Lt. Kwiatkowski arrived at Treehaven Road in Buffalo to respond to a vehicle that had been stopped by the Cheektowaga Police Department (CPD) and that was believed to be involved in an ongoing series of BB gun shootings, including one which occurred earlier that night. Lt. Kwiatkowski was the first BPD officer to arrive at the scene. Other CPD officers were present at the scene when Lt. Kwiatkowski arrived and had already removed the vehicle’s four occupants, who were all between 16 and 18 years old.

At the time of Lt. Kwiatkowski’s arrival, all of the occupants were compliant and completely under the control of the CPD officers. Upon arriving at the scene, Lt. Kwiatkowski used unlawful and unreasonable force on each of the four occupants. Specifically, Lt. Kwiatkowski admitted to forcibly pushing each of the suspects heads and upper torsos into the vehicle around which they were being detained. He also called the four Black teenagers “savage dogs” and asked, "Do you like shooting at white kids?"

Outcome

A federal judge sentenced the former Buffalo Police lieutenant to four months in prison in 2018.

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.

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.