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Feb 18

2020

More Buffalo cop cars on the way

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The Buffalo Common Council today approved two measures that will bring 51 new patrol cars to the city’s decrepit fleet. The Council, without comment or debate, approved a contract to lease 31 new police cars from Enterprise Fleet Management for roughly the cost of purchasing 13 cars outright. The Council also approved borrowing $1 million to purchase 20 new police cars. The cost to the city in the first year of the three-year lease period is $675,000 — about what the city appropriated for the purchase of police cars in the current budget.  In the second and third years, the cost[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Feb 7

2020

$40 for a six pack of beer? OTB parties on.

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 The Western Regional Off Track Betting Corp. is spending more than $300,000 a year on suites to Sabres and Bills games and concerts and running up large tabs for food and drinks, including copious amounts of alcohol. Officials claim they’re rewarding high rollers at its casino, but records show they’re also helping themselves to the free tickets and concessions. OTB, along with other Sabres suite holders, chose from a menu last season that charged up to $130 for a bottle of liquor, $40 for a six-pack of beer and $53 for a pizza. OTB, spending public money, dropped $85,690[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Feb 5

2020

Child pornography prosecutions on the rise

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Prosecution of child pornography cases spiked last year in Western New York. Between the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Erie County District Attorney, 80 cases were prosecuted last year. That’s almost double the number of cases prosecuted in 2017. “There are times where we’re finding child pornography involving children who are 10 or 12 months old. That’s very shocking, seeing those images and videos and trying to figure out why someone would have interest in that stuff,” said said Michael Hockwater, a detective on the FBI’s Child Exploitation Task Force. Cases the FBI task force handle range from a man who photographed[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Feb 4

2020

Police shooting costs Buffalo $4.5 million

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 On Tuesday, Buffalo’s Common Council authorized one of the largest lawsuit settlements in the city’s history: $4.5 million to Wilson Morales, who was shot by Buffalo police officers in the early morning of June 24, 2012, after a car chase on the city’s East Side. The bullet that struck Morales, then a 17-year-old student at WNY Maritime Charter School, instantly paralyzed him from the chest down. “It’s been hard,” Morales told Investigative Post in the offices of Dolce Panepinto, the law firm that handled the lawsuit, after the Council approved the settlement. “Mostly depression, loss of friends, and pain,”[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Feb 1

2020

Police brass overstate availability of patrol cars

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 Buffalo police officers have a lot fewer cars at their disposal to respond to 911 calls than their commissioner would have the public believe, union officials say. Buffalo Police Commissioner Byron Lockwood told the Common Council’s Police Oversight Committee on Jan. 14 that the department’s dilapidated fleet had 134 working patrol cars available to answer calls. The actual number is less than 50, said Mark Goodspeed, vice president of the Police Benevolent Association. Goodspeed performs a regular survey of working patrol cars assigned to the city’s five police districts. On the evening of Jan. 14, the same day Lockwood[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Jan 30

2020

Buffalo News: Is Darth Vader lurking?

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An investment firm with a reputation of buying and gutting newspapers has just bought a stake in Lee Enterprises, which is purchasing The Buffalo News in a deal scheduled to close in March. What’s more, the firm, MNG Enterprises, is reportedly trying to engineer discussions about a mega-merger of newspaper chains, including Lee, Tribune Publishing, and possibly the McClatchy Co. In my column Wednesday, I said Lee’s purchase of The News was bad news that could have been worse. If MNG Enterprises, doing business as Digital First Media and MediaNews Group, gets its hands on The News through Lee, well,[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Jan 29

2020

My take on the Buffalo News sale

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It’s rarely, if ever, a good thing when a chain buys a newspaper. And so it is with the surprise announcement today that The Buffalo News is being sold to Lee Enterprises, one of the larger newspaper chains in the country. We can expect cuts to an already depleted newsroom if Lee’s track record at its other newspapers holds true in Buffalo. But things could be worse. Lee Enterprises is regarded as a more responsible chain than most of the others that have taken over the newspaper industry, and certainly better than the cutthroat hedge funds that have bought and[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Jan 17

2020

iPost hires accomplished fundraiser

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Investigative Post has bolstered its fundraising prowess with the hiring of Nancy Webb as director of Development and Administration. Webb, a relative newcomer to Buffalo, has had a distinguished career in Texas. She served as the director of Philanthropic Services at the North Texas Community Foundation from 2014-17. During her tenure, the team she headed increased the Fort Worth foundation’s assets from $208 million to $280 million. From 2001 to 2013 she served as the development director, then vice president of organizational advancement, at Big Thought, which provides education programs for school age children in Dallas. Big Thought’s staff grew[...]

Posted 5 years ago
Investigative Post