Tag: Buffalo

May 31

2020

Discuss the real issue. Racism.

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Allow me to provide some perspective in light of what transpired Saturday night in Niagara Square. The issue isn’t “outside agitators,” the unsubstantiated claim made by Mayor Bryon Brown and Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz. And it’s really not vandalism and looting, as unfortunate as that was. No, the real issue is how city government under Brown and his rubber stamps on the Common Council have targeted black and brown residents. Many of them turned out Saturday to rally against not only the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis but the manner in which police treat people of color right[...]

Posted 5 years ago

May 14

2020

Video triggers investigation of cop conduct

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A video showing a white Buffalo police officer repeatedly punching the face of a black man who was stopped for a traffic violation has gone viral on social media and triggered investigations by the Erie County District Attorney and the Police Department’s Internal Affairs office. The video, which has been shared on Facebook more than 1,300 times, shows the officers wrestling with Quentin Suttles at the side of a car in an attempt to restrain him. The officer tells Suttles he’s “making it worse” on himself. The video shows Ronald J. Ammerman, a third-generation police officer and three-year veteran of[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Jul 9

2019

Buffalo’s in shaky fiscal shape

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To hear Mayor Byron Brown tell the story, the City of Buffalo’s finances are strong and stable, and his finance team has constructed another in a series of sound, responsible budgets.  Two important bellwethers put the lie to that narrative. The first is the depletion of the city’s reserves. In the past decade, the Brown and the Common Council have used $107 million in reserves to close budget shortfalls. As a result, the city has no reserves left to plug future deficits. The lack of reserves has contributed to a second problem — poor cash flow — that resulted in[...]

Posted 6 years ago

May 9

2019

Legislators propose changes on traffic laws

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In just over two years, New York State issued nearly 1.7 million driver’s license suspensions to more than 620,000 drivers — a disproportionate number of them poor, people of color or both. These suspensions were not the result of reckless or drunken driving, or other dangerous behavior; they were slapped on drivers who failed to pay a traffic ticket fine or show up for a court date over it. These numbers come from an analysis released on Wednesday by Driven By Justice, a statewide coalition that worked with state Sen. Tim Kennedy on a bill to end the practice of[...]

Posted 6 years ago

May 1

2019

Buffalo lags on addressing lead poisoning

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 Hundreds of young children living in Buffalo’s inner-city neighborhoods continue to be diagnosed every year with lead poisoning. And City Hall continues to do next to nothing about it. “Buffalo has not made as much progress as other communities have and not as much progress as perhaps they could,” said Andrew McLellan, president of Environmental Education Associates, which trains contractors and others to recognize and remediate lead hazards. Thirteen months ago, the Center for Governmental Research, a consulting firm in Rochester, developed an action plan with 19 recommendations for the city, county and state to adopt. The county has[...]

Posted 6 years ago

Mar 5

2019

A changing tide on license suspensions

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New York is one of at least 41 states that suspend drivers’ licenses if they fail to pay traffic fines. In 2016, the state Department of Motor Vehicles issued 53,648 suspension or revocation orders to drivers in Erie County, according to data obtained Investigative Post. This captures suspensions issued for any reason, but experts said the vast majority are related to traffic tickets. “Suspending a license is a patently absurd remedy to someone who can’t pay traffic tickets,” Blake Strode, the executive director of ArchCity Defenders, a civil rights law firm based in Missouri, told Investigative Post. New York’s practice[...]

Posted 7 years ago

Aug 1

2018

Council considers action on fair housing law

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Buffalo’s fair housing law is supposed to prevent landlords from refusing to rent to someone simply because they rely on government assistance – like a Section 8 voucher – to help pay their rent. But that law, introduced in 2006, has gone largely unenforced, despite the more than two dozen discrimination complaints, most of them substantiated by undercover testing, that have been filed with the city. Last week, members of the Common Council said they would consider taking steps to ensure the law is enforced. “If we find out something is not being enforced or something is not staffed, it[...]

Posted 7 years ago
Investigative Post