Advocates for reform at the Allegheny County Jail received new hope at Thursday’s Jail Oversight Board meeting. New County Executive Sara Innamorato attended along with two other new board members, continuing her shakeup of county government.

Innamorato’s mere attendance of the board’s meeting was notable after her predecessor, Rich Fitzgerald, was criticized for sending a proxy to its meetings for almost his entire 12-year tenure. That criticism grew especially loud in recent years as a string of deaths in the county jail drew attention to the Fitzgerald administration’s management of the lockup. 

“This is going to be a place where there is productive dialogue,” Innamorato told reporters after the meeting. “It doesn’t mean that everything that the community demands of us is going to happen instantaneously, but there is going to be an honest answer.”

She was mostly quiet Thursday as residents made comments to the board, but longtime advocates made note of her presence.

“I am actually heartened to see our county executive here,” said Tanisha Long, an organizer with the Abolitionist Law Center. “We haven’t had one here in years.”

After public speakers repeatedly aired concerns about a lack of medical staff in the jail, Innamorato asked jail officials how they are trying to speed hiring of nurses and other staff. One responded that they hope to boost hiring incentives for medical staff. 

Judge Susan Evashavik DiLucente, who sits on the board as the newly-elected president judge of the Court of Common Pleas, tried to reset the board’s tenor after 2023 was marked by internal debates between members and anger from community members. 

After one advocate, Marion Damick, criticized the board for its performance last year, DiLucente responded, “We’re off to a new start, with a lot of new members, and it’s going to be a new day.”

Another board member, County Controller Corey O’Connor, welcomed the board’s new members, saying their approach to questioning jail officials “is different than what we had in the past, and having the county executive here as well, we’re able to get a lot more information.”

Poor jail conditions and deaths of incarcerated people were a major issue in the campaign for county executive last year. Innamorato, a progressive Democrat, pledged as a candidate to take a more active role in the oversight board and jail management.

Innamorato was not the board’s only newcomer. DiLucente, elected president by her fellow Common Pleas judges late last year, and Judge Eileen Bigley replaced Judge Elliot Howsie and Judge Beth Lazzara, respectively. 

The board’s three citizen-member seats were empty Thursday. Innamorato’s spokesperson told PublicSource the executive will nominate new members this month. They will need County Council approval to serve.

Several speakers said Thursday that their hopes for a more productive board are mixed with deep-seated frustration with slow progress.

“If we are not your partners, we will be your adversaries.  And we do not want to do that,” said Dave Swanson, a Mennonite pastor and member of the Pennsylvania Interfaith Impact Network. “We want to work together.”

Another resident gave a solemn reading of the names of people who died in the jail as public attendees and board members stood. 

“This is an ongoing and persistent problem where our loved ones are going into the jail and they are not leaving,” Long said. “My hope is that with this newer board that these are problems we can begin to solve.”

O’Connor and Sheriff Kevin Kraus are holdovers from the last two years. So is County Councilor Bethany Hallam, a political ally of Innamorato who harshly criticized Fitzgerald’s jail management practices and often quarreled during meetings with Howsie, the board’s former chair.

While the board and the jail have fresh leadership, many problems will persist. A staffing shortage continues, stretching correctional officers thin and often requiring overtime. The jail’s medical staff has dozens of vacancies, raising more safety concerns. And some major aspects of the jail’s operation, like the arresting practices of local police departments and the judges’ choices of which defendants to confine in the jail, are entirely out of Innamorato’s control.

The jail is without a permanent leader after Warden Orlando Harper retired in September. The state appointed an interim leader to serve while Innamorato and council decide on a permanent replacement.

“I think a lot of people in this room are in general hopeful about what we can do as a new board, [with] a new warden,” resident Jodi Lincoln said during the public comment period. “The possibilities to improve the jail feel more real than ever before.”

Charlie Wolfson is PublicSource’s local government reporter and a Report for America corps member. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org.

The post Innamorato brings ‘new day’ to Jail Oversight Board, but deep issues remain at lockup appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Updated (12/18/23): A bill signed last week by Gov. Josh Shapiro grants judges new authority to extend probation in cases of unpaid restitution, clashing with the ACLU’s interpretation of case law.

The new guidelines on probation sentencing came into force Dec. 14 amid a sweep of criminal reform bills as the legislature wrapped up for winter recess. Pennsylvania law now lists the failure to clear a total restitution balance as one of a handful of codified conditions delaying probation terminations. 

The law also requires the inclusion of restitution payment details in status reports filed prior to probation review conferences, at which defendants have a shot at getting their sentences lifted.

In cases in which a defendant has demonstrated a “good faith effort” to clear their debt, they can be moved on to “administrative probation” –  a new classification of sentencing laid out in the bill that prescribes court supervision with fewer conditions than standard probation.

A separate bill passed last week expanding the state’s expungement program – praised by some reformers – nonetheless mandates full payment of restitution for those seeking to clear their records.

Reported 10/12/2023:

Probation forever? Court ruling clarifies that unpaid restitution shouldn’t mean unending supervision

Nearly a decade after he was charged with pocketing $182,000 from a teachers union fund, Ed Maritz Jr. still lives with regret. 

Thanks to a recent court ruling and some sharp legal research, though, he no longer lives with probation.

For several years, Maritz had been writing himself checks from the Pine-Richland Education Association account without detection, until he finally turned himself in in 2014.

“There was a lot of personal turmoil in my life, and very poor decisions on my part.” he said. “It’s what I would describe as the perfect storm in that people trusted me and I took advantage of that.”

He pled guilty to multiple felonies in 2015, and was sentenced to a year’s house arrest, followed by five more years under probation. He was also ordered to pay back what he’d taken. He vowed to serve his time, find new work and try to put things right.

Then, when his probation was set to conclude in September 2021, Maritz received a letter summoning him to a violation hearing because he had an outstanding balance on his restitution. He says he was advised by the officers to accept a two-year probation extension to “give him more time to pay.” Seeing no alternatives, he signed the papers.

“I did that because I didn’t know any better and I was scared,” he said.

Maritz says that since 2015 he’s consistently made payments ranging from $50 to $300, depending on his means. Court records show he’s paid less than $5,000 toward his $182,386 restitution.

Before his second probation sentence was set to end this September, Maritz received another letter warning of yet another violation proceeding in the works. This time he sought out other options.

“I didn’t feel there was a need for continued court supervised probation when I was demonstrating having a payment, one per month, every month for the past eight years.”

Maritz turned to the American Civil Liberties Union, where an attorney directed him to a ruling, Commonwealth v. Marshall, reached just days earlier in the state Superior Court. The ruling — the result of an appeal on a 2022 probation violation order in Allegheny County — found the defendant did not violate his probation for having an outstanding restitution balance because the court hadn’t proved he was in a position to pay it off faster.

Arriving at this conclusion, the ruling refers to longstanding case law that prohibits “indigent defendants from being sentenced to prison solely because they do not have enough money.” 

A preference for probation

Attorneys and advocates say the Marshall ruling simply reaffirms a longstanding legal principle that, for a variety of reasons, isn’t always followed – particularly in Allegheny County.

One such reason, according to Pittsburgh-based defense attorney Justin Romano, is a belief – widespread among courts – that releasing defendants from probation means releasing them from their debts.

“There’s a misconception that probation is the stick that you need to motivate defendants to pay restitution,” said Romano, a member of the Allegheny Lawyers Initiative for Justice. “In reality there’s a mechanism on the books.” Defendants can be held in contempt of court for failing to make good faith payments on what they owe without being on probation.

“Judges presiding over violation hearings need to understand you don’t need to keep someone on probation indefinitely to get them to pay,” Romano said.

Maritz, while glad to be off probation, says he still intends to clear his balance.

“I am responsible for what I did and I am responsible for putting it right,” he said.

Legal reformers in Pennsylvania have been pushing for years to end the practice of considering unpaid restitution and court fees as a probation violation. Andrew Christy, a Philadelphia-based attorney at the ACLU who was involved with the Marshall case, said Allegheny and Delaware Counties have – for reasons unclear –  stood out for frequently issuing restitution-based probation violations. 

Dolly Prabhu, a staff attorney at the Abolitionist Law Center in Pittsburgh, who recently co-authored a report on “Probation in Allegheny County,” said a team of volunteer court watchers under her supervision has regularly observed probation periods extended for unpaid restitution in the manner described by Maritz.

“We saw this all the time,” Prabhu said. “They make it sound like they’re doing the defendants a favor, because ‘we’re going to give you another five years to pay this off,’ almost like they’re giving them an extension of a homework assignment, when really they’re illegally extending their probation.”

Prabhu’s report notes that probation is “increasingly given as a default sentence rather than an alternative sentence.” It argues that instead of reducing jail sentences as a diversionary measure, probation places people on a “fast track to incarceration.”

While on probation, minor offenses can quickly land you in jail where they may otherwise be dismissed, she said.

Taking data recorded in May, the ALC report stated 40% of the county’s jail population were there on probation retainers – meaning they’d been sent there while awaiting a hearing on probation violation charges. It also noted the prevalence of poor people and people of color within the jail and probation systems. 

“It’s very paradoxical because the conditions of probation itself make it very difficult to get employed and make money,” Prabhu said

Court appointments and meetings with probation officers can interfere with work schedules, Christy said, sometimes jeopardizing employment.

“Keeping people on probation makes it harder for them to work and pay back what they owe,” he said.

Maritz noted simply disclosing his probation drove away some employers when he first sought new work after his sentence.

Is change coming?

While his felony record means he’ll likely never return to the field of education, Maritz has found employment in customer service and – as of last month – is no longer under court supervision.

He counts himself among the lucky ones.

“I’m very fortunate in terms of the nature of my crime, and the size of my restitution. The criminal justice system was fair to me.”

Joseph Asturi, a spokesperson representing the county’s probation department and its broader court system, said the Superior Court ruling was non-precedential and would have no material consequences for sentences related to unpaid restitution in Allegheny County.

“Probation does not detain defendants for failure to pay. Instead, the probation office presents cases to judges, who consider the information and arguments provided by attorneys and defendants, including those concerning whether the defendant made a good faith effort to pay or whether or not the failure to pay was willful,” Asturi wrote in an email to PublicSource. 

