CAN FEDERAL INTERVENTION 
BRING LASTING IMPROVEMENT 
IN LOCAL POLICING? 
The Pittsburgh Consent Decree 
Robert C. Davis 
Nicole J. Henderson 
Christopher W. Ortiz 
 
Vera Institute of Justice 
April 2005 
 
 
 

 2005 Vera Institute of Justice. All rights reserved. 
This project was prepared by the Vera Institute of Justice and supported by Cooperative 
Agreement #2002-HS-WX-K018 by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of 
Community Oriented Policing Services. Points of view or opinions contained in this 
document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or 
policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. 
Additional copies can be obtained from the communications department of the Vera 
Institute of Justice, 233 Broadway, 12th Floor, New York, New York, 10279, 
(212) 334-1300. An electronic version of this report is available for download on Veras 
web site, www.vera.org. 
Requests for additional information about the research described in this report should be 
directed to Nicole Henderson at the above address or to nhenderson@vera.org. 
 

Acknowledgments 
 
This study was conducted under a grant from the Office of Community Oriented Policing 
Services (COPS), part of the U.S. Department of Justice. 
 We are indebted to a number of individuals for their assistance in completing this 
project. In Pittsburgh, we would like to thank Chief of Police Robert W. McNeilly for his 
insights and interest in the project. The Pittsburgh Police Bureau was immensely helpful 
in many ways, including allowing us to visit police zones and interview officers over a 
period of three years. At the Greater Pittsburgh Chapter of the American Civil Liberties 
Union, we would like to thank Witold Walczak for his assistance and comments. At the 
Citizen Police Review Board we are thankful for the perspectives and remarks 
of Elizabeth Pittinger. 
 At the COPS Office, we would like to thank Matthew Scheider and Ellen Scrivner 
whose knowledge and comments helped shape this report. 
 At Vera, we are grateful for the thoughts and guidance of Chris Stone and Timothy 
Ross. In addition, Janet Mandelstam and Van Luu's editorial help greatly improved the 
clarity and quality of the writing. 
 Finally, we extend our sincere gratitude and thanks to all of the community leaders, 
police officers, and supervisors who helped us to understand the impact of the reforms. 
 

Executive Summary 
 
Ten years ago, Congress gave the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department new 
powers to sue state and local governments in federal court to correct a pattern or 
practice of police misconduct. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations have used this 
new power several times: in Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Detroit, the State of New Jersey, 
Steubenville, Ohio, and Prince Georges County, Maryland, among other jurisdictions. In 
Pittsburghthe first city to enter into a consent decree with the Justice Department
most provisions of the decree were lifted after the Bureau of Police was judged to be in 
substantial compliance. Pittsburgh, therefore, is the first place we can look to see how the 
police can satisfy the Justice Department and whether this new kind of federal 
intervention can make a lasting difference. 
To answer those questions, Vera researchers have studied the Pittsburgh Police 
Bureau since 2001. Both before and after the decree for the Bureau was lifted in 2002, the 
researchers observed police in field and management settings, interviewed key officials 
and community leaders, conducted focus groups with police officers, surveyed citizens, 
reviewed the federal monitors reports, and conducted original analyses of police data. In 
2003, researchers also surveyed more than 100 front-line officers. 
The Vera researchers found that two key factors enabled the city quickly to comply 
with the terms of the decree: the leadership of a talented police chief and guidance from 
the federal monitor. The police implemented new systems to track the use of force, traffic 
stops, and searches; new procedures to hold officers accountable; and new policies and 
training. Despite recent financial strains, those reforms remain firmly in place today, and 
both community leaders and citizen surveys reflect significant improvements in service. 
The research also reveals the importance of such intervention for minority officers. In 
Pittsburgh, black officers who quietly criticized how the Bureau operated previously, say 
they appreciate the new consistency in management. In these respects, Pittsburgh is a 
success story for local police management and for federal intervention. 
However, the researchers also found discontent among many front-line police 
officers and persistent concerns about police misconduct among a sizeable number of 
citizens. Both black and white officers in Pittsburgh say they believe that tighter 
management has made police less active and aggressive in fighting crime (although some 
performance data provided by the Bureau and our citizen survey do not support that 
belief). The public still lacks a role in the reform process, and citizens do not have access 
to police data that were given to the monitor under the decree. 
 There are strong signs a year after most of the decree has been lifted that federal 
intervention can encourage long-term improvements in police accountability. More 
engagement of citizens and greater participation of front-line officers might have made a 
good process even better. 

