Peduto, city officials named in lawsuit
Pittsburgh police accused of using excessive force in dispersing crowd
Nicole Rulli, her fiance and her 13-year-old son were protesting police brutality and racism on June 1 when they say Pittsburgh police attacked, blindly shooting less-lethal ammunition through clouds of tear gas and firing indiscriminately on crowds of peaceful protesters.
That day, the family had joined hundreds of other people in East Liberty for one of the mass demonstrations sweeping the country following George Floyd’s death in May by Minneapolis police.
City officers dressed in riot gear and armed with various less-lethal weapons ordered the crowd to disperse, but the Rulli family didn’t. They said they were acting peacefully. And they felt that their First Amendment rights trumped the police order.
But soon, according to a federal lawsuit filed Monday morning on behalf of the family and four other plaintiffs, police shot at them with rubber bullets, gassed them, doused people with pepper spray, cut off their escape route on Centre Avenue and threw chemical gas grenades directly at them, even striking Ms. Rulli on the foot with one, spewing gas in her face.
Ms. Rulli, in pain and unable to breathe, yelled for her son to run as she collapsed, according to the lawsuit. The teen, disoriented and unable to contact his mother because his phone was dead, made it to a nearby Giant Eagle, where strangers helped rinse his eyes.
Eventually Ms. Rulli, her fiance, Charles Bryant Jr., and her son, identified as A.F., found each other. But, the lawsuit said, the damage had been done. The teen was traumatized, and all three were physically and emotionally hurt.
“I couldn’t believe they would call us an unlawful assembly. As things started to unfold, it was disbelief and shock,” Ms. Rulli, 35, of Castle Shannon, said in an interview. “It was almost like I was in a dream. And then it was a fight or flight response. All I was trying to do was get to safety.”
The Rulli family’s harrowing account is one of several contained in the 41-page lawsuit in U.S. District Court that accuses Pittsburgh’s mayor and top police officials of
violating the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights that day. They accuse Mayor Bill Peduto, Public Safety Director Wendell Hissrich and police Chief Scott Schubert of lacking proper crowd control policies, sanctioning excessive force against peaceful protesters, condoning the indiscriminate use of force and then falsely accusing protesters of violence and other misconduct in order to justify the use of force.
A section early in the lawsuit neatly captures the essence of the plaintiffs’ claims:
“The Pittsburgh Bureau of Police (“PBP”) responded by escalating a peaceful protest into a scene of pandemonium, panic, violence and bloodshed. The PBP deployed hundreds of officers to counter approximately 150 protesters. As the assembled protesters held their hands in the air and chanted, ‘This is not a riot,’ and ‘Hands up — Don’t shoot,’ PBP ordered its officers to attack them with explosives, chemical agents and ammunition which is known to seriously wound and sometimes kill its targets.
“PBP officers drove ambulances past injured protesters without stopping. After ordering peaceful protesters to leave the area, PBP officers blocked their escape with chemical gas, riot police and mounted patrols. PBP then arrested several [protesters] for failing to disperse, subjecting them to confinement in the midst of a global COVID-19 pandemic. The PBP ordered tactical officers dressed in paramilitary garb to patrol a residential neighborhood in armored vehicles and arbitrarily throw canisters of chemical gas at and/or arrest anyone they encountered.”
Attorneys for the plaintiffs — Margaret S. Coleman of the Law Offices of Timothy P. O’Brien, the Abolitionist Law Center and Christine T. Elzer — are asking a federal judge to order Pittsburgh police to stop using less-lethal munitions against peaceful protesters who are not committing violence; not to fire rubber bullets, beanbag rounds, sponge grenades or other such munitions indiscriminately or blindly; to not order peaceful protesters to disperse if there is no immediate threat to public safety, peace or order; to not order dispersal without providing a safe way to exit; and to not use chemical agents to disperse a protest without an imminent threat.
The seven-count suit also names police commanders Stephen Vinansky and Jason Lando, as well as the unidentified officer who gave the dispersal order on June 1. The plaintiffs are seeking class-action status and are claiming violations of the First, Fourth and 14th Amendments.
“I think what we saw in East Liberty in Pittsburgh mirrors a lot of what we saw around the country with police using absolutely egregious amounts of force against protesters,” said Quinn Cozzens, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers. “I think what we’re seeing is police are feeling their power is being threatened, and they’re responding to that threat the only way they know how, which is is through brutality, domination, violence and control ...”
