The Allegheny County Independent Police Review Board is one step closer to beginning its work — more than a year after the measure creating the board was passed.
County council appointed the first four members of the nine-person board at a meeting on Tuesday. The appointees are Lynn Banaszak, Richard Garland, Keith Murphy and Justin Leavitt Pearl. Council approved all four without debate, though Pearl drew “no” votes from Democrats Tom Duerr, Bethany Hallam and DeWitt Walton.
The appointees were selected from 15 candidates introduced to council this past spring. The candidates were interviewed by a Committee on Appointment Review, and a special committee created specifically for review board appointees. Both committees endorsed all four finalists unanimously
Paul Klein, who chaired the special committee, said the candidates went through a “pretty rigorous process” before council approved them.
Klein said he hopes the group “is really going to be a good representation of our community. And I think that it’s a group of people who are thoughtful, informed and will really strive to approach this in a balanced way.”
Council has been considering creating a review boardsince 2018, when a police officer in the borough of East Pittsburgh shot and killed 17-year-old Antwon Rose, Jr.. A more sweeping review-board proposal wasvoted down in 2019.
Theexisting measure passed a new councilin April 2021 after revisions to curtail the board’s power were made.
Under the newer legislation, the nine-member board will only be tasked with investigating allegations of police misconduct within the Allegheny County Police Department. Police forces in other municipalities are not required to submit to board scrutiny. While those departments can opt in, none have done so as of yet.
The board will also not be able to discipline officers that it does review. Instead, it will launch formal investigations, hold fact-finding hearings, and draw up recommendations — as well as potentially make criminal referrals to the district attorney or other appropriate agencies.
The ordinance that created the review board went into effect in January 2022, but progress on selecting the board members has been slow.
Klein noted that council had been kept busy by a recently passedban on fracking in county parks and a proposal for a newDepartment of Sustainability.
“It was a long process,” he allowed, but “I think that once we got started, we moved pretty expeditiously. … We knew we had to do this, and we thought, ‘Now’s the time to make this happen.’”
But the board still has a way to go before it can get to work.
For one thing, it still has five vacant seats to fill. Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald must now select four appointees of his own, and the final member is chosen by council and Fitzgerald together.
Klein said Fitzgerald has not disclosed when he might make his picks, but said council members will “find out where we are” from his office. “I would imagine that would happen sooner rather than later.”
In an email, a spokesperson for Fitzgerald said, “We’ll do our part once Council has its portion done.”
At least five board members must be present for the review board to take any formal action. And once the vacancies are filled, the board must create bylaws, assign responsibilities, and address “any number of legal concerns that might arise” before it can begin to review allegations, Klein said.
He said he hopes to make progress on bylaws and leadership decisions by this fall: “I would think that by the time we head into December, some progress should be made.”
And once Fitzgerald makes his picks, “We can probably schedule or encourage [the board] to schedule preliminary meetings maybe even late this fall and certainly by the beginning of next year,” Klein said. “I would imagine that over the next three, four months, things will be up and running.”
But Klein said that will just be the start of the board’s work. The process of encouraging local municipalities to agree to the board oversight will be difficult, he said.
“It is a process, it will take some time, there will probably be a lot of missteps along the way and maybe some false starts here and there,” Klein said. “I think it will require some patience, [and] recognition there will be some growing pains.”