Table of Contents 
Introduction.............................................................................................. 1 
The Experience in Pittsburgh.............................................................................. 2 
Issues Addressed in this Report........................................................................... 4 
Our Sources of Information.................................................................................5 
How Well Have the Reforms Been Maintained by the Bureau of Police?........................................ 7 
PARS and COMPSTAR......................................................................................... 8 
Training................................................................................................. 11 
Inspection Unit...........................................................................................12 
How Has the Decree Affected the Way in Which Officers Approach Their Jobs?................................16 
A Written Survey to Tap Officer Perspectives..............................................................17 
The Perspectives of African-American Police Officers......................................................26 
Has the Office of Municipal Investigations Made Progress Toward 
Meeting the Requirements of the Consent Decree?...........................................................28 
Management Changes at OMI.................................................................................28 
OMI Comes into Compliance.................................................................................30 
Trend Data................................................................................................31 
New Directions and Challenges Going Forward...............................................................33 
Community Views on the Conclusion of the Consent Decree 
and the Current State of Policing.........................................................................35 
The Perspectives of Community Leaders.....................................................................35 
The Perspectives of Ordinary Citizens.....................................................................37 
Conclusion................................................................................................40 
Last Reflections on the Pittsburgh Reform Process.........................................................41 
Appendix A: Community Survey: Weighting Decisions.........................................................44 
Appendix B: Survey Results................................................................................45 
References................................................................................................56 

Introduction 
 
Policing in the United States is among the most local of government services. When one 
of the 18,000 or 19,000 local police agencies in the country goes wrong, it is usually local 
officials who are responsible for fixing the problem. But when the local political process 
cannot resolve problems of police misconduct, the federal courts and the United States 
Department of Justice have a variety of powers that allow them to intervene. Congress 
expanded those powers in 1994, giving the Civil Rights Division of the Justice 
Department authority to file civil law suits seeking injunctions against states and 
municipalities in the face of a pattern or practice of illegal or unconstitutional police 
actions. 
In the 10 years since it received that new authority, the Justice Department has 
investigated police practices in jurisdictions from New York to California. The 
department has filed six lawsuits, but none of these cases has ever gone to trial. Instead, 
local governments and the Justice Department have settled those cases through a consent 
decree. Other investigations avoided litigation entirely when the parties signed a 
memorandum of agreement.1 Both the consent decrees and the memorandum agreements 
generally specify a series of reforms that the police agency in question will implement, 
and most provide for a monitor to be appointed to oversee the compliance of the local 
government with the decree or agreement. 
1 Columbus, Ohio, is the only city in which there was contested litigation. The lawsuit was dismissed when 
the parties entered an agreement. 
The Clinton Administrations Department of Justice under Janet Reno filed the first 
of these law suits and negotiated the first consent decree in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 
1997. Others soon followed in Steubenville, Ohio; New Jersey, and Los Angeles. Under 
President George Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft, federal intervention has 
continued with new consent decrees or agreements in Cincinnati, Ohio; Detroit, 
Michigan; Buffalo, New York; Prince Georges County, Maryland; Washington, DC, and 
other jurisdictions. The decrees and agreements provide for a monitor to oversee 
compliance for the course of the agreement, which ranges from two to five years. The 
agreements can be terminated only after varying periods of substantial compliance 
(usually one to three years). Once local police have met this requirement, the federal 
government is supposed to withdraw, leaving police reform again as a local concern. 
Can a local government and its police department succeed at implementing the 
reforms required by these agreements and regain their former autonomy over local 
policing? And, even if reforms are implemented, can local officials maintain the reforms 
after the federal government and its monitor withdraw? Since 2001, we have looked for 
answers to those two central questions in Pittsburgh, where the first consent decree was 
entered. 
The experience in Pittsburgh demonstrates clearly that the answer to the first question 
is yesthe Pittsburgh Bureau of Police succeeded at implementing the required 
reforms, and the federal court monitoring of the Bureau ended just a few months after the 

