February 17, 2023

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Below is a transcript. Please consider listening to our episodes as they are meant to be heard, not read. 

Sara Ganim:

Note: this episode contains explicit language.

Hi, I’m Sara.

Cariol Horne:

Nice to meet you.

How are you, Sara?

Sara Ganim:

In the first episode of this season, we talked about how there are plenty of examples of good police who feel silenced by bad policy.

So here’s what I was thinking for today.

… Pressured to stay quiet.

I rented a car. Why don’t we drive around? Just like the places that are significant transition periods in your life when you decided you wanted to be a police officer. The incident that happened obviously. Thought it might be good for me to learn at the same time as Gabe. Talk about the story.

Cariol Horne:

You’re going to learn today.

Sara Ganim:

This is, Why Don’t We Know, the podcast about data deserts and missing information and the real life consequences of government secrecy. I’m Sara Ganim, and in this episode I talked to a former police officer named Cariol Horne who stood up in a moment of injustice, stopped a police officer from choking a man, about why more cops don’t do what she did.

Cariol Horne:

So this is Buffalo, east Side, cold Spring area.

Sara Ganim:

Where you born here?

Cariol Horne:

Born and raised.

Sara Ganim:

I met Cariol Horne on a Friday in July.

Cariol Horne:

We used to go to this school, school 39, which is Martin Luther King school. There was a store right here. It’s a lot now. A lot of things that I grew up with are now lots. Johnson Street.

Sara Ganim:

This is yours, huh?

Cariol Horne:

We used to live here, 306 to live here, and I used to live in the back. My sister used to live here upstairs, the 309. My mother lived at 311, but my mother, she lived at 306 when we were younger and that’s where we grew up. So this street has, I have a lot of memories on here.

My first love lived over on Herman Street, so we used to go over there and I just used a tomboy. So we used to wrestle the boys and everything, and it was like he bought me a necklace with some earrings and I was like, oh my God. He gave it to me. I’m like, thank you. And then my mother was like, give it back. I was like, she made me give it back. I was so heartbroken. I think that she, because we lived in poverty, even though it didn’t seem like poverty and people tried to put money on a pedestal, and of course you need it, but we had love.

Sara Ganim:

How old were you when you decided to join the force?

Cariol Horne:

I was like 18, 19. I think I was 19 when I took the test. I think.

Sara Ganim:

What motivated you to do that?

Cariol Horne:

My son [inaudible 00:02:44]. He knew about civil service exams and they were basically hiring minorities because they had to fill a quota from a lawsuit that the Afro-American Police Association filed a lawsuit for them to be more black officers. They hired more black officers, and I was in that number.

Sara Ganim:

This was in ’88?

1988.

Cariol Horne:

’88 is when I got sworn in.

Sara Ganim:

Was there a time when you liked your work?

Cariol Horne:

Oh, I loved the work. I loved the people. I love the community. I did not like the administration. Man, I didn’t like how I saw officers treat people.

Sara Ganim:

Right from the beginning.

Cariol Horne:

From the very beginning, yes. There was a training officer that I had. He took a pager from a young black boy. He didn’t do anything wrong. He just stopped him and then took him to the station. And then he was like, you know, going to just take my pager. He’s like, you got to give me a receipt or something. And he wrote on a tiny piece of paper, I got your beeper. And then he said to him, how many times you been arrested? And the guy says, I’ve never been arrested. He says, you’re 18 and you haven’t been arrested? At that time, I was probably like 21, 22. And I was thinking, you got to make a left. I was thinking, I’ve never been arrested. I was like 21, 22. Why should he even think that this guy had been arrested? Because…

Sara Ganim:

If you’re young and black, you must be a criminal.

Cariol Horne:

Right?

Sara Ganim:

And you need to be arrested.

Cariol Horne:

And the guy was not, the cop, I always thought he was a nice guy. This is the station right here. This is where I worked at and I got fired. So this is C district?

Sara Ganim:

This is C district? What does that mean?

Cariol Horne:

C as in Cariol. No, they have A, B, C, D, and E districts. So this is, A is south Buffalo, B is downtown, C of course is east side, D is LaMoure north, Buffalo E is east side, east north.