The mayor’s spokesman, Timothy McNulty, and city police spokesman Chris Togneri declined comment on the lawsuit, saying the city doesn’t publicly discuss legal matters. Previously, Mr. Togneri denied that police used rubber bullets.
The East Liberty protest followed a May 30 protest in Downtown that turned violent when vandals burned two police cars, damaged buildings, looted businesses and attacked a television cameraman. The police response in that situation, the lawsuit claims, set the stage for what happened two days later.
“The vast majority of the attendees did not engage in any property damage or violence. However, following some reports of property damage, PBP officers used chemical gas, rubber bullets and other projectiles, pepper spray, flash-bang grenades and other riot-control agents indiscriminately against everyone present, including peaceful protesters and nonviolent bystanders,” the lawsuit said.
Officers charged 46 people with failure to disperse; the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office didn’t pursue charges in at least 39 cases.
City officials, the lawsuit said, were on notice that police “would use overwhelming and excessive force against peaceful protesters with little or no provocation.”
On June 1, police arrested dozens of people and said nine officers were injured by objects thrown by protesters.
The DA’s office has dropped charges of failure to disperse and disorderly conduct against most of those arrested in East Liberty. None of the arrests involved violence or property damage, the DA’s office noted.
The lawsuit claims the protest was peaceful despite city officials accusing protesters of throwing rocks and “volleys of bricks” at police. The officials also “vehemently denied using chemical agents.” Videos proved those statements false, the lawsuit said, claiming that top officials disseminated “flagrant lies” to justify the use of force.
Those official statements that contradicted protesters’ own experiences were painful to hear.
“I think that was very, very hurtful to them. And I think that was a big reason why they filed this lawsuit,” Ms. Coleman said.
Another plaintiff, Christopher Wilson Juring, 23, a food service worker from Highland Park, also couldn’t believe what he was hearing on TV after returning home from the protest with gaping wounds to his leg and back from what he claims were rubber bullets shot by police as he fled.
“I watched Bill Peduto and Chief Schubert and the other public officials making these claims that they only used smoke and not tear gas and then doubling down on that and making it very clear that they only used smoke,” Mr. Juring said. “While watching that I was still coughing up a lung from the tear gas” and “trying to stop the blood from coming out of my legs.”
Ms. Coleman chastised Mr. Peduto for accepting the police version of events at face value.
“He doesn’t ask the people that were there,” she said. “I think what it shows is just how entrenched this is in police departments across the country and in every community, the habitual misrepresentation of the facts, lying in police reports, the escalation of violence rather than de-escalation of violence, the use of the maximum amounts of force to respond to any threat, those are things that are so pervasive throughout our society that even for a mayor who says he’s progressive, it’s still very difficult to root that out.”
Mr. Peduto has asked for the city’s Office of Municipal Investigations and the Citizen Police Review Board to investigate the unrest and police response, citing differences of opinion about what happened on the ground in East Liberty and police actions.
The other plaintiffs include Simon Phillips, 26, a dance instructor from Georgia who was arrested near his East Liberty apartment; Donovan Hayden, a nonprofit worker who said he was gassed and chased by police at gunpoint as he was leaving the protest; and Jennifer “Jay” Yoder, who was gassed.
Mr. Juring said the police had no reason to open fire. “There was no provocation. We were chanting literally right before they started shooting at us, ‘Hands up, don’t shoot,’ and ‘This is not a riot.’ ”
The lawsuit compares the actions of police against the crowd of protesters in East Liberty with how police handled protests in Pittsburgh in April by armed individuals upset by Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s stay-athome orders in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Many of the April 20 protesters openly carried tactical rifles and wore paramilitary outfits. A group of these protesters referred to themselves as ‘The Iron City Response Guard,’ ” the lawsuit said.
The armed protesters were allowed to go about their business, the lawsuit said, and were not declared unlawful or cleared out by riot police or SWAT units, unlike the unarmed protesters in East Liberty.
Ms. Elzer, one of the attorneys, said the police actions have had a chilling effect on protests, even though most charges have been dropped.
“But the damage is already done,” she said. “Those people already spent the night in jail, suffered the fear of misdemeanor criminal prosecution and, more importantly, were chilled in their constitutional rights.”