Category: News and Updates

by Vivian Kinter

Drug Court and Mental Health Court are two of Allegheny County’s “specialty courts,” which purport to “divert” people from incarceration but usually require guilty pleas, long periods of probation, and/or inpatient treatment. This is one court watcher’s experience in these courtrooms.

The people coming to Drug Court Review buzz in wait, anxious because Judge Sasinoski is late. Many of them have plans after court, but because the judge has decided their time is not valuable, those plans are in jeopardy. The room was built to create every form of barrier between people to prevent any sort of empathetic interaction. The world is suspended in time, waiting for one man. Finally, he appears, and the room shifts to full speed. The judge spends less than a minute on each person before hurrying through the next. Everyone with a negative review is shuffled away, to a room out of our sight. It’s as if the judge sees not humans in front of him but barriers to be shoved aside so he can get to anywhere other than this doing anything other than this.

This is not a court room but a conveyer belt, a speed round of people’s lives into which we’ve been flung.

And then the round ends. Everything stops.

The first thing you see when you walk into Mental Health Court is a childish and, quite frankly, bizarre array of Star Wars Yoda plushies. This display of toys implies that this room is a safe and comforting place specifically for children. It’s not. This is where adults face Judge Lazzarra. But the tone and atmosphere feel more like a visit with a high school guidance counselor. Positive reviews include praise so enthusiastic it verges on demeaning, award certificates, and courage bracelets. It’s as if we’re at a science fair and everyone’s competing for the blue ribbon.

Lazzara’s superlatives of praise seem not only to be her way of building people up, but also the vehicle for her favorite weapons: subtle jabs and hidden threats. A man stands before her, suffering and struggling after a relapse. She begins by expressing her disappointment with him, all the more accentuated when contrasted with the praise she’s tossed at every other person who has walked through the room. She is using this linguistic dichotomy to tear him down. If she can make him feel less than every other person in the room, she can use his shame as a form of coercion, so he’ll follow the script she wants him to follow.

Due to multiple failed drug tests, the man is being evicted from the program he was living in, and the court has two weeks to figure out what to do. Lazzara compares him and his actions to garbage, describing the program as “tossing [him] out,” She continues with a threat: “if you get tossed out, I have no choice but to jail you.” She uses this ultimatum to force him to publicly admit to an act that he is obviously ashamed of. He receives this emotional flogging in front of the entire court so he can go to an in-patient program instead of jail. Then he is surrounded and hounded by Judge Lazzarra, his lawyer, and the original program’s representative. Between their repetitive and rushed phrases about him ending up in jail, I cannot hear him actually admit to taking drugs, but I know it happens because the lawyer sitting behind him raises her hands in exasperation as if his life is a waste of her time. After everything has gone her way, Lazzarra falls back into the routine of praise, applauding him for doing the right thing. Everyone in the courtroom is being conditioned to do anything she says just to avoid her mood swings.

Neither of these approaches allows room for people in these courts to be treated with dignity or respect.

These two courtrooms are polar opposites in not only the setup but the treatment of the people. In one room, there is an impersonal, blatant disregard for people and their time; in the other, a mother looking after children. While some parts of each approach may seem to work for one or two people, the one-size-fits-all method means that, if it does not work for someone, it becomes their problem. Figure out how to make it work, fake it, or go back to jail. 

Last week, Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala announced he would be seeking to charge a 15 year-old accused of attacking his teacher as an adult, explaining that “the interests of the community are best served if the matter is transferred to the adult division for trial.” Multiple news outlets describe the boy as over six feet tall and 200 pounds. This kind of physical description is a well-known racist dog-whistle. They also describe him as having a “mental disability” and as having been moved between multiple foster homes. They may as well have been describing my brother.

We adopted my brother out of foster care when he was five. He had multiple developmental disabilities, including Reactive Attachment Disorder, a particularly devastating inability to form emotional bonds (overwhelmingly represented in children who have been in the foster “care” system). He followed the trajectory of many Black children with heightened emotional needs: expelled from Kindergarten; shuffled from one special ed program to the next; kicked out of a group home. As an adult, he has been in and out of jail, prison, or rehab.

Life with my brother was painful. He was emotionally volatile. He was loud and sometimes violent: holes in the walls, tantrums that went on and on, my mother wrestling him to the ground. Trying to connect with him was like touching a tornado. We didn’t love him, and he didn’t love us. When we were both teenagers, he was over six feet tall, weighed almost 200 pounds, and he raped me.

None of these facts negate the fact that he was a child.

For a long time, I saw my brother as irreparably damaged. I believed that by the time he came to live with us, it was too late. He was ruined, both for himself and others. As an adult, reading about the portrayal of Black “crack-babies-turned-superpredators,” I had to question my own understanding of how I, as a member of a White middle-class family, interpreted the emotions and abilities of the Black child we adopted. In my mind, nothing anyone could have done would have helped him. In reality, he was only ever offered “treatment” by an inherently anti-Black school system and Psychiatric Industrial Complex. Colonial, White supremacist modes of healing are not the only ones available, and they are particularly inept at addressing the kind of harm he endured. I see now how his immersion in Whiteness caused further harm, or at the very least, didn’t help. And I now know that most of the adults responsible for his care didn’t see a child when they looked at him; Black children become adults in the White imagination long before they’ve grown.

It is true that my brother hurt me deeply. It’s true that what this teacher experienced was horrific and devastating. It’s the community’s responsibility to acknowledge our suffering, to center our needs, to offer a justice process that includes accountability and healing. I’ve never had that. But there is no model of justice and accountability in which I believe my brother belongs in prison, even less so when he was 15.