Sara Ganim:

And C, does C serve a predominantly black community?

Cariol Horne:

Yes.

Sara Ganim:

Are there predominantly black police officers working there?

Cariol Horne:

I don’t think so.

Sara Ganim:

When you were there, was it predominantly black?

Cariol Horne:

No. So it was always more whites working than blacks.

Sara Ganim:

Even though the community…

Cariol Horne:

Was predominantly black.

Sara Ganim:

That’s probably a problem.

Cariol Horne:

Well, it could be part of the problem, but if the black officers would not just go along to get along and just not let them come into our community and treat people any type of way, it wouldn’t happen. And it’s basically a go along, get along type of mentality. I sat and watched the instance where he took the pager…

Sara Ganim:

As we sat parked in front of the C District police precinct, Cariol Horne told me another story.

Cariol Horne:

One time I sat and I was on the passenger side, and I can actually feel that same feeling that I was feeling when I was there.

Sara Ganim:

A different time that she sat silently and watched.

Cariol Horne:

There were some white officers beating on this black guy. I remember him having dreads and I remember them hitting him in the head with a flashlight, which is their go-to weapon. They were beating the guy. And I sat there and I said, if they hit him one more time, I’m going to stop them. And they hit him one more time, two more times, three more times. And I just sat there like this. Who do I tell? If I stop they’re going to probably beat me. I wasn’t sure what to do.

Sara Ganim:

And as the years went on, these incidents were piling up for her.

Cariol Horne:

One time I answered a call. It was a burglary call. It was over $10,000. So a detective needed to come and investigate it. So I called to speak to a detective. And so I’m on the phone with her and the guy comes out and says he pulled a knife, he pulled a knife with my nine-year-old son. So I say, girl, I say, hold on, this guy said that somebody pulled a knife on his nine-year-old son. So then I go over there and he’s like, he’s right there, right there. I said, excuse me, sir, did you just pull a knife on this little boy? He turned around with a knife in his hand, but when I asked him I had my gun out, I wasn’t going to be stupid about it because when he saw the gun, he threw the knife down. I was like, get up against a wall.

I was like, how are you going to pull a knife on a nine-year-old? And then he was talking kind of crazy. And so I get my cuffs out or whatever. Got my gun out. I’m trying to grab my cuffs with my other hand and I dropped the cuffs. So listen, I’m about to pick these cuffs up. If you hit me in my head, I’m shooting you. I hadn’t called for backup, but because she heard me say that the guy had a knife, then she sent somebody to come and check out was a lieutenant. And so then by the time he came, I was putting the guy in the car and one of the officers says, Carol, because they called me Carol, I heard that you had a chance to shoot somebody and you didn’t. I said, if I didn’t have to shoot him, why would I shoot him?

Sara Ganim:

Cariol told me that at this point in her career, she’s realizing that she isn’t going to be able to go along to get along like some of her colleagues.

Did it make you stop liking your job?

Cariol Horne:

Yeah, I used to hate going to work. I used to hate that whenever I treated somebody with respect, they seemed, or trying to make it seem that I had six heads.

Sara Ganim:

Then in 1999, Cariol’s oldest son, who at the time was 16, was arrested outside of a train station.

Cariol Horne:

So he was leaving and he was leaving on the escalator, was a cop with a guy in handcuffs.

Sara Ganim:

She says her son basically walked into an arrest in progress and the police assumed that he was involved.

Cariol Horne:

Made them co-defendants and locked them up.

Sara Ganim:

The charges, according to Cariol were quickly tossed by a judge. And so she was pretty upset thinking that her son was just arrested just because he was black. Plus she says, that when she read the report, she saw a comment that a fellow police officer made that was disparaging about her.

Cariol Horne:

She says that I was a crack head.

Sara Ganim:

Around that same time. She says she was standing up for a fellow black female officer who was accused of assaulting another officer. And so she was feeling a lot of pressure, backlash from fellow officers. She could tell she was becoming a target.

Cariol Horne:

So I’m at bingo one day and the lady says, oh, be careful because you’re being investigated. And they said it was because of my bilateral hernia surgery.

