BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — Buffalo police officer Marc Hurst and Lt. John Sullivan stopped by a corner store on East Ferry Street on Buffalo's East Side.
"How's business today?" Hurst asked a worker who was behind the counter.
"Half and half," the clerk said. "Too hot."
Hurst and Sullivan were on a directed patrol. That's a strategy Buffalo police have been using to fight gun violence.
Here's how it works:
Crime analysts identify hot spots where there have been shootings and reports of shots fired. They map them out in 500-foot by 500-foot grids. That information is sent out to the patrol officers' cell phones. Then, they drive to a hot spot, park their cruiser, turn on their emergency lights and they get out of their cars. Then, they walk around for about 15 to 20 minutes. They talk to folks they run into, go into shops, and mostly...they just try to be visible.
"You know, you walk with people, you're stopping and talking and see different points of view and getting to know each other. And I just think it's, it's great all around," Hurst said.
"I can speak for Charlie District," said Sullivan, referring to C District, the Ferry-Fillmore area where he works. "I think a lot of the crime has gone down since we've started doing these directed patrols. So I think it has a pretty big impact. Plus, like I said, getting out and walking around and talking to people is a great, great thing too."
Lt. Jonathan Pietrzak, who supervises the directed patrol program, says that there are studies that show that when police and their police cars are around, crime goes down.
"The fact that it's data-driven, we're not just picking and choosing random spots, but we're going there for a particular reason makes a big difference," he said.
Data from the Buffalo Police Department indicates gun violence has dropped in the city in the last two years.
Shootings skyrocketed in the city in 2020 and 2021, when there were nearly 300 shootings each of those years. But that number dropped by more than half by 2023, to 141.
The numbers for 2024 so far seem to be following that same downward trend, with 44 shootings so far, compared to 197 back in 2022.
