Buffalo police routinely withhold basic crime details
News editor says paper is prepared to fight it
Two city residents reported a home invasion to police Tuesday. Two men broke into their house at about 4 a. m., threatened them with a gun and demanded cash before making off with a laptop computer and a couple of Xboxes.
You might want to know if it happened in your neighborhood. Better yet, if it happened on your street.
Buffalo police aren’t saying. The incident report only said in what police precinct it happened.
Police incident reports made available to the public and media used to routinely identify where crimes occur, the address and ages of those arrested and other details.
But no longer. In the past two months, police officials have started to suppress basic crime information.
“This is a clear case of the public’s right to know what’s going on in their city,” said Buffalo News Editor Margaret M. Sullivan. “We’re prepared to fight about it.”
The clampdown on information follows a department edict last year that prohibits all but a handful of police brass from talking to reporters and a series of episodes in which Mayor Byron W. Brown, Police Commissioner H. Mc-Carthy Gipson and their subordinates
have confronted Buffalo News reporters and editors expressing their unhappiness over the paper’s crime coverage.
Brown declined to comment through a spokesman, deferring to police officials. Gipson did not return a telephone call seeking his comment.
Department spokesman Mike De- George acknowledged police have reduced the amount of information re-lased in incident reports but said the department has legitimate reasons for doing so.
“It was felt the department was being hurt for investigative reasons by having some of the information out there,” he said.
He also said protecting crime victims was an issue.
“There was a concern about protecting the citizens and public safety,” he added.
The News first reported on the suppression of information Tuesday on one of its blogs, “Outrages & Insights,” which resulted in a five-fold increase in traffic. As a result of the blog post, the restrictions were discussed Tuesday during a routine weekly meeting between Brown and senior department officials. DeGeorge said there was no talk of revisiting the changes.
News police reporters say they honor department requests to withhold sensitive information from stories and take care to not publish information that puts crime victims at further risk.
Sullivan said withholding basic information such as the location of crime scenes does not serve the public.
“The best way to protect the citizens of Buffalo is to keep them well informed about what’s going on in their city,” she said.
Moreover, Sullivan recently learned that the police began to limit information after top officials had told her in the spring that they planned no changes.
At issue are online incident reports available in the press room at Police Headquarters. Until a couple of months ago, these reports provided a basic, if sometimes incomplete, narrative of incidents. The location of the crime was almost always listed, as were the address and age of anyone arrested.
Last year, department officials threatened to deny The News continued access to these reports. They became especially irate after a story in October 2007 that used the reports to detail how the police failed to alert the public about a serial predator who had been terrorizing elderly residents of the Broadway-Fillmore area.
The next business day, Gipson informed The News he was terminating its access to the computer terminal. The department backed off its threat after a series of meetings between police and newspaper editors and reporters, including one between Brown and Sullivan.
Shortly afterward, however — without notice to The News — the department started limiting information in the reports, putting more complete accounts in a database to which the press room did not have access. Crime locations in the reports available to the media are often missing, as is any information on those arrested, except for their names.
This information is considered public record under the state’s Freedom of Information Law.
Vanessa Thomas, one of the paper’s two primary crime reporters, characterized the reports as “bare bones.”
“They’re missing the vital information that gives a true picture as to what really happened,” she said.
If reporters want more information, they have been told to contact De- George, who sometimes, but not always, provides a timely response.
“The Police Department is forcing the media to jump through so many more hoops to get basic information, which ties up our time,” Thomas said. “It means less crime is being reported because we’re using our time trying to find out the most basic information that should be easily available and accessible.”
On top of limiting information in the reports, the department under Brown and Gipson has ordered all but a handful of officials to stop talking to the media. This is a departure from previous administrations.
The no-talk edict has hampered at least one murder investigation.
James Moses, publisher of Artvoice, the alternative weekly, said he had information about a person of interest in the July 2007 murder of a friend. This person of interest had left town but was communicating with Moses. Moses said he called the detective handling the case every day for more than a week but never got a return call.
Finally, Moses said, someone taking messages for the detective told him: “ ‘He’s not going to call you back, he’s not allowed to call you back. If you want, you can call Mike DeGeorge.’ ”
“At that point, I sort of gave up,” Moses said.
The murder remains unsolved.
Niagara District Common Council Member David Rivera, a retired detective sergeant, said sharing basic information with the public is “a good crime-prevention tool.”
He said, “The media should have access to that information. I think the Police Department needs to freely get this information out without any interference.
“If they’re doing this,” he added, “what else are they holding back?”