He added that restitution obligations remain in effect until they’re paid, and judges decide whether to keep defendants on probation — but they’re never “sentenced to jail for failure to pay.”

Christy said the ruling was non-precedential – meaning lower courts are not bound to it in future cases – because it does not reflect a change in precedent but instead “builds on decades of case law” going back to 1984.

The Marshall case “shouldn’t have been necessary,” he said. “But it does leave an open question of: Are courts going to be coming into compliance with this new and reiterated point from the Superior Court that you can’t punish people for being poor by keeping them on probation?”

A former educator with a doctorate, Maritz said his research abilities helped him build a case that persuaded the judge to release him. But, he pointed out, others facing similar situations may be less fortunate.

“I’ve seen people in the courts who say, ‘I’m literally going to be on probation my whole life paying this off,’” Prabhu said. “It’s unfortunate that even after this decision, some judges aren’t taking it seriously, or they simply aren’t aware, in the best case.”

Christy is optimistic about slow change in Allegheny County and he’s learned of cases in Delaware County in which the district attorney has dropped charges in response to the Marshall ruling.

“I do view what happened in Ed’s case as promising,” Christy said. “On the one hand it was troubling that the probation department [was] still trying to [extend his probation]. But on the other hand, the judge clearly was familiar with this decision and stuck with it.”

Correction:  The report citing the proportion of Allegheny County’s jail population held on probation was published by the Abolition Law Center. An earlier version of the story misattributed the author.

Jamie Wiggan is deputy editor at PublicSourceand can be reached at jamie@publicsource.org.

This story was fact-checked by Tanya Babbar.

The post Updated: New law bucks court ruling, may extend probation for those with court debt appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

In the early hours of Sept. 2, 2005, my family’s  sense of normalcy was interrupted by an  aggressive banging on the door. I stood at the top of the stairs as my brother answered only to be pushed aside by four police officers. They pointed at me, stating I was under arrest. 

My brother demanded to see a warrant, which they eventually presented after threatening to arrest him for obstruction of justice. I was allowed to put on shoes before being handcuffed, along with my nephew, and escorted into the back of a police cruiser. 

It was the start of my long and challenging journey through the criminal justice system. I was just 16, wrongly accused and horribly unprepared.

Even as the county moves to reopen the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center – ostensibly to get kids out of the Allegheny County Jail – my own experience with incarceration shows that the entire approach to law enforcement of youth needs to be reexamined beyond the location of their detention.

Naive beliefs, feelings of insignificance

Two weeks after my arrest, following my release on a $3,000 cash bail, I stood in front of Pittsburgh City Council, speaking about my experience in the Allegheny County Jail. 

This was solely at the urging of my mother, who had been deeply affected by my arrest and incarceration. Her anger was visible, and she made it known to everyone who would listen, from the Carnegie Police Department to the corrections officers at the jail and my public defender. She believed my story needed to be heard and that I was the best person to tell it. 

As I spoke before Council, I remember feeling a mix of nervousness and encouragement bolstered by the presence of my mother and aunt. However, the response was disheartening as only one council member seemed to listen attentively, while the rest and the audience ignored me completely. I felt that my experience was common enough to be insignificant in the grand scheme of things. 

It wasn’t until 2019, when I joined the Bukit Bail Fund, that I began to see value in what I had been through, and to understand the context.

In November of 1995, the Pennsylvania Judicial Code was amended under Act 33, allowing minors accused of certain crimes, such as armed robbery, to be charged and tried as adults. This legal backdrop meant that instead of being taken to a juvenile detention center, which I had anticipated, I found myself treated as an adult instead of the child I was. 

Reflecting now, I see parallels between my story and those of many young people I’ve supported over the years who have been similarly charged as adults and placed in jail. The closure of Shuman and the subsequent doubling of the juvenile population in ACJ underscore the urgency and importance of my work in advocating for these young individuals and their families.

My firsthand experience with the criminal legal system at such a young age was a rude awakening. Before that, I had held a naive belief in the fairness and justness of the law – that police required substantial evidence to charge someone, that judges were impartial, and that, according to the U.S. Constitution, one was innocent until proven guilty. However, my arrest, based solely on an accuser’s word against mine; my original bail of $25,000, which was arbitrarily set significantly higher than that of my co-defendant; and my subsequent treatment in the Allegheny County Jail quickly dispelled these beliefs.

‘Is that it?’

From the moment I arrived in the jail, I felt the climate of negativity and the undertone of violence. I didn’t receive an iota of respect from the jail staff as I was ordered from one single cell to another. I waited hours at a time between the logistical procedures of the intake process. I remember dozing off and being awakened by the kick of a corrections officer before he ordered me to the next station. 

Over the next several days, I was searched, arraigned, photographed, questioned and strip-searched before being forced into the red uniform that marked me as an inmate and taken upstairs to the housing units. When I think of the time I spent in the ACJ, I recall the deplorable conditions that make it among the deadliest jails in the country. 

For almost a week, I was kept in isolation, locked in a cell for 23 hours a day without explanation. My pod was not exclusive to minors, leading to me eventually mixing with the adult majority. I lost weight because the jail refused to accommodate my vegetarian diet, leaving me malnourished and vulnerable.

I witnessed rampant bullying and abuse by both the jail staff and the residents that underscored the culture of the jail itself. I watched a man get beaten unconscious and lose control of his bladder while others looked on in amusement. As he was taken away on a stretcher, my name was called for my first visit. It was my mother, who was unable to conceal the pain caused by seeing her youngest son enduring conditions she hoped I would never have to. 

After my preliminary hearing, my bail was reduced from $25,000 to $3,000, and my family was able to pay a percentage to a bail bondsman to facilitate my release. Over the next few months, I fought my case in criminal court until my attorney filed a petition for decertification, which allowed my case to instead be tried in Juvenile Court. 

After I was decertified, I started the legal process again, but this time as a juvenile. I was arraigned in a courtroom at Shuman, placed on home detention for the duration of the case and assigned a new attorney who I didn’t meet until the day of my trial. 

I remember being shocked by the differences between juvenile and criminal court. If found guilty in criminal court, I could’ve been sentenced to 5 to 10 years in a state correctional institution. In juvenile court, I would’ve been placed in the Community Intensive Supervision Project. 

Even after the massive reduction in potential sentencing, I still refused to accept a plea bargain and admit guilt for a crime of which I was innocent. When the judge dismissed the case, I remember everyone casually gathering their belongings and exiting the courtroom. I looked at my lawyer and asked, “Is that it?”

It was. 

There was no apology from the court for what my family and I had endured for over a year. There was no accountability for the person who falsely accused me, or the officers who failed to conduct a thorough investigation. There was no recompense for the time and money spent to prove my innocence. There was nothing.  

What if the money went to engagement?

Time can never be reversed, and trauma can never be undone. My family and I didn’t skip around our experiences; we had no choice but to persevere through them. 

Even 18 years later, a forceful knock on my mother’s door triggers back spasms so severe she’s left lying on the floor.

I was forced to live with the stigma of being labeled a criminal, enduring constant surveillance, harassment by police, illegal searches and several unjust arrests. The problems didn’t stop when my charges were dropped. Most recently, in May 2020, I was violently arrested along with 45 others during a protest in Pittsburgh of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. 

None of these experiences, however, impacted me as much as my initial arrest, which thrust me into adulthood. For a Black person in America, adulthood means coming to terms with being perceived as part of an inferior social class, undeserving of fair and equal treatment under the law. I once accepted this as the norm, but I now recognize it as unacceptable.

Today, my work with organizations like 1Hood and Community Care & Resistance In Pittsburgh [CCRIP] is driven by my experiences and those of my community. We aim to create a network of care and support, advocating for those entangled in the criminal legal system, and challenging its punitive nature. We support individuals and families in several ways, from bailing people out of jail to providing direct aid upon their release. Our weekly presence outside the ACJ, offering cash, food, clothes, and most importantly a sense of humanity, is a small but significant step toward change.

My story, while personal, is not unique. It reflects the broader narrative of mass incarceration and systemic racial and social oppression in the United States. The disproportionate representation of poor and Black people in prisons and jails is a testament. In Allegheny County, while Black people make up 13% of the population, we’re consistently populating two-thirds of the jail. The prevalence of plea bargains, often accepted regardless of guilt, highlights the systemic flaws and the punitive nature of our criminal legal system. My co-defendant, of whose innocence I am convinced, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three to six years in prison, the first of numerous jail and prison terms he’s served.

The potential reopening of Shuman,with Adelphoi chosen as the private operator, raises significant concerns, given the lawsuits against them and the lack of transparency and public input in the county executive’s decision-making process. 

Organizations like 1Hood Media, CCRIP, the Abolitionist Law Center, Community Forge, the Bukit Bail Fund, the Thomas Merton Center and Food Not Bombs Pittsburgh exemplify the kind of community support and engagement that genuinely make a difference, and could do even more if they had a fraction of the funding spent on incarceration.

In sharing my story, I hope to shed light on the realities of the criminal legal system and the urgent need for a system based on restoration, transformation and care. I hope to inspire others to work toward a justice system that is truly just and equitable for all.

Muhammad Ali Nasir, who goes by his emcee name, MAN-E, is the advocacy, policy and civic engagement coordinator at 1Hood Media and founder of Community Care and Resistance In Pittsburgh. He can be reached at muhammad@1hood.org.

The post A jail stay as a teen led me to advocacy, but incarceration leads many to ruin appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Editor’s note: This story contains references to sexual abuse, domestic violence and murders of children.

Update (12/14/23): The Pennsylvania Senate passed the bill dubbed Kayden’s Law by a vote of 50-0 on Dec. 13. The bill now moves to the state House for consideration.

Reported 12/7/23:

Claim abuse, lose custody: A bill aims to curb a trend born of the theory of ‘parental alienation’

When a child development professional first told Inaya that they would be filing a Childline report on behalf of her toddler, she felt both relieved and terrified. 

The Pittsburgh mother of one was fearful her then-husband would hurt her child once she disclosed the abuse, but her worry poured out to the child development professional. “One weekend I broke down before her because of what had been happening, and she then told me that, ‘You and your daughter are no longer safe here,’” said Inaya, whose real name is being withheld out of concern that publicity might result in negative consequences.

