The Buffalo Police Department plans to make information on traffic stops more accessible to the public.
Buffalo Police Commissioner Alphonso Wright told the Common Council’s Police Oversight Committee Wednesday records of the department's traffic stop receipts will be available on their website, starting 2026.
Stop receipts are issued by officers when they pull over a motorist but do not issue a ticket.
The data is already on Buffalo's open data portal, but Wright said the new dashboard - provided by Axion - will be "more user friendly."
"All stop receipts will be searchable by the officer, and the district, the sector, the council district, age or race of a person and the reason why the person was pulled over," Wright said.
The BPD started issuing stop receipts in 2020 as part of Buffalo’s police reform agenda and the initiative is written into local law. Wright said officers have issued more than 23,000 receipts in the last five years.
BTPM NPR published an investigation based on an analysis of stop receipts issued by the BPD between June 2020 through June 2023 which found Black drivers are over 3x more likely to be pulled over compared to white drivers.
The analysis revealed the top two zip codes for total stops were 14215 and 14211, which combined for a third of all recorded stops in the city. Both zip codes have majority Black residents.
Our investigation also found that Buffalo police officers did not record the race of the motorist they stopped in 22% of cases. Officers are required to record that information under the city's Right to Know Law.
In Wednesday's meeting, Council Majority Leader Leah Halton-Pope asked Wright a series of questions concerning the receipts. Wright was unable to answer some of those questions in the meeting, but committed to getting the information to the council as soon as possible.
Halton-Pope asked for answers to the following questions by 2 p.m. Thursday:
- What proportion of the total stops resulted in the issuance of a stop receipt, and has that percentage changed over time?
- Since 2020, how many disciplinary instances have occurred as a result of an officer failing to issue a stop receipt when required?
- What data points are captured?
- Which police districts, neighborhoods or council districts show the highest volume of stops?
