While police shootings of African Americans have touched off loud and sometimes violent protests in other cities, relations in Buffalo have remained tense but calm. But panelists taking part in a downtown forum Wednesday warned that what happened in Baltimore and in Ferguson, Missouri can happen in Buffalo if wholesale social changes are not made.
Media outlet Investigative Post hosted a lunch-hour forum on police-community relations to discuss the subject of tensions between police and the African American and Latino communities.
Henry Taylor, a UB professor and founding director of the Center for Urban Studies, said police violence against members of the black community is symptomatic of the greater social issues that need to be addressed, including education, employment, and health.
"Systems create cultures to reproduce them," said Taylor. "We need systems changes. With those system changes will come the kind of broad-sweeping cultural changes that we need."
Those changes, Taylor and fellow panelist Darius Pridgen said, include education, neighborhoods, the labor force and other opportunities. Pridgen, a Buffalo Common Council member and church pastor, says one reason why relations between police and the community have remained tense but calm in Buffalo is that the city took proactive steps following unrest in Baltimore and Ferguson.
"When I saw Ferguson happening and Baltimore happening, as a legislator I knew that in this area, if we didn't get in front of this issue that we could possible have this issue," Pridgen said. "As the Common Council President, one of the first things I did was to bring back the police oversight commission of the Council."
Pridgen, when speaking of a need for cultural change, looked to education and noted that the current culture enables young people to remain undereducated and become lured into gang life. Most of the gang-related homicide victims he says he has buried have kids of their own, who are then cycled into this culture.
Of the numerous homicide victims he has buried, Pridgen says only one had college credits.
