remains with the agency. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Ethan Mosher, a sergeant with the Watkins Glen Village Police Department in the Finger Lakes, was “observed in public while intoxicated” in 2017, according to a settlement agreement regarding the episode and two other unrelated incidents. Later that day, his “personal vehicle” crashed into another car and fled the scene, per the document, which he signed. He denied driving.

Mosher accepted a five-day suspension without pay.

“I was never criminally charged or issued even a traffic citation,” Mosher, 34, wrote in an email. “I was never arrested and I was never detained or questioned under Miranda.”

Mosher was promoted in 2020 and now leads the department.

Sarah Cohen contributed reporting. This article was reported in partnership with Big Local News at Stanford University, and with support from MuckRock, the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Data-Driven Reporting Project.

Sammy Sussman is an investigative reporter who writes about police and policing in New York State. The Rochester Beacon is co-publishing this series in partnership with The New York Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship.

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