This past January, Bruce Kelley Jr. was fatally shot by Allegheny County Port Authority Police. He was approached by officers for allegedly drinking in public and was ultimately shot after stabbing a Port Authority police dog.
This was the most high-profile case involving Port Authority police in recent memory. The Allegheny County District Attorney’s office stepped in to help investigate, as is protocol in officer-involved shootings like these, according to DA spokesperson Mike Manko.
In June, the DA released a thorough 12-page report, complete with a summary, medical examiner’s evidence and a discussion section. The DA ruled Port Authority officers were justified in shooting Kelley. The whole process took four months.
A month before the shooting of Kelley, Port Authority officers arrested five teenagers after a ruckus broke out at the Wood Street T station Downtown. At least four of the five boys’ cases never went to trial. As former refugees from East Africa, and of Somali Bantu ancestry, the boys’ family told City Paper in December 2015 they were discriminated against due to their ethnicity.
In response to the family’s claims, Port Authority said: “We have reviewed the incident at length with our police chief and have found nothing about our officers’ handling of the situation to be problematic or contrary to their training.” Unlike the lengthy Kelley investigation, this review took only a few days.
These two high-profile cases involving the Port Authority Police had drastically different investigation processes and have sounded the alarm of local police-accountability advocates. There is currently no external, internal or governmental agency dedicated to investigating Port Authority police incidents, and transparency at the authority’s police force is limited.
“With the state of the lack of trust and tension between the police and community, transparency is a must,” says Brandi Fisher of the Alliance for Police Accountability. “When you have a system that only involves the police investigating police, then you are going to have trust issues.”
In January, after the Wood Street incident, Fisher met with Port Authority police chief Matt Porter to discuss the authority’s accountability measures, and will meet with Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald soon to talk about the use of K-9 officers and accountability in the Port Authority police department.
Fisher says she is dissatisfied with the unit’s accountability measures, particularly the lack of an independent review. She says that when complaints are issued, they are sent directly to the chief. He and two of his highest-ranking lieutenants review them and decide how to move forward. Fisher says this constitutes the old standard of “police agencies investigating themselves.”
“It’s [Porter’s] process, so who knows how he handles that,” says Fisher. “He indicated to me that he is the accountability process. … Because of what happened in the Bruce Kelley case, we believe he is not a person who we can rely on for integrity and accountability. The chief should not be the sole accountability officer.”
Port Authority Police officially started in 1982, under Pennsylvania’s Railroad and Street Railway Police Act, with just over a dozen officers. They were given full arrest powers and can act the same as any other police department in the state. Today, the unit has between 40 and 45 officers and should be adding several more when the police start patrolling light-rail T cars in 2017.
While Port Authority police mostly patrol their highest-activity areas, like subway stations and along the county’s busways, the unit has authority to make arrests related to Port Authority’s entire system. So its jurisdiction can take officers all around and even beyond the county, as some bus routes enter Beaver and Westmoreland counties. The authority’s police force is around the same size as Penn Hills’ and Mount Lebanon’s police departments; in the region, only Pittsburgh and Allegheny County police units are larger.
According to Port Authority police arrest records obtained by CP, the force made 3,865 arrests from 2013 to 2015. That averages to about 32 arrests per officer, per year, over that span. The Pittsburgh Police, at around 900 officers, averaged about 21 arrests per officer, per year over the same span; Mount Lebanon officers averaged 13 arrests per year over a three-year span from 2011-2013 (the last year data was made public).
Despite these comparatively high arrest averages and the force’s large jurisdiction, little information is publicly available about the more than 30-year-old Port Authority police unit. The authority’s main website shows no police annual reports, nor has the authority ever conducted an audit of its police unit. Additionally, a separate Port Authority police website is riddled with dead links and offers a link to a message from the Port Authority chief which says that the message “is on its way, stay safe and stop back,” next to a photo of a man who is not the current chief. Pittsburgh’s own nationally recognized policing expert, University of Pittsburgh professor David Harris, even told CP that he too is unfamiliar with the unit. “I really don’t know anything about the [Port Authority] police,” he wrote to CP in January.
Fisher, too, has struggled to understand the mysteries surrounding Port Authority police. She says the department has no transparency or community engagement, and she is still unsure who holds the unit accountable. “If there is an accountability system above him,” she says of Chief Porter, “he did not make it clear [to me] what it is or what it can do.”
Port Authority denied CP’s request to interview Chief Porter directly, but spokesperson Adam Brandolph answered questions via email on the authority’s’ accountability measures.
“When the need for an internal investigation arises, Port Authority has a process in place for its command staff to function as its internal investigation unit. If a complaint is deemed credible, the police department command staff also have Port Authority’s human-resources department, legal department and senior management officers to assist them and provide advice and guidance,” he wrote.
