The City of Buffalo’s 2021 police reform agenda
In 2021, a marketing agency called The Martin Group and a commission empaneled by the Mayor of Buffalo produced a report known as the Buffalo Reform Agenda, pursuant to an executive order by Governor Andrew Cuomo requiring all local governments to adopt a plan to reform their police forces.
The reform agenda was the culmination of the City of Buffalo’s response to the racial justice protests of 2020 that broke out in Buffalo and across the world in response to a Minneapolis police officer’s murder of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd. The Buffalo Common Council approved the reform agenda by a 6-to-3 vote on a resolution that set forth nineteen commitments for police reform.
Three years later, few of these objectives have been accomplished, and the city hasn’t publicly reported its progress or expanded the reform agenda, both of which the resolution promised.
The resolution’s most detailed objectives included a “community planning process” pledged to be undertaken by the Commission on Citizen Rights and Community Relations, a commitment to “implementing Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion,” a promise of improved “Data Transparency,” and revisions to the police department’s use-of-force policy. As of 2024, none of these key reforms have materialized.
Community planning process
The 2021 reform agenda resolved that the Commission on Citizen Rights and Community Relations (CCRCR) would issue bi-annual reports, publish a survey, and produce findings and recommendations about community-police relations and the CCRCR’s membership, structure, and powers. As this blog reported last year, the CCRCR has not met or produced any material since 2020, although its staff continue to be paid full-time salaries.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, an administrative hold was placed on all commission’s activities including the CCRCR,” said its executive director, Jason Whitaker. In response to subsequent Freedom of Information request, Whitaker and a city attorney stated that there are no records related to the “administrative hold” and that no officer or employee of the CCRCR maintains a work calendar.
The CCRCR’s work program statistics in the mayor’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2025 say that, in fiscal year 2024, the CCRCR had 93 customer visits, serviced 93 non-police complaints, opened 30 cases, and closed 30 cases, but these and the CCRCR’s other work program statistics are identical to those in last year’s budget.
Law enforcement assisted diversion
The reform agenda states that the “City of Buffalo is committed to implementing Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) as a pilot program in B District.” According to a May 2023 story in The Buffalo News, the city never did so, nor has it launched the full program, which promised alternatives to arrest for petty crimes related to drug use, sex work, poverty, and mental illness.
“We have moved it as far as a coalition of community groups and health agencies can,” said Andrea Ó Súilleabháin, executive director of the nonprofit organization that developed the planned program in partnership with the city, Buffalo police, and district attorney. “The only thing we’re missing is action from City Hall or the Police Department to do the work of getting a pilot up and running,” Ó Súilleabháin told the newspaper.
Data transparency
The reform agenda made the ambitious claim that “the Buffalo Police Department is well-situated to become one of the most data-driven and transparent police departments in the nation” through its partnership with the data analytics company SAS Institute. Far from it, the results of Buffalo’s $2.2 million dollar contract with SAS remain a mystery. The city denied a Freedom of Information request for its SAS dashboards, and there’s no trace of the “publicly accessible reports on the metrics regarding the implementation of the reform initiatives,” which the reform agenda promised. Although the reform agenda states that “the City of Buffalo is committed to joining the Police Data Initiative (PDI)” to promote public access to the SAS data, Buffalo does not appear on PDI’s list of participating agencies.
“The primary focus of the SAS contract was the Department of Permits and Inspections,” said the city's former Open Data and Analytics Project Coordinator, Matthew Austin. “Towards the end of the consultants’ hours, SAS developed a use-of-force dashboard for the police department that to my knowledge was never used. It was almost a carbon copy of the publicly available dashboard SAS developed for the Ventura County Sheriff in California,” Austin said. That dashboard is available on the Ventura County Sheriff Office’s website and breaks down use of force by year, location, and category. It further breaks down police shootings by suspect race and sex, officer race and sex, and the number of officers firing, among other details.
The “Officer Involved Shootings” tab of Ventura County Sheriff’s Office SAS dashboard for use of force
The Data Transparency section of the reform agenda concludes that the “Buffalo Police Department will also issue a Departmental Report to the Community and an Internal Affairs Report to the Community, annually.” Last year, the department issued its first annual report since 2005, though it has not updated its published Internal Affairs statistics since 2021.
Use-of-force policy
In its seventeenth and wordiest objective, the reform agenda recommended three changes to the police department’s use-of-force policy based on “comments received by the City of Buffalo from the New York State Office of the Attorney General.” On the proposed change of the policy’s recognition of “the value of human life and dignity” to “an active duty to preserve that life,” the agenda states that the “City is committing to make this change in its Use of Force Policy and then training each officer in its meaning and practice.” Second, the agenda states that the policy “must be updated” to make de-escalation “an active duty” rather than something that officers merely “should” do. Third, the agenda states that the policy “must also be amended to include clear definitions of ‘necessity’ and ‘proportionality’” and stresses that this change is necessary “for the protection of the officers and the community.”
The use-of-force policy on the police department’s website, posted as a PDF last modified March 25, 2024, contains none of these changes. The version of the policy in the department’s Manual of Procedures does not either.
In summation
Most of the nineteen commitments in the Buffalo Police Reform Agenda—and all of the most detailed—appear to have been abandoned or forgotten. The status of several of the minor reforms are unclear, though in cases such as such as the pledge to “expand the Police And Community Together (PACT), Citizen’s Police Academy,” a definite lack of commitment is evident. the PACT webpage appears not to have been updated since 2020.
A contemporary evaluation of the last item on the reform agenda gives a small but unambiguous measure of the agenda’s success. Of the four bills that the “City will work with the local State Delegation to pass,” three of the four never became law. The one that did, the HALT Solitary Confinement Act, had already been passed by the state legislature two weeks before the reform agenda was completed.