Audit of the Pittsburg Police Department, Part 2
by Tom Flaherty
PERFORMANCE AUDIT
DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY
OFFICE OF PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS
Part II
Report by the Office of the City Controller
TOM FLAHERTY
CITY CONTROLLER
Anthony Pokora, Deputy Controller
Kevin Forsythe, Esq., Management Auditor
Anabell Kinney, Esq., Assistant Management Auditor
Performance Auditors:
Gloria Novak
Joseph Chigier
Jeff Khadem
Woody Mudd
August, 1996
V. Evaluation of Disciplinary Measures (Objective No. 5)
Our fifth Objective reads: To evaluate the performance of Public
Safety Management in administering discipline in response to OPS
findings of sustained during the years 1991-1995.
For this Objective we used a shortened time period for the
following reasons. 1. A high number of complaints initiated in
1996 had not yet reached a final disposition, making it impossible
to say what the discipline would ultimately be. 2. Prior to 1991
police officers could appeal disciplinary measures to the old Trial
Board composed exclusively of other police officers. We wanted to
examine Public Safety Management¡s disciplinary efforts for only
those cases which could be appealed under the new arbitration
scheme instituted in 1991. 3. This time period also provided at least
three full years (1991-1993) of disciplinary attempts by the
previous Administration and two full years (1994-1995) under the
current Administration; in case the data revealed significant
changes in disciplinary patterns.
This Objective involved intensive field work by our auditors on site
at the OPS offices during the months of June and July, 1996. We
first generated a listing of all cases in which OPS had made a
finding of sustained for the years 1991-1995. This included both
citizen complaints and management initiated complaints. We gave
this list to Public Safety Management (specifically, the Deputy
Director of Public Safety and the person who served as the Civilian
Coordinator of OPS) and asked them to provide us with the OPS
case files for every sustained case on our list. We examined every
file, looking at such documents as the Disciplinary Action Report
(D.A.R.), the OPS Final Report, OPS Disposition Forms, and
several species of inter-office memos and correspondences. From
these various sources we traced the discipline up through the chain
of command, noting the dates and sources of any recommendations,
modifications, changes, reversals, and other pertinent comments.
After we had gleaned all relevant information from these OPS files,
we next had to work with the Law Department, the custodian of
arbitration records, in order to find out how many of Public Safety
Management¡s attempts to impose discipline, in these OPS cases,
had been appealed by the police officer; and whether Management
or the officer had prevailed in the arbitration proceeding.
We now had the complete picture of Public Safety Management¡s
disciplinary performance for 1991-1995; from the initial OPS
finding of sustained, up through the chain of command, and finally,
to the end of any arbitration appeal. Our findings in this regard
appear at pages 35-39.
VI. Additional Statistical Analysis (Objective No. 6)
In this section of the audit we sought to present our several findings
against the back drop of other relevant statistics on crime rates and
police activity. For this we used the 1995 Statistical Report
prepared by the Department of Public Safety, Police Bureau and
other information provided to us by Public Safety Management. We
did not audit any of these statistics. Our findings in this regard
appear at pages 40-46.
FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Preliminary Matters
We interviewed the Executive Director of the Pittsburgh Human
Relations Commission and also examined data provided by them,
as required by City Council¡s Resolution No. 18 of 1996.
According to the HRC¡s Executive Director, a total of 40
complaints, classified as Police Relations, were filed with the
HRC for the six-year period 1990-1995, out of a total of 1,421
(2.8%). The yearly breakdown follows:
PITTSBURGH HUMAN RELATIONS COMMISSION
Year
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
Total
Police Complaints
2
12
12
5
5
4
40
Total Complaints
178
221
294
228
248
252
1,421
%
1.1%
5.4%
4.0%
2.2%
2.0%
1.6%
2.8%
Twenty-seven of these 40 complaints are still open. Twelve have
been closed and classified as no further action warranted. One
was classified as satisfactorily adjusted due to a private
settlement.
