Oct 8
2024
Buffalo cops rarely disciplined
The officers “pulled up in a black Taurus” and started “beating and whipping people,” according to one of several witnesses to a May 2011 altercation between Buffalo cops and a crowd of people outside an East Ferry corner store.
The cops used homophobic slurs, were “beating the shit out of people” and “kicking this boy in the face,” another witness said.
A third witness said “a white male who works for housing” — later identified as Buffalo Police Officer Michael Acquino — “took his [phone] and deleted personal pictures and a video that he had recorded of the officers beating a young boy they had been chasing.”
It was “cops vs. civilians,” the first witness said, according to an internal affairs investigator’s summary of the complaints.
The internal affairs investigation that followed is one of nearly a thousand recently published by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which in 2020 sued the Buffalo Police Department to obtain disciplinary records for current and retired Buffalo cops. The department has been releasing files to the NYCLU on a rolling basis for the past two years, per a judge’s order.
The first tranche of documents NYCLU released Sept. 24 “identify 934 unique allegations of misconduct” made against officers currently on the force. The incidents described occurred between 1995 and 2023.
In an accompanying analysis, the NYCLU found:
- Eighty-six of 934 allegations of misconduct were “sustained,” meaning internal affairs found evidence the allegations were credible and the targeted officers violated department policy.
- Those 86 sustained allegations resulted in 38 officers being reprimanded.
- Twenty-eight of those officers were suspended for a day or more. None were fired.
- Of 157 allegations of officers using excessive force, two were substantiated, resulting in a one-day suspension for one officer and a four-day suspension for another.
- Of the 272 officers with at least one complaint in their files, 27 were named in 10 or more misconduct investigations.
The volume of complaints, coupled with the apparent lack of consequences for officers, is cause for concern, according to Bobby Hodgson, assistant legal director of the NYCLU.
“What these records show is that this is not a matter of a single bad apple or something like that,” Hodgson told Investigative Post.
“This is a system-wide problem about what your accountability system looks like and how it works.”
Attorney Melissa Wischerath, who frequently represents clients suing Buffalo police, said the records represent “the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to police misconduct in the city. Wischerath told Investigative Post she searched the NYCLU’s database for officers and incidents she knew about and couldn’t find them. She faulted the department’s record keeping, which she described as “not terribly organized.”
“That being said, the data here is staggering and shocking, to the extent that there is so much misconduct that goes unaccountable,” Wischerath said.
John Evans, the president of Buffalo’s police union, did not respond to a request for comment.
Michael DeGeorge, spokesman for the police department and Mayor Byron Brown, said the city “does not comment on pending litigation,” without identifying the litigation that prevented him from responding.
Hodgson acknowledged that the NYCLU’s misconduct database is incomplete and will be updated as the department hands over more records. The accompanying analysis will be updated on a rolling basis, too.
For now, Acquino, the officer accused of confiscating a witness’s phone during the 2011 incident on East Ferry, holds the record for most misconduct investigations. He’s had 23 complaints since he joined the force in 2008, according to the NYCLU files. Internal affairs did not sustain any of them.
Opening “the black box”
In 2020, demonstrators took to the streets across the country to protest Minneapolis police killing George Floyd. In response to the protests, the New York State Legislature voted to repeal a section of state law that kept police disciplinary records out of the public record.
Many law enforcement agencies and police unions, including in Buffalo, fought to keep those records confidential in spite of the change in law. The NYCLU sued more than 20 departments that refused to honor the organization’s Freedom of Information requests.
The aim of the lawsuits, Hodgson said, was to “throw open the doors to this black box that had sort of kept all these things secret for so long.”
In 2022, the parties agreed the city would release records to the NYCLU on a rolling basis, as they were gathered and redacted. The department has done so, according to Hodgson.
The records NYCLU published last month comprise more than a thousand files, some of them more than 100 pages long, ranging from officers’ career summaries to internal affairs investigatory files, including audio recordings of interviews with officers and their accusers.
