BUFFALO, N.Y. — Between 2012 and 2020, one Buffalo police officer, Kelvin Sharpe, wrote nearly 12,000 traffic tickets.
More than two-thirds of those Sharpe ticketed were Black, according to data gathered from Erie County and the City of Buffalo and analyzed by attorneys for the plaintiffs in a federal civil rights lawsuit.
Another Buffalo cop, 14-year veteran Michael Acquino, wrote nearly 2,500 tickets for tinted windows in that same time period, 2012-2020.
About 85 percent of the recipients were Black.
A third officer, Richard Hy, issued, on average, at least one more ticket per stop to minority drivers compared to white drivers over those nine years.
In total, at least 70 percent of the tickets Hy wrote in that period were issued to nonwhites.
The plaintiffs in Black Loves Resists in the Rust et al. vs. City of Buffalo et al. want to talk to those three officers, as well as eight more cops and two civilian city employees.
The lawsuit, filed in July 2018, accuses the City of Buffalo and its police department of racially discriminatory and unconstitutional traffic enforcement policies and practices.