When we charge children as adults, we’re claiming their development has stopped, that they are bad apples to be tossed in the trash. We justify this by saying their actions were so violent they can only be attributed to an adult. Does that mean the adult-sized violence endured every day by millions of children makes them adults? We cannot beat, rape, and neglect our children, shuffle them through a “child welfare” system that even its own social workers acknowledge is harmful, and not expect consequences. It stands to reason that if adults do horrible things to children, some of them are in turn going to do horrible things. A child’s violent act does not give us the right to deny him childhood.

I used to say what happened wasn’t my brother’s fault because his disability made him unable to empathize, to control impulses, to think through consequences. I now realize this ableist lens, while releasing him from blame, also denies him agency. I don’t have any answers. I don’t know what accountability in a decarcerated world looks like for someone like him. I can’t address all the systems and nuances at play in one blog post. I do know that incarceration is a wound on top of a wound. The loss experienced by a child deprived of love is unimaginable to most of us. I’m not sure my brother has experienced a day of peace in his life. His community owes him the care and love that was denied him. He deserves rest. And I know that repairing the harm caused to him would be a step toward repairing my own, an acknowledgment that, while it may have been my brother’s fault, it was yours, too. You failed me in that moment, just as we all failed this teacher and this child.

Allowing ourselves to magically turn a child into an adult in order to make sense of a violent act is just another violent act. Our children have seen enough violence.

As abolitionists, we have a responsibility to highlight police and prosecutors who abuse state power to “intimidate and coerce” independent jurists and elected officials whose policies reduce the carceral state and ensure constitutional safeguards against reckless, dangerous law enforcement officers and oppressive practices. We are disturbed that the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office would launch an investigation into Allegheny County Magistrate Mik Pappas, an investigation which the DA does not have innate authority to pursue. The investigation stems from allegations by the DA’s Office and Allegheny County detectives that Magistrate Pappas did not timely sign an arrest warrant for someone who was suspected of involvement in the murder of a Uber driver. The allegations are baseless. We view this as an unethical and improper (and potentially illegal) “investigation” — which is undeniably an attack on the fight to end cash bail and stop evictions by some of the most reactionary forces in Allegheny County.

Make no mistake about it, this is about defending the democratic will of the people that elected Magistrate Pappas on a platform of decarceration and protecting the advances of a human rights movement to keep people out of cages and in their homes. That is what we are defending. We perceive the same state agencies that oppose and intimidate elected members of the judiciary in Allegheny County as the same forces that oppose progressive prosecutors and judges, from Philly to SF:

Whether it’s the FOP in Philadelphia, suing the city for passing legislation that takes cops out of routine traffic stops…or a candidate for Pennsylvania governor, running on a platform to strip the rights of Philadelphians to elect their own DA and return Pennsylvania to the dark days of the 1990’s rush to mass incarcerate…or gentrifiers and a pro-mass incarceration lobby, seeking to recall a progressive prosecutor in San Francisco.

This is a lesson for abolitionists, decarceration advocates, and the human rights movement. We are making progress, threatening the grip of the carceral state’s power over these institutions. However, our progress also exposes the limitations of the system. Those who want to maintain an oppressive, racist status quo will never play by the rules they created to maintain their power.

It is only by dismantling these institutions in the long run, will our communities be safe, our people free, and our dignity and human rights respected.

Councilmember Ricky Burgess recently announced an ordinance intended to affect the way Pittsburgh police conduct stop-and-frisks on pedestrians suspected of having committed a crime. Stop-and-frisks, where police temporarily detain and conduct a limited search of a person based on an officer’s “reasonable suspicion” that the person committed a crime, is an irredeemable practice that functions as a tool to racially profile and harass our communities. We urge the council to expand the ordinance to include all stop-and-frisks and to ban the practice altogether.

The current ordinance requires only that police officers memorialize the reasons that they believe constitute “reasonable suspicion” that a person has committed a crime prior to temporarily detaining them. “Reasonable suspicion” is itself a term that can mean whatever a police officer wants it to mean. Merely existing in a so-called “high crime area” can be deemed suspicious by police officers and courts. While the ordinance would provide more data on the stop-and-frisks that Pittsburgh police officers conduct, it will do little to reduce its practice – a practice that is unequivocally performed in a racially-discriminatory manner, perpetrates significant harm on our communities, and does nothing to improve public safety.

Pittsburgh already publicizes some information related to stop-and-frisks. In 2020, Pittsburgh police reported 825 field contacts/warrantless searches and seizures of pedestrians. Two-thirds of the people stopped were Black. Police reported more than 3,000 warrantless searches and seizures overall, 71% of the people were Black. 327 of these warrantless searches and seizures were conducted on children, including children 10 years old or younger. 84% of these searches and seizures on children were Black. 901 people were frisked during traffic stops. 77% of them were Black. Stop-and-frisk as a practice is often defended by policing apologists as a vital way to keep people safe. While the number of warrantless searches and seizures has trended downward over the last ten years, reported “violent” offenses have decreased by almost half in that same time period. Stop-and-frisks are an integral part of the system of apartheid policing in this city and do nothing to further public safety. The city should end the practice altogether and devote resources to housing, education, food security, and other material needs that actually keep people safe and reduce harm in our communities.

Court Watch volunteer Dheeksha Senthur shares her experiences observing court remotely during the winter of 2020 through the summer of 2021.

by Dheeksha Senthur

“Can you hear me?”

The screen flickered momentarily and a blurry image of a person dressed in an orange jumpsuit came into focus. The clang of the door shutting behind him, the orange jumpsuit against the sapphire-blue paper wall crystallized, the graininess emerging into the silhouette of a person. I watched as the man on the screen placed the headset over his ears, gazing at the monitor with widened eyes.

“Can you hear me?”

His voice echoed through the 14 devices of the 14 participants on the call before dissipating.

