Buffalo City Council Votes To Reopen Case Of Black Officer Fired In 2008 For Stopping Chokehold

The City Council in Buffalo, New York unanimously passed a resolution to call on State Attorney General Letitia James to investigate the 2008 firing of Black officer Cariol Horne, who stopped a white colleague from choking a suspect during an arrest, according to WGRZ.

In 2006 Horne tried to pull white officer Gregory Kwiatkowski off of a black suspect but wasn’t fired until two years later when the Buffalo Police Department determined she put her fellow officers at risk.

“Now with so much attention being on the present and what some officers have done negatively, it is very difficult for some people to move forward if we have not repaired the past,” Buffalo Common Council President Darius Pridgen said to WGRZ.

Mayor Byron Brown tried to appeal on behalf of Horne to the then-Attorney General asking for her pension to be reinstated, but the Attorney General’s office declined to do so.

“I didn’t terminate her, she went through a process she called for and was terminated,” Brown said, referring to the arbitration process that Horne went through— and lost.

The Buffalo Police Department is facing scrutiny right now after footage surfaced of officers pushing down a 75-year-old man at a protest over the death of George Floyd and then stepping over the man as he lay bleeding on the ground.