Hours after they butted heads during a debate at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute, two Buffalo mayoral candidates spoke with Capital Tonight about two critical issues: policing and poverty.

During the morning debate, four-term incumbent Byron Brown called India Walton an “apologist” for criminals. Additionally, in the weeks leading up to the debate, the Brown campaign hammered Walton for being “anti-police." Capital Tonight asked the challenger to clarify her position on how she would change the Buffalo Police Department if elected mayor.

“There’s a lot of misinformation going around,” Walton said. “I am not anti-police.”

Instead, Walton said, she wants the police to focus their energy and time on “decreasing response time to burglaries, homicides and violent crimes," rather than on mental health and quality-of-life calls. 

“My plan is to free police to do the work of police and to bring on experts, like mental health counselors, homeless outreach and community servants who are going to take care of those other issues," Walton said.

When it was pointed out to her that Buffalo has already started engaging the services of mental health professionals and violence interrupters, Walton claimed the homicide clearance rate hasn’t been affected, and so the strategies that have been implemented don’t appear to be working.

“Less than a third of homicides are being solved,” she said. “We are still seeing an uptick in violent crime, particularly shootings in our community.”

Byron Brown has the backing of the Buffalo police union, which, like police agencies across the state, have had conflicts with communities of color.

When asked how he plans to help discipline bad cops when he failed to negotiate any changes in the city’s contract with the PBA, he argued that contract negotiations are the subject of state law. 

“State law has made it challenging to sometimes get concessions in contract negotiations,” Brown said. “But we have been able to negotiate a temporary residency for our police officers and we think going forward, based on the relationships that we are building with our police department, we will have a better negotiating environment.”

He also took issue with the characterization of the Buffalo Police Department’s relationship with communities of color is “troubled."

“We have all kinds of community policing programs," he said. "Our district police stations are open once a month to meet with the community. The police commissioner and I have meetings out in some of the most challenged neighborhoods in our city where residents can come out and see us right in their neighborhoods."

Brown’s critics also argue that under his watch, the city’s scarce resources are spent on the well-heeled, like tax abatements for high-end apartments, rather than on helping poor children of color. 

When Capital Tonight asked Brown how he would spend money differently in his fifth term, he pointed to past spending on development.

“We’ve created thousands of employment opportunities with over $8 billion of development in the city since I’ve been mayor,” he said. “We’ve focused on diversity, equity and inclusion. We’ve been a model for that in the city of Buffalo.”

The election is Nov. 2.