Inaya had been enduring what she described as increasingly threatening tirades and promises of violence: throwing items, breaking down doors and descriptions of physical harm that would come to her and her child if they did not comply. Once the Childline report was filed, Inaya knew the risk had surged, and she had to leave. 

“That’s when I called up the women’s shelter, and she said, ‘Just pack two sets of clothes for yourself and your daughter and come right here.’ OK, and so that’s what I did.” 

She believed that would be the start of a new — and safer — life for her and her toddler. 

Instead, five years later, Inaya’s ex-husband has primary custody and she is only permitted to see her child for two overnight visits per week, which she says amounts to about 13 to 15 waking hours. The case has included testimony brought by an expert witness called by her ex-husband who said that physical and sexual abuse might be less harmful to a child than “parental alienation.”

The decades-old theory of parental alienation, which holds that one parent may deliberately turn a child against the other, has polarized family courts across the country. Court decisions to disregard abuse allegations, driven in part by the theory, have been linked to child deaths.

Since the death of a Philadelphia-area child in 2018, advocates and lawmakers have pushed for more protections for the children of parents fleeing abusive situations. But while measures inspired by that death have made their way into law in some states and can even unlock federal funding, they haven’t yet made it through Pennsylvania’s General Assembly.

Parental alienation: Worse than a punch?

Psychiatrist Richard Gardner coined the phrase “parental alienation syndrome” in 1985, characterizing it as a disorder in which children, programmed by the allegedly “loved” parent, grow resentful of the allegedly “hated” parent, and often of that parent’s extended family. 

In 2013, the American Psychological Association [APA] listed parental alienation as a specific form of child abuse. Parental alienation syndrome is not listed as a medical term in either the International Classification of Diseases or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Nonetheless, it turns up in custody cases, including Inaya’s in a 2021 custody trial.

Her lawyer sought to exclude the testimony of Robert Evans, a psychologist and co-author of the book “The Essentials of Parent Alienation Syndrome,” but a county Court of Common Pleas judge denied that motion. According to the trial transcript, Inaya’s lawyer then cross-examined Evans, presenting hypothetical scenarios of abuse.

“Can a parent inflict more damage by parental alienation than the parent could inflict by, say, breaking the child’s bones?” the lawyer asked.

“Conceivably, yes,” Evans answered.

“… How about, you have a 4-year-old child, and the parent punches the child in the face and leaves two black eyes,” the lawyer continued. “Could in your opinion parental alienation be worse for the child than that?”

“Potentially, yes,” said Evans.

“OK, how about if you have a 4-year-old, and the father forces the child to perform fellatio on him. Could that be less harmful to the child than parental alienation?”

“Potentially, yes,” Evans answered.

“How about the father actually fully penetrates his four year old daughter’s vagina with his penis. Could that be less harmful to the child than parental alienation?” the lawyer asked.

Said Evans: “Potentially.”

Evans did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

In late 2021 the judge gave Inaya’s former husband custody of the child, with periods of supervised custody for the mother.

A theory that usually works against moms

“Historically we have seen fathers get custody of their children during custody cases because women and children were seen as their property,” said Danielle Pollack, policy manager for the National Family Violence Law Center at George Washington University Law School. Over the last several decades, Pollack said, “we have seen more of a 50/50 standard.”

Parental alienation claims, though, have pushed the pendulum back, according to research conducted by the center.

“Parental alienation is an effective legal strategy even though there is no evidence to support it,” said Joan Meier, a professor of Clinical Law and Director of the center. “It fits the court’s mind that no abuse could ever happen and both parents should just get along.”

Meier’s 2019 study found that in cases in which mothers claim abuse by a father, and the father then claims alienation, courts are more than twice as likely to disbelieve the mother’s claim. When a mother claims child abuse, and the father claims alienation, courts are almost four times more likely to dismiss the claim than if the father did not claim alienation. 

“Women’s voices are taken as less credible and children even less credible,” Pollack said. “So when you have to talk about the abuse, the courts have the human response to deny it. We all don’t want it to be true that these things have happened, especially child sexual abuse. Your brain just turns off.”

Meier also found that when fathers claim alienation, the rate at which mothers lose custody shoots up from 26% to 50% for any abuse allegation. Even when courts believe a father has abused a mother, if they also believe the mother is alienating, some mothers still lose custody to the abusive fathers. 

Across all cases in which alienation was claimed — regardless of whether abuse was claimed — when a father alleged a mother was alienating the man took full custody from her 44% of the time. When the genders were reversed, mothers took custody from fathers only 29% of the time. 

“It’s a mix of ignorance, stereotypes, denial of abuse and misogyny,” Meier said. “There has not been any useful training [in courts] on the use of parental alienation and its gendered outcomes.”

Judges “see an abuser come into court calm, cool, collected, a pillar of the community,” said Kathleen Russell, executive director of California-based Center for Judicial Excellence. 

The mother, by contrast may appear stressed and could be suffering from PTSD, impacting their courtroom delivery, Russell added. As a result, judges “don’t believe the women because they don’t present well, and they believe the abusers because they are poised and don’t act abusive.” 

When parental alienation is alleged, she said, efforts to disprove it can instead appear to support the underlying claim, in a system where judges tend to reward the friendliest parent.

“If your kid is being raped on the weekend and you are trying to restrict custody or go for sole custody because your child is having medical issues or is hysterical upon pickup, you are not going to look friendly to the court.”

Incautious calls by courts can bring tragedy.

The Center for Judicial Excellence’s dashboard logs nearly 1,000 children’s deaths nationwide, since 2008, in cases in which custody was contested over allegations of abuse. The issue, said Russell, is that the family court system was not designed and has not been trained to handle cases like these. 

“The majority of cases that come in are not domestic violence or child abuse cases,” said Russell. “Those all settle amicably; the parents are able to put the child’s best interests forward.” But when the case gets complicated, she said, untrained family courts too often fail to protect children. 

Kayden’s story — and the bill named after her 

On Aug. 6, 2018, 7-year-old Kayden Mancuso, from Bucks County, was murdered by her father Jeffrey Mancuso during court-ordered unsupervised custody time, which had been granted despite the mother raising safety concerns during custody litigation. Kayden’s mother, Kathy Sherlock, had submitted evidence to the court of the father’s abusive, violent history including criminal records and filed for a restraining order.

In 2019, a bill named after Kayden, and aimed at averting future tragedies, was introduced in Pennsylvania. Almost five years later, the latest version passed the Senate Judiciary Committee with a unanimous vote in October, but has not yet passed either full chamber of the General Assembly. 

The bill would:

• Make clear that the most important issue in custody cases is protection of the child
• Establish a hearing to review evidence after claims of abuse
• Require that a court-determined abusive party would be limited to supervised custody until that party could prove they do not pose a risk to the child’s health and safety
• Mandate ongoing, evidence-based training programs within courts regarding child abuse, domestic violence and the impact of child abuse and domestic violence on children.

State Sen. Steven Santarsiero, D-Bucks County, the prime sponsor of Kayden’s Law, said he is “cautiously optimistic” that the bill will pass soon.  

“Every stakeholder has been very supportive,” he said. “It was just fine tuning.” 

State Rep. Emily Kinkead, D-Brighton Heights, said she expects the bill to pass.

Kinkead, an attorney who serves on the House Judiciary Committee, said she had concerns that provisions in prior versions, which would have required professionals to supervise visits when there was an allegation of abuse, would be very difficult to execute given the lack of trained court supervisors. “If the courts are telling you that they can’t make it work, that’s something you should listen to,” said Kinkead. The updated bill suggests looking closely at each case to determine whether it requires a professional visitation supervisor. 

Last year President Joe Biden reauthorized the Violence Against Women’s Act, enacted in 1994, increasing services and support for survivors from underserved and marginalized communities including for LGBTQIA+ survivors of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and stalking. The act endorses provisions echoing Kayden’s Law’s planks, pledging federal funds to states that require courts to carefully consider abuse allegations, ensure that the right of a child to be with a protective parent is not secondary to the desire to improve the child’s relationship with the other parent and require training for judges. However, states are not required to take these measures. 

“Kayden’s Law is such low-hanging fruit,” Meier said. “Requiring that experts are truly experts in what they are testifying for, requiring training for judges and not ordering the [child’s] reunification with an alleged abuser seems so clear and necessary.”

While Kayden’s tragedy occurred in Pennsylvania, Colorado became the first state to officially pass Kayden’s Law in May. New York, Maryland, Montana and Illinois have also introduced similar legislation. California passed similar legislation in mid-October. 

An Allegheny County court spokesperson declined to respond to questions, saying the court can’t comment on anything related to pending legislation.

‘We just can’t side with abuse’

Kendra, a mom in Allegheny County whose real name is being withheld, said she endured almost six years of being “emotionally, mentally, spiritually” abused. Kendra was granted a PFA, but once it expired, she said, her husband would break into her house, vandalize her property and verbally abuse her in front of their two children.

“When I would call the police, they said they couldn’t do anything because his name was still on the deed of the house because we weren’t officially divorced yet,” Kendra said. 

Kendra said these events were very traumatizing for her and her children. Her son, then three years old, would lock the doors anywhere they went because he “wanted to keep the bad guys out.” 

Kendra has primary custody of her children, with her ex-husband having five hours per week plus every other weekend and some holidays. She notes that she found a way to finance the continued cost of a lawyer.

“What is happening to these women and children that don’t have the money? There were times I would get [lawyer bills] up to $2,000 to $4,000 every two weeks,” Kendra said. “The system is so perverted and twisted, it doesn’t protect women; men use kids as pawns and there’s no accountability unless women are in the financial position to keep going to court for as long as it takes.”  

“It still comes down to who has the most money for a better lawyer,” said Pollack, of the National Family Violence Law Center.

Neighborhood Legal Services, a federally funded program to provide legal aid, can help eligible households to navigate family courts. 

Meier said that abuse continues through generations in part because it is not acknowledged. 

“We just can’t side with abuse any longer,” Meier said. “So many kids are being intentionally harmed and traumatized, and it’s so frustrating that courts deny abuse all the time and still hold onto old fashioned and inaccurate standards. … We need to just keep calling it out or it will keep happening.”

