Commentary

The Buffalo News Police Cover-Up

by / Feb. 3, 2017 3pm EST

Today’s article in the Buffalo News about police injuries is not only poorly researched and irresponsibly framed, but also symbolic of how local media faces a public accountability crisis of sorts.

But first, I feel it’s important when crafting such an argument about police and fellow journalists to clear a few hurdles at the outset so that a few very important points don’t get lost.

It’s clear that police have a difficult and dangerous job, one that involves the countless sacrifices that all public servants endure with the added physical component that is asked of very few in society. Police put their bodies on the line to do their jobs in the name of protecting our neighborhoods, and that’s admirable.  

Furthermore, the actions of individual officers must be weighed against administrative decisions and policies that govern, permit, or sanction their actions.

Also it’s clear that Buffalo News crime reporter Lou Michel is a skilled reporter and a person of integrity. I’ve probably read every story he’s written for years now, and I thought his Halloween interview with Artvoice’s former editor Buck Quigley to be an incredibly candid account about how his reporting on brutal crimes has affected him personally.

All things considered, however, one begins to smell a rat in how the Buffalo News bends its editorial focus towards pockets of influence in our city. We called them out on it in 2015 when a Buffalo State researcher spoke out against an editorial bias against public education. Around that same time, a pandering email written by reporter Sandra Tan to Carl Paladino surfaced, and the Buffalo News reassigned Tan, a usually thorough and diligent reporter, to Erie County politics.

Still, the News endorsed a serial racist in Carl Paladino for his 2016 reelection bid, tying together loose threads after years of editorials slamming the interests of the Buffalo Teachers Federation and promoting the interests of local business minds in reforming Buffalo Schools with the charter model in mind. Foremost among them being Paladino, Larry Quinn, and M & T CEO Robert Wilmers. The News has attempted again and again to find themselves in good standing when they show their faces at Buffalo-Niagara Partnership meetings, and curry their sources. And we called them out again in 2016.

(Ironically, News employees have been recently engaged on social media in promoting their side in a contract dispute with the same editors who used the paper and its reporting as a weapon against the BTF.)

And that’s one of the glaring problems with (police) accountability in Buffalo. We have a three-term mayor selling hope to its citizens who fear being left behind while its foremost developers enrich themselves on Buffalo’s surging real estate market, and when studies on the ground suggest widespread minority distrust of police amid an appalling homicide clearance rate, the Buffalo News editorial board scrambled to life to pour cold water on the concerns of African American citizens who regard the police as an occupying force with a report AND an editorial aimed at debunking those concerns.

Meanwhile the city’s poor homicide clearance rate is hardly ever mentioned by the News, let alone properly investigated.

Michel has earned his sources and his access, but you have to question how he gets it. Other reporters at the News have posted on Twitter their frustration with the tight lid the Mayor’s office keeps on any information that can be used against them. Meanwhile, reporters like Justin Sondel (City & State) and Daniela Porat (Investigative Post) have to fight through the Mayor’s smokescreen and attend press events in the hope of getting the mayor to answer questions outside of the narrative of “New Buffalo” he hawks at every turn.

Michel is only able to get individual officers on record because the city has endorsed the message Michel is prepared to convey: Police officers as heroes, full stop.

Germane to today’s story, the Strike Force officers Anthony Fanara and Joseph Acquino deserve full marks for not only saving their own lives, but the life of the man with the alleged intent to kill them. But does anyone question why they were chasing him in the first place? Strike Force recruits officers with the most aggressive mentality present in American policing, many of whom are combat veterans, these things need to be considered and weighed.

The News reports say that Fanara chased him because they saw him running across a street after getting a report about an armed mugging. Did the person’s description or location even match up?

Several suppression hearing transcripts we’ve reviewed suggest that Strike Force officers consider the smallest actions as “reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot,” the legal justification for Fourth Amendment protections. In one transcript we’ve read a man walking down the street is assumed as the suspect of an incident that occurred 10 minutes prior, a mile away because he is wearing jeans and a blue hoodie and we’ve read another transcript where a man sitting on his porch and then going into his house upon seeing an officer is ruled “suspicious” enough to warrant a search and seizure.  

“According to recent [court] decisions, and our research, the Buffalo police appears to be systematically discarding the Fourth Amendment rights to unreasonable searches and seizures and Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection of communities of color by substituting race as a proxy for reasonable suspicion,” UB law professor Anjana Malhotra has concluded on her collaborative research with the Cornell University Law School into Buffalo Police police and practice.  

The job Strike Force has before them matters to all of us as they’re charged with being the primary public effort to get illegal guns off the streets. Yet even with their aggressive actions, Buffalo’s shooting incidents have stayed level, or even risen in recent years. It’s hard to tell, because the city doesn’t offer reporters that kind of information, leaving the News’ Aaron Besecker to compile his own data.

If the News cared to consider the counterpoint, they’d realize there’s been a shift in recent years in how local criminal defense attorneys challenge cases, and there’s been a pattern of cases being dismissed in local courts when the circumstances of Strike Force and Housing Unit arrests in particular come to light, according to several local attorneys who have tried these cases successfully in court.

If the News cared to read the Department of Justice investigation into the city of Baltimore’s police practices, they would have found the same word that Byron Brown made a campaign cornerstone in 2005 and has stuck with to the present day: zero tolerance policing.

Michel reports on the number of injuries reported with the BPD but then fails to contextualize it in anyway. Is the number of on-the-job injuries comparable with rates of injuries on other police forces? Does the injury rate factor in as a bargaining tool for the Police Benevolent Association, whose current contract expires in 2019? What kind of injuries are we talking about? None of this information is given.

And why does Michel accept Fanara’s rather wild story of coming under attack in Romania as fact? Perhaps it happened as Fanara described, but having traveled in Eastern Europe, I would imagine there’s more to the story than a “gang” attacking a group of young American military personnel. Are Romanian criminals that stupid to pick on a group of healthy young men in a “restaurant”?

This article, and other recent Buffalo News articles pointed at the softer, humanitarian side of police work now read as deliberate narratives to counter the reporting that’s being done on the other side of Buffalo’s sphere of influence.

Meanwhile, the BPD’s Strike Force and Housing Unit police in particular are engaged in some of the same Constitutionally dubious practices that have come under fire elsewhere in the country, the BPD are not accredited, and they lack de-escalation training to better handle the mentally ill. Putting a fine point on that particular deficiency, last month they ran someone suffering a mental breakdown over with a squad SUV, and the police response was to praise the officers for bringing the incident to “safe conclusion.” Safe for whom?

We’ve seen enough from current events about just how important it is to have a working press to hold power accountable. The Buffalo News has shown it can do this, take today’s report about the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority director Dawn Sanders-Garrett extensive travel schedule for example. But their blind spot for their political and financial allies weakens their ability to fulfill that role in totality, and the entire community suffers the result.

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