Rochester Police Officer William Mason stopped the victims car after allegedly noticing that a taillight was out. Officer Mason and his partner entered their patrol car, sped up and stopped the vehicle. After issuing two appearance traffic tickets to defendant, one for a violation of Rochester's excessive vehicle sound ordinance, Mason asked the defendant to exit his car and sit in the back of his patrol car while defendant's car was searched and towed. Defendant was not under custodial arrest at that time, and the officer had no intention of taking defendant into custody. Rather, Officer Mason concluded that he was required to tow defendant's car because Rochester's City Code mandates the impoundment of a vehicle when its driver is cited for violating the city's excessive vehicle sound ordinance. Before it was towed, Officer Mason and his partner conducted an inventory search of defendant's car. During the inventory search, the police found a loaded shotgun and extra ammunition in the trunk of defendant's car. Defendant was then arrested, taken into custody, and charged with the prohibited possession of a firearm

Outcome

The impoundment and concomitant search of defendant's automobile, conducted without probable cause or a constitutionally permissible community caretaking purpose, violated the New York State and United States Constitutions. Rochester City Code is unconstitutional insofar as it authorized the impoundment of defendant's automobile in this case. The evidence seized as a result of the unlawful seizure and search of defendant's must therefore be suppressed.

Andrew Mackenzie shot victim after the man allegedly resisted arrest

Involved in event without description regarding "Information Regarding Crime"

Outcome

Reprimand

In 2006, Officer Cariol Horne intervened to stop a fellow officer, Gregory Kwiatkowski, who was choking Neal Mack, a Black man who was already placed under arrest and handcuffed. Horne was assaulted by the officer during the intervention, and thereafter the Buffalo Police Department punished officer Cariol Horne by terminating her for attempting to stop the assault by her fellow officer upon a citizen —just one year shy of receiving her full pension.

In October 2020, Buffalo adopted "Cariol's Law," to require police to intervene if a fellow officer uses excessive force. In 2021, a New York court awarded her the pension and back pay she earned. The city has yet to pay Cariol her pension.

Several RPD officers allegedly approached victim with their guns drawn. Malley told him to get on the ground. Two officers allegedly jumped victim, wrestled him to the ground, and bashed his head. The officers allegedly placed victim in a police car with handcuffs so tight his wrists bled and his hands swelled. When victim filed a complaint with PSS, Sgt. Malley was the officer put in charge of the investigation, even though he was the commanding officer who ordered the assault on Davis.

Outcome

After two years, victim’s complaint was determined to be unfounded.

According to legal documents, RPD Officer Donald Flood arrested a man who was standing on the sidewalk holding a sign that said "Homeless. Hungry. Please Help." The man was simply standing silently on the sidewalk. The arrest was made for violating Rochester's Aggressive Panhandling Act (passed in 2004).

Outcome

The arrest was found to be unconstitutional by judge

Background

Mayor Byron W.  Brown's administration wanted to turn Buffalo's “crime problem” around by trying to replicate former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's famously tough stance on crime in New York, where crime levels plummeted. This was despite the fact that the “tough on crime” tactics were notorious for racially targeting Black communities and crime levels were dropping before Giuliani took office.

Brown declared what he called a "zero-tolerance" policy on so-called "quality-of-life" crimes in an effort to curb petty crime.

Buffalo Police Chief H. McCarthy Gipson announced when he was appointed to his position in February 2006, ”we're going to have to be mobile, agile and slightly hostile in trying to get the job of policing done in the City of Buffalo.”

The several days prior to the events detailed below, the Erie County Executive at the time, Joel Giambra, publicly came out against the Drug War. Giambra held a press conference with members of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of ex-cops and prosecutors advocating the decriminalization or legalization of drugs.

The Raids

From April 18th to April 20th, 2006, 38 Buffalo homes were invaded by no-knock SWAT raids in "Operation Shock and Awe," a phrase, borrowed from the US military to describe its strategy in the early days of the Iraq War. The war on drug raids were conducted under the direction of then Buffalo Police Commissioner H. McCarthy Gipson over a three day period and resulted in the arrest of approximately 78 people.

The department even invited a couple of reporters from the Buffalo News(BN) to cover the invasion, like embedded war correspondents. "We are declaring war on street-level drug dealing," Gipson told two reporters from the BN, during one of the raids.

Scores of police officers dressed in military battle gear conducted the no-knock SWAT raids deploying diversionary grenades, broke down doors with battering rams, and stormed residences with automatic assault rifles ablaze traumatizing entire communities while they were going about their daily lives. Accounts of the raids detail a 1-year-old being present while shotgun blasts rang out and their three dogs were murdered in front of their eyes,

Gipson declared victory, boasting of the department’s haul: six pounds of marijuana, seven ounces of crack cocaine, and five guns. 

