Four Independent Police Review Board members — (from left) Richard Garland, Regina Ragin-Dykes, Justin Leavitt Pearl and Stacey Hawthorne — meet in the Allegheny County Courthouse on Apr. 17, 2024. (Photo by Miranda Jeyaretnam/PublicSource)
Three years after Allegheny County Council voted to create an Independent Police Review Board, its board members say it’s finally ready to step up. But confusion at its Wednesday meeting revealed a board plagued by vacancies, absences and a lack of jurisdiction.
by Miranda Jeyaretnam, PublicSource
In April 2021, Allegheny County Council established an Independent Police Review Board [IPRB] to review public complaints, potentially against more than 100 police departments in Allegheny County. Three years on, the board is now “actively running,” Chair Justin Leavitt Pearl said.
But at its April 17 quarterly meeting, the efficacy of the board — which currently has two vacant seats and has taken zero action on the seven public complaints received this year — came into question.
“Who are we working for?” Rev. Regina Ragin-Dykes asked at the meeting, expressing confusion over the scope of the board’s oversight.
While the IPRB was intended to oversee the county’s police forces outside of Pittsburgh, which has its own review board, only the Allegheny County police is mandatorily covered. County police primarily patrol parks and the airport, and sometimes assist municipal departments.
Municipal police forces only fall under the board’s oversight if they opt in, and so far none have.
As a result, the board has been unable to take action on any of the nine public complaints so far submitted through its online form. Complaints about incidents that occurred more than 180 days prior or in a municipality outside of the board’s jurisdiction are not in its purview.
“So we’re very, very limited,” Ragin-Dykes said.
Allegheny County Councilor Bethany Hallam, who helped launch the review board, said she has been in conversation with municipalities since the board’s inception. Responses from municipalities have been varied, Hallam said, but there are a “small number” that have been waiting until the board was fully functioning before making a decision to opt in.
“But now it’s at the point where it is, and the architecture and structure has been created,” Hallam said. “Now really is the time where I expect those conversations to hopefully turn from informal conversations to action-based conversations.”
Empty seats, unofficial motions
The board has nine seats; four appointed by county council, four appointed by the county executive and the final seat jointly appointed by both. In 2022, eight of those seats were filled, enough for the board to begin work. Since then, however, three members have left, and only one of those vacancies has been filled.
The current members are Pearl, Ragin-Dykes, Richard Garland, Stacey Hawthorne, Keith Murphy, Lynn Banaszak and Mark Bibro, who was jointly appointed by the executive and council in July 2023. Four out of seven members — Pearl, Ragin-Dykes, Garland and Hawthorne — were present at Wednesday’s meeting. The board needs five members — a majority out of the nine seats — to make quorum.
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