The City of Pittsburgh officially declared November as Family Court Awareness month. Pollack led a press conference conducted by Mayor Ed Gainey’s office, which included statements from child survivors of abuse.

“As a survivor, you are told to tell the truth and you would be okay, but after hours of questioning and telling the truth, we were completely ignored,” said a child referred to as Nova, whose real name was withheld. “Everyone overlooked what we had to say, and it affected us greatly. The trauma caused by family court is real.”

Inaya does not want to give up on getting custody of her child, but it’s exhausting and expensive. She’s also unsure if more hearings will even make a difference.

“I shared what my daughter had told me, ‘Papa does bad things to me.’ And another time, she had said that he doesn’t stop,” she said. “I shared this in the court.” 

Correction: Neighborhood Legal Services provides legal aid to victims of domestic violence, and to clients in custody cases related to Protection from Abuse cases if there is a high risk of lethality or other safety factor. Subject to available resources, NLS represents clients in some types of family court cases in which custody is contested. The agency also helps clients in Allegheny, Beaver, Butler and Lawrence counties to navigate family courts. An earlier version of this story mischaracterized NLS’ availability. To seek legal help, click here.

Meg St-Esprit is a freelance journalist based in Bellevue. She can be reached at megstesprit@gmail.com or on Instagram and Twitter.

Erin Yudt is an editorial intern at PublicSource and can be reached at erin@publicsource.org.

This story was fact-checked by Punya Bhasin.

The post Updated: Kayden’s Law passes Pa. Senate, would change family court handling of child abuse allegations appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

For many around the world the images and reports out of Israel and Gaza since October have brought anguish and devastation. 

“It’s traumatic for both sides — Israeli or Palestinian,” said Christine Mohamed, executive director of the Council for American-Islamic Relations Pittsburgh. “The images and the things that you’re hearing are just traumatizing for all of us. I don’t even have loved ones in that area, but it’s traumatizing for me with some of the images, so I can only imagine what those members of our community are feeling.”

The news has led to an increase in reports of discrimination and hate directed at Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities worldwide. In Pittsburgh, faith and cultural communities are navigating sensitive discussions while also combating discrimination to ensure public safety. 

Attacks by the militant group Hamas, from Gaza into Israel on Oct. 7, led to the deaths of 1,200 Israelis, with an estimated 200 taken hostage. Israel’s military response has brought estimated death tolls ranging from at least 11,000 to more than 14,000. Even as efforts to swap hostages and pause fighting continue, the enduring tension and violence in the area ripples outward.

“Just because the war isn’t directly happening here does not mean it does not have an impact here,” said Shawn Brokos, director of community security for the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh.

Instances of Islamophobia, antisemitism surge

In 2021, the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh logged 82 reports of antisemitic incidents and safety concerns. This year, the number has almost tripled to 237 by the end of October. 

“It’s very easy to say that there has been a dramatic increase in antisemitic attacks in Pittsburgh since [Oct. 7],” Brokos said.

A Pittsburgh police spokesperson did not provide data on an increase in hate incidents, but said the bureau is working closely with the FBI and faith communities in the city to continuously monitor any acts of violence and hate that may stem from escalations in Gaza and Israel. 

“For obvious reasons, there is heightened awareness and fear in the community, both locally and nationwide, and police encourage everyone to report all crimes or anything of concern,” the police spokesperson wrote in response to questions.

Mohamed said CAIR has seen an increase in Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiments across the country since the events of Oct. 7. Between this date and November 4, CAIR received 1,283 reports, a 216% increase since 2022. 

Mohamed said there has been a swell in verbal assaults and profanity directed at community members in public and at schools. She said while many area schools and universities have taken a neutral stance, some have only offered support for Israel, which has made Palestinian and Arab students feel disenfranchised. 

The majority of the recent safety concerns involving antisemitism have come from college campuses, according to Brokos, who oversees security for local Jewish organizations and places of worship. The University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University have both seen on-campus activism in response to the war.

“I think there is a lot of misinformation and disinformation among college students, specifically more disinformation, which is intentionally inaccurate information to exploit something,” Brokos said. “But we work closely with Pitt and CMU student organizations and their police, and that has been really great.”

Brokos also said recent events can make it easy to pit groups against one another, but it is important to remember that we are all human.

It’s tempting to feel “that there should be one clear side to support when it is much more complex,” Brokos said. “We also need to all look out for one another, not just the Jewish community.”

The 10/27 Healing Partnership, an organization that provides support for individuals and their loved ones impacted by the October 2018 synagogue shooting and others who experience hate-induced trauma, has posted an anonymous survey inviting observations on respondents’ “internal questions and conflicts” and suggestions for what the organization can do to better support the community. 

“Some people may feel worried about antisemitism and personal safety, and yet try and dismiss it because it feels insubstantial compared to the worries of others,”  said Maggie Feinstein, executive director of the partnership, in a statement. “However, multiple truths can be true at the same time.”

Mohamed said CAIR has had an interfaith relationship with Pittsburgh’s Jewish community for many years and encourages people from all communities to check in on each other. She met with Rabbi Ron Symons from the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh and said their shared concern is “​​the security and safety within our own hometown.”

“Neither one of us wants to see violence, even if we have disagreements on how things should go on the geopolitical scale,” Mohamed said. 

Colleges implementing new reporting and resources

Pitt has noticed an uptick in reports regarding antisemitism and Islamophobia. In an email sent out to the Pitt community, Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Clyde Wilson Pickett noted this rise and encouraged community members to avoid letting “disagreements spill over into hateful rhetoric.”

According to Pitt spokesperson Jared Stonesifer, the university has received “approximately two dozen reports since October 7, many of which are still under investigation. Prior to October 7, we averaged one to three reports per month in 2023.”

Pickett said Pitt wants to emphasize a “proactive strategy and not be reactive,” noting that the majority of dialogue on campus has remained respectful to all communities.  

“We are not seeing an increase in ‘hate,’ but we are hearing elevated concern, and we are taking that seriously and being proactive,” Pickett said. Pitt offices, he said, are reaching out to faith communities and ethnic groups and listening to their concerns.

CMU Provost James Garrett Jr. and Vice President of Student Affairs Gina Casalegno released a statement to the campus community about art expression on the campus fence, which has stood as a self-regulating, student-governed space for open expression for over 100 years. Students have painted the fence with words in support of a free Palestine and against antisemitism.

“We acknowledge that, on issues that may divide us, the free expression of some may cause discomfort and concern for others,”  the statement read. “As an academic community committed to advancing our educational mission, we must grapple with these tensions.”

Some students say that they have faced discrimination and Islamophobic attacks at the fence and throughout campus. Several students were so concerned that they asked that their names not be published.

A CMU student who works with pro-Palestine student organizations on campus said their organization, which they asked PublicSource not to name, had never had reports of hate crimes from students until the escalation following Oct. 7. 

“There were lots of comments at the fence by considerably older men,” the student said. “They called us everything from baby killers to rapists, the most common is terrorist. … Our police had to escort them away. It was really scary.”

CMU has since created a Campus Climate and Bias Reporting Protocol for reporting incidents of bias, harassment and discrimination. 

Peter Kerwin, director of CMU media relations, said in a statement that the university is listening to student leaders and allowing faculty to extend deadlines for exams and papers for students struggling with the crisis.

Students express fear on campus 

Deena Eldaour, a Palestinian student at Pitt whose family is originally from Gaza, said she has noticed increased fear on campus among her peers, especially among other women who wear hijab. 

“They no longer can walk alone or they always feel like people are staring at them,” Eldaour said.

Eldaour, a board member of Students for Justice in Palestine [SJP], said the majority of the discrimination leveled at her community has taken place at rallies on Pitt’s and CMU’s campuses. She noted that during one such rally on CMU’s campus, an agitator approached the group yelling Islamophobic remarks and asking if protesters were going to “bomb” them.  

Another Pitt student, who is Jewish, said there has been a “tense vibe” on campus since the attack and expressed worry about saying anything about Israel. After attending a Jewish student organization meeting soon after Oct. 7, the student recounted, another student came into the meeting shouting and calling attendees “fascist and other names,” the student said.

“This was supposed to be a place for healing and connecting with other Jewish students when we’re in such a vulnerable position,” the student said. “I kind of wished someone had said something [to Pitt administration], but I think everyone was too afraid to.”

The student said that they have always been nervous in Pittsburgh.

“I chose to go to school where the most antisemitic event in [U.S.] history occurred,” the student said. “Until the actual conflict resolves, until there’s a ceasefire, I think it will be tense and simmering under the pot, making people feel bad on both sides.”

A Muslim student at Pitt told PublicSource they were “called terrorists, baby killers” while selling coffee at a Charity Week event for orphans and underprivileged children, and arrived at a meeting room for a gathering of a student organization only to find pro-Israel posters displayed.

“It has been very unsettling over the last few weeks,” the student said.

Pitt has worked to address student safety concerns by staying in contact with student and community leaders, speaking with concerned parents and religious and cultural leaders, coordinating with law enforcement and maintaining security at demonstrations and rallies, according to Stonesifer. 

Eldaour said Islamophobic and anti-Arab sentiments have been heightened by people in power who have propped up harmful rhetoric, including President Joe Biden and Pitt’s chancellor. Following the attacks in Israel, Chancellor Joan Gabel released a statement in which she condemned the actions of Hamas calling them “unconscionable, barbaric acts.” It did not mention Palestinian loss of life.

Eldaour said the word “barbaric” has historically been used against Muslims and Arabs, and could encourage harmful rhetoric directed at students on campus. 

“I think a lot of the negativity harbored came from that,” Eldaour said.

In response to the email, students at SJP sent the chancellor a letter on Oct. 18 criticizing her use of the word “barbaric” and demanding that Pitt “unequivocally recognize and name the suffering of the Palestinian people.” 

Dean of Students Carla Panzella addressed the violence and student concern on campus in an Oct. 13 email noting she serves “all students affected by these tragic and horrifying acts, including our Israeli and Palestinian students, some of whom may be uniquely affected.”   

Eldaour said it’s “really important” that Jewish, Muslim, Israeli and Palestinian organizations on campus connect. “Hostility,” she said, “is the antithesis of both our movements.”

