Jul 25
2025
Buffalo lawmaker joins call for police oversight
- Share on
Leah Halton-Pope at a Buffalo Common Council meeting.
Buffalo Common Council Majority Leader Leah Halton-Pope is keeping alive her predecessor’s call for reforms to the Buffalo Police Department, including the creation of a civilian oversight board with the power to investigate claims of officer misconduct and recommend discipline.
That makes Halton-Pope the third city lawmaker to express support for civilian oversight of policer, joining the University District’s Rasheed Wyatt and Masten District’s Zeneta Everhart.
Halton-Pope, who represents the Ellicott District, submitted a resolution last week that re-ups and refreshes police reforms proposed four years ago by former Common Council President Darius Pridgen. Pridgen’s recommendations have sat in the purgatory of the Council’s Police Oversight Committee ever since.
Buy your tickets now for our July 31 benefit concert
This week the Council, preparing for its August recess, cleared its agenda of items that have been lingering in committee for years. Halton-Pope told me she didn’t want Pridgen’s call for police reforms relegated to the dustbin.
“I’m not going to let this die, because many of these questions haven’t been answered,” she said. “And I support these measures. I want these things.”
Halton-Pope’s resolution calls for:
- An independent “civilian oversight entity” with subpoena power, a budget, and a mandate to investigate allegations of misconduct and recommend disciplinary measures. If police leadership ignores the oversight board’s recommendations, they’d need to explain why in writing.
- Firming up the language in the department’s policy manual regarding what constitutes an acceptable use of force and an officer’s affirmative obligation to try to deescalate volatile situations and render first aid to injured civilians.
- Greater clarity on how an officer’s use of force is reported and reviewed.
- The release of body-camera video to anyone who is captured on that video, without the need for a formal request under the state’s Freedom of Information Law. The resolution also calls for “regular review of BPD officers discontinuing recording or failing to record interactions with the public.”
- The publication of “as much BPD data as is feasible to the Buffalo Open Data website to allow for public scrutiny, analysis, and potential notice for when statistical trends of disparate treatment become apparent.”
Halton-Pope also wants the Council to work with state lawmakers to create a residency requirement for police officers. The city’s current contract with its police officers requires new hires to live in the city for seven years, but that contract expired on June 30.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomThe majority leader also calls for a hearing to gather “public feedback on policing and police reform initiatives.” That, too, is a holdover from Pridgen’s original resolution, which was prompted in part by a perceived failure by the last mayoral administration to solicit public opinion on police reforms.
In June 2020, in response to nationwide protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Gov. Andrew Cuomo by executive order required all local governments in New York to draft, adopt, and submit to the state police reform plans by April 1, 2021. Then-Mayor Byron Brown’s administration empaneled a commission to draft a proposal, which was submitted to the Council for its approval just a week before that deadline. The commission’s proposals were relatively modest and did not include a civilian oversight board.
Pridgen and Wyatt at the time objected to the Brown administration’s last-minute submission and what they perceived as a lack of community engagement. So did the state attorney general in a letter to the Brown administration. Wyatt tried to add a civilian oversight board to the draft proposal — a measure also supported by the attorney general — but his amendment was shot down after a contentious debate.
Pridgen submitted his proposed police reform agenda the following month. It was referred to the Council’s Police Oversight Committee, where it sat until this week.
Halton-Pope said her resolution was in part motivated by last week’s meeting of the Police Oversight Committee, where police brass initially failed to show. The meeting was canceled, then reconvened when the commissioner and his deputies finally appeared, nearly an hour late.
Wyatt and Everhart recently filed a resolution calling for a civilian oversight board, which puts three of nine city lawmakers on the record as supporting the idea.
Halton-Pope said she doubts there are enough votes on the Council to make it happen. Still, she said she does not intend to let her resolution languish in committee like Pridgen’s, even if it means bartering away some measures in order to achieve others.
“Government is the art of compromise,” she said. “So I can’t get this? Then what can I get? I’m happy to take little bites at a time.”