five-year minimum term of the decree (although it remains in effect for the citys citizen 
complaint agency). The police revised their policies on the use of force and other tactics. 
They implemented an early warning system that allows supervisors to identify officers 
who are at high risk of engaging in misconduct. They revised training in cross-cultural 
communication and tactics to defuse confrontational situations. They made it easier for 
civilians to file complaints. These findings and our account of how the police department 
achieved these results are described in our first report on the experience in Pittsburgh, 
published in April 2003. 
This report addresses the second question: Can local officials maintain these reforms 
after the federal government and its monitor withdraw? 
A familiar danger with any federal intervention in local government is that the reform 
effort may lack local legitimacy. The temporary nature of federal intervention in pattern 
or practice cases makes this a special concern here. Without the development, during the 
period of federal intervention, of a local commitment to the required reforms, any 
improvements achieved during the period of intervention may quickly fade away. 
Moreover, the local commitment may have to develop among several different 
constituencies. Do local elected and appointed officials embrace the reforms and make 
them their own? How do the rank and file members of the police department react to the 
federal intervention and the reforms? Do the local citizens and community organizations 
that originally urged federal intervention see lasting improvements that matter to them? 
Do they remain involved with the process and committed to the reforms after the federal 
monitoring has ended? 
 
The Experience in Pittsburgh 
The Justice Departments first settlement based on the pattern or practice authority it 
received under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 came in 
Pittsburgh. Long-standing distrust between the police and the African-American 
community there was exacerbated by a series of incidents in the 1990schanges in 
minority hiring practices at the Bureau of Police, highly publicized incidents of police use 
of force against African Americans, racially charged rhetoric in political campaigns, and 
the deaths of two black men in policy custody. 
In 1993 the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union began to express 
concern about the number and disposition of complaints against the police. Under a court 
discovery order, the ACLU was allowed to examine city files and concluded that 
investigations of complaints were biased and incomplete. The ACLU and the local 
NAACP began to collect their own file of complaints and by 1996 believed they saw a 
pattern of misconduct and a lack of management control over the behavior of police 
officers. The two organizations filed a class action suit and invited the Justice Department 
to examine the situation in Pittsburgh under the provisions of the 1994 statute. 

Following its investigation, the Justice Department sent a letter to the city in January 
1997 alleging use of excessive force by the Pittsburgh police, false arrests, improper 
searches and seizures, failure to discipline officers adequately, and failure to supervise 
officers. Justice was concerned not only that misconduct was occurring, but that it was 
not being adequately investigated and guilty officers not routinely disciplined. The city 
initially disputed the allegations but decided to settle and signed a consent decree that 
was filed in U.S. District Court in April 1997. 
The decree outlined specific policy and practice changes for the Bureau of Police. It 
instructed the Bureau to make comprehensive changes in oversight, training, and 
supervision of officers. Key elements of the settlement required the Bureau to develop a 
computerized early-warning system to track individual officers performance; document 
uses of force, traffic stops, and searches; and provide annual training in cultural diversity, 
integrity and ethics. The decree also required changes in the processing of citizen 
complaints, including liberalized filing procedures and more thorough investigations. The 
reforms were to be scrutinized by a monitor who would report quarterly on the citys 
compliance to the federal judge who issued the decree. 
The Pittsburgh Bureau of Police has been widely recognized for bringing about 
significant reforms in the years since the signing of the decree, and the court lifted most 
requirements of the decree with the assent of the Justice Department in September 2002. 
In 2001, during the final year of the decree, the office of Community Oriented 
Policing Services within the Justice Department asked the Vera Institute to examine how 
this first pattern or practice consent decree was received in Pittsburgh. Our report, 
Turning Necessity into Virtue: Pittsburghs Experience with a Federal Consent Decree, 
and the monitors reports demonstrate that Pittsburgh made substantial progress in 
reducing police abuses by implementing innovative programs. 2 We attributed much of 
the success to a pro-reform police chief and the guidance the monitor provided to city 
officials. Their accomplishments included: 
 
-A state-of-the-art early warning system that identifies officers who may be 
in need of remediation by comparing each officers performance to that of 
his or her peers; 
-New policies to capture information on all use of force incidents, search 
and seizures, and traffic stops that place Pittsburgh among law 
enforcement agencies with best practices in these areas; 
-Increased accountability through centralized review of officer 
performance data in the early warning system and centralized review of 
the new incident forms; 
-Improved police training, especially in the area of use of force. 
 
