Local news stations have recently reported that shortly before Downtown Buffalo’s 2023 St. Patrick’s day parade, a Buffalo Police Department sniper rifle mounted on a tripod with a hanging weighted bag fell from the roof of an office building owned by Carl Paladino’s Ellicott Development Company and onto the sidewalk below, landing inches away from a propane-powered hotdog cart.
Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia told WGRZ that “the officer was acting in an overwatch position, a security measure that offers the department a vantage point during mass gatherings.” The Buffalo Police Department’s 924-page Manual of Procedures does not describe this security measure but simply states that “[i]t is the policy of the Buffalo Police Department to safeguard participants of parades.”
Letting a unattended sniper rifle and its heavy mount fall off the edge of a four-story building and into a group of civilians below puts the department’s adherence to this policy in question.
Despite the obvious risk posed by the rifle and tripod with a weighted bag falling on a busy sidewalk from 50 feet above, WGRZ claims that “[e]xperts say it didn’t pose any immediate risk to the public.” The former Buffalo Police spokesman cited for this claim—retired police captain Jeffrey Rinaldo—is quoted as saying “[t]hese weapons are not something like a handgun or something where you could just pick it up and the average person would know how to utilize it.”
Consistent with the specifications of an RFP from 2020 (a request for proposals which garnered just one bid, for $8,626 dollars per rifle), the weapon in question appears to be a suppressed and accurized bolt action rifle fed with an internal magazine, sighted with a high-power variable optic scope, and fitted in a length of pull and comb adjusting chassis. While that may sound complicated, its modern accessories are ancillary to and unnecessary for the operation of the weapon. The necessary component—the bolt action firing mechanism—is shared by nearly every hunting and target rifle on the market and has remained virtually unchanged for 130 years. The notion of such a rifle being less intuitive to use than a handgun is laughable.
Schematic of an accurized bolt action rifle, the GOL Sniper Magnum.
Despite stating that an internal affairs investigation is ongoing, Commissioner Gramaglia told WGRZ that he “does not believe the officer mishandled the firearm” and that “it wasn’t dropped.” Per the department’s Manual of Procedures, the Commissioner alone determines whether departmental charges are brought following an internal affairs investigation and, if charges are brought, later renders a decision as to what disciplinary measures, if any, officers face.
Given Commissioner Gramaglia’s duty to fulfill the impartial roles of grand jury and judge in disciplinary policy matters such as these, his comments risk imperiling the integrity of the disciplinary process by creating the appearance that he adopted a preconceived view of the facts of the incident, formed a prejudicial conclusion as to the adherence to procedures, and colored media coverage of the incident with prejudicial statements.
WIVB’s article on the sniper rifle incident quoted a criminal defense attorney, Barry Covert of Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria LLP, who appeared to take a different view than the Commissioner’s. Mr. Covert said that the conduct constituted “negligence” even in the event that officers adhered to protocols. In tort law, negligence is defined as a “failure to behave with the level of care that someone of ordinary prudence would have exercised under the same circumstances.”
The sniper rifle incident hasn’t been commented on by Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown or any member of the Buffalo Common Council, but one candidate for the Ellicott District’s open seat on the Common Council, Matthew Dearing, called Commissioner Gramaglia’s response to the incident “beyond absurd” and seized on the opportunity to advocate for an “independent Police Review Board” in City Hall.
An independent police oversight body or civilian review board could bring cases like these to transparent and equitable conclusions. In 2021 (the last year on record), only 22.5% of investigated cases resulted in sustained allegations, and likely fewer resulted in departmental charges. Even fewer likely resulted in disciplinary action. The formerly published statistics do not clarify those details but do indicate that no one was terminated that year.
Following the racial justice protests of 2020, the New York State Legislature lifted the veil of confidentiality over police discipline, at least on paper. Following the legislature’s repeal of New York State Civil Rights Law section 50-a, which prohibited public disclosure of police disciplinary records, police departments have seized on the repeal’s legal ambiguities in order to resist making full disclosures.
Shortly after the 50-a repeal, LOSA lead counsel Stephanie Adams intervened in a civil lawsuit against the City of Buffalo that was brought by the city’s police and fire unions, who opposed the Buffalo Common Council’s request for five years of disciplinary records. Following a vigorous legal battle, Judge Frank A. Sedita III decided in favor of LOSA’s client and denied the unions’ request for the court to stop the city from turning over disciplinary records to the Common Council.
Other court cases involving police resistance to releasing disciplinary records have not been as successful, and even in the successful case for LOSA, the court did not compel the production of records. Consequently, the disciplinary process remains largely opaque. The Buffalo Police Department makes few proactive disclosures to promote information access, and the process to request and obtain records from the department is arduous and typically stonewalled, seldom permitting review and awareness.
Civilian review boards are the most direct way to achieve transparent police accountability, but Buffalo’s political establishment has resisted this approach for over 50 years. In 1966, the city’s former Commission on Human Relations investigated a Buffalo police officer for the fatal shooting of a unarmed Black youth. Buffalo’s police union responded by accusing the commission of overstepping its authority, and two members of the Common Council along with the Crime and Corrections Committee of the Buffalo Niagara Business Federation promised to investigate the commission for investigating the officer. One councilman echoed the police union’s accusation that the commission was acting like a civilian review board. That was reportedly the last complaint against a police officer that the commission investigated.
In 2021, Stephanie Adams and other community members helped members of the Common Council’s Police Advisory Board circulate petitions for a ballot measure to create a civilian review board. The coalition submitted the signatures of several thousand Buffalo residents collected pursuant to New York State law, but the Common Council failed to create the ballot measure. In 2022, the Common Council dissolved the Police Advisory Board and replaced it with an advisory body whose members must be confirmed by the Common Council after being appointed.
Days after the sniper rifle incident, The Buffalo News published an editorial that called for the creation of a “long-awaited” civilian review board for police accountability. It accompanied a news story by Deidre Williams that described the powers of Rochester’s and Syracuse’s civilian review boards and quoted the Buffalo police union’s president, who said that the union “would exhaust every resource to fight” efforts to create a civilian review board with disciplinary power. According to Investigative Post, the city last year forfeited its best bet to win concessions from the union, when, due to inaction from Mayor Brown’s administration on union contract negotiations, the union went to an arbitrator who awarded raises and back pay for police department employees. The Brown administration declined to oppose the award, despite that it offered nothing in return.
Buffalo’s need for independent police oversight is stronger than ever. The sniper rifle story has been picked up by news organizations in the McClatchy Media Network, including The Sacramento Bee, The Kansas City Star, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and the Miami Herald, whose article has been featured by Yahoo! News. The story’s national reverberation affirms the necessity of an impartial, appropriate, and corrective resolution to this dangerous and alarming incident. Such a resolution is not guaranteed by the current system, which must be overhauled with a transparent and accountable civilian review board to prevent injury and loss of life in future incidents.