Outcome

A month after the raids occurred, an analysis conducted by the Buffalo News found that of the 78 Buffalo residents who were originally detained during the raids, only 20 faced a felony charge. Sixteen Buffalo residents were immediately released because the judge found there wasn't enough evidence to support legally sound charges. At least 36 of those arrested were out of jail within 24 hours of being arrested.

The original six pounds of marijuana police claimed to have found was actually four pounds, thirteen ounces. Three and a half pounds of that came by way of an unrelated traffic stop on the same day that raids had taken place and had nothing to do with the raids. They found all of five guns. 

City leaders were furious, not because city police had just terrorized innocent people with fruitless SWAT raids, but because they believed so many petty offenders were let off. City officials demanded tougher drug laws.

Commissioner Gipson meet with City Court judges, following the charge dismissals, to try and encourage them to increase bail for people charged with drug dealing. However, City Court judges said they simply didn't have the discretion to impose harsh sentences just because the mayor ordered a crackdown on drugs. Council Member Dominic Bonifacio Jr. of Niagara District said that the dismissals were, "a slap in the face to our good men in blue" and claimed that they proved the “revolving door in the court system.”

Judge Thomas P. Franczyk, who presided over the majority of cases from the raids, said he found problems with police paperwork that they don’t pass legal muster. "It still has to pass the test of legal sufficiency," Franczyk said. "The law is the law, and the facts are the facts," he said. "In some cases, the accusatory paperwork is not alleging sufficient facts to support the defendant's knowing and unlawful possession of the drugs . . . It's not enough to say they were there when the drugs were found somewhere in the house."

Franczyk sent a letter to Commissioner Gipson, urging him to have his officers meet with the members of the District Attorney's office to cut down on paperwork errors and properly document evidence.

"What we learned was we need to be more specific about who possesses what," conceded Chief of Detectives Dennis Richards, who said he and other police brass recently sat down with narcotics detectives to make sure they write up their paperwork correctly after realizing that police actually have to have evidence of a crime for an arrest to have legal standing.

Department and city officials started to discuss sending narcotics cops and SWAT teams out with housing inspectors and the county Health Department to “clean up” suspected crack houses without the Fourth Amendment warrant requirements. The inspectors' presence would enable police to get inside the home without the legal hurdle of procuring a search warrant, intentionally circumventing constitutionally protected right to no unlawful search and seizures. And police talked about looking into working with federal housing officials to seize problem drug houses.

Shock and Awe "is just the beginning," said Richards, the chief of detectives.  "If you're dealing drugs in Buffalo, basically, you're going to be dealing with the Police Department. There will certainly be more raids in the future," Richards said. "You can count on that . . . We're looking at small-scale, large-scale, street-level. Nice quiet streets marred by one drug house as well as entire streets written off as drug house streets. So we're looking at top to bottom."

Gipson said arresting dealers repeatedly may be the only way to get the message through, comparing it to the aggressive, long-term approach to treating drug abusers, who often try to quit multiple times before having success.  "Our effectiveness comes in trying to keep them off kilter .  .  .  Keep them wondering if we're coming today or not coming."

Buffalo Police and city leadership took several steps beyond the raids in the war on drugs. The Police Department rearranged its squads to add three more sergeants and eight detectives to its Narcotics Unit, which operated day and night, instead of just at night. The city also reintroduced "Operation Clean Sweep," in which a team of law enforcement, city inspectors and other city workers descend on a block identified as having crime and blight problems. 

As for the Brown Administration's decision to replicate the Giuliani “tough on crime” strategy, well Rudy Giuliani’s personal reputation in tatters but so is the reputation of the tough-on-crime policing system he supervised as mayor of NYC in the 90s. There have now been 18 overturned convictions from that era based on the testimony of a single corrupt NYPD detective, Lou Scarcella.

According to city disciplinary records Officer Goulay was suspended for a day for failure to operate fleet vehicle in a safe manner, the fourth time in 36 months

Outcome

Suspended without pay for one day

According to D&C, officer Mark Simmons responded to a call that Lashedica Mason was threatening to hurt herself, and ended up shooting Mason three times. Simmons said Mason charged at him with a knife; Mason's family members said she didn't have a knife. then-Sergeant Jeffrey Koehn wrote in Simmons' 2005 yearly appraisal, “His assessment of the threat and his decision to use deadly physical force was correct.”

Outcome

After an internal investigation, Simmons was cleared.

Officers verbally harassed civilian child. Officers threw civilian to the ground, kicked him and pepper-sprayed him. Both children were treated at the hospital. The family was then stalked and harassed by RPD officers.

Outcome

filed a civil rights claim and the family received monetary compensation.

