D.J. Granville and the “blue wall of silence”

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At the heart of the scandal enveloping Erie County Sheriff John Garcia and his chief of narcotics, D.J. Granville, is the so-called “blue wall of silence” — the unwritten understanding that law enforcement officers protect one another by refusing to report or corroborate wrongdoing among their ranks.

For nearly a year Granville has been protected by that code. A deposition the narcotics chief gave for a lawsuit in November — nearly seven months after the incident that in recent weeks has made him famous — illustrates his own commitment to it.

First, a refresher: Granville last April 11, while driving his take-home county vehicle late at night, crashed into seven cars on Buffalo’s West Side.

His sister-in-law, a Buffalo police lieutenant, oversaw the police response to the incident. Granville does not appear to have been tested for sobriety at the scene. There’s no evidence the county sheriff investigated the incident — not in the immediate aftermath or since — nor that Granville was disciplined. His badly damaged county vehicle appears to have been squirreled away at a sheriff’s office shooting range in Cheektowaga, far from prying eyes.

None of the Buffalo cops who responded to the scene, nor any sheriff’s personnel who must have known Granville had wrecked a county vehicle and done serious damage to seven other cars, said a word publicly about what happened.

The incident was kept under wraps for 10 months, until Investigative Post broke the story of Granville’s misadventure and the $60,000 the county paid to the owners of the cars he damaged.

Now Buffalo police are conducting an internal investigation of the department’s response. Garcia has belatedly vowed to “do the right thing” when that investigation is concluded. City and county legislators say they will investigate, too. Our report, and the excellent reporting by other outlets, pierced the “blue wall.”

Now, let’s move on to the testimony Granville gave last November 1 in Martin Gugino’s lawsuit against the City of Buffalo.

Gugino is the demonstrator who in June 2020 was badly injured when Buffalo cops pushed him to the ground during a protest in Niagara Square. He sued the city, the police department and the cops involved in federal court the following year. 

Neither Granville nor the sheriff’s office are parties to the lawsuit. Gugino’s lawyers deposed Granville because he oversaw the sheriff’s “plainclothes and undercover details related to the protests” that roiled the city that summer. 

That much he acknowledged. He apparently forgot nearly everything else.

Gugino’s attorney asked Granville who he coordinated with in the Buffalo Police Department during the protests. She asked how he communicated with the officers he was overseeing, and with other law enforcement agencies. 

He said he couldn’t remember.

The attorney showed him a copy of an operations plan created by the various law enforcement agencies policing the protests and asked him if he’d ever seen it before, or if he’d taken part in drafting it. She asked him which law enforcement agencies fielded undercover officers during the protests and if those agencies coordinated with one another.

He said he couldn’t remember that, either.

He said he didn’t remember who was in charge of police response to the demonstrations, or who was in charge of the city’s undercover and plainclothes officers. He said he didn’t know if he’d ever attended a training on dealing with large protests. 

He said he could not recall if there were passwords or visual clues undercover officers used to recognize each other in the crowd. There were. When Gugino’s lawyer told him what they were, he still said he didn’t remember.

He said he couldn’t recall whether his team comprised men and women, or only men. Shown photographs of two individuals in Niagara Square — ostensibly plainclothes law enforcement officers — he said he did not know whether or not they worked for him.

By my count, the attorney asked Granville 70-80 distinct questions during the deposition. At least three-quarters of his answers were some iteration of “I don’t remember.”

He used the phrase “I don’t recall” 41 times. On 19 other occasions, he responded, “I don’t remember,” “I don’t know,” or words to that effect.

In essence, Granville gave Gugino’s lawyers his name, rank, and serial number — and little else.

What I’m reading …

— The Buffalo News’s Steve Watson reports that hope springs eternal for Democrats in Grand Island. Then, in the fall, just as the leaves on the trees, those hopes fade to red.

— Paul Wolf of the New York Coalition for Open Government offers his wish list for Erie County charter reforms: 1) term limits for county officials; 2) a ban on political party chairs serving as elections commissioners; 3) filling vacancies in elected offices via elections rather than party-controlled appointments; 4) open primaries, in which voters of any political persuasion can participate; 5) ranked-choice voting.

— The Chautauqua County District Attorney will review the 1967 drug convictions of civil rights activists Martin Sostre and Geraldine Pointer,  The Buffalo News’s Natalie Brophy reports. Sostre died in 2015. Pointer began her campaign to clear their names last year.

— Republican state legislators lost their legal challenge to a cap on the outside income lawmakers can earn to supplement their public salaries, City & State reports. The $35,000-a-year limit on outside employment was adopted in 2022 to help justify, at least politically, the 29 percent pay raise legislators gave themselves that year. The GOP conference sued, arguing the cap on outside income was unconstitutional, but the courts disagreed. Some Republicans plan to appeal the ruling.

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— The Empire Center reports that 1,575 state employees earned more than Gov. Kathy Hochul’s $250,000 salary last year. The highest-paid public employee in Western New York in 2024, according to the Empire Center, was Erie County Sheriff Captain Joseph Usinski, who made $280,013. The highest-paid City of Buffalo employee: Buffalo Fire Department Division Chief Daniel Bossi, $270,752.

— The Trump administration has frozen payments to farmers who shelled out money upfront on clean-energy and other environment-friendly measures, based on promises that the federal government would pick up part of the tab. Keith Wagner, a dairy farmer near Albany, spent $1.4 million on a manure-powered generator, for exmple, with the understanding the feds would pay about $400,000. “Now, they’re not holding up their end of the deal,” Wagner told New York Focus. “It’s kind of like, if I wasn’t going to pay my taxes, and I said, ‘Well, I’m just not going to pay them.’” Statewide, farmers were counting on $186 million that the Trump now says it won’t pay.

— Trump has withdrawn his nomination of U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik of Schuylerville to serve as ambassador to the United Nations, preferring instead Stefanik maintain her seat in Congress. Politico reports Republicans are so concerned about safeguarding their thin House majority that they’re “sweating” even reliably Republican districts such as Stefanik’s.