Categories for News

Aug 10

2020

Jail guard suspended after confrontation

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An Erie County Sheriff’s Office employee has been placed on administrative leave after being caught on camera menacing Black Lives Matter protesters with a baseball bat during a march Saturday evening in South Buffalo. A video shared more than 300 times on Facebook shows a man wearing an “All Lives Matter” t-shirt climbing out of his pickup truck, then cursing and approaching protesters waving an aluminum bat. An estimated 100 to 150 protesters were marching near Mount Mercy Academy.  Commenters on the post identified the man as a corrections officer with the Erie County Sheriff’s Office who was off-duty at[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jul 27

2020

Impact of Investigative Post reporting

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Lawmakers have responded to stories published last year by Investigative Post on the heavy-handed way the state and City of Buffalo enforced traffic laws and punished drivers who failed to pay fines. In February 2019, Marsha McLeod reported that the city, in an effort to generate revenue, was aggressively enforcing traffic laws and had imposed 13 new fees and fines that drove up the cost of paying off their tickets.  (Investigative Post readers subsequently selected the report as the best story of 2019.) In it, McLeod wrote: The city’s strategy is costing drivers a lot of money, and, in some[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jul 24

2020

Judge bars release of cop disciplinary records

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Updated: 9:21 p.m. A state Supreme Court judge has at least temporarily blocked the release of most disciplinary records of Buffalo police officers.  Judge Frank A. Sedita III, responding to a complaint from the Police Benevolent Association and Buffalo Professional Firefighters Association, issued a show cause order Friday afternoon that prohibits the release of most disciplinary records until a hearing scheduled for Aug. 26. The police department has received several dozen requests under the Freedom of Information Law for disciplinary records since the state repealed 50-a, a state law that shielded from public disclosure the personnel and disciplinary records of[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jul 23

2020

A critical voice on OTB board?

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The Erie County Legislature has appointed a prolific Democratic donor as its representative to the Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp.  Francis Warthling was approved in a unanimous vote Thursday to replace Beverly Mazur, who served in the role for ten years. His appointment follows nearly 18 months of controversy at OTB, including ongoing federal and state investigations.  Despite allegations of wrongdoing, no OTB board members have questioned CEO Henry Wojtaszek during meetings or otherwise criticized operations publicly. That is part of the reason the Legislature chose to replace Mazur, a former Conservative Party official with Republican ties. Warthling said he[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jul 22

2020

Details emerge of police disciplinary records

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Investigative Post has been combing through the documents it received earlier this week from the Buffalo Police Department that starts to paint a picture of officers most frequently investigated by Internal Affairs for inappropriate behavior. We’re seeking additional records to provide a more complete picture, but here is what we’ve ascertained so far: Seventeen of the 29 officers named in the documents live outside the city, many of them in West Seneca. Seventy-nine percent are white, vs. 67 percent of the department as a whole. This, in a city that is 56 percent minority. Their average pay is $100,200, slightly[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jul 20

2020

Buffalo police release disciplinary records

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 The disciplinary records of police officers across the state have been a well-guarded secret until last month, when the state Legislature and governor changed the law to make them public. Some of those records involving Buffalo police are now being disclosed, including 50 pages released Monday to media outlets including Investigative Post after we filed a request used the Freedom of Information Law. The records involve the disciplinary records of officers who have been investigated most often by the department’s Internal Affairs unit in the past five years. Buffalo police released information on the 10 percent of officers who received[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jul 14

2020

Furloughs at OTB despite federal aid

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Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp. has furloughed two-thirds of its workforce after accepting more than $3 million from the federal government intended to keep employees working during the pandemic. The Batavia-based OTB has been forced to shutter most of its operations since March. Its casino at Batavia Downs, the largest source of revenue, is closed under state order. OTB’s 19 betting parlors, located around Western and Central New York, have reopened at 50 percent capacity. The harness racing season at Batavia Downs is scheduled to start on time July 25 and run through  December. The shutdown has cost OTB an[...]

Posted 4 years ago

Jul 13

2020

Former Bills great recalls beating by police

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On a cold winter night in 1987, Booker Edgerson was driving down Bailey Avenue, just a few blocks from where he then lived on Buffalo’s East Side. Suddenly, a flash in his rearview mirror: a police car signaling him to pull over. So he pulled into a parking lot — a “mistake,” he later called it, “because it’s dark up in there.” Within a few minutes, he was on the ground, surrounded by several cops, nightsticks raised. “They beat the shit out of me,” he said. It was a familiar experience for a black man in America. But the fact[...]

Posted 4 years ago
Investigative Post

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