Categories for Analysis

Sep 10

2025

How the investigation on police misconduct was done

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This story is co-published with The New York Times and New York Focus. It’s a followup to yesterday’s story about police officers who drive drunk, crash cars, and escape meaningful consequences. In the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in 2020, New York State repealed a law that for decades kept the disciplinary records of its police officers secret. The New York Times and New York Focus, a nonprofit newsroom, have since gathered more than 10,000 such files from around half of New York State’s nearly 500 law enforcement agencies. The documents, most[...]

Posted 2 months ago

Aug 5

2025

U.S. crackdown sends refugees to Canada

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This story is published in partnership with the Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB) at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, a collaborative investigative newsroom supported by Postmedia that partners with academics, researchers and journalists while training the next generation of investigative reporters. As fears of refugee deportation mount in the United States, a surge of asylum seekers is turning to Canada — only to find a border that is getting increasingly hard to cross. The number of refugee seekers processed by the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) shot up by 87 per cent between January and April. In[...]

Posted 3 months ago

Jun 26

2025

Buffalo’s mayoral election has been settled

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The fat lady has sung. Sean Ryan will become mayor come January 1. The November election is simply a formality, barring any drastic unforeseen circumstance. Prior to the primary, Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon stated his intention to run on a third-party line if he didn’t win the Democratic nomination, although in his concession speech Tuesday night he said he had some “soul searching” to do. The cold, hard fact is that he was only able to garner 35 percent of the vote Tuesday. His strategy, should he continue his campaign into November, is to pull a Jimmy Griffin — supplement[...]

Posted 4 months ago

Jun 25

2025

Five takeaways from the Buffalo mayoral primary

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Editor’s note: This story was updated Wednesday at 7:15 p.m. State Sen. Sean Ryan scored a resounding victory in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for Buffalo mayor, beating Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon — his chief rival — by 11 percentage points. Ryan finished with over 46 percent of the vote in the five-way race, while the incumbent had just over 35 percent. The three other candidates — former fire commissioner Garnell Whitfield, University District Council Member Rasheed Wyatt and former Assembly staffer Anthony Tyson-Thompson — split the rest. Here are five takeaways from yesterday’s results: It was all about turnout Ryan’s base[...]

Posted 4 months ago

Jun 19

2025

Buffalo’s $2 million mayoral primary

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Next Tuesday’s Democratic primary election for Buffalo mayor is already a $2 million affair, as of the most recent campaign finance disclosures, with a weekend of TV and radio spots, phone banks, social media ads and mailers still to come. That figure doesn’t count independent expenditures — money spent by political committees unaffiliated with, but supporting, a one candidate or another. The first such independent expenditure took place this week in support of Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon, paid for by an Albany-based group whose backers are for now a mystery. On its own account, Scanlon’s campaign committee has spent $950,879[...]

Posted 4 months ago

Jun 17

2025

Podcast: Profiling Buffalo mayoral candidates

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There’s just one week left until the Democratic primary fro Buffalo mayor, the marquee race this election season. In the last month, Investigative Post’s government and politics reporter, Geoff Kelly, profiled four of the five candidates on the ballot: state Sen. Sean Ryan, University District Council Member Rasheed Wyatt, former Assembly staffer Anthony Tyson-Thompson and former Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield. In January Kelly wrote a three-part profile of the fifth candidate, Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon. Editor Jim Heaney last week sat down to ask Kelly his impressions of the candidates and the contest. The candidates and their issues Acting[...]

Posted 4 months ago

Jun 12

2025

Political profile: Garnell Whitfield

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Garnell Whitfield at his Dec. 3, 2024 ,mayoral campaign launch. Photo by Nate Peracinny. Garnell Whitfield, the former fire commissioner, has specific ideas about what he’d do if elected mayor of Buffalo — about city finances, overtime costs, the shortage of affordable housing, and a host of other issues. But those policy positions aren’t the platform on which he’s built his campaign. And he doesn’t think candidates and voters should get bogged down in debating, for example, whose plan to rescue city finances is better, or how to restructure city government. Rather, he hopes voters will measure the candidates’ characters[...]

Posted 5 months ago

Jun 11

2025

Political profile: Anthony Tyson-Thompson

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Mayor candidate Anthony Tyson-Thompson Anthony Tyson-Thompson is to many voters the least familiar of the five candidates running in the June 24 Democratic primary for Buffalo mayor.  He was the last candidate to join the field, skipping the party’s months-long endorsement process and announcing his candidacy in mid-April, just two weeks before nominating petitions were due. His campaign is largely self-funded, he said, and it shows. He has few campaign signs around the city, no ads and no mailers — just social media. The East Side native is also the youngest mayoral candidate, at 34, with the least experience in[...]

Posted 5 months ago
Investigative Post