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Statement from The Lodge Buffalo
- 1. To the community of WNY, Many of you have heard of the events that transpired early in the morning on Monday, June 20th , 2016 after a DJ Party that we host on a monthly basis. In the whirl of story like this it is easy for some facts to be over looked and others blown out of proportion, what is communicated below is the truth, it is raw and real. Read it for yourselves and form your own opinions about everything. Thank you for taking the time, I am available to answer questions, listen to all concerns or any feedback than anyone may have concerning these events or what you are about to read. Thank you, Matthew Krupp General Manager -‐ The Lodge Buffalo On June 19th we had a DJ series event featuring popular local Hip-‐Hop DJ’s. Like the news says, we did use a promoter, but remember that every live entertainment event uses a promoter…Live Nation is a “promoter”. 99% of people at any event are good, hard working, responsible people, and to place the blame on the venue or generally assign it to the type of crowd, weather it is something on the waterfront, in the park, at a hockey or football game , or at a party in a bar is to avoid the real issues here. We get 100’s of calls every month from promoters who want to do huge parties at our venue, we turn every single one of them down and since we began the DJ series 12 months ago we have only used 1 promoter, the only one who came with recommendations; someone who had hosted events at major venues all over Buffalo and Rochester, works with national recording acts, comedy acts and athletes on a regular basis. We did this because it was important to us to work with someone who knew what they were doing, and not just some kid with a ton of facebook friends. The DJ events run from 11:00pm until 3:00am, we end at 3:00am. Our dancing license only allows us to play live music until 3:00am and we follow that to a T. We could continue to serve drinks until 4:00am but we feel it is better to only be open for a 4 hour duration for special late night events so for this event we ended at 3:00. We employ in house security and have the highest of standards; at Sunday’s event we had over 20 security guards present. 5 uniformed officers of the peace standing outside at the door to ensure no one under the age of 21 is admitted and that if a line forms it is in an orderly fashion, and 15 licensed security guys on the
- 2. inside. We limit capacity to these parties at 300 people; we keep 15 guys inside because industry standards recommend 1 security guard per 20 people. Inside the party was fairly standard, lots of dancing, and having fun. No fights broke out and no one had to be thrown out; it was the experience we strive to provide for all a guests every night, a safe high class venue for your enjoyment. We strongly feel that no matter where you are from, or what music you like to listen to, you deserve to be able to come to downtown buffalo and feel safe. Usually we follow a procedure to alert the Buffalo Police Department and the City of Buffalo to our events. Chief Patterson, a recently retired Buffalo police chief had a system we followed and for the previous dozen events we have done, the police have known about them every time. This time, when we went to follow through with our normal procedure to inform the city and the police of our event, we were alerted things no longer worked the same way, but no one really knew how they were going to work going forward. Our security director is a well known officer of the peace and does considerable amounts of defensive tactics training for police departments around New York State. His Procedure with Chief Patterson was to call dispatch at 2:45am to request 2 patrol cars to show a presence on the street when our patrons exited so the felt safe. Tonight, we called at 2:45am as normal and were told that unless we had an ongoing emergency they wouldn’t dispatch cars simply because we asked them to, that it didn’t work that way and to call 911 if we needed too. Since we had no incidents that occurred early in the night and nothing was happening at that moment we didn’t have an emergency to call 911 about. Once everyone had exited the lodge, a few small fights broke out, there were a lot of people standing around watching so it appeared to be larger but it wasn’t the 150 person melee you have read about. We tried to disperse the fights and the police arrived at this point to assist our private security team in breaking up the fights. Things were calming down when an unknown person or persons fired gunshots off in a dark parking lot over a block away behind a completely separate building. We feel very strongly that everyone deserves to be able to enjoy The Lodge and feel safe doing so, however we feel that, in light of these events, there is not currently the needed structure in place to ensure our guests safety from the minute they step out of their cars to the moment they step back into their cars. The City, The Buffalo Police Department, and Every Business owner has a responsibility to make sure that safety is our number one priority; we are committed to working with Ellicott district council president Darius Pridgen, The City and The Buffalo Police Department to draft a structure for special events that can be implemented uniformly across the city to ensure the safety of every event. We have a community violence issue, there were multiple other incidents of violence this same night, two ended with fatalities; one from a gunshot and one from a hit and run. Every other day last week there were multiple reports of gunshots and other forms of violence all over the
- 3. city. IT ISN’T AN EAST OR WEST SIDE PROBLEM, A NORTH BUFFALO OR SOUTH BUFFALO PROBLEM, OR A CHIPPEWA, ALLEN OR ELMWOOD PROMBLEM, IT IS A COMMUNITY PROBLEM! Violence is an issue that isn’t going away unless we fight it, that is why we want to commit to working with city and community leaders to establish initiatives that empower responsible members of the community to combat violence through education, communication, and community involvement.