Buffalo Officers Quit Response Team After Colleagues Suspended

Originally published 2020-06-07.

On 5 June 2020, all 57 members of the Buffalo Police Department's Emergency Response Team stepped down from that unit. They did it the morning after two of their colleagues were suspended without pay for pushing 75-year-old protester Martin Gugino to the pavement in Niagara Square. None of the 57 left the police force. They gave up a specialist assignment, the riot-control team, and went back to their regular duties.

Most early headlines said the officers had "resigned", and many readers took that to mean they had quit policing altogether. They had not. What they did, why the union backed it, and how the case against the two officers ended tells you a lot about how accountability in American policing works in practice.

The shove that started it

The confrontation took place on the evening of 4 June 2020, during the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Buffalo's mayor, Byron Brown, had imposed an 8 p.m. curfew, and shortly after it began a line of officers moved forward to clear Niagara Square, the plaza in front of City Hall.

Gugino, a long-time Catholic peace activist, walked up to the line. Video recorded by a local public radio reporter shows two officers pushing him back. He fell backwards, struck his head on the ground and lay still while blood ran from his ear. Several officers walked past him. One officer who began to lean down toward him was pulled away by a colleague. Thinking Humanity covered the first footage in an earlier report on the video and the officer involved.

His injuries were serious. He suffered a fractured skull and a brain injury and could not walk for some time. He spent almost four weeks in hospital and was released on 30 June.

A false first account, then suspensions

At 8:50 p.m. that night the department told the public that a person had "tripped & fell" during a skirmish with protesters. The video, which spread across the world within hours, showed nothing of the kind. The department later explained that the description had come from officers who were not directly involved.

The response from City Hall was fast. By around 11 p.m. the two officers seen pushing Gugino, Robert McCabe and Aaron Torgalski, had been suspended without pay, and the police commissioner ordered an internal investigation. Governor Andrew Cuomo called their conduct "fundamentally offensive and frightening" and urged the city to consider firing them.

Why 57 officers left the Emergency Response Team

The next day, local TV reporter Dave Greber of News 4 Buffalo broke the news that the entire Emergency Response Team had stepped off the unit. His tweet made the key point that is often lost: the officers remained employed and simply stopped serving on the team.

#BREAKING: I’m told the entire @BPDAlerts Emergency Response Team has resigned from the team, a total of 57 officers, as a show of support for the officers who are suspended without pay after shoving Martin Gugino, 75. They are still employed, but no longer on ERT. @news4buffalo

— Dave Greber (@DaveGreber4) June 5, 2020

The Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, the officers' union, presented the move as solidarity. Its president, John Evans, argued that the suspended pair had done what they were told to do when the square was being cleared, and that the team members had walked away in disgust at how the two were treated.

That was not the whole story, though. The union had also announced that it would stop paying legal fees for officers in protest-related cases. Two of the officers who left the team said their decision had more to do with that loss of legal cover than with solidarity. Riot-control work carries real legal exposure, and some officers did not want to do it without a guarantee that someone would pay for their defence.

How local officials reacted

Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said publicly that he would be disappointed if the officers had stepped down, because it suggested they saw nothing wrong in what had happened. News 4 Buffalo posted his comments:

"If they resigned, I'm exceptionally disappointed by it because it indicates to me that they did not see anything wrong with the actions last night," Poloncarz said after being asked about the ERT Team resigning. pic.twitter.com/gbQ4Z7vKr5

— News 4 Buffalo (@news4buffalo) June 5, 2020

The city said contingency plans were in place, and that state police and other agencies would help keep services running. A few days later Mayor Brown announced changes, including appearance tickets instead of arrests for nonviolent protesters and a new public protection unit to replace the Emergency Response Team. He also said the union was "in the wrong".

The problem with "following orders"

The union's defence put the incident into a much older argument. "Following orders" is one of the best-known excuses in modern history, and it has a poor record.

After the Second World War, the Nuremberg tribunals rejected the claim that an order from above removes personal responsibility. The principle that came out of those trials, often called Nuremberg Principle IV, says a person who acted on government or superior orders is still responsible if a real moral choice was possible. Obedience might reduce a sentence, but it is not a defence. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court allows the defence only in narrow cases: the person had to be legally bound to obey, did not know the order was unlawful, and the order was not obviously unlawful.

None of that means two police officers in Buffalo can be compared with war criminals, and fair-minded critics did not make that comparison. The point is narrower. In any profession that uses force, the order to clear a square does not settle how much force is reasonable against a particular person. That judgement stays with the individual officer.

How the criminal case ended

On 6 June 2020, McCabe and Torgalski were charged with second-degree assault, a felony. They pleaded not guilty and were released without bail.

The case did not get far. On 11 February 2021, Erie County District Attorney John Flynn announced that a grand jury had dismissed the charges, so neither officer stood trial. In April 2022 an arbitrator ruled that the two officers had not broken the department's use-of-force guidelines.

Gugino filed a civil lawsuit on 22 February 2021 against the city, the officers, the mayor and senior police officials, alleging that his constitutional rights had been violated. Former President Donald Trump had suggested on Twitter in June 2020 that Gugino might be an "ANTIFA provocateur", a claim for which no evidence was ever produced. Gugino's lawyer called it "dark, dangerous and untrue". Gugino died in early 2026, at the age of 81, as Buffalo Toronto Public Media reported in April 2026.

What the episode shows

Several lessons from Buffalo still apply to similar cases:

• Read "resigned" carefully. Officers stepping off a unit, refusing overtime or taking sick days is not the same as leaving the job. The wording shapes how the public judges the protest.
• First official statements can be wrong. The "tripped and fell" line was published before anyone looked at the footage. Independent video has become one of the main checks on first accounts.
• Suspension is not conviction. The two officers were suspended within hours, charged within two days and cleared by a grand jury eight months later. Each stage used a different standard.
• Union support can mean more than it says. Legal-fee policies and liability worries often drive collective action as much as loyalty does.

The Buffalo case has become a reference point in arguments about police accountability, and people on both sides use it. Supporters of the officers point to the grand jury and the arbitration ruling. Critics point to the false first statement and to the image of officers stepping past an injured 75-year-old man.

Sources: Wikipedia: Buffalo police shoving incident; Wikipedia: Superior orders; Dave Greber, News 4 Buffalo, on X (5 June 2020); News 4 Buffalo on X (5 June 2020); video: WBFO / YouTube.