This was my first time attending court as a volunteer court watcher and I hadn’t quite known what to expect. I had envisioned a polished, wood-paneled courtroom presided over by a stern-faced judge; then the defense and prosecution would heatedly debate the case. I expected a game of legal jargon, one which I had to capture and transform into writing. The day before, I had prepared for this game of Motions Court, looking through the docket sheets for each one of my cases. It was in one of the docket sheets, next to his name, that I saw a date of birth in inked black letters: his year of birth was close to mine. A heavy charge was printed beneath his name.

At this moment, looking up from my desk, it was surreal to see the man from the docket sheet before me. The screen then flipped over to Judge Lazzara who appeared to be in her own home. She greeted everyone with a sunny “Good morning” and a gentle smile, apologizing for the delay caused by a prior status hearing. The screen flickered to the clerk in a mahogany courtroom with his right hand raised as the man in the motions court case was sworn in. The words rang out like the strike of a gavel as my laptop’s screen melted away into the courtroom proceedings.

Judge Lazzara began promptly with a series of questions: whether the individual consented to the lack of face-to-face interaction, to having his due process carried out remotely, etc. The man replied with “Yes ma’ams” during the questioning, but now, he asked a question himself. The screen lit up with a blue B icon as his video materialized; he asked whether future proceedings would take place over video call. Judge Lazzara smiled and said it was a good question and reassured him that continuing with the video call was “just for today.”

The defense attorney brought up the first of seven motions, a motion to sever, stating that the jury could be prejudiced during the two separate trials required by two different charges brought against the defendant. The attorneys went back and forth before Judge Lazzara denied the motion to sever but assured that there would be precautions in place and reminders to the jury so prejudice wouldn’t hold. As the proceedings continued, the room was filled only with the voices of the judge, defense, and commonwealth attorneys. The man in the orange jumpsuit seemed like a silent spectator.

Behind a light-blue surgical mask, he gazed at the screen; sometimes his eyes would wander off to the side and sometimes they would glaze over. The voices of the courtroom buzzed, but he never spoke. Loud beeping sounds from the jail began punctuating the din of legal arguments; eventually, the beeping became so disruptive that he had to be muted. That was the last time I saw him.

The hearing soon came to an end and the defense attorney brought up the question of a trial date. Judge Lazzara said she would look further into it but could not guarantee an exact one. The judge then said goodbye to everyone, including the muted defendant, whose headset, she jokingly noted, was already on the table.

I logged out of the call, examining all the nondescript terms in my notebook on the man I saw only in flashes, the “motions in limine” and “discovery motions.” I had witnessed my first ever hearing where a human being’s fate would be determined—and I would witness more.

The days passed by in a blur and I adjusted to the routines of remote court watching to the point where I could identify who was presiding simply by distinguishing the camera angle, the soft humming of background noise, and the mannerisms of the masked judge behind the sheets of plexiglass. I grew attuned to the ambiance of the courts as I sat at the desk beside my snow-banked window. The snow soon melted to a warm spring, and court officials became more adept at managing technical difficulties. As hearings passed by, I began pinpointing notable moments and conversations rather than focusing on keeping up with the formalities of the proceedings.

During a probation violation hearing, a defendant called into the meeting through his phone. His public defender described for the judge a number of unimaginably difficult circumstances the defendant was going through in his life. Despite these challenges, the defendant’s voice was bright with optimism and laughter as he spoke, never alluding to any of these struggles himself. He was determined, despite them, to try his best to pay his restitution.

Other cases were more obviously suffused with suffering and not just that of the people incarcerated at ACJ. Witnesses were brought forth, friends and family members, who would convey their pain to the judge. When I heard their voices crack as they appealed for justice within this system, I realized I was privy to a delicate, far-reaching vulnerability. They reminded me that what happened in these courtrooms, themselves an extension of the prisons where so many were held, had an impact beyond the person whose name was listed on the docket sheet. Hundreds of people away from my screen were experiencing the system’s influence on their lives, including the moments when I was absorbed in writing about just one.

Recently I noticed there was now a trial date set for the man whose hearing I observed during my very first court watching shift. Like all the hearings I observed, we’d only been connected once by the blue of our screens, but now he’d be alone in his orange-branded jumpsuit at the jail, awaiting a trial with countless others who had also sat in front of the blue wall of the jail, the thin table of the Pittsburgh Municipal Court, awaiting their fates. Now, there would only be waiting until his trial approached, waiting until this series of oblique connections through computer screens and courtrooms might begin to look like change.

by Jaclyn Kurin

On May 18, 2021, Allegheny County became the first county in this nation’s history to abolish solitary confinement by referendum. The ordinance bans Allegheny County Jail (ACJ) from using solitary confinement,¹ the restraint chair, chemical agents, and shackles at the jail.

However, as momentous a victory as this is, there are exceptions when solitary confinement can be used at ACJ. Individuals can be placed in emergency short-term solitary confinement when medical and mental health professionals find that temporary commitment is necessary for medical or safety reasons. Healthcare professionals also must state the specific conditions that must be provided to individuals prevent them from experiencing adverse physical or mental health problems while confined. Individuals in temporary confinement are to receive 4 hours of out of cell time daily.

Individuals might also be confined to their cells if the warden locks down the jail, which may occur only if the warden determines a facility-wide lockdown necessary to ensure the safety of persons held in the jail and that less restrictive interventions are insufficient to accomplish those safety goals. During a lockdown, ACJ must ensure individuals have a daily opportunity to leave their cell for hygiene and exercise. Even when one of these exceptions apply, ACJ is prohibited from denying individuals access to food, water, or any basic necessity, appropriate medical care, including emergency medical care.

The ordinance requires the warden to report on a monthly basis to the Jail Oversight Board and post on the jail’s website information concerning the use of temporary solitary confinement and jail lockdowns. The reporting requirements go into effect on July 7^th while the substantive provisions banning solitary confinement and the restraint chair begin on December 4^th. In order to ensure this ban on solitary confinement brings real and meaningful relief to those subjected to the torture of solitary confinement, we must continue to hold the ACJ accountable to the people’s will. Submit comments and virtually attend Jail Oversight Board hearings by following this link.