2 U.S. Department of Justice, COPS Office Cooperative Agreement # 2001-CK-WX-K037. 

While these institutional achievements were impressive, opinions about the reforms were 
more mixed in the last year of the decree. We found community leaders guardedly 
optimistic about the potential for meaningful reform under the decree and with a good 
deal of faith in the police chiefs commitment to reform. Our survey of 400 Pittsburgh 
residents indicated that about four in 10 whites and three in 10 blacks felt that police 
abuse had declined and police-community relations improved since the decree was 
signed. Most worrying, however, our focus groups revealed that many officers were 
resentful of federal intervention. 
The consent decree extended beyond the Police Bureau, specifically in its 
requirements for the handling of citizen complaints against the police. The decree 
required the Office of Municipal Investigations (OMI)an office under the city solicitor 
that investigates citizen complaints against the police and other municipal agenciesto 
expand the methods by which complaints can be made, to accept and investigate 
anonymous complaints, and to investigate complaints thoroughly according to strict 
standards. OMI made progress toward these goals but was not able to consistently meet 
the standards of investigation set by the monitor. Moreover, the city was slow to hire 
additional investigators, resulting in a large backlog of open cases. Because of its failure 
to meet all requirements of the monitor, OMIs period under the decree was extended. 
Despite the substantial changes that occurred under the consent decree, many people 
in Pittsburgh were concerned about whether the accountability procedures implemented 
by the Police Bureau would remain in place and be followed as rigorously once most 
provisions of the decree were lifted. This is a critical issue for the Justice Departments 
use of pattern or practice suits as a method of encouraging reform in police agencies. 
Federal intervention in local policing is a controversial process, and most agree that it 
should not continue in any one place for much longer than the five-year term of most 
decrees. Thus, it is important to know whether changes produced within this time period 
can endure, why they do or do not, and the strategies that promote successful 
institutionalization of reform. 
 
Issues Addressed in this Report 
In this report, we examine policing in Pittsburgh during the post-decree period
beginning in March 2003, six months after the lifting of the decree, and continuing for a 
yearto determine whether reforms initiated under federal oversight remain robust or 
show signs of collapsing as soon as the federal monitor leaves. We examine three 
principal areas: 
 
 We first look at how deeply the reforms have taken hold in the Bureau of Police. 
No one believed that the widely-hailed early warning system or the new incident 
forms that make up its raw data would be dismantled with the lifting of the 
decree, but effects could be diluted if supervisors or the command staff failed to 

enforce completion of the traffic stop, use of force, and search and seizure 
forms; failed to monitor the information produced by the early warning system, 
or failed to take effective action to correct problem officers. We also examine 
separately if, with the passage of time, officers would come to accept the 
reforms as a routine part of their daily work. And, since many current officers 
joined the force after the decree was signed, would these officers in particular 
embrace the new policies? 
 Second, we continue to track the progress of OMI toward meeting the 
requirements of the decree. Shortly after we began this second Pittsburgh 
project, a new head of OMI was appointed and the agency began making 
progress in reducing its case backlog. Nonetheless, community leaders remained 
skeptical that OMI could act as an impartial investigative body when it is a part 
of the office that defends the city in lawsuits. We examine the changes at OMI 
aimed at improving efficiency, enhancing investigations, and gaining the 
confidence of the community. 
 A third issue is how the community responded to the lifting of the decree. Many 
civil rights leaders and citizens had expressed concern about the commitment of 
the Bureau to maintaining high levels of accountability and other reforms once 
the federal monitor was no longer in place. We look at how the relationship 
between the Bureau and the civil rights community and citizens was affected by 
the lifting of the decree. Did the community believe that the chief retained his 
commitment to reform? In examining this issue, we use the results of a 
community survey conducted during our first study as a base and contrast those 
outcomes with the results of a subsequent survey. 
 
Our Sources of Information 
We sought to obtain the perspectives of diverse sectors of the communityfrom city 
officials to rank-and-file police officers; from community leaders to citizens at large. In 
the year before the decree ended, we measured several important indicators of police 
performance and civilian satisfaction and trust, providing baselines for comparison with 
the period after the decree. We continued data collection in the post-decree phase, 
allowing us to compare the figures before and after the lifting of the decree. 
Our main source of information was in-depth interviews with key informants 
including police command staff, union officials, OMI staff, and leaders of community 
organizations. We interviewed police and OMI administrators at regular intervals 
throughout the project. We interviewed leaders of community organizations in the final 
year of the decree and again in the year after it ended.3 
3 Repeated attempts to interview police union officials were unsuccessful. 

