Cariol Horne says she’s been harassed for over a decade after blowing the whistle on a fellow Buffalo police officer. When Daily Kos spoke with Horne, she was just getting her car out of impoundment. She says it was illegally towed from in front of her house at midnight—another example, she claims, of the ongoing pressure on her and her family.
Horne, 54, is a mother of five and grandmother of 15. She worked as a Buffalo police officer for 18 years. But in 2006, she says, she’d had enough of the racist police brutality she’d witnessed, and it was time to stand up.
Horne joined the Buffalo Police Department in 1988. She had two kids at the time, wanted to help young people, and she was desperate for a job.
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“I grew up in the ‘hood, but I didn’t grow up ‘hood. I love to read. I was more of a nerd,” Horne says. She adds that the violence she was taught in the police academy “was shocking.”
“The lieutenant who worked with who and wound up working in internal affairs, he said, ‘If you see cops fighting, you get your little foot and you kick, too,’ and he looked right at me.” Horne says that the cops she worked with weren’t just beating suspects: “They were actually killing people. And it was covered up. And if you said something, you were the one that was ostracized.”
On Nov. 1, 2006, Horne reported fellow officer Greg Kwiatkowski, who she says crossed the line during the arrest of a man by the name of Neal Mack. Horne explained to WGRZ that when she entered Mack’s residence, she witnessed Kwiatkowski punching Mack in the face. Mack was handcuffed at the time. Once outside, “he [Kwiatkowski] spun Neal Mack around and just started choking him," Horne said.
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“Mack was between us and up against Gregory Kwiatkowski's chest, so he was choking him and I yelled, 'Greg, you're choking him!' And when he didn't stop, I grabbed his arm from around Neal Mack's neck, and he was in a squatted position. He came up and punched me in the face, and he broke my dental bridge," she adds.
Horne says that’s the day her life changed. “I was just tired. I didn't feel like I needed to sit back and watch it anymore.”
Horne lives in East Side Buffalo, just blocks from the grocery store where 10 Black people were gunned down on May 14. She says her 97-year-old father was on his way to the store that day and would have been there at the time of the shooting had he not simply changed his mind.
Horne was fired from the force after reporting Kwiatkowski. She lost her pension just months before she was set to retire, and then she was hit with 13 disciplinary charges. Kwiatkowski was promoted to lieutenant and won a $65,000 defamation suit against Horne, Kirkland news reports.
In 2018, Kwiatkowski was found guilty in another police brutality case stemming back to 2008. He was sentenced to four months in federal prison and a year of supervised release. The charge was use of force against four Black teenagers, where, one by one, he slammed the handcuffed teens headfirst into a police car, Buffalo News reported.
In 2021, 15 years after Horne first blew the whistle on Kwiatkowski, she finally found redemption. The New York Supreme Court vacated her firing and reinstated her pension.
“One of the issues in all of these cases is the role of other officers at the scene and particularly their complicity in failing to intervene to save the life of a person to whom such unreasonable physical force is being applied,” wrote Judge Dennis Ward of the state Supreme Court in Erie County, according to The Washington Post. “While the … George Floyds of the world never had a chance for a ‘do over,’ at least here the correction can be done,” Ward added.
Horne said at the time that her “vindication” came at a “15-year cost.”
“I never wanted another police officer to go through what I had gone through for doing the right thing,” she said.
Horne was not only exonerated, but her case led to the passage of Cariol’s Law by Buffalo's Common Council—a law that protects police from being maliciously charged by other officers for intervening in police brutality on the scene, the website explains, by prohibiting retaliation and requiring external investigations into complaints, as well as mandatory reprimands for officers accused of excessive force. It also creates a reportable registry of officers under complaint and ensures retroactive justice for officers like Horne who have been subject to financial losses from department and officer retaliation.
Horne says now she’s working to make this city law a state law, and ultimately a national registry to keep track of cops with bad records.
“You have the racist, bad police officers who just want to go out and abuse Black people. So in order for them not to do that, we have to make it a law, because then the good officers can say, ‘No, I'm not going to jail for you,’” Horne says.
Horne has yet to receive a penny of her pension. “The city says they lost the paperwork,” she explains “That’s something common that they would say.”
Horne’s son is currently behind bars for charges of murder and robbery. She says she believes the city is holding her pension to prevent her from hiring a quality lawyer for him. The judge has deemed the 17-year-old a flight risk and has refused bail. Horne says the police know that he’s not the shooter, but are punishing her for speaking out against them.
“It's not like it's easy and, even though I am being targeted, I will still continue to do the work because it's necessary … I want people to know that the only thing you need is the will to want to make a change. And when you do that, everyone who's elected or whatever, we just push them to do what's right.”
The Good Fight is a series spotlighting progressive activists battling injustice in communities around the nation. These are the folks who typically work to uplift those who are underserved and brutalized by a system that dismisses or looks to erase them and their stories.
*The interview was edited for space and clarity.