Sara Ganim:

This was 2000. Cariol was injured on the job, and there’s a dispute about how much paid leave she should get. And eventually she stops showing up for work. And so she’s terminated.

Cariol Horne:

It took me five years to get back.

Sara Ganim:

But she gets her job back. An investigation finds that someone had altered her records and she was not wrong. So she’s back on the force by 2005. And then in 2006, about a year later, she finds herself once again watching another police officer mistreat someone. And this time she can’t just sit there and watch.

Okay, take me to this day in 2006.

Cariol Horne:

Yeah. So November 1st, 2006, there’s a popular restaurant down this way. It was called GG’s. I was there having breakfast with one of the guys. We were working in one man cars. So we met for breakfast, one of the other officers. And after breakfast, I get in the car, I hear the call, and the call is officer in trouble. So I go over there where this white van is, just stop. Right, right here. This is 707 Walden is here. And then when you see up the door, you go to that door, go up the stairs, go to the left, and when we go in, I’ll look to the left. There’s a young man on the ground, I see a cop, this nice stick. And then I look to the right and there’s like a scuffle going on.

Sara Ganim:

The scuffle is between a man named Neal Mack who lived at that house. And Buffalo police officer Greg Kwiatkowski.

Cariol Horne:

So Greg has Neal Mack, who’s handcuffed in the front, which is not protocol to be cuffed in the front. And then he’s punching him in the head. And then he said, they beat me. They beat me. And then Greg is like, this mf’er won’t listen. Something to that effect.

Sara Ganim:

At this point, Horne says that another officer steps in and offers to handcuff Neal Mack in the back as protocol states they should.

Cariol Horne:

Since Greg let me get him, let me cuff him in the back. Greg just kept punching. I’m like, no, this mf’er won’t listen. And he swung him towards us. So now I’m thinking we need to get him out of here before he kills him. But anyway, we get him outside. There was a gate, I don’t know if I see a gate now. There was a gate that was right there and his leg got caught in the gate. I don’t know if we pushed his leg in the gate or what, but we had to move back and push forward. And I think from that momentum that Greg may have fell, I’m not sure. But whatever happened, Greg stopped, swung him back around and just choked him. And he squatted down.

Sara Ganim:

At this point he’s on the ground?

Cariol Horne:

No, he’s like crouched down and he pulled Neal Mack to him. So now they’re, Neal Mack is on the ground, but he’s choking him. And I’m like, Greg, you’re choking him. That’s when I just grabbed his arm from around his neck.

Sara Ganim:

Kwiatkowski later accused Cariol Horne of jumping on his back, attacking him and trying to stop Neal Mack’s arrest.

Cariol Horne:

From the testimony he was saying that he went down. But then he also was saying that I pulled him.

Sara Ganim:

You pulled him?

Cariol Horne:

Yeah, I pulled him by his collar or whatever. He’s saying that I was to his left side. We were face to face. Because how can I jump on his back? If we are face to face? And a person is between us, it’s impossible. Neal Mack’s face was towards me because he was holding him in a choke hold.

Sara Ganim:

He was choking him.

Cariol Horne:

Right, right.

Sara Ganim:

With his arm? And not with his hands, with his arm?

Cariol Horne:

His forearm. With his forearm. And so then Neal Mack was in front of me. Well, they both were in front of me, but Mack was between us. So his back wasn’t even available for me to jump on. Not that I would’ve jumped on his back because that wasn’t what I was thinking. I was thinking about releasing the choke hold, which is what I did. I grabbed his arm.

Sara Ganim:

He was clearly in distress when… I mean he was struggling to breath. Was he saying anything?

Cariol Horne:

No.

Sara Ganim:

You just knew that Greg was choking him.

Cariol Horne:

I knew that if I didn’t stop that he would kill him. And I was hoping that I wasn’t too late because of the way he looked.

Sara Ganim:

You tried to release the arm from his neck?

Cariol Horne:

I didn’t try. I did.

Sara Ganim:

You did release the arm from his neck. And what did Greg do?

Cariol Horne:

He came up out of his crouch position and punched me in the face.

Sara Ganim:

He punched you in the face. Did you fall back or I mean, what happened?

