Articles for Investigative Post staff

Aug 10

2020

Jail guard suspended after confrontation

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 5 years ago

Jul 27

2020

Impact of Investigative Post reporting

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 5 years ago

Jul 22

2020

Details emerge of police disciplinary records

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 5 years ago

Jul 20

2020

Buffalo police release disciplinary records

 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 5 years ago

Jul 13

2020

Former Bills great recalls beating by police

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 5 years ago

Jul 7

2020

Ingersoll discusses police, protests on WBFO

Ali Ingersoll has extensively covered Buffalo police and the recent protests about them. Jay Moran interviewed her about recent developments on WBFO’s Press Pass.

Posted 5 years ago

Jul 1

2020

Vulgar insult by cop only the half of it

Further details about the incident Sunday in which a Buffalo police lieutenant verbally accosted a woman suggest police didn’t know how to properly handle a mentally ill man or the woman who taped the episode. The incident, which resulted in Lieutenant Michael DeLong getting suspended without pay for calling Ruweyda Salim a “disrespectful little fucking cunt” began at the home of Monica Lynch, whose son was subject of police attention at a 7-Eleven convenience store. pic.twitter.com/JXiPFslWIE — رويدا سالم (@ruweyda_salim) June 29, 2020 Lynch said she was shocked to hear police tell Salim on the video that her son attacked[...]

Posted 5 years ago

Jun 29

2020

Police suspend cop over misogynist insult

Updated: 9:01 p.m. Buffalo police have suspended a lieutenant without pay Monday night and launched an Internal Affairs investigation into an incident captured on video Sunday in which he called a woman a vile name when she questioned why 10 officers were called to deal with a man who appeared high on drugs.  In the video, Lieutenant Michael DeLong calls Ruweyda Salim a “disrespectful little fucking cunt.”  Police Commissioner Byron Lockwood responded by ordering an investigation by the department’s Internal Affairs unit and then later suspending DeLong. Lockwood was responding to the wide circulation of the video, shot by Salim[...]

Posted 5 years ago
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