Buffalo Police officers are rarely reprimanded when they have done wrong on the job a new report from the New York Civil Liberties Union finds.
The NYCLU obtained records of almost one thousand internal police misconduct investigations from the Buffalo Police Department previously unavailable to the public, dating from 1995 through to 2023. The legal advocacy organization says this is the first in a set of data releases of misconduct investigations by the BPD and is not a complete set of records. This dataset concerns some active and recently retired officers.
The NYCLU’s analysis of the data reveals that of 934 internal misconduct investigations, only 86 were “sustained” by the department after investigation – meaning the complaint was upheld and the officer found at fault.
Of those 86 sustained investigations, only 38 officers were reprimanded. Just 28 were suspended for at least one day and no officers were fired or put on probation.
“It raises a lot of questions about how accountability is working and has worked within the Buffalo Police Department, and it suggests that additional oversight is needed,” said the NYCLU’s Assistant Legal Director, Bobby Hodgson. “The fact that so many didn't result in a sustained finding does not mean that the misconduct didn't happen, right? It often means that they didn't collect enough evidence to come to a conclusion one way or the other.”
The analysis found that BPD does not keep a database of internal investigations and lacks a systematic tracking system for those investigations and complaints against officers.
It’s a discovery Hodgson calls “troubling” since it makes it doubtful that the BPD is identifying or addressing possible broad trends such as the demographics of those making complaints or particular officers frequently investigated.
“The fact that Buffalo is not doing that themselves was itself a really troubling finding and raised a lot of questions about how they could possibly be making any sort of meaningful review of the internal misconduct complaints that are happening,” he said.
“It raised a lot of questions for us about the system itself and how investigations happen,” he added.
And the system is not designed for accountability according to Professor Alex Vitale, coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He said the primary job of police internal affairs divisions or bureaus is damage control for the department rather than producing “some kind of justice.”
“In fact, a lot of what these internal affairs bureaus do is cover up misconduct, excuse it away, or pick out a particular officer and throw them under the bus in a way that is made to look like the department is cleaning house without really changing its basic practices,” Vitale said.
WBFO has contacted the BPD seeking comment or an interview with Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia and has not received a reply.
The BPD initially resisted making the records public when the NYCLU first asked for their release as part of a freedom of information request back in 2020, according to Hodgson. That request was made after New York State repealed a subsection of state law called 50-a, which had been used to block the release of police misconduct records for decades. Hodgson claims the BPD only released a single record before the NYCLU was subsequently forced to sue for the information, securing their release.
As a result of their analysis, the NYCLU calls for a civilian review board to independently oversee the BPD in an effort to improve transparency and public accountability.
“What this data is telling us is that if we allow the police to police themselves, we're not going to get any measure of accountability from them,” said Aymanuel Radford, the Buffalo-area field officer for the NYCLU. “And so what we’re calling for is a civilian review board, basically that has some teeth, to be able to hold the police accountable.”
It’s a call that has been made in Buffalo before but has gone unheeded.
Back in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Buffalo Common Councilmember Rasheed N.C. Wyatt submitted a resolution to the council requesting that the city research the cost of establishing such a board in Buffalo, as well as successful models of similar police oversight measures across the country. Despite adopting the resolution, no civilian review board was established, and the Common Council shows little interest in creating one.
But with Byron Brown stepping down as Mayor to lead Regional Offtrack Betting Corporation, and a mayoral election on the horizon in 2025, Radford sees an opportunity to resurrect the push for a civilian review board in Buffalo supported by the NYCLU's findings.
“I think because of the change in Buffalo, because of the data we have now, I think we're having a different conversation about a civilian review board than we've had over the last four years.”
