2021 Update
As a result of their Barbara McDowell Foundation grant, National Center for Law and Economic Justice brought a class action lawsuit suit to redress and reform unconstitutional police ticketing practices by the Buffalo Police Department which had conducted thousands of “traffic safety” stops at police checkpoints overwhelmingly concentrated in low- income communities of color to generate revenue for the City.
The litigation continues with wide-based community support seeking to change the Buffalo Police Department’s discriminatory ticketing practices. Black Love Resists in the Rust v. City of Buffalo
“Turning around the Buffalo Police Department is a herculean task, but one we must undertake to advance racial and economic justice in New York,” said Claudia Wilner, Director of Litigation and Advocacy.
2022 Update
In 2019, the Foundation awarded NCLEJ $30,000 in support of Black Love Resists in the Rust v. City of Buffalo, a class action lawsuit intended to redress and reform racially discriminatory policing practices. Before filing, the Buffalo Police Department (BPD) had conducted thousands of "traffic safety" stops at police checkpoints overwhelmingly concentrated in low-income communities of color. So common were the Checkpoints that Buffalo's East Side residents lived their daily lives under near-constant police surveillance. Plaintiffs allege that Defendants targeted and continue targeting them for increased police enforcement to generate revenue for the City budget, as in Ferguson, Missouri. We engaged in extensive discovery and community outreach efforts with the Foundation's support. Because the City refused to turn over basic data on ticketing practices, we successfully subpoenaed this information from third parties. We then hired experts to help us interpret and analyze the data. After the grant period ended, we amended our complaint to include new allegations of discriminatory ticketing practices outside of Checkpoints, and we added five new named plaintiffs, whose stories fill out the range of discriminatory ticketing practices employed by the BPD.
Since our last update, we have continued to litigate the case aggressively despite extraordinary intransigence by the City in refusing to comply with basic discovery obligations. We had to file four separate motions to compel, and the district court eventually ordered sanctions against the City, which spurred the City to produce documents. We have subpoenaed and are analyzing updated ticketing data for 2020 and 2021. We have reviewed nearly 90,000 documents, with review ongoing. We have conducted ten depositions and expect to take at least another ten during Summer 2022. We expect to conclude discovery and move for class certification in September 2022. We featured this case and our community clients at our 2021 Catalyst Awards celebration – the video is here: https://awards.nclej.org/watch-now. The case continues to generate local media attention. A few noteworthy stories are below:
•Racial profiling in Buffalo traffic enforcement hard to gauge with imperfect data | News 4Buffalo (wivb.com)
•Buffalo Council president says racial disparity in police traffic stops does exist | News 4Buffalo (wivb.com)
• EXCLUSIVE: Critics say Buffalo Police's traffic enforcement targets minorities – and there's data that supports their claims | News 4 Buffalo (wivb.com)
Click here to see the original grant, including the six-month and year-end reports.