Onondaga County honors officers for traffic, impaired-driving enforcement work

A Liverpool police officer who made 1,845 traffic stops and 63 impaired-driving arrests stood out as Onondaga County marked its annual traffic safety awards, a signal that the county sees drunk driving, aggressive driving and dangerous road behavior as urgent threats, not routine violations.

The Onondaga County Traffic Safety Advisory Board used its ceremony to recognize officers and other law-enforcement members for traffic enforcement and impaired-driving enforcement work. The board says the annual recognition honors personal contribution and dedication to traffic-safety education and enforcement in Onondaga County, and it frames traffic stops as a way to reach beyond tickets and into more serious crime detection.

That point was central to the board’s Aggressive Criminal Enforcement Award, which recognizes traffic stops that led to arrests or solved crimes. The board says an estimated 70 percent of all serious crime involves a motor vehicle, a statistic that helps explain why chiefs and supervisors keep pushing officers onto road patrols even when the work is less visible than other kinds of policing.

Syracuse Police Chief Mark Rusin said the value of the recognition is that officers on traffic details are often uncovering more serious crimes, not simply writing citations. He also stressed that those assignments run around the clock and that the public often sees only the ticket or arrest, not the crash that never happened or the dangerous conduct that was stopped before it spread onto a city street or highway.

The numbers from Liverpool show the scale of that work. The officer’s 2,068 citations and 63 impaired-driving arrests suggest a county where officers are still finding enough risky behavior to keep traffic safety high on the agenda. For a region that depends on routes through Liverpool, Syracuse and the surrounding towns, those enforcement numbers point to a continuing concern about impaired driving, speeding and repeat dangerous behavior behind the wheel.

The board’s mission is to foster cooperation and partnerships among agencies, law enforcement and community members around traffic safety in Onondaga County. That message has gained extra weight since Syracuse Police Officer Michael Jensen and Onondaga County Sheriff’s Lt. Michael Hoosock were honored posthumously after they were killed following a traffic stop in Salina on April 14, 2024. James Snell said families should know the officers “haven’t been forgotten.”

County officials renamed the Onondaga County Emergency Management Complex for Hoosock in May 2025, and a memorial for Hoosock and Jensen was unveiled on Tipperary Hill on April 14, 2026. In Onondaga County, traffic enforcement has become both a public-safety strategy and a point of remembrance, with every stop carrying the possibility of preventing a crash, solving a crime or exposing something far more serious.