Investigative Post

Last week Buffalo’s Fair Housing Office filed its first activity report with the Common Council since April 2019.  The new report is five pages long. Given its lack of content, it probably could have been shorter.  It was just the third report the office has filed in the 16 years since the city adopted its […]

Most of Mayor Byron Brown’s proposed $5.4 million hike in police spending is for new patrol officers and detectives.  There is also $364,000 earmarked for a product called ShotSpotter. ShotSpotter deploys an array of microphones in a neighborhood — 15 to 20 per square mile, attached to buildings and light posts — to detect and […]

Mayor Byron Brown’s proposed city budget is awash in federal pandemic relief funds. It’s bolstered by the restoration of long withheld Seneca casino money. And, on top of those windfalls, Brown has proposed a property tax hike for only the second time since he took office in 2006. The city needs all the money it […]

Earlier this week, The Challenger — Buffalo’s leading African-American newspaper — published an article describing the March 29 police chase that started as a routine traffic stop at the foot of West Ferry and ended on the city’s East Side, with police surrounding and firing into the vehicle driven by 28-year-old Kente Bell. It was […]

Mayor Byron Brown is having a heck of a time replacing Kevin Helfer, who retired last month after nearly 12 years as the city’s parking commissioner and a top advisor to the mayor. So far, the mayor has taken two swings at the ball and whiffed twice. On February 25, the mayor nominated Christopher Savage, […]

For more than a decade, Roswell Park Cancer Institute has been doing business with a leading Russian oligarch with long-standing ties to Vladimir Putin. The annual reports of the charitable foundation that raises money for Roswell tell part of the story: The Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has been a leading individual donor to the foundation, […]

When India Walton beat Mayor Byron Brown in last June’s Democratic primary, it seemed like progressive activists might be ready to wield greater influence in the party, which monopolizes city politics and governmental institutions. Brown, after all, lost the primary despite carrying the Democratic Party’s endorsement. Furthermore, Kim Beatty — a city Democrat — beat […]

A coalition of advocates for immigrants’ rights claims that “egregious conditions” and “unsafe release practices” at the federal detention center in Batavia have caused detainees “serious injury and even death.” Those claims are leveled in a Freedom of Information request filed Wednesday with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the agency that runs the […]