QUICK FACTS

What’s Banned at ACJ?

• Solitary confinement—i.e. holding a person in his cell for more than 20 hours a day.
• The restraint chair, chemical agents, and shackles.

When Can a Person Be Placed Solitary Confinement?

• Emergency Use of Short-term Solitary Confinement: An incarcerated person can be placed in temporary solitary confinement only if medical and mental health professionals find it to be necessary for the person’s safety or the security of others. Healthcare professionals also must state which specific conditions are to be provided to the individual to prevent him from experiencing adverse health consequences. Individuals in temporary confinement are to receive at least 4 hours of out of cell time a day.

• Jail Lockdowns: The warden may lock down the entire jail only if the warden determines it a necessary to ensure the safety of persons held in the jail and that less restrictive interventions are insufficient to accomplish those safety goals.

• Protective Custody: An individual requesting protective custody may be placed in short-term solitary confinement but for not more than 72 hours, which is sufficient time for ACJ to ensure less restrictive arrangements to keep the person safe.

What Conditions Must ACJ Provide to People in Solitary Confinement?

• ACJ must provide individuals access to food, water, or any basic necessity, appropriate medical care, including emergency medical care.
• Temporary Solitary Confinement: ACJ is to allow 4 hours of out of cell time.
• Facility-wide Lockdown: ACJ is to make every effort to ensure out of cell time for hygiene and exercise.
• Any conditions that the state or federal constitutions or laws require jails to provide.

How Does a Person Get Out of Solitary Confinement?

• A person being held in isolation—e.g. temporary solitary confinement or jail lockdown—can file an habeas petition for his release in any court of competent jurisdiction.

What Are ACJ’s Monthly Reporting Requirements?

• The warden must report to the Jail Oversight Board and post on the ACJ website the dates and reasons for any lockdown of the jail or section of it; the number of times any person has been subjected to temporary solitary confinement, with the duration and reason for each; the number of times the same person has been held in solitary confinement more than once a in month; the age, sex, gender identity, race and ethnicity of each person held in solitary confinement.

Ordinance Effective Dates:

• The reporting requirement: July 7, 2021
• The ban on the use of solitary confinement, the restraint chair, chemical agents, and shackles: December 4, 2021

1 “Solitary confinement, meaning the confinement of a detainee or inmate in a cell or other living space for more than 20 hours a day, has devastating and lasting psychological consequences on all persons, but especially for vulnerable populations, including youth and persons with diagnosed or undiagnosed cognitive or emotional disabilities.” Ordinance amending Ch. 205 Allegheny County Jail.

Violence work, occupation, and apartheid in Allegheny County

by Suhail Gharaibeh

Content warning: anti-Black hate speech; gun violence

It’s all on video. Just after 4:15 on the afternoon of Sunday, December 20th, 2020, closed-circuit television captures a white police SUV pulling into the rear entrance of the McKeesport Police station between Blackberry and Market Streets. On the right of the frame we can see snow on the ground, and snow on the train tracks that separate the police station and McKeesport’s main drag from the hulking Dura-Bond Pipe facility on the south bank of the Monongahela River. 

The cruiser parks, and an officer (later identified as Gerasimos “Jerry” Athans, 32) exits the driver’s side and walks around to open the back right door. Suddenly Athans stumbles back, stunned, (we’d learn later he’d been shot in the neck and shoulder, spots left uncovered by his ballistic vest) and moves behind the hood of the cruiser. A man in a black hoodie (later identified as Koby Lee Francis, 22) exits the backseat and points his arms toward Athans, presumably shooting at him once more, before running east, away from the station and out of the frame, ducking to avoid Athans’ returning shots. (We’d learn later that Francis fled McKeesport at some point after this, and Athans was flown to UPMC Presbyterian in Oakland to be treated for wounds to his neck and shoulder.)

This is the entirety of the released footage. There’s no audio, just a thirty-second clip of video. It’s exactly the sort of scene that our televisual mass culture loves to latch onto: a single moment of shocking violence, immortalized by a fly-on-the-wall camera. The story was broken by several local reporters and the accompanying footage was rapidly released on social media, including via the official Twitter accounts of the Allegheny County District Attorney and the US Marshals Service. 

Unsurprisingly, the video clip of a Black male suspect shooting a white policeman rapidly became the story in itself among right-wing and pro-police social media circles. Under a tweet from KDKA, one user posted a YouTube link to his own electric guitar cover of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which he dedicated to Officer Athans. “Back the Blue,” “Blue Lives Matter,” and “Thin Blue Line” stock images began popping up on posts about the shooting. Racist jokes about absentee fathers abounded. Under a photograph of Francis tweeted by KDKA, one user wrote, “No graduation pic!!?? Dindu Nuffin, better call Crump.” Three BLM-era tropes are rehashed here—the mocking allusion to the media’s use of graduation photos when covering victims of police brutality like Michael Brown, Jr.; the use of racist moniker “Dindu Nuffin,” a neologism derived from the AAVE “didn’t do nothing”; and the reference to Black civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who has famously represented victims of racist murder from Trayvon Martin to Jacob Blake. Echoing the nineteenth- and twentieth-century zeal for lynching, other users called for Francis’ summary execution: “Black lives don’t matter with this one! Put him down!” wrote one. “Give him the needle,” commanded another. “And that my friends is what we call a rabid animal,” wrote a third. “You act like one, you get taken down like one. Hope the officer is OK.” 

It’s no coincidence that all these tropes are deeply anti-Black and deeply pro-police. We know now that throughout American history, white supremacy has convened under the auspices of “law and order.” Just look at the number of rioters at the Capitol on January 6th who belong to police and military units from across the country. White supremacists (who, as it so happens, need not be white themselves) act as self-declared crusaders against “Black criminality” (an ideological construct, they refuse to acknowledge, that has been built by and for white supremacy).