According to the Executive Director of the HRC, it is their practice
to inform citizens with complaints against police officers that they
may also obtain help through the Allegheny County Bar
Association¡s Lawyer Referral Service, the United States
Department of Justice¡s Civil Rights Section and/or OPS. It is
likely that some of these complainants filed with both OPS and the
HRC. At any rate, none of the complaints filed exclusively with the
HRC would have led to any disciplinary action on the part of
Public Safety Management. For these reasons, and also because
complaints against police officers comprise a small percentage of
the HRC¡s caseload (particularly in the last three years) the
remainder of this report deals only with OPS data. We did not
combine the HRC figures, above, with any of the remaining
findings.
The second preliminary matter concerned OPS complaints
determined to be unfounded. As noted above, all of these are
required by the collective bargaining agreement with the police
union to be removed from OPS records and the officer¡s personnel
file after one year. We do not know whether this directive has been
followed with respect to personnel files or OPS case files, because
we did not view any personnel files and we viewed only OPS case
files for sustained, not sustained, closed, and exonerated cases. We
did discover that this directive had not been followed with respect
to the OPS database we received. Had proper procedures been
followed, we would only have seen unfounded records for entries
made within the last year.
RECOMMENDATION NO. 1:
OMI should immediately purge its database, and all other records
in its custody, of all cases against police officers with dispositions
of unfounded going back more than one year, to avoid exposure to
legal challenge from the police union and/or individual officers.
The failure to remove these unfoundeds, did give us a more
complete picture of citizen dissatisfaction than we would have
otherwise had. We present them by year and in total below.
Unfounded OPS Cases
Year
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996 (1st 2 mos.)
Total
Total Unfoundeds
17
3
0
1
37
32
26
35
65
63
2
281
Total Complaints
140
270
262
218
252
261
247
294
405
381
46
2,775
%
12%
1%
0%
.5%
15%
12%
11%
12%
16%
17%
4%
10%
Of particular note is a significant increase, in both the absolute
number and percentage of total, for unfounded dispositions in 1990
which then held roughly constant until 1994. The number of
unfoundeds then almost doubled for the next two years. The
percentage of total, however, did not increase as much due to the
overall rise of total complaints.
Of these 281 unfounded complaints, 262 were filed against
employees of the Police Bureau. The rest were filed against other
employees of the Public Safety Department, such as fire fighters,
paramedics, building inspectors, etc. Once we compiled the
numbers on unfoundeds, we immediately removed them from our
data and did not consider them in any of our remaining analysis.
None of our work with unfoundeds involved examining any police
officer¡s name. We generated no print outs or any other documents
containing police officers¡ names in this regard.
I. Database Verification (Objective No. 1)
The results of our verification testing appear in the Appendix to
this report. On the basis of that testing we concluded that the OPS
database we had received from Public Safety Management was
sufficiently reliable to allow us to proceed with the remainder of
the audit.
II. OPS Statistical Overview (Objective No. 2)
Of the 2,494 complaints remaining for our analysis (2,775 minus
281 unfoundeds), filed with OPS from April, 1986 through March
4, 1996, 1,980 were filed against police officers. 306 of these were
management-initiated complaints. This leaves a total of 1,674
complaints filed against police officers by citizens. The following
table presents this information by year and in total.
OPS Statistical Summary 1986 - 1996
Note that in the table above, the percentages are of the police
complaints, not percentages of total OPS complaints (i.e. 95 is 84%
of 113 and not of 123).
The following tables give the dispositions, first for the 1,674
complaints filed by citizens against police officers, next for the 306
management-initiated complaints, and finally for the total 1,980.
Years marked with an asterisk (*) will not add up to the total,
because these years contain complaints for which no disposition is
given. Most often this is because complaints are still pending, but
in a small number of cases it can mean improper data entry or a
unique designation (for example, expunged, which we found in
one case for the 10 year period).