We used two methods to gauge the effects of the decree-related reforms on police 
officers and first-level supervisors in the year after the decree ended. We conducted focus 
groups with officers and supervisors in all six of Pittsburghs police zones. We selected a 
shift from each zone and assembled groups of six to ten officers and supervisors at the 
beginning of the targeted shift. Participation in the groups was voluntary. Officers were 
asked questions about how the decree-related reforms had affected their approach to 
policing and the way that they interacted with the public. They also were asked if they 
believed the reforms had increased accountability in the Bureau and if they had ideas for 
improving the accountability system. 
Our experience during the decree showed that these focus groups tended to be 
dominated by a few highly opinionated officers. To gain insight into opinions of all 
officersnot just the most vocalwe had hoped to conduct a written survey with a large 
and representative sample of officers, but we were not authorized to do so then. However, 
we were granted authorization for such a survey in the year after the police monitoring 
ended. That survey was conducted with all officers who reported for the second shift in 
all of the citys police zones. Although completion of the written survey was voluntary, 
the refusal rate was very low, suggesting that the sample was representative and that we 
could have a fair amount of confidence that the views we obtained accurately reflect the 
sentiments of officers in the Bureau. 
During the last year of the decree we contracted with a survey firm to interview 400 
residents of Zone 2, an area containing roughly equal numbers of black and white 
residents. The survey results showed that many residents believed that policing had 
improved under the consent decree. Black residents, however, were significantly less 
optimistic in their appraisals than white residents. In the year after the monitoring ended, 
we conducted a second wave of interviews in Zone 2 using the same methodology: a 
random digit dialing telephone survey with 400 residents. The second survey repeated 
many of the same questions about perceptions of police effectiveness and misconduct and 
about satisfaction of citizens who are stopped or who request assistance from the police. 
The second survey asked whether the respondents knew that the consent decree had been 
largely lifted and whether they thought that the decree had brought about positive and 
lasting changes. It also contained a set of questions identical to those used in several other 
surveys of major U.S. cities to enable comparison of opinions in Pittsburgh to opinions in 
other places. 
The data obtained from these multiple methods were collated and synthesized to 
produce a picture of how the Police Bureau adapted to the end of the consent decree and 
the extent to which changes made under the decree have been continued and internalized. 
While no one method is definitive, a fairly clear picture emerges when the different 
sources are used in combination. 

How Well Have the Reforms Been Maintained by the 
Bureau of Police? 
 
Since the lifting of the decree in 2002, there have been significant changes in the context 
within which the Bureau of Police functions. Pittsburgh has experienced a severe budget 
crisis that put pressure on the Bureau to downsize, and a restructuring plan led to a 
reduction of the Bureau from 1,175 officers down to 915. To accomplish the reduction, in 
2003 the city had to lay off more than 100 officers; many others were demoted (see 
Figure 1). (The city has since hired back all but 19 of the laid-off officers, and the force 
now is slightly more than 1,000 sworn officers.) Two of the citys six police zones were 
merged, reducing the number to five. The special deployment division and mounted unit 
were disbanded, and community policing was decentralized and placed under zone 
commands. 
 
Figure 1: Department Separations 1995-2003, Pittsburgh Bureau of Police 
 Bar Graph 
1995	119
1996	22
1997	33
1998	42
1999	33
2000	52
2001	27
2002	37
2003	231
Relations between the administration and the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) had 
been adversarial under the decree. The FOP opposed the signing of the decree and was 
not involved in the negotiations between the city and the Justice Department that 
determined the requirements the Bureau had to meet. Reforms in the Bureau were made 
without the support of (and, indeed, often with active resistance from) the police union. 
We expected that relations with the union would have thawed a bit with the lifting of the 
decree requirements, but the downsizing process has ensured continued struggle between 
the interests of a cash-strapped city administration and a union trying to protect its 
members jobs. 
We have noted that the Bureau quickly implemented extensive reforms under the 
decree. This section of the report focuses on how well the Bureau maintained three key 

