May 28
2025
Police lawsuits push city budget into deficit
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Buffalo City Hall. Photo by I’Jaz Ja’ciel.
Settlements for police-related lawsuits continue to be a drag on Buffalo’s finances. Recent payouts threaten to create a deficit in the city’s current fiscal year that ends June 30, according to the city comptroller, at a time when the city has no reserves available to plug budget holes.
Currently before the Common Council are two such settlements totaling $1.3 million.
The bigger of the two is a $1.1 million to James Kistner, an East Side man who on New Year’s Day 2017 saw two police cars parked in front of a rental property he owns, across the street from his residence. When he approached the officers to ask what they were doing, one police car pulled away and struck Kistner, knocking him to the ground and injuring him.
The police refused to let Kistner’s son call an ambulance for his father, took his phone and shoved him around. They arrested Kistner and sent him to ECMC for a psychological evaluation, then booked him, strip-searched him, and charged him with felony criminal mischief and disorderly conduct.
The charges were later dropped. The encounter was caught on surveillance video. Kistner filed a federal lawsuit in March 2018.
The attorney who won Kistner’s case, Anthony Rupp, is the recipient of a proposed $200,000 settlement before the Council this week.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomRupp in December 2016 shouted at an officer who, while driving in the dark with his cruiser’s headlights off, nearly hit two women crossing Seneca Street in front of Chef’s Restaurant. The officer, Todd McAlister, pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot and threatened to arrest Rupp for yelling at him. McAlister and his partner, Nicholas Parisi, finally issued him a ticket for violating a city noise ordinance.
Rupp subsequently wrote a letter to the police commissioner describing the officers’ rudeness and insisting the cops receive better training.
Two months after that encounter, McAlister and Parisi were involved in the death of Wardel Davis, an unarmed, asthmatic Black man who the officers tackled, punched, and handcuffed face-down on the ground. Davis died in their custody “due to his underlying asthmatic condition … exacerbated by acute bronchitis and exertion due to the physical altercation with Officers Parisi and McAlister,” according to the state attorney general’s investigation of the incident.
“Nobody heeded my letter, nobody gave them training and now a guy is dead,” Rupp told the New York Times. “If they had just trained them on how to turn the other cheek and not be retaliatory — which they were with me, with the summons — I thought this guy might still be alive. So it troubled me.”
Rupp filed a federal lawsuit in November 2018, seeking $1 in damages and legal fees incurred by his firm, Rupp Pfalzgraf. He also opened a new practice area: civil rights litigation. Kistner was among the new division’s first clients.
An attorney with the firm confirmed the city’s proposed $200,000 settlement covers the costs associated with Rupp’s lawsuit. The city will transfer nearly $500,000 earmarked for payments to the state police and fire retirement fund to help cover the cost of the Kistner and Rupp settlements.
Through March 31 the city had spent $10.2 million on lawsuit settlements for the fiscal year that ends next month, according to the Scanlon administration’s third-quarter financial report. That’s $6.7 million more than the amount budgeted last June.
On top of that, a federal appeals court earlier this month upheld a $6.5 million judgment against the city for the wrongful conviction of Josue Ortiz, a mentally ill man who spent 10 years in prison for two 2004 murders he didn’t commit. A jury made the award three years ago, finding that now retired Buffalo Police Detective Mark Stambach fabricated Ortiz’s confession to the killings.
The Scanlon’s administration’s third-quarter financial report, filed in April, projected a $2 million surplus come June 30, the end of the city’s fiscal year. Comptroller Barbara Miller-Williams last week opined the city would finish the year $7.4 million in the hole, “primarily due to a recent legal settlement of $6.5 million, which had not been accounted for in the Administration’s April 2025 report.”
