October 23, 2024, Buffalo, NY – Today, legal and civil rights groups argued on behalf of the grassroots organization Black Love Resists in the Rust and nine individuals for class certification in their lawsuit against the City of Buffalo challenging unconstitutional checkpoints and ongoing racially discriminatory traffic enforcement practices by the Buffalo Police Department (BPD). Certification would allow the case to proceed as a class action lawsuit on behalf of thousands of Buffalonians affected by the BPD’s aggressive and punitive practices.  

“The City of Buffalo's racist policies have denied our inherent dignity; deprived us of our human rights, resources, and safety; and kept us in poverty. Checkpoints the Buffalo Police Department targeted in our poorest and mostly Black and Brown neighborhoods complicated harms and enacted further damage by extracting resources, unnecessarily increasing surveillance and our encounters with police, which increased the likelihood of physical harm at the hands of police – people have lost their lives,” said Bianca Basset with lead plaintiff Black Love Resists in the Rust. “All Black and Brown folk in Buffalo deserve to thrive in a city that honors our humanity. This lawsuit is a first step in holding the City and its police accountable to creating a just Buffalo.”

Plaintiffs’ legal team argued in court that the BPD’s traffic enforcement practices targeting Black and Latine communities, which were designed to harvest revenue for the City budget, violate the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The lawsuit seeks both damages and structural and remedial accountability and oversight measures to ensure an end to harmful and discriminatory practices that have continued to target Buffalo’s communities of color and inflict deep financial and psychological harm.  

The three proposed classes are: 

1. All drivers in Buffalo who were ticketed or arrested at a BPD checkpoint since June 28, 2015; 

1. Black and Latine drivers who received multiple tinted windows tickets (a separate ticket for each window) in a single stop since June 28, 2015; 

1. All Black and Latine drivers in Buffalo who have been or could be subjected to traffic stops.
   

Read the brief for class certification. 

“The Buffalo Police Department has violated the civil rights of minority residents on a daily basis through checkpoints and now top-down systemic, ongoing racially biased traffic enforcement that is designed to harvest revenue for the City budget,” said Claudia Wilner, Legal Director at the National Center for Law and Economic Justice. “We are seeking class certification to achieve compensatory relief and systemwide reform for thousands of residents affected by these unlawful and dehumanizing policing practices.” 

“The Buffalo Police can’t be trusted to police themselves. Without court intervention and oversight, the Black and Latine communities in Buffalo will continue to face dehumanizing and racist police tactics,” said Anjana Malhotra, Senior Attorney at the National Center for Law and Economic Justice. “The BPD’s over-aggressive, quasi-military traffic policies have led far too many Buffalo residents to be subjected to daily, racist policing that results in residents living in fear and inflicts deep financial and psychological costs.”

The lawsuit was first filed in June 2018 on behalf of Buffalo-based advocacy group Black Love Resists in the Rust and thousands of individuals by the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Western New York Law Center, and the law firm of Covington & Burling LLP. 

In May 2024, the groups also submitted to the court three expert reports detailing patterns of discrimination by the Buffalo Police Department: 

• A statistical report finding significant racial disparities in tickets issued and the locations of checkpoints that cannot be explained by crime. Between January 2012 and December 2022, around 75% of driving and vehicle citations (not including parking tickets) were issued to minority individuals, despite their comprising less than 50% of the population. Minority Buffalonians received 3.2 times as many citations compared to non-minority individuals relative to their population. From 2020-2022, the BPD issued almost three times as many stop receipts for minority drivers as for non-minority drivers. 

• A police practices report based on a review of over 70 complaints of racially discriminatory traffic enforcement and BPD’s policies and practices, finding that the BPD’s supervision, investigation, discipline, monitoring, and training practices are inadequate and well below accepted industry standards, and ultimately fail to promote accountability. Without a high functioning investigative process for complaints of alleged violations by police, instances of wrongdoing cannot be identified, remedial action cannot occur, and officers can engage in biased traffic enforcement with little concern for detection and intervention. The expert also found that BPD has not enforced or implemented any so-called remedial measures, while engaging in policies and practices that facilitate discrimination.  
  
• A historical expert report finding that the City of Buffalo and BPD have engaged in a history of racial discrimination in the East Side of Buffalo and throughout the city, as exemplified through patterns of intentional racial segregation in housing, education, and policing, and that the current discriminatory policing patterns are a continuation of this discrimination. Ongoing discriminatory policing against Buffalo communities of color without accountability has been documented in research over the last several decades. Importantly, racial discrimination in Buffalo has not been remedied without court intervention or outside monitoring.  

In 2013, the City of Buffalo established a program of traffic checkpoints through which BPD officers stopped Black and Latine motorists without any suspicion of wrongdoing, attempted to develop evidence of criminal activity, and issued tickets for as many alleged traffic violations as possible. The BPD ran over 1,600 checkpoints and placed them in predominantly Black and Latine neighborhoods seven times as often as in predominantly white neighborhoods. In addition, from 2012 to 2022, Black and Latine drivers accounted for 86.9 percent of tinted window citations issued during traffic stops in cases where race could be determined. From 2020-2022, the BPD issued more than three times more stop receipts for stops that did not lead to a citation in BPD districts that had the highest percentage minority population than in the BPD district that had the lowest minority population.  

In November 2022, sworn testimony of retired members of the Buffalo Police Department revealed that Buffalo police regularly used racial slurs when referring to Black members of the public. In this litigation, a former BPD Strike Force lieutenant revealed that he heard “probably every officer” use the N-word while at the BPD, but never reported it, and no one was disciplined. In addition, a study conducted by WBFO revealed that Black drivers in Buffalo are over three times as likely to get pulled over by Buffalo Police as white drivers; WIVB made similar findings.  

For more information, visit the Center for Constitutional Rights’ case page. 

The National Center for Law and Economic Justice (NCLEJ) advances racial and economic justice for low-income families, individuals, and communities across the country through ground-breaking impact litigation, policy advocacy, and support for grassroots organizing. Founded in 1965, NCLEJ protects access to critical benefits such as food stamps, Medicaid, and childcare; empowers low-wage workers, advocates for people with disabilities; and fights unlawful debt collection.  

The Western New York Law Center is a non-profit legal organization in Buffalo. We provide free, direct legal services and impact litigation throughout Western New York, and work through coalitions to promote economic and social justice in our area.