initiatives created under the decree: the PARS and COMPSTAR systems, new training, 
and quarterly inspections. 
 PARS and COMPSTAR 
A major requirement of the consent decree was the creation and maintenance of an 
automated early warning system. Within a year of signing the decree, the Pittsburgh 
Bureau of Police had created one of the most comprehensive early warning systems in 
policing, the Performance Assessment Review System known as PARS. In addition to 
PARS, the Bureau devised COMPSTAR, a management process that added depth and a 
human aspect to PARS, ensuring that the information gathered in the early warning 
system was acted upon. 
In the last year of the decree we found the PARS early warning system to be a 
functional system that helped to create broad accountability within the Bureau. A year 
after the federal monitoring ended, PARS remains a strong presence in the Bureau, the 
current system and its use having changed little from the earlier period. Supervisors are 
still required to log in to the system daily and view the performance of officers under 
their direct command. PARS collects data on a wide range of categories and indicates any 
officer who exceeds predetermined thresholds for any one performance category; this 
notice is brought to the attention of supervisory staff. Under the decree, the Bureau was 
required to capture data on 14 separate categories. The Bureau management added an 
additional four categories, bringing the total to 18 performance indicators entered into 
and analyzed by the system. In some of those categories, the allowable threshold is 
determined by an officers peer group through the use of a standard deviation calculation. 
At the time of its creation, the concept of comparison with peers was unique to PARS. 
The true impact of PARS is seen in the Bureaus COMPSTAR meetings, quarterly 
command staff meetings that focus on personnel management. Each zone commander at 
the COMPSTAR meeting makes a presentation based on a report submitted to the chief. 
The presentation begins with a recitation of the aggregate performance figures for each 
zone. Commanders often list the aggregate data for use of force, searches, and 
complaints, noting any increase or decrease over the last reported quarter. Large increases 
are explained and justified. Individual officer performance is then discussed in detail. 
Commanders present PARS data for indicated officers and attempt to offer a picture of 
each officers performance that is more detailed than the data captured by PARS. For 
example, a commander might note that an officer was assigned to a special detail 
instructed to issue summonses, which would explain why he was indicated for issuing a 
far greater number of summonses than his peers. 
The command staff has continued its commitment to PARS and COMPSTAR. PARS 
is being expanded to capture information regarding secondary employment, vehicle 
pursuits, compensation claims, and weapons discharges. Table 1 presents the type of data 
captured and reported on by the PARS early warning system. 

Table 1: Data collected by the PARS early warning system, decree and post-decree 
 
Accidents 
Arrests1 
Awards, Commendations, Recognition1 
Citizen Complaints1 
Civil or Administrative Claims arising from official duty1 
Civil Claims regarding domestic violence, untruthfulness, racial bias, or physical 
force1 
Criminal Investigations of Officers1 
Disciplinary Action1 
Discretionary Charges Filed by an Officer1 
Lawsuits 
Mandatory Counseling1 
Missed Court Appearances 
Officer Involved Shootings, both Hit and Non-Hit1 
Sick Time 
Traffic Stop Data1 
Use of Force1 
Warrantless Search and Seizures1 
Excused absences, Absence without leave, and suspensions1 
*Secondary employment2 
*Workers compensation claims3 
*Weapon discharges3 
*Vehicle pursuits3 
*Data collected post-consent decree 
1Mandated by the consent decree 
2Implemented and operational as of 1-01-04 
3Performance indicators still in planning phase 
 
In addition to ensuring that the data produced by PARS is acted upon, COMPSTAR 
meetings provide a forum for open communication in which commanders are able to 
familiarize themselves with the performance of officers both in and out of their 
commands. Our observation of the COMPSTAR meeting for the second quarter of 2003 
provided numerous examples of how PARS and COMPSTAR ensure accountability. The 
chief frequently questioned commanders about the performance of officers being 

reviewed at the meeting and was quick to warn commanders regarding insufficient field 
checks of monitored officers. Members of the command staff shared information and 
opinions about individual officers. This sharing of information is especially important in 
an environment where restructuring and massive transfers have resulted in many new 
duty assignments. For example, one commander advised another to keep a close eye on 
an officer who was recently transferred. At the end of this exchange, the chief said, This 
illustrates the key to all of thiswe communicate between each other and no officer can 
fall through the cracks. 
Our interviews and observations indicated that the Bureau remains fully committed to 
the use of PARS and COMPSTAR in its day-to-day management process. PARS 
continues to grow in scope and complexity, and COMPSTAR continues to ensure that 
officers indicated by PARS are thoroughly scrutinized. 
 Data on use of force and searches and seizures supplied by the Bureau reinforce the 
idea that the reforms have not been weakened during the post-decree period. Figures 2 
and 3 suggest that, if anything, incidents involving use of force and searches and seizures 
have declined during the post-decree period. 
 
