The three candidates for mayor of Buffalo have all made public safety a focus of their campaigns.
Democrat Sean Ryan, Republican James Gardner and independent Michael Gainer all say lower crime will help people feel safe in their homes, create a better climate for businesses to grow and enhance civic pride.
This is the first in a series of articles detailing the candidates’ policy platforms on critical issues facing Buffalo as City Hall will see its first newly elected mayor in 20 years.
Public safety officials in Buffalo have touted recent drops in crime after spikes during the heart of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Throughout the year, most violent and property crime categories are down, with only aggravated assault rising by 1%, in year-over-year comparisons. Compared with last year, in which those crimes were already sinking, homicides are down 46% and shooting incidents are down 30%.
Still, residents have voiced concerns, particularly around quality-of-life issues. Block club leaders and residents wonder what the next mayor will do about public safety issues like homelessness, derelict properties, dirt bikes and ATVs racing through the streets, and drug dealing.
Here are details of their plans, as explained in interviews with The News, in public statements and in campaign materials.
This is the second in a series of articles detailing the candidates’ policy platforms on critical issues facing the city as voters will choose a new mayor for the first time in a generation.
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Gainer views investing in youth, particularly in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, as an effective tool at preventing crime.
He plans a training and jobs program for young people he calls City Action Corps, which he envisions as a community beautification program that also provides apprenticeship opportunities for young people. He said in addition to making communities look better and feel safer, such a program would offer young people jobs, purpose and pride.
He wants to partner with Erie County to expand a street-level treatment program for addiction and mental health for homeless people.
“I very rarely see boots on the ground from those homeless organizations and entities from those drug addiction services,” Gainer said. “We need to put more of those boots on the ground doing prevention and intervention.”
He also wants to expand the foot patrol program recently rolled out by Buffalo police, as he has heard positive reviews of the program while canvassing neighborhoods, he said.
“I’ve talked to police chiefs specifically about the implementation of those foot patrols, and they would love to have more resources committed to that, but they’re stretched,” Gainer said. “They’re stretched because they’re dealing with all of these social service needs.”
And Gainer said focusing on derelict buildings with code enforcement and other tools, where people sometimes squat or use the spaces for illegal activities, would help beautify neighborhoods while also preventing crime.
“Long-term vacancy should not be a strategy,” he said. “It is disempowering. It decreases the value of those communities, and it doesn’t do anything to help us address our housing needs and our housing shortages.”
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Gardner has made public safety his campaign’s top focus, holding several events highlighting crimes across the city. He has railed against the state’s bail reform laws. He has held press conferences in front of pizza shops to highlight a string of burglaries in the city’s restaurants. And he visited a Bailey Avenue grocery store the day after it was broken into and posted his interaction with the owners on social media.
Despite the encouraging statistics in crime reduction from the Buffalo Police Department, Gardner said crime and safety are often the first concerns raised by people he meets on the campaign trail.
“The message that I have heard has been the number one priority is public safety,” Gardner said. “That is the top of every agenda,” at block club meetings he has attended throughout Buffalo.
Gardner pointed to his time as a prosecutor in the Erie County District Attorney’s Office and as a law clerk for Erie County Judge Kenneth Case as making him the candidate best suited to handle public safety issues from City Hall.
He said that the perception that crime is bad in the city, in part because of increased visibility of homeless populations, specifically downtown, is preventing people and families from moving into the city and dissuading people from starting businesses.
Gardner said that as mayor he would be more aggressive about using tools the city already has. For example, he would act faster to declare properties a nuisance if they had been the site of large parties or known drug dealing. He said he would bring landlords into Housing Court faster, in an attempt to root out properties being used for illegal activity. “That’s the kind of decisive action that has to happen … where you have individual problem houses that directly and awfully affect neighborhoods,” Gardner said.
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Ryan said that while he cheers the falling rates of serious crimes, as mayor he would work with the Buffalo Police Department to continue improving on crime prevention and police work. He pointed to some changes that the department has made in recent years that have helped those numbers fall, and wants to continue pursuing more methods of crime prevention.
A shift in the work of the Detective’s Bureau has put those detectives in more direct contact with violence prevention volunteers who work in neighborhoods and with community police officers, which Ryan supports.
“We need to keep on that model,” Ryan said.
Ryan said the reduction in homicides is admirable. But reducing nuisance crimes would also be a focus of the Police Department under his leadership, he said.
City Hall and Buffalo police will need to continue building their relationship with the Erie County District Attorney’s Office, to make sure that serial thieves and repeat offenders of property crimes face stronger consequences, Ryan said.
“When I’m mayor, I want to be able to follow those things through to make sure that the people who are accused of these multiple nuisance crimes actually at the end of the day, face punishment for it, and I think that’s how you get some of the nuisance crimes down,” Ryan said.
Ryan said he wants to bring county and state resources together with those working on issues of homelessness to combat what he described as the worst and most visible homelessness he has seen in his adult life.
The presence of large numbers of homeless people can make people feel unsafe, in addition to being unsafe for those who live on the streets or have unstable housing, he said. Ryan wants to expand programs that connect people with services, with a goal of getting more people into stable housing.
“No one deserves to be living like that,” Ryan said. “But it adds to this growing sense of unease.”
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