Not all the responses to Athans’ shooting were virulently and explicitly anti-Black. But even the most benevolent both-sides-ism (“police are scared, too!”) is deeply misleading because it smudges away all the context that surrounds interactions between police and civilians. As abolitionists, we must grapple with the fact that Francis and Athans were entangled in a much broader relationship of power and authority than what is visible in those thirty seconds of CCTV footage.

The video of the shootout is sensational and upsetting. It was an “easy A” for some local reporters—you get a story you can follow, neatly reported by the police; you publish it, and you get to watch as the public swarms to it and picks it apart for meaning, bringing you ad revenue and social-media clicks. But it’s not actually very substantive. Simply viewing and reviewing this highly-clickable video doesn’t actually tell us much about what we’re seeing. And it certainly doesn’t constitute critique.

Why did this violent event occur? How did two young men living and working in the same community—one a white, 32-year-old cop; the other a Black, 22-year-old civilian—end up in a nearly-deadly shootout? The dominant mode of thinking (as exemplified by the Twitter users above) tells us that this all occurred because Black people are inherently prone to criminality, and instinctively attracted to violence. This explanation, of course, is pure ideology. It’s less connected with reality than it is with the white supremacist and anti-Black ethos of the American state project in general, and of the carceral apartheid regime of Allegheny County in particular. 

In order to truly understand that moment on December 20th, 2020, let’s rewind. 

September 2016. A former Pitcairn Police and current McKeesport Police officer, Melissa Adamson, a white woman, was fired after posting a Snapchat photo of herself in uniform with the caption, “I’m the law today nigga.” The firing (somewhat surprisingly) got reported by national and international newsrooms, and became a local cause célèbre. That Adamson ever thought this Snapchat selfie was a good idea says a lot about the types of people working in Allegheny County’s municipal police departments (PDs). Koby Francis was high-school age at the time, in a school district with double-digit racial achievement gaps and a superintendent who had to be threatened with federal legal action by the ACLU before he would allow students at McKeesport Area High School to form a Black Student Union. (The superintendent told reporters that “he grew wary of the initiative…[once] it became apparent that local activist and McKeesport mayoral candidate Fawn Walker-Montgomery was behind the effort.”)

November 2017. Koby Francis was 19 years old. He and another 19-year-old from McKeesport named Savonce Williams were facing a battery of charges after an alleged October 24th robbery. They were both held for court on $5,000 bail by Magisterial District Judge Eugene Riazzi—himself a former McKeesport Police Detective. Apparently unable to post bail, Francis was held in the Allegheny County Jail instead. 

In summer 2018, Francis pled guilty to the charge of criminal conspiracy and was sentenced to three years’ probation by Common Pleas Judge Donna Jo McDaniel. This process left Francis with over $4,000 in court fees, according to his criminal docket. Here’s the October 24th, 2017 event that led to Williams and Francis being arrested in the first place, according to Mon Valley paper The Tube City Almanac: “McKeesport police said that an Abraham Street resident reported that two men visited her home to ask about an apartment for rent. When they left the house, she noticed a video game console was missing. She confronted them as they got back into their car, police said, but the men drove away, knocking her to the ground.” 

What would it look like if this dispute had been settled according to the principles of transformative justice, rather than punishment and retribution? What if Francis and Williams had been charged with the simple task of replacing the Abraham Street woman’s video game console? What if the woman, accompanied by a social worker, had been able to sit down Francis and Williams and tell them, face-to-face, how they hurt her?

In early December 2018, Judge Donna Jo McDaniel, who had sentenced Francis in this case, resigned amid accusations of bias and sanctions by the Pennsylvania Superior Court. 

The very same week, Koby Francis was arrested again as part of a massive drug sweep that local police had reportedly been planning for over half a year. At just 20 years old now, Koby was one of the youngest arrestees in a sweep that ended in charges being filed against 70 residents of Allegheny County. 

Francis was assigned Judge Jeffrey Alan Manning in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas. Manning has a judicial history that can only be described as sordid. He’s known for his commanding personality, raucous outbursts, and cigar-smoking. Among Black Allegheny County residents and activists, Judge Manning is notorious for upholding white supremacy in his courtroom; among women attorneys, he is notorious for his misogyny. In April 1998, Manning was brought before Pennsylvania’s Court of Judicial Discipline for allegedly having referred to two Black women as “nigger[s]” on two separate occasions. In 1999, the Allegheny County Bar Association refused to recommend Manning for retention, citing, in part, his sexism as perceived by female lawyers and judges. “Those who know him best say he is a sexist,” wrote the Post-Gazette in 2001. In 2007, Manning faced a federal investigation by the FBI and IRS after allegedly giving special treatment to long-time friends of his, particularly criminal defense lawyer Patrick Thomassey, with whom Manning worked as a teenager at a local country club. No charges were ultimately filed. In 2008, he cleared the now-infamous Pittsburgh Police officer Paul Abel of all charges related to an incident in which Abel’s gun went off as he drunkenly pistol-whipped a twenty-year-old man on the South Side, shooting him through the hand. Manning’s decision allowed Abel to continue working (until 2020, when he was fired, unsurprisingly, for excessive force). In 2015, Manning “broke a legal norm” by accepting a lenient plea deal that offered probation to three of five white men who ganged up on a Black man and threw him onto the train tracks at the Wood Street T station after a Kenny Chesney concert. Manning told reporters he “felt compelled to accept” the deal. After all of this, in 2018, protestors demanded that Manning be removed from the trial of East Pittsburgh Police officer Michael Rosfeld, who shot 17-year-old Antwon Rose, Jr. three times in the back as he ran away from Rosfeld. Rosfeld was to be represented in Manning’s court by none other than attorney Patrick Thomassey.

