BUFFALO, N.Y. — With two more fatal shootings reported Sunday, the Buffalo violent crime index keeps rising at an alarming rate, just like many other cities across the country.
The Buffalo Citi-Stats program shows there is an average of 50 homicides in the city each year. The database shows there were 44 homicides in 2019, but it jumped to 65 in 2020. The Buffalo News reports that these two recent cases pushed the rate to 47 so far this year, at the halfway mark in June.
The issue was addressed during a Sunday afternoon radio program hosted by Mayor Byron Brown, who brought two of his top cops into the discussion.
That steep increase in fatal shootings in recent days, and actually past months, has to be a sore spot for the Buffalo Police Department, especially considering that again violent crime was trending down in 2018 and 2019.
In his weekend WUFO radio program, Mayor Brown did say the COVID pandemic interrupted the BPD's community outreach and violence prevention programs. So to ask what more can be done now, the mayor brought in two of the department's deputy commissioners.
They said for one thing, state grant funding is allowing for increased police patrols. Deputy Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia stressed they are not designed to blanket neighborhoods like past policy, which sparked criticism and sometimes involved innocent residents.
He says instead they are focusing on specific locations and dayparts tied to shootings. Gramaglia says, "We'll get into areas, use those additional patrols, have them do park and walks at those specific times at those places to try to prevent such incidents."
Also, there are the ongoing weekly shoot reviews in which federal, state, county, and local law enforcement intensively look at shootings, possible suspects involved, and patterns with even sophisticated analysis and tracing of shell casings through a national database.
In addition, they are now getting back to community policing as COVID numbers dip with the neighborhood engagement team. Deputy Commissioner Barbara Lark says there is a continuing partnership with anti-violence community groups such as the Stop the Violence Coalition, Buffalo Peacemakers, and SNUG (state-funded group known as Should Not Use Guns), which meet monthly with the police commissioner.
Lark added: "They get information on each shooting, so they're able to go out and work with the community to try to discourage any further violence."
However, there was this somewhat surprising statement from Gramaglia: "Believe it or not, we are actually seeing reductions in the number of our shootings, the percentage of our shootings. Yes they are up, but we have seen them trending in the right direction over the last couple of months, so we just need to be, you know, continue driving at this and doing it the right way."