On May 11 2004 Steve Kurtz awoke to find his wife dead beside him. When paramedics arrived at his house they noticed a makeshift laboratory on an upstairs landing, with an incubator full of toxic-looking bacteria, and alerted the Buffalo Police.

Kurtz assured them his lab was, in effect, his studio; that he was an internationally recognised artist, as well as an art professor at the University at Buffalo, who used molecular biology in his work. He was forced to give the police an impromptu presentation while his wife lay dead in another room - he even stuck his finger in a Petri dish of bright scarlet bacteria and tasted it to prove it was harmless. An autopsy later showed that Hope, his partner of 27 years, had died of heart failure in her sleep.

Police deemed the Kurtzes' art materials suspicious and alerted the FBI. The day after the death of his wife, when Kurtz returned from the funeral home, three car-loads of FBI agents were waiting for him. He was now suspected of bioterrorism. His house was quarantined with yellow police tape. Five regional branches of the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defence, the Buffalo Police, fire department, and state marshal's office swarmed over Kurtz's home. They were protected by white hazmat suits and wore breathing apparatus. In the middle of all this, his next-door neighbour put up a sign of support in the window: "He's not a terrorist, he's my neighbour!"

In 1986, Kurtz and his wife co-founded Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a small artists' collective "dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, radical politics and critical theory". When the FBI raided his house, Kurtz was researching the history of germ warfare for a new project. He was growing simple types of bacterial cultures, routinely used in high-school biology classes, that could also be used to simulate the mushrooming of anthrax and plague.

Outcome

The FBI detained Kurtz in a hotel; agents took the room across the hall so they could watch his door. Investigators impounded Kurtz's three computers, the contents of his lab, his car, correspondence and a small library of books with titles like Spores, Plagues and History: The Story of Anthrax. They locked his cat in the attic for two days without food or water. They also confiscated his wife's body.

A federal grand jury was convened to evaluate bio-terrorism charges against Kurtz. He was indicted, but not under the biological weapons anti-terrorism act. He and Robert Ferrell, a professor of human genetics at the University of Pittsburgh, were charged with mail and wire fraud, accused of colluding to illegally furnish Kurtz with $256 of harmless bacterial cultures. The crime carried a sentence of up to 20 years. Under the USA PATRIOT Act, the maximum sentence for these charges was increased from five years to twenty years in prison. Kurtz's lawyer argued the case should be thrown out of court. The government's "paranoid over-reaction", he said, is a political attack on Kurtz's subversive art.

The artistic community rallied to the cause, staging protests and organising an auction - that raised $170,000 for his defence.

Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara dismissed the government's entire indictment against Dr. Kurtz as "insufficient on its face." In October 2007, Dr. Ferrell pleaded to a lesser misdemeanor charge after recurring bouts of cancer and three strokes suffered since his indictment prevented him from continuing the struggle.

An individual called police for help removing a tenant allegedly stealing from her, was told she needed to evict the tenant, she became agitated and was cuffed, pepper sprayed, and placed under a mental hygiene arrest.

Outcome

No report in disciplinary records, lawsuit filed, unsure of outcome

Officer Camilo was charged with various failures related to performing his regular duties in a competent matter including failure to place a suspect's weapon on an evidence intake form, failure to utilize proper equipment, failure to bring necessary equipment to a scene, leaving a suspect's handgun unattended and unsecured in the Technician's Unit overnight, and under subpoena failing to report to the New York State Supreme Court at the appointed time to give testimony.

Outcome

Letter of reprimand

in court case file, victim alleges improper or illegal police conduct in approaching, attempting to stop, and in pursuing and arresting

Outcome

no discipline

(Fourth) avoidable fleet accident

According to complainant's hand-written letter, complainant was verbally abused, wrongfully arrested, and taken into custody with a loaded handgun. Complainant alleges officer reported other false allegations against the complainant.

Outcome

A letter of reprimand was filed against Mark Allen

According to Davy V Blog and other sources, Officer Simmons responded to a call from family members to assist with a 13 year old threatening suicide. He shot the child in the pelvis three times, claiming self defense.

Outcome

Acting Police Chief Cedric Alexander said victim "acted in an appropriate manner, "The way he was trained to act." He was not disciplined.

CW: More than two dozen Buffalo police officers attacked a peaceful group of bicyclists at 6:30 p.m. They kicked some and beat several with clubs and Mag-Lites. They arrested nine of them on the kind of trumped-up felony charges.

According to City misconduct databse, Costello was involved fleet vehicle accident ; 3rd avoidable accident

Outcome

suspended 2 days without pay , removal of 16.5 hrs from comp bank

According to RPD Misconduct Database, Coniglio was involved in an avoidable fleet vehicle accident.

Outcome

letter of reprimand