This 2018 trial in the court of Judge Manning again left Francis with thousands of dollars in legal fees. It’s unclear which controlled substances Francis was accused of being involved with. In any case this sweep was conducted in a day and age where the War on Drugs has been declared an abject failure, and policy experts around the world are urging against criminalization and incarceration as a response to drug trafficking. This War-on-Drugs-era sweep is exactly the type of police offensive that resulted in the murder of Breonna Taylor in March 2020 (and so many others). 

Again, as abolitionists, we must ask the question, no matter how kooky it may seem in the eyes of our opponents to the right: what would Koby Francis’ life be like today if the hair-trigger reaction was not to incarcerate him for being involved in drug dealing, but rather to give him the support needed to transform and heal his life?

For Black American men like Koby Francis, the likelihood of being incarcerated within one’s lifetime is one in three (compared to one in seventeen for white men). Black adults, while representing just 12 percent of the US’ population, make up 33 percent of the US’ prison population (which, in turn, is the largest group of incarcerees on the planet). Black people are disproportionately likely to be arrested and incarcerated for drug-related offenses, despite using drugs at the same rate as all other races.

This reality of carceral apartheid only gets clearer when we zoom in on a place like Allegheny County, one of the most deeply segregated metropolitan areas in the country. It’s one of many American metro areas that serve as touchpoints for the prison-industrial complex, with the carceral geography of Greater Pittsburgh culling scores of oppressed and exploited people—largely members of the Black working class—into its dangerous machinery.

Recent research by ALC has borne this out. The new report “Apartheid Policing in Pittsburgh: Why Defunding the Police Can’t Wait” details how, in 2019, Black people made up only 23.2 percent of the Pittsburgh population, and yet they made up 43.6 percent of individuals involved in traffic stops, 71.4 percent of all frisks, 69 percent of individuals subject to warrantless search and seizures, 63 percent of all arrests conducted by the Pittsburgh Police, and 60 percent of all use-of-force incidents.

This was the context that followed Koby Francis to the McKeesport Police station just before 3 PM on Sunday, December 20th. It was an hour before the shootout. He had been summoned to receive a protection-from-abuse (PFA) order, a type of restraining order for adults or the minor children of adults who suffer abuse by members of their household. 

It’s unclear exactly why Francis was served this PFA order, but we know that it covered his four-month-old son and the child’s mother. Just over an hour after Francis left the station, police were called to the sprawling Crawford Village public housing complex adjacent to the McKeesport & Versailles Cemetery. The caller, a relative babysitting Francis’ child reported that Francis was sitting outside the apartment of the person who had obtained the PFA order. Police arrived on scene but Francis had left. They searched the perimeter, and eventually, at the 1500 block of Yester Square, found an upset and combative Koby Francis sitting in a parked car, which they searched before arresting him. Somehow, despite being handcuffed and arrested, police say Francis was able to keep a handgun concealed and move his arms from his back to his front. Officer Athans drove him back to the Downtown McKeesport station—and what followed is, of course, all on video.

Policing has been trotted out over and over again in response to abuse and intimate violence. But, ironically, the literature suggests that police officers are among the most likely demographics to commit domestic violence. The families of police officers are two to four times more likely than others to experience violence at home. 

According to the National Center for Women and Policing, “even officers who are found guilty of domestic violence are unlikely to be fired, arrested, or referred for prosecution.” As the New York Times concluded in a 2013 investigation, “In many departments, an officer will automatically be fired for a positive marijuana test, but can stay on the job after abusing or battering a spouse.”

Abolitionist feminists have long argued against policing and prisons as a “solution” to domestic violence. Carceral responses, they argue, represent their own kind of violence, which gets layered on top of already-existing harm, exacerbating rather than alleviating suffering, especially when the victims are femme, of color, and/or undocumented. 

This was all compounded exponentially by police’s heavy-handed and unconstitutional response to Officer Athans’ shooting. Almost immediately after the shooting, a bevy of law enforcement agencies descended upon the Mon Valley: not only McKeesport Police and other small Mon Valley municipal departments, but also the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police; the Allegheny County Police; the Allegheny County Sheriff’s Office; the Pennsylvania State Police; the state Attorney General’s Office; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATF); and the US Marshals Service. 

This is what residents of Allegheny County are faced with on a daily basis, though many agencies regularly go unseen. The region’s topography and modern history have resulted in a messy, jigsaw-like municipal map that lends itself to over-policing, as jurisdictions overlap, multiplying police presence (particularly in Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela River valley cities like McKeesport). On an average day in McKeesport, you might find not only McKeesport Police in operation, but also the Port Authority Police, Penn State Greater Allegheny Police, McKeesport Area School District Police, the County Sheriff’s Office, the County Police, and officers from the surrounding PDs of Port Vue, Glassport, West Mifflin, Versailles, North Versailles, and others.

Working in concert, at least ten different policing agencies locked down and occupied the city of McKeesport on December 20th. At least four checkpoints were set up, ostensibly stopping every single vehicle attempting to enter or exit the city—on Lysle Boulevard, Walnut Street, the McKeesport-Duquesne Bridge, and elsewhere. SWAT tactical vehicles were posted up Downtown. Police searched home after home, summarily, indiscriminately, searching for a harbored Francis without warrant. 

Tanisha Long, the founder of Black Lives Matter Pittsburgh & Southwestern PA and a student at the University of Pittsburgh, happened to be driving into McKeesport on the evening of the 20th to visit with a family member at the UPMC hospital there. But when she attempted to cross the Monongahela River into the city around 6 PM, she noticed something odd. 

