Reports: FBI, IRS, HUD Raid Buffalo City Hall

The FBI, IRS, and Housing and Urban Development raided the city hall building of Buffalo, New York, on Wednesday morning. (Google Street View)

The FBI, IRS, and Housing and Urban Development raided the city hall building of Buffalo, New York, on Wednesday morning.

A Buffalo City Hall spokesman told 7 Eyewitness News that the FBI was conducting “court-authorized activity.”

“Our understanding is that court-authorized activity has taken place at a BURA office. At this time we have no further information,” said the spokesman, Michael DeGeorge.

As reported by WGRZ, the officials are currently in the Office of Strategic Planning.

No arrests have been made.

A source told Spectrum News that the agents are “searching to support allegations of misappropriation of funds in housing projects.”

The city issued a statement and said that the activity involves The Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency, which is chaired by Democratic Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, Spectrum reported.

A city spokesperson said they didn’t have any additional information.

Local reporters and staffers posted photos of FBI agents standing at a doorway at Buffalo’s City Hall.

The investigation might be related to allegations of public corruption.

The Buffalo News reported that federal investigators over the summer were looking into the Community Action Organization of Western New York, an anti-poverty initiative that was funded by state and federal dollars.

“They had several file boxes,” an anonymous person told the news outlet about the allegations in August. “They presented me with documents, and we went through them for inconsistencies and things that looked suspicious.”

Facts About Crime in the United States

Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).

The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.

The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.

The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.

While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.