Onondaga County Sheriff Toby Shelley declared victory Tuesday night in his race for re-election against Republican RJ Lenhart.

Shelley won 64% of the vote with 71% of the votes counted, according to Onondaga County Board of Elections unofficial results. Lenhart, who has not conceded, had 36%.

“We made a promise to a bunch of people who voted for us, and now we’ve got to keep
that promise,” Shelley told a boisterous crowd at the Mizpah Syracuse, where county
Democrats gathered to celebrate the results.

He said he was 100% certain that he was victorious in the race.

Shelley flipped the seat blue four years ago, becoming the first Democratic sheriff in Onondaga County in decades.

At his watch party at the Ale ‘n’ Angus Pub in downtown Syracuse, Shelley supporters handed out red clown noses as a rebuke to Lenhart, a former Madison County undersheriff whose campaign had posted images of Shelley as a clown and accused him of “clowning around with public safety.”

At 10 p.m., an enthusiastic crowd broke into chants of “Shelley, Shelley, Shelley” as televisions in the bar showed early results indicated the sheriff had a formidable lead.

Going forward, Shelley will likely need to navigate County Executive Ryan McMahon’s planned integration of Syracuse’s aging downtown Justice Center jail with a consolidated  and renovated Jamesville Correctional facility. He will also face setting county policies on the role of surveillance technology and artificial intelligence in the county’s policing. 

One issue in the race was whether sheriff’s deputies would collaborate with federal Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) on civil immigration cases. ICE has caused fear and disruption among municipalities and businesses locally and nationally for its aggressive practices of raiding homes, farms, construction sites and other locations to detain immigrants.

Shelley campaigned on a pledge to comply with a New York state law requiring local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE only if honoring judicial warrants in criminal cases, not civil immigration cases. 

Lenhart said he planned to collaborate with ICE as much as possible, but that the sheriff would not have the manpower to enforce federal immigration law. He later clarified that cooperation with immigration enforcement would occur only when an undocumented person was accused of a crime. 

Lenhart’s campaign also emphasized a staffing shortage of some 80 corrections officers at the two jails and noted that the union for deputies at the downtown Justice Center had voted “no confidence” in Shelley earlier this year. The union held that vote several months ago during a stall in contract negotiations, but waited to announce it right before a live debate between Shelley and Linhart last month.

Shelley chalked the last-minute announcement up to campaign tactics by a new president for that union, which is separate from the one serving Jamesville Correctional staff.

Shelley oversees a department of about 700 employees. He has said he plans to address staff shortages under the new plan for the consolidated jail in Jamesville, as well as expectations that the number of inmates will continue to fall.

Shelley, a former sheriff’s deputy and police officer with the Village of Jordan police department, ran on the Democratic and We The People lines.

Lenhart ran on the Republican and Conservative lines. Lenhart currently serves as director of opioid response strategies in the county district attorney’s office.

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Janet Gramza is an alumnus of Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Comminications and Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. She has 30 years experience in journalism and is a veteran...

Laura Robertson is a staff reporter covering Onondaga County. Prior to joining Central Current, she lived on the edge of the Bering Strait in Nome, Alaska, where she worked as a reporter for a year. She...