Hodgson said they’re still sorting documents, a task made more difficult because the department “did not turn over any sort of systematic database or spreadsheet or way that they, as a department, would be tracking these internal investigations.”
Other departments use internal tracking systems that allow supervisors to evaluate the number and type of misconduct allegations leveled against individual officers and the department as a whole, Hodgson said. Those departments provided the NYCLU “high-level summaries” that could help a police chief “to recognize trends, to address problems … and to provide some sort of clarity and critique of their accountability systems.”
Not in Buffalo.
“It is just a mass of individual files,” Hodgson said.
“And that means that for our analysis — to be able to tell you that there were this many investigations, only 86 of the 934 resulted in substantiation, right? — we had to go through the files individually to do that work and create the database.”
The database breaks down the complaints by category, revealing that:
- More than a quarter of the complaints — 259 in all — involved car accidents.
- 174 regarded use of force, including 19 involving firearms.
- 72 alleged improper searches.
- 34 had to do with conduct while off duty, including at least eight incidents of alleged domestic violence, half of them involving a firearm.
Internal affairs investigations typically are opened one of three ways. First, a citizen might lodge a formal complaint, either at police headquarters or the district where the subject officers work. Second, a supervisor — a captain or lieutenant, for example — might file a complaint against an officer. And third, a citizen might file a notice of claim against the city, the department and the offending officers, indicating the intention to file a lawsuit for damages.
However a complaint reaches internal affairs, the resulting inquiry is undertaken by officers who belong to the same union as those they’re investigating. They present their findings to the commissioner: sustained, not sustained, exonerated, or unfounded.
“Sustained” is akin to guilty; “not sustained” means there’s not enough evidence to make a determination. “Exonerated” means the officer was justified in taking the actions described in the complaint. “Unfounded” means investigators determined the events described in the complaint didn’t happen.
Leader of the pack
Acquino, the officer with the most complaints in the NYCLU database, was exonerated in four of the 23 investigations into his conduct. Two complaints were determined to be unfounded. The rest were not sustained.
In all, 10 of the 23 complaints against Aquino involved the use of force against suspects. None of those use-of-force complaints were sustained.
In 2018, Acquino was written up after his gun was stolen from his personal car, which he’d left unlocked overnight outside his Orchard Park home. For that offense, he received a lecture from a deputy commissioner.
In August 2016, he issued tickets to a cyclist for not having a bell or reflectors on his bicycle. Acquino claimed the cyclist, riding slowly down the middle of the street, was interfering with a traffic stop. The cyclist later accused Acquino of stealing his bike from in front of a corner store. Acquino denied taking the bike. The allegation was not sustained and there was no discipline.
The May 2011 incident on East Ferry began with “a suspicious person call,” according to an internal affairs report. The responding officers pulled up in front of the store and began questioning people outside.
“At some point, one of the suspects spat in the direction of [an officer], or just in general, which set off one of the officers,” the investigator wrote.
The cops charged two people that night with resisting arrest, obstruction of governmental administration, and using profane language and gestures — no serious criminal activity.
Acquino admitted to investigators he’d taken away a witness’s phone but denied deleting any photos or videos. Investigators reported they could locate no civilian witnesses. There’s no indication whether testimony was taken from any of the more than dozen officers who are identified in the report as having taken some part in the incident.
The complaint was ruled “not sustained.” Acquino was not disciplined. He was promoted to detective in 2018 and is assigned to the department’s intelligence unit, according to payroll records. He made $169,438 last year.
DeGeorge, the department’s spokesman, declined to make Acquino available for comment.
The NYCLU's Hodgson said he prefers to consider the “broader picture” the data presents over anecdotes about individual officers such as Acquino.
“This is now a set of data that covers over 20 years,” he said. “It reveals a much deeper problem than any individual officer, and it's one about systems of accountability and investigation and oversight that don't exist.”