Mayor defends decision on detectives
Officers involved in bar fight keep jobs
Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto on Thursday defended the city’s decision to keep on the force the four undercover detectives who were involved in a brawl in a South Side bar, saying multiple investigations determined they did not use excessive force and their actions did not warrant criminal charges.
“The discipline fit what the actions were and did so in a way that will allow us to create a better Bureau of Police,” Mr. Peduto said after an EMS swearing- in ceremony at City Hall, Downtown. “It’s a very sharp razor’s edge you walk between being able to have discipline and following the rules and regulations we are required to [ follow] when working through state law, individual rights, pending litigation and the ability to create a system in which every officer is proud to put on a uniform.”
Mr. Peduto said the city used Oct. 12 incident at Kopy’s Bar — in which the detectives apparently drank alcohol for hours before fighting with four members of the Pagans motorcycle club — to review and reform the police bureau’s narcotics and vice division.
Officials say they’ve put in place new “guidelines” for the use of alcohol during undercover operations, and a new commander took over the unit this week.
“Even though we had three independent investigations saying officers were not found to have any criminal charges or acting outside what their use- of- force rules are, we did an additional one on top of that and dug as deep as we possibly could into the entire operations of narcotics and vice,” Mr. Peduto said.
The Allegheny County District Attorney’s office decided in February not to pursue criminal charges against the officers, and the U. S. Attorney’s office declined to prosecute federally. The city’s Office of Municipal Investigations also examined the incident.
The goal of the city’s fourth investigation, which the mayor said was conducted by Public Safety Director Wendell Hissrich and involved more than a dozen interviews with “everybody involved,” was not merely to discipline the officers but also to ensure similar incidents were not repeated.
“Systematic changes and policies have been enforced since that time that have gone all the way up to command staff and all the way down to the policies involving any officer who is involved in an undercover operation where alcohol is involved,” Mr. Peduto said.
City officials have declined to detail those new guidelines and won’t reveal the detectives’ new assignments.
Mr. Peduto said the city has released only limited information because of pending lawsuits. He said he is prohibited from discussing specific discipline “under the rules of the union.”
Elizabeth Pittinger, executive director of the Citizens Police Review Board, said Thursday that the force used by the detectives — particularly
one who punched a man 19 times in the head — was “very questionable ...”
“It’s true there were no criminal charges filed, however, misconduct is not always limited to criminal conduct,” she said. “We have some issues around unbecoming conduct and what the public observed in those videos.”
George Farneth, attorney for Kopy’s Bar, said Thursday he rejects the city’s assessment that the use of force was appropriate — calling the claim “comical” — and said the detectives should have faced criminal charges.
“I can’t image that two ordinary citizens can pin someone down and punch someone 19 times in the face and it’s not aggravated assault,” he said. “It seems as though when it comes to criminal prosecution, the police are held to a different standard than the rest of the community.”
Mr. Peduto also said he was unaware of an investigation into allegations made by bar owner Stephen Kopy that a detective reported he was unable to retrieve the bar’s surveillance video of the incident because the security system “would not turn back on” — even though others had retrieved the video..
“Never in any point in the briefings — I had weekly briefings for approximately six months — did anything like that come up,” Mr. Peduto said.
“It’s hard to imagine the mayor or someone in his office was not aware at the time, nine months ago, that there were concerns about the destruction or the loss of evidence by the police department,” Mr. Farneth said. “But assuming that is true, he’s now aware of it. Will there be an investigation? And if so, will the results be shared with the general public?”
Attorney Noah Geary, who is representing Pagans motorcycle club member Bruce Thomas in a lawsuit against the city, said the allegation about the lost video was “one of the many layers of outrageousness by the police” that will be factored into the lawsuit.
“After everything else they did, they then intentionally, or at minimum recklessly, destroyed the video surveillance,” he said, “which would have deprived our defendants of their defense had the charges not been dropped.”