Figure 2: Use of Force in 2003 by quarter, Pittsburgh Bureau of Police 
Bar Graph
Qtr 1	264
Qtr 2	333
Qtr 3	279
Qtr 4	216

Figure 3: Search and Seizures in 2003 by quarter, Pittsburgh Bureau of Police 
 Bar Graph
Qtr 1	817
Qtr 2	876
Qtr 3	653
Qtr 4	592
Training 
The majority of the changes brought by the consent decree centered on the collection and 
analysis of officer performance data, but training also changed. The decree mandated that 
the Bureau of Police train all of its officers in cultural diversityincluding relating to 
different groups and relating to persons of the opposite genderverbal de-escalation 
skills, and ethics. The Bureau implemented the training reforms as required and was in 
complete compliance regarding training by the second year of the decree. 
The training reforms have continued in the post-decree era. Patrol officers still 
receive yearly in-service training in cultural diversity, verbal de-escalation, and ethics. 
During the initial stages of the decree, much of this training was contracted out to private 
sector organizations or other experts in an effort to facilitate rapid compliance and to 
ensure that the training represented the best practices in policing. Because of recent fiscal 
woes that have plagued many municipalities including Pittsburgh, the Bureau has had to 
create its own in-house training using the lessons supplied earlier by outside experts. 
Even with the fiscal problems, the Bureau has made an effort to expand its training to 
include terrorism awareness and crimes against the elderly as special topics for 2004. In 
addition, 12 Bureau of Police sergeants attended a police executive training at 
Pennsylvania State University. According to the deputy chief, this reflects a new 
initiative to train mid-management in leadership. The Penn State training speaks directly 
to that initiative, but the training commander said that it is extremely expensive and will 
likely not be offered again for some time. 
 And although the academy class slated for 2004 has been canceled because any 
vacancies will be filled by laid-off officers rather than recruits, the training commander 

states that the curriculum would have been front-loaded with training in cultural diversity 
and ethics as had been the case under the decree. 
According to the commander, a large part of the training program is devoted to 
remedial training for officers who have been identified by the early warning system 
(PARS). He noted that about 10-15 percent of officers per year (163 in 2003) receive 
some form of remedial training. This one-to-one training directly tailored to the 
individual officers deficiency tends to be time consuming and costly. According to the 
training commander, the main issue covered in the retraining is the proper completion of 
departmental forms and paperwork. 
These programs are beginning to strain the budget of the training academy and the 
Bureau as a whole. In an effort to continue providing training within these limitations, the 
Bureau has sought alternative sources of education. It hosted a training forum entitled 
Community Problems and Problem-Solving presented by the Justice Departments 
Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). This training was open to all 
agencies in the Pittsburgh area, but it allowed the Bureau to provide advanced training for 
its supervisors without cost. The training commander said that future COPS sessions are 
in the planning stages. 
In addition to curtailing the use of outside experts and programs such as the one at 
Penn State, the Bureau has slowed the availability of specialized training for officers. 
One officer complained that it is impossible to receive optional training in such areas of 
police work as investigations or narcotics. Still, the Bureau has been able to find 
alternative sources of education for its officers, especially in the areas that the decree 
mandated. According to the training commander, the current fiscal problems will have no 
effect on any of the mandatory training programs. 
 
Inspection Unit 
While under the consent decree, the city was required to hire an independent monitor 
whose duty was to ensure compliance with the provisions of the decree. As part of his 
work, the monitor created an inspection team. Funded by a grant from COPS, the team 
consisted of a lieutenant and a police officer at each duty location. Together with the 
monitor, they inspected locker rooms, bulletin boards, and personnel files in each police 
zone. The team checked to see if required materials such as Office of Municipal 
Investigations brochures and manuals were available at the zones and made sure that no 
inappropriate or obscene material was present. In addition, approximately 20 percent of 
the personnel files were randomly audited to check that all required reports (supervisors 
daily activity reports, performance evaluations, OMI complaint files) were in the jackets. 
In the post-decree period, the Bureau of Police has attempted to institutionalize the 
role of the monitors inspection team. The Bureau absorbed the inspection unit into its 
management program. Following the monitors lead, the current inspection unit 

