This story has been updated.
A video posted to Instagram purports to show an Allegheny County Jail employee holding a weapon and saying a racial slur.
As of Monday morning, attention is mounting surrounding a clip of a white man wearing a Patriots sweatshirt brandishing a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire and calling the weapon a “[n-word] beater.”
A caption superimposed on the video identifies the man as an ACJ correctional officer named Brian Davis. Jail Oversight Board and Allegheny County Councilor Bethany Hallam told Pittsburgh City Paper that numerous jail employees confirmed to her that Davis is the man in the video.
According to 2024 county salary data released by Public Source, Davis has worked at the county jail since January 2018. Other publicly available salary data indicates that, from 2018 to 2020, Davis worked as a clerk typist for the county treasurer’s office before transferring to the same role at the jail and then becoming a correctional officer there.
The video was originally posted to Instagram late Sunday night by the account @homewoodinc_15208. Many social media users have called for the man in the video to be fired.
Tanisha Long of the Abolitionist Law Center echoed that sentiment in a written statement to City Paper.
“65% of incarcerated people at the Allegheny County Jail are Black. It is disturbing that someone who is so violently racist is in a position of power and anything short of his immediate termination is unacceptable,” Long wrote. “Incarceration is violent and traumatic enough, we don’t need corrections officers like Brian Davis and his violent and racist ideations anywhere near the Allegheny County Jail.”
Hallam said that Davis works in the jail’s intake department, which, she said, makes the video even more disturbing.
“There’s no place for anyone who thinks and talks and acts like that in the Allegheny County Jail, let alone in the Intake Department where Davis works, where people are dropped off in their most vulnerable state, where we know most of the deaths occur and an inordinate (and unacceptable) level of force is used against them,” Hallam said.
Hallam called for ”a full review of all of the grievances filed against this (hopefully soon-to-be-former) CO, any uses of force he participated in, and any disciplinary actions taken against him to understand how this may have slipped by unnoticed for so long and also to understand who he may have harmed in his time there, and what could be done to make it right now.”
ACJ spokesperson Jesse Geleynse declined to comment at length on personnel matters but said that the jail is investigating the situation and has suspended an employee, presumably Davis.
“The ACJ administration, from Warden Wingard down, expects professionalism from all jail employees,” Geleynse wrote in an email. “The jail does not tolerate racist or abusive language or behavior. The employee in question has been suspended, and we are investigating the situation.”
This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2025.
