By Paul Wisniewski
LANCASTER — Fridays are the busiest. The hour between 6 and 7 p.m. is the busiest time of day. And officers used force in 41 of more than 24,000 police calls last year.
Those are a few of the numbers in the Lancaster Police Department’s first annual report, a 42-page look at how the department spent 2025. The Lancaster Bee has also reported on its highlights. The department says it plans to publish one every year.
“On behalf of the men and women of the Lancaster Police Department, I welcome you to the first edition of the Lancaster Police Department Annual Report,” Chief William M. Gummo wrote in the opening statement.
Who answers the calls
The department covers about 38 square miles and just over 45,000 residents in the town, the Village of Lancaster and part of the Village of Depew, according to the report. It has 55 sworn officers, 13 public safety dispatchers and five clerical staff members. That includes 35 patrol officers, three of them school resource officers, and seven detectives.
The dispatch center, which also handles fire and EMS calls for the town and village of Lancaster and the town and village of Alden, took 8,608 calls on 911 and 20,499 on the non-emergency line last year. That works out to roughly 80 calls a day. Dispatchers created 28,496 “complaint cards,” the records opened for every call for service.
Friday led the week with 4,312 of those records, and Sunday was the quietest, with 3,597. By the hour, 6 to 7 p.m. was busiest, with 1,721, and midnight to 1 a.m. was quietest, with 535. One curiosity: the 2 a.m. hour logged 1,375, more than any other hour from midnight until 10 a.m. The report does not explain the spike.
Traffic and trucks
Officers made 2,652 traffic stops and issued 2,330 traffic summonses. After a change in record-keeping on June 1, dispatchers began logging how each stop ended: 771 with a citation, 174 with a written warning and 712 with a verbal warning, for the rest of the year.
The department also has an officer certified to inspect commercial trucks. That officer did 228 inspections in 2025, 48 of which ended with out-of-service orders, and wrote 365 commercial vehicle citations, the report says. Gummo’s statement lists the department’s first full-time commercial vehicle and traffic enforcement officer as new, though the commercial vehicle section says the certified officer is not currently assigned full time to those duties.
Use of force
The most detailed section covers use of force. In 2025, the report says, the department handled 24,598 police-related calls, made 463 arrests and logged 41 use-of-force incidents. That is 0.17% of calls and 8.9% of arrests.
“This indicates that use of force occurred in a very small fraction of overall police activity,” the report says.
Most incidents, 31, involved hands-on control. Officers pointed a firearm 11 times and pointed a Taser-style conducted energy weapon six times, and used one three times. No firearms were fired, and no pepper spray or batons were used. Because more than one type of force can be used in a single incident, those numbers add up to more than 41.
The report is candid about who is involved. Fourteen of the 41 incidents, about a third, involved people taken into custody for a mental health evaluation. Counting intoxication and other crises, 22 incidents, or 53.7%, involved someone who was impaired or in crisis.
Those were also the incidents where people got hurt. Subjects were injured in 36.4% of impairment or crisis incidents, compared with 15.8% of the others. All three officer injuries came in those incidents, including one officer who needed knee surgery after being kicked, according to the report.
A clinician on calls
That helps explain the department’s biggest change for 2026: a behavioral health co-responder program with Endeavor Health Services that puts a licensed mental health clinician inside police operations to work with officers on crisis calls.
“As times have changed, so has our department,” Gummo wrote. “In addition, mental health needs have continued to rise. The department has taken a proactive approach to meet this increased need by working hand in hand with our first embedded mental health clinician, who works closely with officers to interact with residents and provide services and resources.”
Drones, cameras and a new rulebook
The report lists other changes this year. The department will start a trial “Drone as First Responder” program to send a drone to some calls ahead of officers. The report says the program “is not intended for general surveillance” and will be evaluated before any long-term decision.
It also uses automated license plate readers and points residents to an online transparency portal for current statistics. The department is rewriting its policy manual with Lexipol, with completion scheduled for October 2027, and plans its own website.
“Under our current administration, we pride ourselves on providing the residents of the Town of Lancaster with police service that demands integrity, professionalism, and a willingness to serve,” Gummo wrote.
What we’d still like to know
The report does not compare 2025 with earlier years, so it is hard to tell whether calls, arrests or use of force are going up or down. It also does not break down arrests or stops by location. Those would be useful additions to next year’s edition. The Buffalo Chronicle has asked the department about the 2 a.m. spike, the drone trial’s timing and plans for future reports, and will update this story with any response.
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