Cariol Horne:

Well, after that we started arguing because then I was ready to defend myself. But two officers got between us, two officers pulled me back. I think that’s how my rotated cuff got torn because I think when he pulled me back, he pulled me back really, really hard. God only knows how it would’ve escalated. But the point is, so I didn’t fault them for that. What happened next was the Ann Vanyo.

Sara Ganim:

Ann Vanyo is another officer who eventually was fired for threatening to kill someone. Actually, in reporting for the story, we got her personnel file and found she had quite a few investigations into her conduct, and Ann Vanyo played a big role in what happened to Cariol Horne.

Cariol Horne:

She said that Greg was just trying to do his job as if I was interfering. I said, what? Killing somebody. She said that I turned around, pushed her full force with my hands and caused injury to her and it never happened. I never touched her. I did turn towards her and said, get back bitch.

Sara Ganim:

So how many in total officers were there? Do you remember?

Cariol Horne:

I think that we got in count of 18. I think it was.

Sara Ganim:

18 officers? Was it basically 17 on one when the stories are written down at the end of the day?

Cariol Horne:

No.

Sara Ganim:

Was it you against everybody or were there other people?

Cariol Horne:

Oh, the stories didn’t even go together. They didn’t even match.

Sara Ganim:

But basically everybody’s against you and siding with Greg at the end of the day or no?

Cariol Horne:

No, because we just had some people that told the truth, but they did not use any of the black testimony. When I say none of the black testimony, I mean any of the black officers that said anything that could have helped me they didn’t use.

Sara Ganim:

In the internal investigation?

Cariol Horne:

Right.

Sara Ganim:

How did it come to be that you were the target of this investigation?

Cariol Horne:

Yeah, you have to ask them. You would have to ask them because that is the trillion-dollar question right there. But I think it was because I kept speaking up about things.

Sara Ganim:

So what did you find out later? Why were they even, why were they even there? Why were they arresting Neal?

Cariol Horne:

Okay, good. I’m glad you asked that. So the mailman saw Neal Mack and his girlfriend arguing, and there was a police car going past.

Sara Ganim:

The mailman sees them arguing and a police officer stops and the situation escalates. Neal Mack is charged, but a judge tosses the case. He’s never convicted of any wrongdoing.

Cariol Horne:

I wanted to file criminal charges against Greg.

Sara Ganim:

For punching you?

Cariol Horne:

Right, they wouldn’t allow me to. Right. They wouldn’t allow me to. So rather than do that, they put charges on me.

Sara Ganim:

So they charged you with what? With interfering with an arrest?

Cariol Horne:

Yeah. So obstructing, harassment.

Sara Ganim:

Harassment? What sort of harassment?

Cariol Horne:

They said that for pushing Ann Vanyo, which I never did.

Sara Ganim:

Got it.

Cariol Horne:

And I don’t know if it was assault. I don’t, no, I don’t think it was assault. But they charged me administratively. They never charged me criminally, which is what they should have done if they felt that I had did something wrong and they didn’t.

Sara Ganim:

In all, Cariol faced 13 violations of department rules. They spent six months investigating. Meanwhile, she’s relegated to desk duty. She fought for and got a rare public hearing, and ultimately she was found guilty of 11 departmental charges. And then she gets fired. Not only that, Kwiatkowski then files a defamation suit against her and he wins an almost $70,000 judgment. And Cariol Horne ends up having to pay him about $20,000.

Cariol Horne:

Mentally, physically, emotionally, I’ve been drained. Financially drained.

Sara Ganim:

What kind of jobs have you had to work over the years?

Cariol Horne:

Well, I’ve done truck driving, Uber, Lyft, taxi cab driving. I drove the college bus.

Sara Ganim:

What’s the college bus?

Cariol Horne:

The Stampede, UB, University of Buffalo. They have a bus that goes from campus to campus. So I drove that. It just was so boring to me because we only go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

Sara Ganim:

She told me that she truly did not mind driving trucks on longer routes, but along with driving, she had to do heavy lifting and she hurt herself.

Cariol Horne:

I smashed my finger and from the police department, I hurt my ankle and was never able to get it properly taken care of. Which of course causes you to overuse the other one, which causes that one to hurt.