Response includes increased funding, security

Hateful and threatening incidents have been documented throughout the country on college campuses. At Stanford, an Arab student was the victim of a hit-and-run that is being investigated as a hate crime. At Cornell, a student was arrested for making threats to Jewish students online. 

In Vermont, three college students of Palestinian descent were shot on Saturday.

According to a survey of 609 college students by Intelligent, an online magazine, one in five students feel less safe on campus since Oct. 7. Nearly one-third said their mental health has worsened.

The Biden administration on Nov. 14 announced new actions and resources for schools across the country. These include resources on promoting religious inclusion in K-12 schools and in higher education, and a series of webinars for schools. 

The Department of Justice is also awarding more than $38 million in grants to support the investigation and prosecution of hate crimes, increase hate crimes reporting, expand victim services and improve community awareness. This includes more than $8 million in grants to community-based organizations and civil rights groups, including awards to organizations serving Jewish and Arab American communities.

Incidents across the U.S., including the killing of a 6-year-old Palestinian boy in Chicago and an attack directed at a Muslim teen who wears hijab on the subway in New York, have left many Pittsburgh Muslims afraid to go about their daily activities, Mohamed said. 

“We have a lot of work to do to dispel the hate and the misconceptions that currently are happening,” Mohamed said. “It doesn’t help when there’s been so much dehumanizing rhetoric, through the media, through the press, not just over the recent times, but I’m talking about long periods of time, where Muslims and Islam and Arabs may be dehumanized in various ways.”  

Recently, there have also been reports and investigations of graffiti which “can be characterized as antisemitic and political in nature” in Squirrel Hill, according to the spokesperson for the Pittsburgh police. The city’s Department of Public Works is assigned to remove the graffiti. 

Amro Elaswalli, the imam at the Muslim Association of Greater Pittsburgh, said the mosque has hired more security for gatherings such as Friday prayers, Sunday school and other large events.

In an effort to bring together grieving communities and call for peace, more than 100 students and community members from multiple faiths held a candlelight vigil on Nov. 13 at CMU’s campus, and listened to prayers given by Jewish, Muslim and Christian community leaders. 

Elaswalli, who recited a verse from the Qur’an, said it’s important that everyone, regardless of faith and background, come together against violence and war. 

“Whoever kills one soul it’s as if they killed all of mankind,” Elaswalli said during the vigil, reading the English translation. “And whoever saves one soul, it’s as if they saved all of mankind. … I hope we can all reflect on this verse. ” 

Elaswalli said it’s crucial to work on fighting misinformation and maintaining dialogue across marginalized communities.  

“We need to stand up for justice and do our best to make our voices heard,” Elaswalli said. “To be part of the solution and not to be part of the problem.”

A participant at the vigil read a translation of a Jewish prayer, saying it’s important for everyone to recognize the grief and emotions that many are facing right now. Her prayer called for peace and a path forward in which everyone is safe. 

“I think there is hope, but I think it’s going to take a very different approach than what we’ve seen,” she said. “I think that it will take a lot of innovative thinking and openness to do something you’ve never been able to do before in the world.” 

Resources

If you or someone you know has been a victim of an Islamophobic hate crime or an act of discrimination, submit this anonymous form to have your case reviewed by the CAIR-Pittsburgh civil rights department.

To report an antisemitic or safety incident, visit the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh’s incident report page.

Anyone is welcome to complete the 10/27 Healing Partnership anonymous survey. 

To report incidents of bias related to the respective universities, complete CMU’s report form  or  Pitt’s form.

Editor’s note: This article was updated to improve the accuracy of characterizations of the synagogue at which the 2018 shooting occurred and of one participant’s involvement in the Nov. 13 vigil.

Erin Yudt is an editorial intern at PublicSource and can be reached at erin@publicsource.org.

Betul Tuncer is a student at the University of Pittsburgh serving as a Pittsburgh Media Partnership intern this semester, and can be reached at betulstuncer@gmail.com.

This story was fact-checked by Tanya Babbar.

The post Amid antisemitism and Islamophobia, faith communities and students try to tamp down tension appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court last week ruled that evidence derived from Pittsburgh’s ShotSpotter gunshot detection system was properly allowed in the prosecution of a now-72-year-old North Side man, but two justices expressed concern about the admissibility of tech-derived reports.

The six sitting justices ruled unanimously that Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas Judge Jill Rangos did not err when she allowed prosecutors to submit, and a City of Pittsburgh police officer testify regarding, a ShotSpotter-generated report in a case against Angelo Weeden. 

He was charged in a 2018 incident involving shots fired at a car in which a former romantic partner and others were riding. Court records indicate two bullet holes in the car door, but no injuries. A jury convicted him of aggravated assault and related charges, and Rangos sentenced him to 10 to 20 years of incarceration.

Weeden’s attorney, Justin Romano, appealed the conviction, arguing that ShotSpotter’s “inherent unreliability” and the failure of the prosecution to present any witness who could be effectively cross-examined about its methodology, resulted in a violation of Weeden’s right to confront an accuser.

ShotSpotter installs acoustic sensors in locations like the tops of buildings, streetlight poles and cellphone towers. The sensors listen for loud sounds, and an algorithm calculates the location. The technology, plus human reviewers, determine whether the sounds are likely gunfire. The information is then transmitted to the county 911 system, which determines whether to dispatch police.

The state Supreme Court ruled that the ShotSpotter-generated report tied to Weeden’s charges did not constitute testimony, because it was just a repackaging of data generated by ShotSpotter at the time the shots were fired. Based on U.S. Supreme Court precedent allowing admission of evidence gathered in an “ongoing emergency,” the state’s high court found that use of the report did not run afoul of Weeden’s rights as a defendant under the Sixth Amendment.

Justice David Wecht, while concurring with the opinion because of federal precedents, wrote that admitting such reports “without a corroborating witness on the stand to undergo cross-examination hardly contributes” to the goal of fair trials. “To the contrary, it all but guarantees the opposite.” Unless the U.S. Supreme Court “reverses course,” he wrote, “this inequity shall continue.”

Justice Kevin Brobson, in another concurring opinion, wrote that “as technology advances, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence, these concerns will continue to arise.” He recommended that the state court system’s Committee on Rules of Evidence examine concerns with the use of emerging technology as evidence.

Pittsburgh began using ShotSpotter in early 2015 over a 3-square-mile area in the northeast of the city, with officials billing it as a way of summoning police and medical assistance to gunshot victims even when no one calls 911. It has since been expanded to cover roughly one-third of the city.

The city pays ShotSpotter around $1.2 million a year and the current contract runs through 2025.

Rich Lord is the managing editor at PublicSource and can be reached at rich@publicsource.org.

The post Pa. high court approves use of ShotSpotter report in North Side man’s conviction, airs concerns appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Update (11/13/23): Allegheny County Executive-elect Sara Innamorato today called news of lawsuits against Adelphoi — the private, nonprofit contractor hired to run the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center — “deeply concerning,” calling transparency in youth detention “a main priority for our administration.”

“This sets off alarm bells,” Innamorato said when asked about PublicSource’s reporting on Adelphoi and the recent complaints filed against it in federal courts.

“I want to understand more of what’s going on and what we’re looking at,” Innamorato said, “and ultimately that’s why above all else, as we open up a detention facility, we have to make sure that there is public oversight like the Jail Oversight Board, that there’s community voice there, that we are investing in a way as a county so there is enough capacity there for highly trained staff, that there’s resource providers that have access — there’s just a lot of sunshine on that facility.”

Prior to Shuman’s 2021 closure, the county operated a Juvenile Detention Board of Advisors.

“The unfortunate reality is our history of administering Shuman isn’t a great record either,” Innamorato noted.

She stopped short of suggesting a reversal of the county’s contract with Adelphoi.

“We are going to look at the terms and see what we are bound to and what best serves the needs of the young people who are caught up in this system at the moment,” she said, adding that there are now “kids in the county jail and we want to make sure that we can get those kids out of that facility and into one that is specialized and geared toward the young people who are there.”

Allegheny County’s pick to run Shuman hit with negligence lawsuits

Reported 11/9/23: When Allegheny County announced in September that it would reopen its youth detention center, it praised the private contractor hired to operate it. 

“Adelphoi has a proven track record as a leading and highly respected agency” in caring for “delinquent and dependent children,” said President Judge Kim Berkeley Clark, of the Court of Common Pleas, in a press release. “This is a crucial step toward creating a safer and more supportive environment for juveniles in the county.”

That record includes accusations of failing to protect children from abuse, according to two civil lawsuits filed just days after Adelphoi Western Region signed a $73 million contract to hold arrested youth at the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center.   

One is a class-action complaint filed in federal court in Philadelphia, accusing Adelphoi USA — one of seven affiliated nonprofits based in Latrobe — of a broad pattern of “negligent staffing” and failing “to enact safety measures and other policies to protect the children.” As a result, according to the complaint, “vulnerable youth … were exposed to predators and abusers.”

The other complaint, filed in federal court in Harrisburg, seeks civil damages for the survivor of former Adelphoi Services employee Tabitha Dunn, who pleaded guilty to corruption of minors and endangering the welfare of children in relation to her work with a minor to whom she was assigned as an in-home worker. 

The attorneys who filed the suits told PublicSource their clients experienced severe trauma while in Adelphoi’s care and allege that some of the entities are responsible for failing to protect them from harm. 

It’s important that “the institutions harboring these abusers” are held accountable, said Renee Franchi, an attorney representing the young male in the case against Adelphoi Services.  

David Wesley Cornish, a Philadelphia attorney, filed the class-action suit on behalf of eight plaintiffs who allege they were abused by staff at Adelphoi facilities throughout the state. 

“It’s not just one or two people … that are saying this,” said Cornish. He said his clients “had never met each other,” but made similar accusations of mistreatment by Adelphoi staffers. 

The lawsuits — and another filed last year against Adelphoi Village in Westmoreland County court — raise questions about the plan for Shuman and speak to broader concerns about youth incarceration, which some advocates say exposes children to physical and mental harm and the risk of abuse.

Adelphoi said it can’t comment on pending civil complaints, but takes “extensive steps” to protect the children in its care, including training and supervising its staff and reporting incidents to Pennsylvania State Police and ChildLine, the state’s call center for reporting child abuse.  

