by Rich Lord
Last year, Pittsburgh police reported that subjects resisted arrest 549 times, prompting officers to engage in hundreds of forced handcuffings and takedowns, 100 Taser shocks, 59 punchings and 31 knee strikes. They used pepper spray 25 times, impact weapons seven times, police dogs six times and their guns four times.
Meanwhile, the city’s internal affairs unit, the Office of Municipal Investigations [OMI], handled 27 complaints related to use of force. Two of those complaints were sustained, meaning the investigation found that a violation of city policy occurred. A single officer was disciplined — an oral reprimand — for inappropriate use of force.
What do those numbers say about OMI and its role in police accountability?
To Pittsburgh police officer Robert Swartzwelder, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 1, they show that there’s “a very, very small percentage of citizens who feel that the force used on them was unreasonable. And then through further investigation, that number dwindles down even further.”
Brandi Fisher, president and CEO of the Alliance for Police Accountability, counters that she “can almost guarantee you that 27 complaints does not reflect the number of people that have been harmed in those 549 incidents.” The low number of OMI use-of-force investigations, and the two sustained complaints, “really speaks to how difficult it is to hold police officers accountable, especially within the system that currently exists.”
Details of OMI’s work are almost never made public. And as the city debates police use of force in the wake of the death of George Floyd under a Minneapolis officer’s knee, OMI has gotten little attention. Though it is the only city investigatory arm with which officers are contractually required to cooperate, OMI gets just one mention in the raft of police-related bills introduced in city council. (A bill passed in July requires that officers who see other officers using “unreasonable force” must report that to OMI.) A list of a dozen demands by the Allegheny County Black Activist/Organizer Collective, issued in June, didn’t mention OMI.
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