Sara Ganim:

She was behind on bills and on rent.

Cariol Horne:

I was behind in the rent. I tried to pay it. Oh. Because I had like $700 then.

Sara Ganim:

And then she gets an eviction notice.

Cariol Horne:

Not old. Probably like about 2000. Whatever.

Sara Ganim:

You got evicted.

Cariol Horne:

Yeah, I did. I got evicted. Yeah.

Sara Ganim:

It’s a struggle.

Cariol Horne:

It’s been very hard. It’s been very hard. The reason I really bounced back or kept bouncing back was because of my children, I knew that I had to show them that regardless of what you go through, you have to keep it moving.

Sara Ganim:

All of those years, Cariol Horne was villainized, made out to be a bad cop who lied on other cops, someone who can’t be trusted. Even the Afro-American Police Association turned on her. But Cariol wouldn’t shut up. She wouldn’t be silenced. She continued to talk openly about what happened that day in Neal Mack’s yard.

Cariol Horne:

No, I never gave up hope because I knew that I had to create change because nobody has the backbone to do it. And because I knew that I was right, and I knew that, you know what happened on the police department prior to any of this happening, I just was like, no, I can’t, because somebody else is going to go through the same thing and they’re not going to know what to do.

Sara Ganim:

And somebody else did go through the same thing. Right? Greg ends up choking somebody else.

Cariol Horne:

And choked another officer.

Sara Ganim:

We also got the personnel file for Officer Greg Kwiatkowski and found that he had several internal affairs investigations into his conduct. One was for excessive force on a teenager in 2009. And in that case, Kwiatkowski was actually investigated by federal prosecutors and charged in 2013, he ended up taking a plea deal and spending four months in jail. But there’s this whole decade and a half that goes by in between the Neal Mack incident and Kwiatkowski’s conviction, a whole 15 years where Cariol Horne still isn’t believed. And during this time, she’s struggling for work, struggling to pay bills. She has been stripped of her pension. Even after Kwiatkowski indictment, Cariol still does not get her pension back. In fact, it took 13 years for Cariol Horne to get a reversal of that order with the ruling finally coming down in April of 2021. New York State Supreme Court Judge Dennis Ward reversed her firing and wrote “To her credit Officer Horne did not merely stand by, but instead sought to intervene despite the penalty she ultimately paid for doing so.”

Cariol Horne:

I didn’t get a picture until like two weeks ago.

Sara Ganim:

Two weeks ago? Oh my God.

Cariol Horne:

And it was because George Floyd, because he died. That’s why it even came up. So I have to be grateful to George Floyd, which is horrible to think about his death.

Sara Ganim:

What do you think it was?

Cariol Horne:

Because people wanted the police to stop Derek Chauvin from choking him. They wanted them to stop. And they’re like, well, why didn’t he?

Sara Ganim:

And when people said, why didn’t the other police officers stop him? And you basically could sit there and say…

Cariol Horne:

Exactly. People don’t want to lose their livelihood. They’d rather cover up, which is crazy. It makes no sense to me. Why would you just not do the right thing?

Sara Ganim:

Well, I guess to play devil’s advocate, doing the right thing didn’t work out so great for you for many years. Right? Do you think people are just scared?

Cariol Horne:

They are. But why?

Sara Ganim:

Well…

Cariol Horne:

And it’s more of us than the people that want to do wrong, but it seems like the people that do wrong have the power. And that irritates me because we have a lot of power. We just don’t realize it.

Sara Ganim:

So the community members rallied and they’ve pushed for them to take a second look and then they gave you the pension back.

Cariol Horne:

Right. And so that’s when we did the Cariol’s Law campaign.

Sara Ganim:

Cariol’s Law mandates police bystander intervention. It provides protection from retaliation and it creates a required reportable registry for officers who abuse Cariol got it passed in Buffalo and is now advocating to make it the law nationwide.

Cariol Horne:

So I just said, you know what? I don’t want another officer to have to go through what I have gone through for doing the right thing. And I understand the stigma that’s put on you if you’re on the police department. But I said, well, now an officer can say they’re not breaking that law from you and they have to respect it. It’s the duty to intervene. I break it down to the acronym, DAPAIRD. D-A-P-A-I-R-D is for the duty to intervene. A is accountability for not intervening. P is for protected for officers who do intervene. A is for accountability, for falsifying reports. It impacts the funding when they don’t adhere to it. R is a restorative justice.