“There was a long line of cars…which was confusing,” Long tells me. “There appeared to be police officers, so I assumed there was a car wreck, [but] there was not. There were officers looking through windows…Cars were being ushered through. Some cars were stopped, and they were asked to come out the car, open up their trunk. Some people had to take things out of their vehicle[s]. The car in front of me, they made him get out of his car and empty out his trunk. That’s the one I took a picture of…I asked the officer, why are you stopping us? And he wouldn’t answer. And I’m like, what is this search for? And he wouldn’t answer…[The officer] made me roll all my windows down, and they were just looking through [my car]…There were, like, four other points in McKeesport where they did similar things or did a quick search…You couldn’t get through McKeesport. It took me an hour to get to the hospital.”

Fawn Walker-Montgomery, co-founder and executive director at Take Action Mon Valley (TAMV), an anti-violence and community organizing group based in McKeesport, immediately knew something was wrong in her city.

“There were police everywhere in the city. There were over ten police departments. We had the SWAT here, we had the county, we had the state…Just police everywhere, walking around the streets with shotguns…As I rode around, and I went to [Crawford Village], there was people out, so I obviously told them [about] what happened. There were about eight cops just riding through the housing project. So I went home after I seen that, and honestly, I do feel like I was having a panic attack. I came home, and I just did a [Facebook] live, and I said, ‘look, Black people in McKeesport…stay home.’ Because my biggest fear was that they were gonna kill anybody that looked like Koby that night. So, basically, that’s any Black person. I just figured they was gonna kill anybody Black. And as I’m doing this live, I’m getting calls and texts [saying], ‘Fawn, they run up in my house. They pointed guns at my kids. They were just searching the house, looking for Koby.’ This was people who were related to him, people who are not related to him. And I got calls from people [saying]…if you were leaving or trying to come in, they were searching your trunk. And [civilians] would say, ‘well, you don’t have permission.’ And [police] would say, ‘well, you don’t have an option.’ And they would just do it anyway. They were pulling some people out at gunpoint. They were rolling up to people’s houses. They had no warrants. They weren’t even giving people the opportunity to say yes or no. They were breaking some people’s property, they were arguing with some people. They were telling his family, and basically anybody, that they were shooting to kill.”

Until about 4 AM that night, as K-9 units roamed the streets, car after car was arbitrarily searched, and homes were raided, Walker-Montgomery trailed police to document their actions and to connect victims of aggressive police searches with legal counsel and mental healthcare. 

She and her organization reached out to contacts at the American Civil Liberties Union, and Pennsylvania Legal Director Vic Walczak quickly slammed police activity in McKeesport, saying, “The shooting of any individual is tragic, but it does not give police license to run roughshod over peoples’ constitutional rights in their effort to arrest the suspect. Now, a day after the terrible shooting of the police officer, it is highly unlikely the McKeesport police can justify continuing the search methods we witnessed yesterday. Warrantless, non-consensual entries into peoples’ homes, suspicionless vehicle stops and searches of motorists’ cars and trunks, and checkpoint stops cannot be justified under the fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution or Article I, section 7 of the Pennsylvania Constitution.”

Nothing justifies police violating the 4th Amendment by searching vehicles and homes without probable cause and without a warrant. Read our statement on the actions of McKeesport police by our legal director, Vic Walczak.

The testimony that TAMV has collected on these illegal police actions—including the accounts of 18 victims and eyewitnesses—are likely to form the basis of class-action litigation against the agencies involved. Walker-Montgomery tells me she instructed terrified civilians to comply with police searches that night, fearing that any altercation could lead to more violence. “‘Don’t argue with [the police], just let them [search], because I want you out alive,’” she remembers telling people over the phone. “And they’re saying, ‘well, do they have rights to do this?’ No, they do not. But at this point, we gotta decide if we’re going to argue with them, and possibly die, or just let them [search]…Being in that position is very traumatic, because you know you have rights, but you know if you use those rights, if you bring them up, you could die.”

Brooke Harris, Francis’ cousin, told reporters that her and her mother’s home were searched without warrant within hours of Athans’ shooting. “They opened up the door [to my mom’s house]. The babies were standing right here. They opened up the door and they had the guns aimed…they [pushed] my mom and my uncle out of the way, who are both elderly in their 70s, and charged upstairs,” she said, and added that when they searched her own house across the street, police damaged her closet and pulled some curtains down before tossing them in a baby’s crib.

Responding to community criticism of the unconstitutional and aggressive searches, Allegheny County Police superintendent Coleman McDonough said, “I just find it hard to believe that we’re talking about these issues when Mr. Francis is still out there in the community, endangering innocent citizens…I think that’s the priority that we ought to be talking about today.”

But is concern about harm coming to the community of McKeesport really moving the police here? Their drastic, martial response seems more connected to the fact that the victim was a police officer rather than the actual substance of the crime. A Black civilian being shot is part and parcel of the system of policing to which McDonough belongs. But a Black civilian shooting a police officer? The full force of police’s violence work must be felt. 

Police/(para)military occupations are carried out when state regimes feel they must consolidate their monopoly on violence. That is what the McKeesport crackdown was about. 

If they cared so much about community harm, where was all of this action in late May 2020, when 32-year-old Black transgender hairstylist and ballroom emcee Aaliyah Johnson was found dead outside her apartment on Sinclair Street in Downtown McKeesport? It took grassroots movement builders like Dena Stanley of Trans YOUniting to get the public eye on Johnson’s case. What about when George Brosey was found shot to death at Crawford Village in June? What about Niko Dawson, 31, or Keith Jones, Jr., 20, both murdered in July? Officer Athans is thankfully still alive today. A lot of McKeesport residents can’t say the same about their loved ones.

Walker-Montgomery shares my suspicions here, that the police’s response to the Athans shooting was not only disproportionate, but cynical. “[The police response was] just further confirmation of what we already know about police. They’re violent. They have a strong blue line, to where they really care about their own,” she says. “There are a lot of shootings in McKeesport. A lot. On a weekly basis. There have been triple homicides, double homicides in this city. People have died, children have died, parents have died, mothers, fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins. And we have never had that many police resources in our entire lives. I know families, including my own, that would kill to have that many resources available to get justice for their loved ones. It made me sick to my stomach…You have people over here who’ve been waiting for justice for ten years plus for their loved ones, and weren’t able to have that kind of attention.”

