Categories for Investigations

Feb 25

2026

The trouble with Save the Michaels

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A Save the Michaels billboard on Broadway Street in Sloan. Photo: Adam Smith-Perez. Save the Michaels, a prominent addiction services provider, will lose its Erie County funding this summer following a state audit that identified years of fiscal mismanagement. The county’s decision to pull its support coincides with an Investigative Post investigation into the nonprofit agency that found slipshod financial practices, a hostile work environment and inaction by state and local regulators. It also comes on the heels of Save the Michaels founder Avi Israel’s resignation as chief executive, two years after an Erie County official first sounded alarms about[...]

Posted 2 weeks ago

Jan 28

2026

State troopers face light discipline for serious misconduct

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The Gray Rider, a statue dedicated to state troopers, outside of the New York State Police Headquarters in Albany, N.Y. Cindy Schultz for The New York Times. This story is co-published with The New York Times and New York Focus. An investigator with the New York State Police helped get a friend’s traffic tickets reduced “in exchange” for her sexually explicit photos, according to a disciplinary letter from 2017. Another stunned a combative suspect with his Taser in 2020 and held down the trigger for 33 seconds, twice the amount of time widely considered dangerous and potentially fatal. Some officers[...]

Posted 1 month ago

Dec 9

2025

Local police who cooperate with ICE

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The Cheektowaga Police Department heads the list of a half-dozen local law enforcement agencies that are cooperating with federal agencies to detain and deport migrants. So far this year, police in the Buffalo suburb have turned over at least 21 people to federal immigration agents after detaining them for low-level offenses like shoplifting. Sheriff offices in Erie and Niagara counties are also working with U.S. Border Patrol and ICE. So are police in Lewiston, North Tonawanda and Amherst, though to a lesser extent.  Buffalo police do not appear to collaborate with immigration authorities. Mayor-elect Sean Ryan said it’s not the[...]

Posted 3 months ago

Dec 4

2025

Lack of medical care led to prison deaths

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  Jason “Poppy” Phillips’ family protest outside Greene Correctional Facility where Phillips died in December 2023. Video by by Angus Mordant for The Marshall Project. Ashley Dolcy heard panic in her husband’s voice. On most evenings, they would talk after she returned home from her job as an assistant principal at a school in the Bronx. Jason “Poppy” Phillips would call on a prison-issued tablet from his cell at Greene Correctional Facility near Albany. On Dec. 14, 2023, he told her that, since lunch, he’d increasingly had trouble breathing and swallowing. Alarmed that Phillips was struggling to breathe while locked[...]

Posted 3 months ago

Dec 2

2025

Buffalo’s indifferent response to opioid overdoses

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Editor’s note: This is the first of two stories on the use of opioid settlement funds by government agencies. Part 2 is here. The City of Buffalo has spent less than a third of the almost $6 million in state funding it has received over the past three years to fight the opioid epidemic. During that time, more than 500 people died of overdoses within Buffalo city limits, according to data from the Erie County medical examiner. The victims have been disproportionately Black and Latino. Of the $1.75 million the city has spent, about $500,000 went for equipment and activities[...]

Posted 3 months ago

Nov 6

2025

Detainees allege shoddy medical care at ICE Batavia

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and staff have administered what experts say was shoddy medical treatment to at least a dozen detainees at its Batavia facility in the past two years, Investigative Post has found.  Serious injuries went untreated, medications were denied or scaled back, and needed medical appointments were delayed at the ICE detention center.  In one case, a Nigerian migrant arrived in February at the detention facility suffering frostbite. A doctor who provided emergency care ordered that he see a specialist within a week before releasing him into immigration custody. Agents in Batavia never took him to[...]

Posted 4 months ago

Nov 4

2025

The intersection of neglect and indifference

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The intersection of Niagara and Jersey streets on Buffalo’s Lower West Side is riddled with trash, vacant lots, abandoned buildings and menacing squatters. It’s been going downhill for a decade or more. The only consistency has been the indifference of property owners and the inaction of city officials. Jersey Street resident David Eisenbart used to tend a community garden on a corner of the intersection, but he said that squatters in an abandoned cottage next door made the environment too dangerous. “Every once in a while I would go and mow, just because it got very bad, but the squatters were[...]

Posted 4 months ago

Sep 17

2025

Inside the human smuggling racket along U.S.-Canadian border

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A smuggler waits for a reporter posing as a client in a Toronto parking lot. Photo via IJB. This story is published in partnership with the Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB) at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, a collaborative investigative newsroom supported by Postmedia that partners with academics, researchers and journalists while training the next generation of investigative reporters. A silver Toyota minivan pulls into a bank parking lot in Toronto’s west end. Two young Punjabi men step out and start looking around for their client, a woman they’ve been communicating with over the previous days through[...]

Posted 6 months ago
Investigative Post