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 sustainedŒ during the years 1991-1995.Œ

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 RelationsŒ, 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.Œ One was classified as satisfactorily adjustedŒ 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.Œ 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, expungedŒ, 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 closedŒ 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.Œ 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 officerŒ, but they could also be classified under conduct towards the public.Œ Failure to perform/neglect of dutyŒ 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 pendingŒ 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 pendingŒ 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 pendingŒ 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.