Civil rights group seeks escalation of lawsuit against Buffalo police

National civil rights groups seek class status in lawsuit against Buffalo police over discriminatory traffic stops

Four years ago, in an effort to end or at least reduce the number of tickets issued by members of the Buffalo Police Department, Mayor Byron Brown initiated a system in which officers were required to issue “driving tickets.” ‘stop’ or ‘stop receipts’ whenever someone was arrested and in which officers were required to record the arrestee’s race.

This was at the same time as Black Lives Matter marches following the death of George Floyd and two members of the Buffalo Police Department were under investigation for the incident caught on camera in which an elderly activist appeared to have been pushed down in front. City Hall, fracturing the man’s skull.

Practices intended to reduce a kind of racial profiling during traffic stops did not work as intended, according to a lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of New York by Black Love Resists in the Rust, a community activism organization, and others “individually and on behalf of a class of all similarly situated,” against the city of Buffalo.

For more than a decade, Buffalo police officers have targeted Black and Latino drivers as part of “aggressive and punitive traffic enforcement.” City policymakers sought to turn a limited legal license to undertake administrative traffic stops into a crime investigation and enforcement strategy, in violation of the Fourth Law. The principles of the amendment, which prohibit officers from imposing heavy seizures on citizens in the sole hope of detecting a crime; the strategy also contravened Fourteenth Amendment principles that proscribe the racially discriminatory assumption underlying the city’s policy that black and Latino citizens are more likely to commit criminal acts. crimes,” according to the lawsuit filed May 29.

These discriminatory practices, the lawsuit continues, constitute a large part of the city’s “long-standing project to generate revenue on the backs of Buffalo’s poorest and least politically powerful people and are a continuation of the “the city’s deep and troubled history of racial discrimination.”

As Dan Tevlock reported in 2022, with two years of data on new requirements imposed by Mayor Brown in June 2020, officers were not recording the race of people they stopped for a traffic citation or ticket in a quarter of the stops. do. A Channel 4 and Cornell ILR Buffalo Co-Lab investigation further found that black people were 2.5 times more likely to be stopped by BPD officers than white drivers; When city demographic information was taken into account and driver race was unknown, black drivers were still twice as likely to be stopped as white drivers.

A similar investigation by WBFO of traffic stop receipts issued between June 2020 and June 2023 found that Black drivers were more than three times as likely to be stopped as white drivers.

The lawsuit seeks class status for all affected Black and Latinx drivers in Buffalo who have been ticketed or stopped at a city-run checkpoint since 2015 or if they have received multiple tickets for “having tinted windows in a practice where officers issue a separate ticket for each tinted window on a vehicle. A class also includes all Black and Latinx drivers who have been or may be subject to traffic stops, and seeks structural corrective, accountability, and oversight measures to ensure an end to these harmful and discriminatory practices.

This case is a continuation of a lawsuit initially filed in June 2018 on behalf of Black Love Resists in the Rust and individuals by the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Western New York Law Center and the Covington firm. & Burling, LLP.

“These blatantly unconstitutional practices targeting Black and Latino residents are part of Buffalo’s long and sordid history of discrimination and are designed to harvest revenue for the city budget on the backs of Buffalo’s poorest residents,” said Anjana Malhotra, senior lawyer at The National. Center for Law and Economic Justice, in a statement released Monday. “We are asking the court to certify our proposed courses so that we can seek relief, system-wide reform, and a voice for minority communities whose civil rights have been and continue to be violated by the City of Buffalo and the Buffalo Police Department on a regular basis. daily. »

The updated trial also contains three expert reports and a statistical report, in addition to reports on police practices and a historical expert report. Plaintiffs’ attorneys say that while the city typically has two weeks to respond, additional time will be granted depending on the amount of evidence included in the latest filing.

The full 60-page lawsuit can be read here.