“We remain committed to providing a safe and nurturing environment for every child under our care,” said Karyn Pratt, Adelphoi’s vice president of marketing and strategy development, in an email. 

Clark announced in September that Shuman — which closed in 2021 after the state revoked its license — will reopen under Adelphoi management. County and court officials signed a contract with Adelphoi that month. The center could begin holding youth again as soon as this winter if renovations to the facility are completed on schedule. 

Amie Downs, a spokesperson for the county, referred all questions about Adelphoi to the county’s court system. Joseph Asturi, a spokesperson for the county’s Court of Common Pleas, declined to answer questions, including how civil complaints might inform the court’s monitoring of Adelphoi’s work. 

How Adelphoi landed a $73 million contract to operate Shuman

Shuman first opened in 1974 in a brick building near the Allegheny riverfront in Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar. The county managed it for decades until the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services revoked its license for multiple violations. 

Walter Harris was 14 years old when he was first held there in the mid-1980s. He was growing up in Section 8 housing in the Hill District, and stole clothes and nice things he couldn’t afford. He was caught in a Sears store after closing time and charged with theft and trespassing. 

The idea of being locked up scared him, but he calmed down after arriving at Shuman and bonding with other kids. He was sent there about a dozen more times until he turned 18 in 1988. “After that, you’re prepared,” he said, describing youth detention as an onramp to his time in state and federal prisons as an adult. 

Harris’s experience gets to the core of a debate about how to help youth who’ve been arrested — and whether detention is the right approach. 

After Shuman closed, law enforcement leaders complained they had no place to put youth they deemed too dangerous to be released. Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey even partly blamed spikes in gun violence — without citing evidence — on Shuman’s closure. “We should have never closed Shuman without a plan,” he told reporters after a triple homicide on the North Side. 

Advocates, on the other hand, pushed for approaches outside the carceral system, which disproportionately locks up Black people.  

“I don’t think there is any benefit or value in incarcerating children,” said Muhammad Ali Nasir, who goes by his emcee name, MAN-E, and is the advocacy, policy and civic engagement coordinator at 1Hood Media. The county should invest in non-carceral approaches, such as working to end poverty and investing in schools instead of reopening Shuman, he said. 

Under pressure from judges, law enforcement and other public officials, the county searched for a private operator to take over the site. It had “a strong preference” for one that would run a youth detention center, according to a request for proposals released last year.       

Enter Adelphoi, one of the largest youth service providers in the Pittsburgh region. It submitted a proposal to reopen and provide detention services at Shuman. The county accepted the bid and drew up a contract to pay Adelphoi $73 million over five years — an annual cost that’s 40% higher than what it paid to run the facility itself.     

Under the contract, Shuman will hold youth aged 10 to 20 who are from or found in the county. They may have been charged with serious offenses, deemed aggressive or at risk of leaving an unsecured facility, adjudicated delinquent or some combination of those. 

Read more about Adelphoi’s pledges to Allegheny County

County Council sued to block the plan, asserting its authority to approve or deny the use of county property. And advocates criticized the high price tag — which they said could instead go toward non-carceral programs — and lack of public oversight over the decision to reopen Shuman.     

“I don’t think that taxpayers have had enough input [and] I don’t think the kids who have gone through the juvenile legal system have had any input,” said Tanisha Long, Allegheny County community organizer for the Abolitionist Law Center. “This decision was made in the dark by the courts and [County Executive] Rich Fitzgerald.”

The county’s announcement stirred “mixed emotions” in Harris, now 52 and a member of the Elsinore Bennu Think Tank for Restorative Justice. He tries to help the youth of today by volunteering for ALC Court Watch, a team that observes court proceedings, including decertification hearings. And he’ll soon launch the Pittsburgh location of Fathers on the Move, a mentorship program for youth involved in the criminal justice system.   

“My mission is to make youth incarceration so rare that I have to find a new career,” he said. 

Though he believes Shuman should be reopened, he can’t be sure a private contractor who’s “out to make money” shares his mission.

“Who are they?” he asked about Adelphoi. “And what is their track record?” 

Who is Adelphoi and what is its track record? 

The Adelphoi nonprofits operate in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and Delaware. They’ve served youth in the Pittsburgh region for more than 50 years. 

Based in Latrobe, Adelphoi provides foster care, education, in-home services and youth detention to nearly all counties in the state. Across its seven entities, Adelphoi made over $68 million in total revenue in fiscal 2022, with its largest arm, Adelphoi Village, a group home business, pulling in about $44 million. Combined, the Adelphoi entities employ around 600, according to Pratt. More than 1,000 youth receive its services every day. 

Adelphoi declined a PublicSource request to tour one of its detention centers and did not make an executive available for an interview. Pratt, the group’s marketing executive, answered detailed questions via email.  

She said Adelphoi isn’t new to the county. It serves about 60 youth per year here, including those who need shelter or are in the foster care system. After Shuman closed, the county placed youth it wanted to detain in Adelphoi facilities in nearby counties, including group homes in Westmoreland County, she added. 

Pratt called the lack of available beds a “detention crisis” in the region. She drew a straight line between the closure of Shuman and an uptick in youth fleeing Adelphoi’s group homes. She said non-secure group homes provide “an inappropriate level of care” for some youth, which is why a detention center is badly needed.    

At least one longtime advocate for incarcerated people agrees. 

Richard Garland is desperate to keep kids out of adult prisons, which he said is where some will end up if they don’t receive services while they’re in the more rehabilitative juvenile justice system. There were 25 children in the Allegheny County Jail on Nov. 8. 

Garland, the executive director of Reimagine Reentry, which provides services to formerly incarcerated people, said Adelphoi is a “tried and tested” provider of therapy and other supportive services. He described having good experiences with them that date back to the 1990s, when he first started his violence prevention work.     

But he was alarmed by the allegations in the civil complaints, which PublicSource shared with him during a recent interview. “That sends up a real big red flag for me,” he said. 

Adelphoi’s care for ‘vulnerable’ children questioned

Franchi’s client — anonymized as A.M.M. in the civil complaint — was a child in the Bradford County foster care system when he encountered Dunn, an Adelphoi in-home worker at the time. The complaint alleges she groomed him via phone messages and during trips to his foster home. She was soon barred from contacting him by a Protection From Abuse order. 

“Adelphoi knew or should have known that Dunn had inappropriate contact” with the minor, according to the complaint, and the firm “did not take steps to intervene or protect” him.

The complaint says she eventually kidnapped him, withheld food and water from him, and repeatedly sexually and physically abused him. When Dunn let him drive, it alleges, he sped on a highway to try to get pulled over by police, leading to Dunn’s arrest.

Dunn’s attorney didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The suit seeks damages from Bradford County, a county caseworker and Adelphoi Services for being “indifferent to the risk of sexual victimization to children in county custody.”

Pratt said Adelphoi reported the abuse to state police and ChildLine, and was “wholly supportive of the legal process and consequences” imposed in the criminal case.  

The separate class-action lawsuit alleges a longstanding pattern of “negligent staffing” and cases of abuse dating to 1998. The class of the suit includes current or former residents of any Adelphoi juvenile facility who “were subjected to either physical, mental, and/or sexual abuse by any [Adelphoi] staff members … and/or either had their educational opportunities deprived,” according to the complaint.

It accuses Adelphoi USA, the parent organization, of failing to properly screen, train and supervise its employees, some of whom sexually and physically abused the plaintiffs. “Many of the children who were abused at Adelphoi USA were vulnerable, intellectually disabled, and already fleeing from abuse,” according to the complaint. The nonprofit’s staff “took advantage of children who had already been victims of sexual abuse and were at Adelphoi USA to seek healing.”

The complaint alleges Adelphoi USA also misrepresented the abuse as part of plaintiffs’ treatment. The abuse often took place during “therapeutic sessions,” which made the plaintiffs believe it was “normal” and “medically necessary,” the complaint says.

The complaint argues that attempts to deceive plaintiffs toll the statute of limitations to file claims for physical and sexual abuse.     

It was “almost impossible” for children to stop the abuse or get help because Adelphoi USA limited their phone usage and cut off their contact with the outside world, according to the complaint.  

Some amount of violence and abuse “is almost inevitable when you lock people up,” said Sara Goodkind, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Social Work. She added that some facilities are better-managed than others. 

“We’ve heard really concerning things about Adelphoi,” said Jessica Feierman, senior managing director of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia. But “those kinds of stories” aren’t unique to them and happen in public and private facilities across the state and country.  

How will Adelphoi operate Shuman?

Shuman has a long history of failing to protect young people from harm, according to a report, co-authored by Goodkind, that explored ways to end youth incarceration in the county after Shuman closed. 

The researchers interviewed young people — ranging in age from 14 to 27 — who were held at Shuman. They described moldy food, inadequate medical care and unsanitary conditions there. Many said staffers were abusive and predatory, though a few were helpful and supportive. One described Shuman as a place that “grooms kids for crime, not healing.” 

PublicSource asked Adelphoi if it believes it can do better. 

Pratt said Adelphoi “maintains the highest standards of care” across all its programs, including detention. Its management of Shuman will be trauma-informed, she said, though she didn’t specify what that will look like. 

Adelphoi will bring in UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh to provide nursing care and manage medication, which is a condition of its contract with the county. Medication errors were among the violations that led to the revocation of Shuman’s license.

The lawsuits raise questions about how Adelphoi will screen candidates for jobs at Shuman.   

Pratt said Adelphoi has already begun interviewing candidates for 25 open positions at Shuman. They’ll be screened via child abuse and criminal history checks, and their fingerprints will be run through the FBI database.  

She didn’t answer a question about how much Adelphoi will pay workers at all levels at Shuman, though she said wages would be competitive in the local market.

Goodkind said the least qualified and trained workers in a detention center tend to work undesirable shifts and often aren’t paid “more than you might get … for working at Target.” While all staff are capable of abuse, the risks are elevated with low-paid, undertrained “line staff,” she said.    

Adelphoi faced a labor shortage during the COVID-19 pandemic that forced it to scale back services and ask staff to work overtime, according to its most recent annual report.  

A civil complaint filed last year in the Westmoreland County Court of Common Pleas by plaintiff Timothy Rice alleges that insufficient staffing contributed to Adelphoi’s failure to protect him from a stabbing attack by three other residents when he was placed at Adelphoi Village in Latrobe.