Sara Ganim:

So the P protection.

Cariol Horne:

Protection for officers who do intervene. So no, they wouldn’t be fired like I was.

Sara Ganim:

I think that’s the important, I mean they’re all important, but that’s like, to me that really stands out because that doesn’t exist in many police departments. I would venture to say almost none. Police officers are afraid to do the right thing because the backlash is so great. And there are these examples of it all across the country.

Cariol Horne:

Of course.

Sara Ganim:

Yours is just one, but many and I’m sure there are many that we don’t know about and we’ll never know about. What do you do about that? I mean that’s…

Cariol Horne:

You pass Cariol’s law on the national level and you add a national registry.

Sara Ganim:

And the national registry is to… pass the trash basically/

Cariol Horne:

Exactly. Yeah. Can’t pass the trash. Is that what you said? Exactly.

Sara Ganim:

Pass the trash comes from, I cover a lot of education stories. Teachers who slept with students or sexually assault students. There’s also not a registry for that. And then a lot of times they call it pass the trash.

Pass The trash is a slang term that I picked up while covering education corruption stories. It’s what educators say when teachers who are caught sexually assaulting students are allowed to leave their schools and get jobs at other ones.

Why is there a cultural problem and how do you fix that?

Cariol Horne:

Because they are brainwashed to think that they need this brotherhood because some of these people are really dangerous.

Sara Ganim:

Do you think it comes from this defensive sort of need to protect your own?That outside of the police force, and these are people, they’re understanding…

Cariol Horne:

But then there’s really no unity for real for all.

Sara Ganim:

As we drove down the streets of East Buffalo, it became clear to me quite quickly that Cariol is kind of a local hero here. She’s easy to spot. She has a head full of bright gray hair and a very contagious smile. People waved at her as we drove windows down through the streets.

Cariol Horne:

I don’t know him, but people just do that. They just waved.

Sara Ganim:

She’s even featured on a banner celebrating local community heroes.

You’re a celebrity around here.

Cariol Horne:

They always say, oh, hey our local celebrity. But it kind of makes me feel funny for stopping, doing something I was supposed to do. And they’re like, yeah, but people don’t. They don’t, but they should.

Sara Ganim:

But this goodwill does not extend to her former colleagues at the police department. Even though she’s been vindicated by the courts.

Cariol Horne:

Some of the officers are cool with it, but still that go along, get along type of mentality. So they can’t, a lot of them outwardly can’t say it.

Sara Ganim:

She still feels that she and her family are targeted.

Any other notable moments?

Cariol Horne:

Yeah, Destiny right here at the Chinese place. Thank you. They pulled her over. Her license was suspended.

Sara Ganim:

Her daughter was pulled over and while she admits that her license was suspended, Cariol says that the way that she was treated was still unacceptable.

Cariol Horne:

Basically, they dragged her out of the car. I have a video I’ll show you.

Sara Ganim:

She did show me that video and it showed what she described.

That’s crazy.

Cell phone video:

Crazy. Are you serious?

Officer:

Get out of the car!

Cell phone video:

Yo? Yeah. This shit is crazy.

Cariol Horne:

This is why everything I tell you about. I pretty much got proof of it.

Sara Ganim:

And recently Cariol’s car was towed in the middle of the night.

Cariol Horne:

Why are you coming to my house at midnight? Towing my vehicle?

Sara Ganim:

Police said her van didn’t have insurance, but she says it did.

Cariol Horne:

Let me tell you, the car behind me was my daughter’s boyfriend’s car that had no insurance, no registration, no nothing. So if the reader would’ve went off, it would’ve went off on that one first.

Sara Ganim:

She says she proved she had insurance, but she still had to pay to get the van back.

Cariol Horne:

I had to pay, had to pay for a tow to get it out of there.

Sara Ganim:

Cariol’s teenage son was also convicted of murder last year. Court records show he wasn’t the shooter, but he was arrested for participating in the robbery. Cariol said officers who had problems with her did not recuse themselves from the investigation and that really bothered her.

