Former Bucks County deputy sheriff took photos of naked people in custody with personal cellphone, DA says

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Bucks County District Attorney Joe Khan said his office has charged Ryan Gaffney, a former county deputy sheriff, with several misdemeanor offenses after an investigation found that he used his personal cellphone to photograph naked people in custody on two separate occasions.

Gaffney, who was terminated from his role last month, is charged with two counts of official oppression, one count of unsworn falsification of authorities, one count of obstructing the administration of law or other government functions, and one count of possession of an incident of crime.

Paul Lang, of Parlow & Lang LLC, is representing Gaffney, according to Lang’s office. The attorney could not immediately be reached for comment.

Court-ordered search revealed photos of naked people in custody on Gaffney’s phone, per investigators

On Jan. 30, Gaffney was executing a warrant in Middletown Township with four other deputies when he covered his body camera and used his personal cellphone to take a photo of a man who was naked from the waist down. The man was “suffering a mental health crisis,” Khan said. Body camera footage from the other deputies in the room captured the incident, per the criminal complaint.

Gaffney then showed the photo to female employees in the sheriff’s office, per investigators, and a forensic analysis showed that he sent the image to personal contacts in his phone.

Khan said in the course of the investigation, detectives discovered a second photo on Gaffney’s phone from Dec. 26, 2024, showing a handcuffed man lying on a bed. Khan said that person was in custody in a hotel room and the photo was not taken at the Bucks County Correctional Facility.

Investigators allege Gaffney then sent the photo to 12 personal contacts in his phone over four separate dates.

The complaint alleges that Gaffney made false verbal statements in a voluntary administrative interview with county Sheriff Danny Ceisler and investigators on April 6, denying that he used his personal phone to create and distribute the Jan. 30 image.

Through his attorney, Gaffney provided screenshots of active and deleted photo libraries “in an attempt to mislead investigators into believing that this Jan. 30 image was not stored on this phone,” Khan said.

A court-ordered search of Gaffney’s phone on April 23 recovered an image of the Jan. 30 victim, with digital metadata on the recovered file matching the timestamp and physical positioning captured on the other deputies’ body-worn cameras, Khan said. The image of the December 2024 victim was also recovered in that search.

Gaffney ‘knew that what he was doing was wrong,’ DA says

“Mr. Gaffney’s conduct is a disgrace,” Khan said at a press conference at the Bucks County Justice Center in Doylestown on Monday. “It is a betrayal of the trust that is placed in him by the sheriff and by the taxpayers. The people of Bucks County must be able to trust that those who are sworn to protect them will respect their basic rights and dignity at all times, especially when they are at their most vulnerable.”

Khan thanked Ceisler for “swift action” in referring the case to the DA’s office in March. No one else is being charged in connection with the case, he said.

“What was clear was that Mr. Gaffney knew that what he was doing was wrong, and that was really the essence of why he covered his body camera at the time,” Khan said. “The other deputy sheriffs weren’t doing that; they weren’t engaging in this kind of obscene behavior to take out personal cellphones and mistreat people, and they weren’t covering up their body cameras.”

A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Aug. 10, per court records.

Gaffney, 46, of Feasterville-Trevose, assumed the deputy sheriff position in June 2023. Per the county press release at the time, Gaffney is a U.S. Air Force veteran who served in Iraq and formerly worked part-time as a police officer in Hulmeville Borough.