Striking differences appear in disposition rates between citizen and
management complaints. Overall, the sustained rate for citizen
complaints was 12%, while for management complaints it was
52%. The rate for not sustained citizen complaints was 46%,
compared to only 6% not sustained for management complaints.
11% of citizen complaints were exonerated. Less than 1% of
management complaints were exonerated. Several factors could
account for this. Complaints filed by citizens can range from the
very serious to the very frivolous. Presumably, Public Safety
Management would only file complaints with a high probability of
ultimate success on the merits. For example, management-initiated
complaints sometimes result from confidential (and often accurate
and detailed) information given by police officers or others in the
police bureau against other officers.
But this large difference in disposition rates could suggest less
innocuous factors at work, including a tendency among OPS
investigators to take allegations of management more seriously and
pursue them more diligently than those of the public at large. This
would compromise the mission of OPS as an independent fact
finder. Our audit work did not provide us with a basis for stating
that this is, in fact, the case. We raise it here as a concern, for the
benefit of future management. Another concern is the high number
of management complaints disposed of as closed: 34% overall, and
as high as 47% in 1993 and 61% in 1994. It was the auditors¡
understanding that the closed disposition was given in those
instances where the complainant refused to cooperate after the
initial intake interview. If this is so, the use of closed in a
significant percentage of management-initiated complaints needs to
be explained.
II. a. Types of Offenses
We preface this subsection with a comment that reflects favorably
upon the police. One of the offense codes in the OPS database is
Racial, Religious/Ethnic Intimidation. Out of a total of 1,674
citizen complaints, this classification was used, by OPS personnel
filling out intake sheets, only 17 times in 10 years (0.1%). This
was, apparently, a classification used for the most blatant,
egregious examples of this type of conduct. Only one out of the 17
was sustained by OPS in those ten years. It must be kept in mind,
however, that there could have been other cases in which the
complaining citizen felt that racial, ethnic and perhaps religious
prejudice played a role but, for one reason or another, OPS used
one of the more common offense codes discussed below.
The following table gives the frequencies for the four most common
types of alleged police misconduct complained of by citizens over
the entire audit period. [Though the great majority of these would
have been filed by citizens, a small percentage of them would have
been initiated by management, which makes the total add up to
more than 1,674]. Complaints of verbal abuse would most often fall
under the rubric of conduct unbecoming an officer, but they could
also be classified under conduct towards the public. Failure to
perform/neglect of duty often refers to cases where a police officer
refuses to fill out a report when asked to by a citizen.
We next compared the disposition rates for these four categories.
Note that numbers for the dispositions do not add up to the total
due to pending cases (see text accompanying
RECOMMENDATION NOS. 2-4 at pages 20-22).
Close parallels can be seen between these disposition rates and the
rates for citizen complaints as a whole, in the table on page 17.
This is to be expected since the great majority of complaints
alleging these four most common offenses are filed by citizens.
(See the remarks on page 18, noting differences between
disposition rates for citizen vs. management-initiated complaints).
II. b. Pending Cases
As noted above, several cases remain pending, even for years going
back as far as 1989. This should be kept in mind when interpreting
the above data, especially for the more recent years. In the
following table we have used the designation pending to refer to
all cases for which the database did not contain one of the four
standard dispositions (i.e., sustained, not sustained, closed,
exonerated). The great majority of these are true pending cases, that
is, OPS had not yet (as of March 4, 1996) made a disposition. But
pending also stands for the very small number of cases having
unique designations or data entry errors.
1996 can be disregarded since the OPS database we received was
dated March 4, 1996. It is normal that almost all of those 1996
cases would still be pending. They were, at the most, just two
months old. It is also normal to suppose that a certain percentage of
1995 cases would still be pending in early 1996, and 82 out of 292
(28%) does not seem an unreasonably high number. But the further
back one goes the less acceptable the pending cases become: 38 in
1994; 31 in 1993; 26 in 1992; and 10 in 1991.
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