“At the time of the stabbing, it is believed there was only one member on staff in the facility which is against standard policy,” said the complaint. 

The complaint alleges that proper Adelphoi policy requires at least two staff members to be on duty at all times to ensure the safety of residents. It also alleges that failures, including understaffing, allowed Rice’s attackers to possess a weapon despite one of them having a known violent past, and slowed the response to the attack. 

Rice’s attorney, Daniel Soom, declined to comment. 

Pratt said Adelphoi’s staffing issues have eased; it has seen a 65% decrease in open positions over the past four months. 

The county is paying Adelphoi a flat fee of $7,800 per day for 12 beds, with the goal of expanding to 60 beds for $39,000 per day. Pratt said that should reassure community members who are concerned about incentives for “maximizing the number of youth in the program.” 

Incentives to fill beds have backfired before in Pennsylvania: Luzerne County judges sent children to for-profit jails in exchange for kickbacks in the notorious “Kids for Cash” scandal, which didn’t involve Adelphoi. 

While a flat fee is good, it could still incentivize judges and other stakeholders to send more kids to Shuman, said Jeffrey Shook, a professor at Pitt’s School of Social Work. 

They could say, “We’re paying for it, we’ve got to move kids into this system,” he said, warning that “the deeper kids get into a system, the more likely they are to stay in a system and go into the adult system.”

Goodkind said it’s important to understand that detention facilities typically house young people for short periods of time before they’re adjudicated or found delinquent. That means many will be held at Shuman before it’s been determined that they’re guilty of an offense. 

She added it’s a common misconception in the community, and even among some political candidates, that detention centers provide long-term rehabilitative services. The average stay at Shuman was around 12 days when it closed, according to the county.  

Pratt said Adelphoi’s goal is to “minimize as much as possible” the amount of time youth spend in detention. That way, they’ll be placed into treatment plans that “most align with their unique needs.”  

But Long isn’t buying it.  

No matter how private detention contractors market themselves, she believes they will always “default” to a carceral approach. If they really wanted to help kids, they would do it “without the requirement of incarceration.”  

Harris said he recidivated after his time at Shuman because he was sent back to his traumatic home life with no support. He’d like to see a program for incarcerated youth “whose goal is to put themselves out of business.” If the county tried hard enough, it could work toward that goal, he said.  

“But a corporation can’t have it because they’re trying to make money.” 

Correction: The complaint filed by A.M.M. names as defendants Adelphoi Services Inc., Bradford County and a county caseworker. An editing error in an earlier version of this story indicated another defendant.

Venuri Siriwardane is PublicSource’s health and mental health reporter. She can be reached at venuri@publicsource.org.

Tanya Babbar is an editorial intern at PublicSource and a junior at the University of Pittsburgh. She can be reached at tanya@publicsource.org. 

Charlie Wolfson contributed.

This story was fact-checked by Jack Troy.

This reporting has been made possible through the Staunton Farm Mental Health Reporting Fellowship and the Jewish Healthcare Foundation.

Adelphoi’s pledges

Key points in the nonprofit firm’s role with, and promise to, Allegheny County, expressed in its contract and in responses to questions from PublicSource:  

• Adelphoi said it has an “impeccable” licensing history with the Pennsylvania Department of Education and Department of Human Services. It’s accredited by The Joint Commission, the nation’s oldest and largest independent healthcare accreditor.  
• About 79% of youth placed at Adelphoi facilities completed its programs in 2022 and 80% remained out of care one year after they were discharged.
• Adelphoi said it will provide youth held at Shuman with education, medical and dental care, mental health services, recreational opportunities and spirituality services. 
• Adelphoi’s contract with the county allows it to use “physical techniques” to manage crises at Shuman. Staff are trained to use “alternatives to restraint” first, but will use “passive restraint” in situations that pose “imminent danger to oneself or others,” according to Karyn Pratt, Adelphoi’s vice president of marketing and strategy development. All restraints are recorded via camera systems and reported to the placing agency.   
• Adelphoi will influence how courts and probation officers make decisions about youth in the criminal justice system. It will provide those stakeholders with a “high-level view of all clinical and assessment information” about a child. It will also provide that information to the treatment provider that a court or probation office selects for that child. 
• Elizabeth Miller is Adelphoi’s medical director and is responsible for clinical practice and overall care at Adelphoi facilities. She is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine, and is chief of the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

The post Updated: Innamorato hears ‘alarm bells’ in lawsuits against Adelphoi, picked to run Shuman appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Stephen J. Zappala Jr. will continue his quarter-century tenure as Allegheny County’s top prosecutor after surviving a well-financed challenge in a race that forced the lifelong Democrat to run as a Republican.

Zappala reversed the results of the Democratic primary, won by Matt Dugan, a former public defender. The incumbent stayed politically alive by receiving the Republican nomination, then won slightly more than 51% of General Election votes despite the county’s 2-to-1 Democratic registration edge.

“First and foremost, I want to thank the voters of Allegheny County,” Zappala told supporters at his campaign’s watch party. “I think it was more a referendum of us as a community.”

“We were up against a billionaire,” he continued, in reference to George Soros, the liberal philanthropist who largely funded his campaign rival. “We had to be competitive, not just financially

Zappala said voters are “aware of some of the problems we have and some of the things that need to be done,” calling the vote “a referendum on us as a community.”

In his seventh term as district attorney, he said he’d like to explore the development of a municipal authority for the South Side and the South Side Flats. He described the area as a regional asset and said that, “rather than argue about undermanning the Pittsburgh police and not helping them do their job, we’re going to look at it a little bit differently, in a little bit more broader manner.”

In regards to the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center, Zappala said the facility’s name and “the concept of a penitentiary in and of itself — that should disappear.” He has said that greater emphasis should be placed on providing juvenile offenders with education and support, and he referenced that in his speech. 

“We bring health care, education, and as a last resort, then we talk about detaining younger people, even though serious consideration has to be given because they are serious crimes that people are being accused of,” Zappala said. 

He also discussed the issue of homelessness, saying that under Pittsburgh mayors Bob O’Connor and Luke Ravenstahl, there were about 250 people characterized as being homeless, and most city police officers knew them. Zappala said that Pittsburgh was unprepared for its designation as a sanctuary city under Mayor Bill Peduto, which he said caused the population of unhoused people to grow to more than 1,000. 

Unhoused people, he said, are “being exploited by the nickel and dime drug dealer. So there’s a new market Downtown,” he said. “So there’s a lot we have to do tonight. We’re not going to fix everything, but we’re going to start tomorrow morning.”

Zappala thanked his finance team early in his speech. He said his campaign was “up against a billionaire,” referencing Soros’ roughly $1.8 million in support for Dugan’s campaign. “We had to be competitive, not just financially,” Zappala said. 

He said he faced “the national type of organization, the national type of commercials, the national media people that they bring to bear,” faulting Soros for “doing this all over the country,” and blaming such campaigns for liberal public safety policies and decline in cities like San Francisco. “I don’t know what the economic status of our county would be a year and a half from now if we continue to move in the same direction, but, which, by the way, we will not.

Not all welcome the news of Zappala’s political survival.

Corinn Lyon, 77, of Sheraden, said crime in the county also motivated her to vote — but it prompted her to vote against the DA candidate who positioned himself as tough on crime. 

The retired US Airways worker and registered independent voted for Dugan because we need “new blood” in the district attorney’s office. 

“[Zappala’s] been in there too long and I just don’t think he’s done enough,” she said.

That thinking, though, did not prevail at the polls.

Zappala became DA in 1998 after the judges of the county’s Common Pleas court elected him to fill a vacancy, and voters granted him a full term in the 1999 election. Then it was smooth political sailing for Zappala, who didn’t face a serious challenge until 2019, when he turned aside independent challenger Lisa Middleman with 57% of the vote.

Dugan — defeated tonight after besting Zappala in the Democratic Primary — earned the backing of local progressives who wanted to see Zappala’s career over, and perhaps more importantly, he earned the backing of Soros, who has funded numerous DA candidates throughout the country. The philanthropist bolstered Dugan with $700,000 worth of TV ads during the primary season and more than $1 million ahead of the General Election. Zappala raised considerable sums himself, including more than $600,000 ahead of his November rematch with Dugan, but it didn’t stack up with Soros’ support for Dugan.

“I would absolutely do it again,” Dugan told supporters at his campaign’s election watch party in Carnegie. 

He said his campaign fought for people in the criminal justice system “who are underserved, whose needs are under-met.”

“I stand here, proud of the campaign that we ran, proud of the message that we brought unapologetically across the county demanding reform in our system,” he said during his concession speech.

Zappala accepted the Republican nomination after Dugan defeated him in the Democratic primary, thanks to several thousand Republican write-in votes. He also accepted the endorsement of the Forward Party, the centrist-focused national political group fronted by former presidential candidate Andrew Yang.

The two candidates clashed in a heated campaign season this fall. Dugan assailed Zappala for being too tough on nonviolent offenders and Black defendants. Zappala said Dugan would likely be too lenient toward criminals as DA, and said he would be too beholden to Soros. 

Zappala is new to the GOP side of the ballot, and referred to himself in a debate as a “law and order Democrat,” but he has pulled support from traditional Republican donors and politicians. And while the ink is still drying on his party switch, he is the first Republican elected to countywide office (other than a county council at-large seat which is virtually guaranteed to the party) since 1999, when Jim Roddey was elected county executive.

Zappala campaign spokesperson Ben Wren said that voters in the county are deciding how far they’re willing to be pushed to the left. He said that Democrats are getting increasingly liberal and added that there is division in the county between what he referred to as city Democrats and Mon Valley Democrats.

Dugan, a Moon Township resident, worked in the public defender’s office from 2007 until this year, and served as chief public defender since 2020. 

Venuri Siriwardane is PublicSource’s health and mental health reporter. She can be reached at venuri@publicsource.org. 

Emma Folts covers higher education at PublicSource, in partnership with Open Campus. She can be reached at emma@publicsource.org. 

Charlie Wolfson is PublicSource’s local government reporter and a Report for America corps member. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org.

