Judge hears arguments for class-action status in Buffalo police discrimination lawsuit

This article was originally published in The Buffalo News. Read it here.

Attorneys for advocacy groups and people bringing a lawsuit against the Buffalo Police Department for alleged discriminatory policing practices were before a U.S. District Court judge on Wednesday arguing for class-action status.

Judge Christina Reiss, who was brought in from the District of Vermont to take the case because of concerns the Western District of New York is overburdened, heard arguments from attorney Claudia Wilner of the nonprofit law center the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, on the need for class-action status for three separate classes in the lawsuit.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs filed a motion in June to achieve class-action status for any Black or Latino driver ticketed or arrested at checkpoints, which ended in 2018 under former Buffalo Police Commissioner Byron Lockwood. The department also disbanded the Strike Force, the unit that ran the checkpoints, and its controversial Housing Unit, which patrolled the city’s public housing complexes at that time.

The three new classifications of people as plaintiffs sought are:

• Black and Latino drivers in Buffalo who were ticketed or arrested at a department checkpoint since June 2015.
• Black and Latino drivers who received multiple tickets for having tinted windows during a single stop.
• Black and Latino drivers who could be subjected to discriminatory traffic enforcement measures by the Buffalo Police Department going forward.

In court, Wilner said that among the reasons they are arguing for class-action status is to secure injunctive relief – court-ordered changes and limitations on Buffalo Police Department policies – in order to protect the communities they say have been affected by discriminatory policing.

Reiss, who did not make a ruling on the class-action status from the bench, indicated agreement with some of the arguments laid out by law center attorneys. In particular, she questioned the argument outlined in Buffalo Police Department documents and testimony that setting up checkpoints near locations where violent crimes happened in recent days was likely to turn up evidence in those specific crimes.

“That kind of makes no sense to me,” she said.

But she also pushed back on the idea that the relief for people of the sought-after classes would have a common set of circumstances under which damages could be determined, especially for people in the class who received multiple tinted windows tickets. Many of those infractions came during regular traffic stops, not at checkpoints.

“Once you get beyond checkpoints, it gets more onerous,” Reiss said.

Hugh Russ, a partner at Hodgson Russ, outside counsel representing the city and Police Department, argued that the individual nature of each stop and the range of potential relief among the plaintiffs should not allow for class-action status.

And the plaintiffs provided no formula for how to duly compensate any individual who might be awarded damages, which could significantly burden the court system with thousands of individual claims, he added.

“At least as it’s pled now, there is no formula,” he said. “It’s all individual.”

The lawsuit, first filed by the group Black Love Resists in the Rust in June 2018, alleges that the Buffalo Police Department used checkpoints to target drivers in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods for the purpose of creating revenue for the city. The suit alleges that 75% of driving and vehicle citations between January 2012 and December 2022 were issued to minorities, despite minorities in Buffalo making up less than 50% of the population. That means minorities received 3.2 times as many tickets as non-minority residents relative to their population.

Outside the federal courthouse, Bianca Bassett, a Black Love Resists in the Rust member, noted that the group has been fighting this battle in court for six years.

“I think that we anticipated it was going to be a really long road, and we’re in it for the long haul,” she said.

But the effort is necessary to change the practices of the Police Department going forward, and achieving class-action status would help to move that goal forward, she said.

“I also think about the people who have lost their lives to police brutality because of these frequent encounters with the police that were not necessary in all of this, the excessive surveillance,” Bassett said.

The city, the Police Department and their attorneys have declined to comment on the checkpoints since the lawsuit came to light, citing a policy of not commenting on ongoing litigation.

Police spokesman Michael DeGeorge told The News in 2017, after complaints of discriminatory practices were first reported to the U.S. attorney for the Western District of New York, that the Police Department had made significant reforms that exceed state standards.

“As we said before the complaint was filed, any allegation of discrimination is completely false,” DeGeorge said at the time.