Fisher says there are many problems associated with only the chief and high-ranking officers deciding which cases are worthy of review, because concerned citizens and advocates are solely dependent on them to make the right call.
Beth Pittinger, of Pittsburgh’s Citizen Police Review Board, says multiple high-profile police cases in the 1980s and ’90s caused the community to demand some accountability from the Pittsburgh police, which led to the creation of an independent review board. She says this board is due for an expansion.
“We have all these police agencies operating in this city and we only have jurisdiction over one of them,” says Pittinger. “When it is the same government and the same taxpayers, you have to find a way to make it happen.”
CPRB is currently unable to investigate cases involving Port Authority officers, even when cases occur within Pittsburgh limits. Pittinger says that if the board were given umbrella powers to look into the Kelley and Wood Street cases, it would have done so. She says relying on the DA to investigate potential criminal acts of Port Authority police isn’t sufficient.
“Misconduct is not always an unlawful act, but it is often offensive,” says Pittinger. “But because of how laws are written now, we are not always able to hold officers accountable.”
The problem lies in Port Authority’s oversight. Although the authority receives the vast majority of its funding from the state government, it is governed by Allegheny County’s authority system. This means the state’s Inspector General office — which is responsible for investigating fraud, waste, abuse and misconduct — cannot investigate it.
Allegheny County Controller Chelsa Wagner has been attempting to audit county authorities for years, but the county’s current rules don’t allow her office to do so. She sued the authorities in March 2015 to gain access, but lost a challenge in court later in the year.
Wagner refers to county authorities like Port Authority as “shadow governments.”
“Authorities were historically set up to get the benefit of governments without the responsibility of government,” says Wagner. “When it comes to economic development, I think there is some justified rationale in that, but at the same time, I think it has spun out of control.”
She says the authorities’ structure is problematic given their size (the combined budgets of all county authorities is larger than the county’s budget) and potential conflicts of interest (many county employees serve on authority boards). Their structure also exempts them from reviews by Allegheny County’s ethics and accountability commission because the commission is charged only with investigating county employees and elected officials.
“That is one of the biggest problems with the ethics law as it is written right now,” says Wagner. “It needs to be rewritten.”
Without an external agency looking into Port Authority police-conduct issues, concerned citizens rely on the authority to take actions internally. But the authority’s police unit doesn’t have an internal-affairs unit to look into potential misconduct cases.
Port Authority’s Brandolph says that more than 80 percent of all police departments in the U.S. have 50 or fewer police officers, and most don’t have the resources for an internal-affairs department or a citizen police-review board. Brandolph says Port Authority doesn’t believe there is a need to establish an external review board, given the authorities’ small number of citizen complaints (just six in 2015). And Brandolph says that given the size of the authority’s police unit, an internal-affairs unit isn’t necessary.
“Much like the vast majority of smaller, specialized police departments in the U.S., the Port Authority Police Department does not have an internal-affairs office,” wrote Brandolph. “The Port Authority Police Department does, however, accept citizen complaints that are processed and fully investigated by the department’s command staff, similar to how an internal affairs office or unit would handle such complaints.”
But Port Authority police do have a comparable, if much larger, agency within the state. With around 260 officers, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority police unit — which was also formed under the railroad and street-rail police act of 1982 — patrols Philadelphia and its surrounding counties. Though SEPTA also lacks an external review board, it does have an internal-affairs department.
SEPTA police chief Tom Nestel corresponded with CP via email and says that his internal-affairs office consists of two full-time officers and another 13 officers to help with investigations when needed.
“The benefit of having supervisors dedicated specifically to [internal affairs] and not relying on the Chief or another executive staff member to personally conduct the investigations is that quality control and auditing of behavior is constant and not periodic,” wrote Nestel.
Nestel says SEPTA also doesn’t receive a large number of complaints from citizens but his internal-affairs officers investigate violations of conduct policy that are generated by internal reports and complaints. The officers also engage in quality-control audits and conduct random reviews of the SEPTA police’s newly installed body cameras.
But Brandolph says that comparing Port Authority with SEPTA and other larger departments is not appropriate.
“It is categorically wrong for City Paper to compare the Port Authority police department to departments that have many more officers and resources,” wrote Brandolph. “SEPTA’s police department has nearly 260 officers. Pittsburgh’s police department has more than 800 officers.”
Ultimately, Pittinger says that if there are going to be changes at Port Authority police and other county police agencies, the people are going to have to demand it. She says county residents can pressure county government for legislation to create another citizen review board, or to allow Pittsburgh CPRB to expand and investigate more cases involving non-Pittsburgh police units.
“We have all the tools necessary to maintain public order,” says Pittinger. “We just aren’t using them very well.”
This article is part of an occasional series delving into police units located within Allegheny County.
