Buffalo's Rochester Resident Agency is responsible for all FBI investigative programs in the nine eastern-most counties of the Division's territory, some 5300 square miles with a population of over 1,250,000. The Resident Agency covers Monroe, Wayne, Livingston, and Ontario counties. Based in the city of Rochester with a satellite office in Elmira, the Resident Agency consists of 28 Special Agents and eight Professional Support Personnel organized into two squads.
Squad 9, the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), is located in an off-site facility and augmented by eleven non-FBI law enforcement personnel from five different local departments. The JTTF works in conjunction with the Buffalo Division JTTF, other JTTFs nation-wide, and FBI Headquarters to protect the United States from terrorist attack from both domestic and international groups. Squad 9 also includes Special Agents assigned Foreign Counterintelligence duties designed to protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage.
Squad 10 is located in the Rochester Kenneth Keating Federal Building and has investigative responsibility for all criminal investigative matters worked by the FBI to include Cyber Crime, Public Corruption, Civil Rights, Transnational and National Criminal organizations and Enterprises, Organized Crime, Drugs, Gangs, White Collar Crime and Violent Crime. Criminal matters for Squad 10 are prosecuted from the Rochester office of the United States Attorney for the Western District of New York.
Both squads work frequently with the 2,140 sworn officers and 665 support personnel from the 58 different State and Local Law Enforcement organizations in the Rochester Resident Agency territory. The Rochester area also has offices or stations for almost all Federal Law Enforcement organizations to include the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the United States Secret Service, the US Border Patrol, and others.
The territory covered by the Rochester Resident Agency includes 75 miles of Lake Ontario shoreline and ranges from industrial areas of downtown Rochester to large agricultural areas in outlying counties. The area is bisected from north to south by the Genesee River and from east to west by the Erie Canal and the New York State Throughway (US Route 90). Rochester is home to several Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies to include Eastman Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, and Xerox.
Rochester area history is documented as far back as the 17th Century. In 1679 Jacques-Rene de Brisay, Marquis de Denonville, Governor General of New France (now Canada) led an expedition from Quebec to attack and destroy the Seneca Indian village of Ganondaga near present day Victor, New York. During the 19th Century, numerous "Canal Towns" grew and prospered along the route of the Erie Canal, built between 1817 and 1825, connecting Albany and Buffalo.