The post Stephen Zappala wins DA race, pledges action on Downtown, South Side appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Mayor Ed Gainey is approaching the halfway point of his first term leading Pittsburgh and preparing to deliver his second budget proposal to City Council in two weeks. Two years in, stabilizing and reforming the police force and reaping more revenue from major nonprofits remain high on his agenda. 

Both areas have bedeviled Pittsburgh mayors for decades, and both are issues Gainey claimed he would master during his 2021 campaign. An initial draft of his 2024 budget shows how he is trying to reshape city government — but also illustrates how far he has yet to go on two signature campaign promises.

His budget calls for fewer positions in the Bureau of Police — an open acknowledgment that police staffing continues to lag the administration’s stated goal of 900 uniformed officers, and that they don’t expect to hit that goal anytime soon.

On the revenue side, the budget also lacks significant payments in lieu of taxes [PILOTs] from major nonprofits, such as UPMC, the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and Allegheny Health Network [AHN]. This is not unusual — mayors have struggled for decades to extract more money from major owners of tax-exempt property — and it’s still uncertain whether the administration’s strategy to reap more revenue from tax-exempt properties will yield big results.

UPMC: playing fair?

Gainey campaigned passionately on getting UPMC to pay its “fair share” to the city in 2021. In an hour-long Oct. 17 interview with PublicSource in his office suite, he reiterated that goal while acknowledging an impasse with the nonprofit’s leadership.

“Let’s talk about the fact that you can’t have a city that’s for all, or a quality city, if you have nonprofits that own so much real estate and not pay taxes,” Gainey said. “Let’s talk about the fact that through decades and decades and decades of building an empire on those tax subsidies that you got to help you build your empire, don’t you think it’s time to give back without raising taxes on the residents?

“I can’t understand why billions can’t pay a little bit.”

Paul Wood, UPMC’s chief communications officer, wrote in an email to PublicSource that Gainey is “aware of UPMC’s ongoing support of various initiatives and can count on our full participation in programs that are fair and equitable and include the region’s other major nonprofits.”

He listed numerous community investments from UPMC, including funding the Pittsburgh Promise, providing medical care at a Downtown homeless shelter and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of charity care.

Jared Stonesifer, a University of Pittsburgh spokesperson, said in an email that the university contributes “an estimated $70 million in volunteerism each year” and that the university “fulfills its nonprofit mission.”

An AHN spokesperson said the organization goes “above and beyond tax obligations to benefit and strengthen” the community and referenced $1.4 billion spent helping communities navigate the COVID pandemic.

Officials at Carnegie Mellon University did not respond to requests for comment.

Gainey said he thinks the groups’ charity is not a substitute for direct payments to the city.

“We appreciate what you do from a charitable situation,” he said. “There’s nothing to do about paying your fair share.”

Gainey held a series of meetings with leaders of UPMC and Highmark (which controls AHN) that he said did not yield any results. He announced early this year that his team would review every tax-exempt property in the city to challenge parcels that might fall short of exemption criteria, raising the possibility that the city could pursue and win taxation of now-exempt properties rather than seeking PILOT agreements.

That effort has been slow, though. The city released an initial list of 26 challenges, which city officials said has so far yielded about $130,000 in annual revenue — about 0.01% of the city’s projected 2024 revenue. 

Gainey told PublicSource his team will announce a potentially larger slate of exemption challenges early next year but declined to give details.

Even while his law department attempts to take a big bite out of local nonprofits’ tax exemptions, Gainey said he extends an “olive branch” to nonprofit leaders and would be open to coming to an agreement.

“I’ve never told them I wouldn’t talk,” he said. “I don’t know where that came from.”

Police: defunding or defending?

Gainey launched his campaign in early 2021 when calls for police reform ran hot from the 2020 protests of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. He made police reform — though not defunding — a key  campaign issue. This month, he said he’s often misunderstood on the subject as Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor.

“You know, I’m supposed to be the Black mayor that’s going to defund the police,” Gainey said. 

On the contrary, Gainey has affirmed time and again that he wants the bureau to maintain its long-held officer quota of 900. This summer, when a staffing study he commissioned suggested removing numerous officers from patrol beats, he sided with his police chief and disregarded the idea, angering some police reform advocates.

But against that backdrop, the bureau has not added officers to active duty since Gainey took office, and he has fired a handful for cause.  Gainey’s 2024 budget includes money for 850 police officers, and his deputy mayor said they don’t expect to achieve 900 again until 2027.

A hiring freeze instituted during the pandemic by former Mayor Bill Peduto carried into Gainey’s term, and Gainey didn’t announce a new class of police recruits until Aug. 31, 2022 — nine months after he took office. Recruits take almost a year to be trained and ready for active duty.

Robert Swartzwelder, the president of the police officers’ union, said the city won’t be able to hire enough officers with current pay levels, which he said are uncompetitive with nearby municipalities.

A newly ratified contract between the union and the city gave officers significant raises, including a 30% bump for first-year officers. 

“I know this administration has bragged about the raise that [officers have] received,” Swartzwelder said. “We were eating table scraps and now somebody said, ‘Hey, here’s a hamburger and some vegetables.’”

Another Peduto-era event — the death of Jim Rogers following an encounter with city cops in late 2021 — weighed heavily on Gainey’s first year. Gainey ended up firing five officers for their involvement in Rogers’ death. He said in the interview he also fired seven other officers in his first year, though details of some of those terminations are not publicly available while arbitration is ongoing.

Swartzwelder said two officers have returned to the force after settlements and five are currently in litigation or arbitration trying to get their jobs back.

Gainey acknowledged that some of the officers he fired will return.

“At the end of the day, we sent the message of what we will tolerate and what we won’t tolerate,” the mayor said.

“My first year I fired 12 cops, because we had to set a tempo … We did what we had to do to send a message early that it wasn’t about being tough, it was about being fair.”

Swartzwelder said in response that if firing officers is “what he finds as a hallmark of his mayoral administration, I think that’s appalling. That’s not something to be proud of considering you spent a lot of money training them and equipping them and supervising them.”

Gainey held up a new disciplinary matrix, which is included in the contract the city agreed to with the police union in March, as a top achievement on policing to date. 

“A police contract with a disciplinary matrix is the beginning of everything,” he said, because it “gives us the ability to fire with cause. We didn’t have that before.”

Swartzwelder, too, saw the new matrix as a positive, saying that it is helpful for all parties to be “on the same page” when it comes to infractions and disciplinary measures.

Charlie Wolfson is PublicSource’s local government reporter and a Report for America corps member. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org.

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At a five year memoriam of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, Rabbi Doris Dyen said a prayer, but with a caveat. 

“I’ve always been bothered by the term ‘thoughts and prayers,’” Dyen said.  

Her prayer called for action, and that’s what attendees focused on Thursday evening. 

When the crowd gathered at Rodef Shalom Congregation, local representatives and activists helped attendees create video, audio and hand-written stories detailing their own personal experiences with gun violence to send to legislators resistant to gun law reform. 

Five years ago today, a gunman shot and killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill. The shooting took members of the Tree of Life, New Light and Dor Hadash congregations. In August of this year, a court sentenced the shooter to the death penalty. 

During Thursday’s event, led by Squirrel Hill Stands against Violence, attendees commemorated all victims of gun violence alongside those of the Pittsburgh shooting.

The memoriam event came one day after a widely publicized mass shooting in Lewiston Maine, where a gunman still at large killed 18 people. Before a moment of silence, Dyen encouraged the audience to commemorate all gun violence victims since 2018, with a specific reference to the latest slaying. 

“Those who have died by gun suicide, those who were victims of domestic violence, those who were a part of community violence, and especially, the community of Lewiston, Maine, for whom we pray, because they are the most recent victims of gun violence in a community,” Dyen said. 

Since 2018, local activist groups have rallied around a package of Pennsylvania state legislation proposed by CeaseFirePA called the Common Agenda to End Gun Violence. The laws focus on basic gun control measures with popular support: lost or stolen gun reporting, safe storage requirements, universal background checks and extreme risk protection orders, which would allow judges to temporarily confiscate guns from individuals in a mental health crisis.

Bills calling for stolen gun reporting and safe storage were struck down by the state House in May. The two bills on extreme risk protections and temporary confiscations cleared the House around the same time but have not since progressed through the Republican-controlled Senate.

Civic leaders including state representatives Arvind Venkat and Abigail Salisbury led conversations about processing personal experiences into a story.  Participants were invited to tell their stories using a video booth, a table for recording audio or pen and paper. Event organizers strongly encouraged everyone in attendance to tell a story. 

Nathaniel Myers, a member of Squirrel Hill Stands Against Gun Violence, helped people put their memories and feelings into words and images. 

“I was surprised how many people were willing to do videos,” Myers said. “Now, we do have an audience that has a lot of active folk, who are involved in talking to legislators, so I think that helped, but I think a lot of the other people who were just here for the commemoration were pretty willing to do videos.”

Jessica Podolsky, a 42-year-old Point Breeze resident, created a video detailing a friend who died by suicide using a gun after a dark period in his life following a debilitating illness. “I don’t love speaking,” Podolsky said. “I don’t always find myself to be super articulate, but it was easy.” 

She also talked about her constant concern for her school-age niece and nephew.

“I can’t fathom that they go to school and have active shooter drills and live in a world where I wake up every day and there’s yet another mass shooting,” Podolsky said. 

Cynthia Robinson, a 53-year-old from the Hill District, spoke to the camera about the constant gun violence she sees in her community, often affecting young people. 

“Where I live, there’s a shooting every day. There’s gunshots,” Robinson said. “My grandson is traumatized.” 

Maureen Anderson, a member of Moms Demand Action, created a video. A former teacher who still works in education, Anderson said that throughout her years teaching she had several students who were either shot and killed or closely knew other victims. 

In line with the event’s focus, Anderson made connections with other activists by sharing contact information and information. 

“It was not normal, in my life, to have students murdered. It shouldn’t be normal in anybody’s life,” Anderson said. “That’s when I started to feel like we gotta do something.” 

Matt Petras is a freelance reporter and adjunct professor based in the Pittsburgh area. He can be reached at matt456p@gmail.com or on Twitter @mattApetras.

The post ‘I wake up every day and there’s yet another mass shooting’ appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.