Ferguson panel: Poverty rate key to Buffalo racial disparity

Advancing the conversation on community policing, race and safety in Buffalo will require working with the region’s ‘two cultures’ simultaneously, according to a panel of UB and community leaders. The panelists were speaking during a program, “What Ferguson Can Teach Us: Working Together for Justice and Community Safety,” on Feb. 25 in the Student Union.

The ‘two cultures’ were identified as the city of Buffalo and the surrounding region, linked by sharply different poverty rates.

The program, focused on discussing underlying issues that go beyond last year’s events in Ferguson, Missouri, was the work of UB graduate student Andrew Tabashneck, who traveled to Ferguson last November with two other UB Law School students. Their trip was in response to an emergency request from the National Lawyers Guild for legal observers, following violence that roiled the city for weeks after a grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, on Aug. 9, 2014, in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis.

The topics of discussion, open to panel members and the audience, were wide-ranging.

“To move our region forward, we need to get a better understanding of implicit bias versus overt bias,” said panel member Sam Magavern, co-director, Partnership for the Public Good, and clinical adjunct professor, UB Law School. “To not just talk about how prejudice is bad. Implicit bias is a critical factor in this, something we must all begin to recognize. How do we see implicit bias happening? It is not just a police problem.”

Audience and panel members also discussed the value of diversity training and body cameras for police.

“Sensitivity training and diversity training is absolutely critical to continue — because things change,” said Joshua Sticht, deputy chief of University Police.  “We are doing that now within our own police department here at UB. We have to keep moving forward.”

Several audience members agreed, saying such training would help build better bridges across racial divides and improve law enforcement practices in neighborhoods across the city and the region.

On the subject of body cameras worn by police, there was some difference of opinion.

“I don’t think they will make a big difference in changing the disparity without also building the relationships between the two sides,” said Curtis Alford, program director for Urban Christian Ministries. “They are useful, but not a solution.”

Sticht noted, however, that early studies have shown drastic decreases in levels of complaints against police with the use of the cameras.

“They are very much worth exploring,” said Magavern. “Civility of both the officers and the individuals they meet in their day-to-day work goes up when everyone knows they are being recorded.”

Other panel participants included Valerie Dobson, University Police officer; John Washington, community organizer, People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH); and Lana Benatovich, president, National Federation for Just Communities.