Within a week, four more young adults between 19 and 25 years old were charged with hindering apprehension for allegedly helping Francis to escape after being seen on CCTV footage entering a convenience store and riding in a car with Francis after the shooting.

Shortly after Athans’ shooting, the BATF had put up a $10,000 reward for tips leading to Francis’ arrest, which was followed up by an additional $5,000 from local automobile dealer Richard Bazzy, putting a $15,000 bounty on Francis—and on December 29th, after nine days on the run, an anonymous tipster called the US Marshals Service with knowledge that Francis was hiding out at the Oakmound Apartments in Clarksburg, West Virginia (a city anchoring the southern portion of the Pittsburgh megaregion). Police entered the apartment where Francis was staying by himself, unarmed. “He was actually asleep when we came in and arrested him,” Chief Deputy Terry Moore of the US Marshals Service said, suggesting Francis was arrested via no-knock warrant (a strategy that has been decried by lawmakers and activists since Breonna Taylor’s assassination). Lieutenant Venerando Costa of the Allegheny County Police said in a press conference that Francis’ arrest had been carried out by the Northern Office of West Virginia’s Mountain State Fugitive Task Force in an interjurisdictional collaboration with at least twelve policing agencies—McKeesport Police, Allegheny County Police, the Allegheny County Sheriff’s Office, Pennsylvania State Police, the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, West Virginia State Police, the US Marshals Service, the BATF, the FBI, the Harrison County Sheriff’s Office, the Clarksburg Police Department, and the Greater Harrison County Drug and Violent Crime Task Force.

On Friday, January 8th, the Allegheny County Sheriff’s Office successfully extradited Koby Francis back to Pittsburgh. Allegheny County Sheriff’s deputies shuttled Francis from the North Central Regional Jail in rural Doddridge County, WV to the Allegheny County Jail in Downtown Pittsburgh. 

Both of these facilities are death traps. In 2019, the West Virginia Division of Corrections was sued by the mother of inmate Zachary Bailey, who died under disputed circumstances at North Central just a few weeks after Janson Davenport was found dead in his cell there. Then, in December 2020, two inmates at North Central were pronounced dead after being found unresponsive in a quarantine cell. And at this point, Allegheny County Jail (ACJ) can no longer hide its medical neglect, excessive force, abuse of the mentally ill, unsanitary conditions, and staggering suicide rate. Timothy Pauley died at ACJ in April 2019 after a suicide attempt, Daniel Pastorek was found dead in his cell there in November 2020. And on top of all this normalized violence, we are in a pandemic, and detention facilities are superspreading factories for the coronavirus. 

Koby Francis is at ACJ until further notice. On Tuesday, January 12th, 2021, he was denied bail by Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Edward J. Borkowski. His preliminary hearing, scheduled for today, January 21st, was postponed until mid-February.

The entire Francis-Athans debacle was precipitated by a single interaction between officer and civilian. In our abolitionist future, this type of interaction wouldn’t happen again. 

What if this whole situation—the PFA order, the violation—had been given over to a talented social worker, of which Allegheny County has many? The situation—Koby Francis sitting in a car outside the apartment of his alleged abuse victim—was potentially disturbing, but it wasn’t an emergency that required armed personnel to respond. What if a local social worker had had an existing relationship with Francis, allowing them to effectively step in and de-escalate the situation?

How can we transform harm? That is the question we keep coming back to. As abolitionists, we are animated by a hunger for healing, not retribution. Justice means nothing if it does not transform the original conditions from which harm emerged.

When a contingent organized by TAMV tried to call all of this out at the McKeesport City Council meeting on the evening of January 6th, they were barred from entering. Fawn Walker-Montgomery says that the group, about eight strong, had signed up for speaking slots through all the proper channels—but when they arrived, they found a note on the door indicating that the meeting was closed to the public due to the coronavirus. Though they could see civic officials carrying on a meeting inside, this group of residents was literally locked out. Walker-Montgomery says this was in direct violation of Pennsylvania’s Sunshine Act, a statute which guarantees the right to witness open governmental proceedings, holding that “the right of the public to be present at all meetings of agencies and to witness the deliberation, policy formulation and decision-making of agencies is vital to the enhancement and proper functioning of the democratic process.”

The City Council has another meeting coming up on Wednesday, February 3rd at 7PM. Walker-Montgomery is asking all who are able to call, message, and email McKeesport City Council, and show up to their February meeting to be heard in person. 

Contact McKeesport Mayor Michael Cherepko. Contact McKeesport Police Chief Adam Alfer. Contact Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala, Jr.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Suhail Gharaibeh is a Chicanx and Arab American writer born and

We seek the abolition of cash bail in Allegheny County – and everywhere else in the US colonial project.

We believe cash bail contributes to a violent system of apartheid policing and punishment, and exacerbates economic precarity and poverty by governance thru debt. 

We recognize cash bail as a feature of racial capitalism that benefits white people, the ruling class, and state power thru parasitic exploitation and dispossession of Black people and poor community members – not as a legitimate pretrial condition for securing one’s appearance in court.

We observe the wild inconsistencies of how cash bail is imposed among magistrates, revealing a crisis of legitimacy in their courts; since there is no standard, the financial and carceral fates of community members are merely entropic.

We reject the use of surveillance, algorithmic violence, and predictive policing, which rely on risk assessment “formulas” that are inherently anti-Black; these practices are often offered up as “alternatives” to cash bail thus co-opting initial abolitionist demands.

We situate our objective of abolishing cash bail within our larger protracted goals of ending state violence and transitioning from a punitive paradigm to one that centers healing, accountability, and community power.

– ALC COURT WATCH