Cariol Horne:

They know that he didn’t do the shooting, but you want a 16-year-old to go away for 25 years to life for something that he didn’t do. It’s like why?

Sara Ganim:

And then

News report:

The city of Buffalo is digging out after several feet of snow blanketed cars, roads and homes.

Sara Ganim:

During the aftermath of the December holiday blizzard that paralyzed Buffalo dumping four feet of snow and blowing 70 mile an hour winds. Cariol was out trying to help people and she noticed some folks who were being detained by police were forced to sit in the snow. She says she approached police and was eventually arrested.

Cariol Horne:

I said to the officer, I was like, well, you need to get them off the ground. And he says that I needed to get back from impeding his investigation or else I’ll be on the ground.

Sara Ganim:

The paperwork shows she was accused of pointing a finger at police, obstructing, and refusing to move on.

Cariol Horne:

I got arrested because I was speaking up for people who were placed on the ground, on the cold ground and the snow. That’s pretty much it.

Sara Ganim:

Again, she felt targeted.

You think there’s a sense that we have to stand together because the rest of the world doesn’t understand us or the rest of the community is against us?

Cariol Horne:

Yeah, but that’s the bad cop mentality because why would the rest of the world not understand you?

Sara Ganim:

I know you had to talk a lot today, but I really appreciate everything you shared.

Cariol Horne:

No problem. No problem.

Sara Ganim:

And your tour of the town.

Cariol Horne:

Yeah, so you get to see Buffalo, raggedy Buffalo. The Raggedy Park. Okay. So I’ll see you whenever.

Sara Ganim:

It was good hanging out with you too. Thank you so much.

On my way to Buffalo that morning before I met Cariol Horne, I saw a news story in the airport.

News report:

Let’s go now to Buffalo, where the community will come together at the side of that city’s mass shooting.

Sara Ganim:

And I realized that this day that we had somewhat randomly picked to meet. It was a pretty significant day in the city of Buffalo.

News report:

Tops Markets is hoping to help customers disconnect the location from the trauma caused on May 14th.

It’s a step forward since a teenage gunman allegedly stormed the grocery store and shot 13 people, killing 10.

Sara Ganim:

It was the reopening day for the Tops grocery store where 10 people had been murdered a month earlier by a teenage white supremacist. When I arrived, I went to visit the memorial. Cariol was there holding a sign that said we put a bandaid on a gaping wound called racism.

Cariol Horne:

So rather than deal with that issue, they’re like, ma’am, Tops is reopening everybody. A lot of people are going along to get along.

Sara Ganim:

Cariol explained to me that she sees a lot of parallels between what happened to her and what happened at that Tops grocery store. Cariol sees the responses to both incidents as lacking as fleeting Unsubstantial as her sign says “Just band-Aids.”

What do you think they should have done at Tops?

Cariol Horne:

I think it should have been used to represent racism and getting over racism and working on racism. So if they wanted to do anything, how about some type of something that’s going to help with racism?

Sara Ganim:

So you think that by kind of opening today and just they’re kind of trying to say like, everything’s fine.

Cariol Horne:

Right.

Sara Ganim:

It’s beautiful.

Cariol Horne:

We’re not racist anymore. We got over it. We’re not racist anymore. Now you get over it. It’s like, but do you understand why? Just like the one guy says nothing’s changed, I said the day. That’s what’s changed.

Sara Ganim:

This is Why Don’t We Know.

Former police officers Ann Vanyo, Greg Kwiatkowski and the current officials at the Buffalo Police Department either could not be reached for comment on this episode, or did not return requests for comment by publication time.

This episode was written and produced by me, Sara Ganim, with records requests filed by our research consultant, Britney Suzan. Additional research and reporting was done by Trey Ecker and Brett Posner-Ferdman. This episode was edited by Amy Fu and James Sullivan at WUFT in Gainesville, Florida. The Why Don’t We Know theme music was composed by Pete Readman. Audio mixing was done by James Sullivan. Why Don’t We Know is a production of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida. For more information, please visit our website at www.whydontweknow.org.

Transcript completed by Rev.com