completes quarterly checks of all duty locations. According to a current inspection team 
member, We follow what [the monitor] did. 
The first two quarterly inspections in the post-decree phase were conducted 
randomly, and several of the duty locations were chosen for spot checks without their 
prior knowledge. The last inspection during our research, which occurred in September 
2003, consisted of checks of the entire Bureau. This was done in response to an order by 
the chief requiring the unit to inspect all locations, as was the practice under the monitor. 
As it is structured now, the inspection unit differs very little in form and function 
from the monitors unit. It is comprised of one assistant chief and two lieutenants. The 
lieutenants are responsible for conducting the actual inspections. There is an additional 
officer or sergeant at each duty location who acts as a liaison to the team. It is this 
officers responsibility to make sure all materials are up to date at the location. The unit 
conducts quarterly inspections that result in a report to the deputy chief outlining each 
locations compliance with the internal requirements of the Bureau. When a deficiency is 
found, the unit brings it to the attention of the liaison officer who then becomes 
responsible for correcting the situation. If the problem persists or numerous problems are 
noted, the commanding officer of the duty location is notified. 
Inspections take between 20 and 60 minutes. One inspection cycle for all locations 
usually takes two or three days. Commands are notified that an inspection will take place 
during the following week but are not given the exact time and date. 
In an attempt to gain better insight into the workings of the inspection unit, a member 
of the research team accompanied the unit for one day of the third quarterly inspection in 
September. The unit conducted inspections in Zones 1, 2, and 3 in a systematic manner 
using a printed checklist. The initial check entailed a physical walkthrough of the 
facilities including locker rooms, restrooms, and common areas. A lieutenant explained 
that they were looking for any obscene or inappropriate material. Next, the team asked 
the desk officer to produce the zones copy of the Office of Municipal Investigation 
Policy and public brochures. Behind the desk area, the team leafed through all of the 
legal advisories and chiefs orders to ensure that each bulletin was complete and up to 
date. 
Lastly, they inspected the contents of the performance and supervisory files. They 
randomly selected approximately 20 percent of the files and examined the contents in 
detail. The lieutenant explained that they were looking to see if the files were up to date 
and if all of the forms had been reviewed and signed by the zone commander. In addition, 
they checked the supervisors daily running sheets to ensure that supervisors were 
conducting a sufficient number of field checks of monitored officers. Table 2 details the 
tasks involved in a typical inspection. 
 

Table 2: Tasks involved in an Inspection Unit site visit  
-Task 							
-Description 
-Chiefs Order Board 
and Legal Advisor 
Board 
-Each board should be up to date and have the entire years 
orders. All boards should be in descending order by date 
with the most recent orders on top. 
-Employee Assistance 
Program Posters 
-Each location must have this poster hung in a clear and 
conspicuous area. The poster should not be obstructed by 
any other postings. All referral phone numbers must be up 
to date. 
-OMI Manual 
-Each location must have a copy of the OMI manual. This 
copy must be available to all officers and should be located 
in the area of the front desk. 
-OMI Brochures 
-Each location must have up to date copies of OMI 
brochures. These brochures must be located at or near the 
front desk area and within reach of the general public. 
-OMI Referral policy 
-Each location must have an up to date version of the OMI 
Referral policy. Desk officers must be able to produce a 
copy on demand. 
-Memo boards and locker 
rooms 
-Each location is checked for the presence of questionable 
material. Questionable material includes obscene photos, 
gender or racially derogatory cartoons or sayings, and 
graffiti. 
-Duty location facility, 
vehicles, and equipment 
-Each location is checked for the presence of questionable 
material. 
-Performance files 
-Officers files are checked to see that they contain up to date 
information about evaluations, disciplinary action reports, 
complaints, and awards. 20 percent of the files are inspected 
in detail. 
-Supervisory Daily 
Activity Reports 
-Each report is checked to see if field checks of monitored 
officers are being done and that each supervisor is making 
specific comments about officers rather that just writing the 
same observation over and over. 
Our observation suggested that the work of the inspection unit was thorough and 
methodical. In the zones where the inspections were observed, the unit uncovered several 
deficiencies. Some were minor, such as a failure to purge complaint narratives of other 
officers names, while some bordered on major transgressions. Examples of major 

problems included insufficient numbers of field checks of officers under supervision and 
the inclusion of entire OMI complaints in officers personnel files. (Officers should not 
be able to see the entire complaint file, which may include information about 
complainants and witnesses.) In addition, the inspection unit found that several 2002 
annual personnel reports had not been completed. These deficiencies were noted on the 
checklist and were to be included in the quarterly report to the deputy chief. 
According to unit members, when a deficiency is found, it is brought to the attention 
of the commanding officer of the zone and it is usually remedied within a day. If the 
problem persists, disciplinary action may be taken but, to date, there has not been any 
discipline handed down. 

How Has the Decree Affected the Way in Which Officers 
Approach Their Jobs? 
 
To assess the responses of police officers to the decree and the degree to which it has 
affected their jobs, we held focus groups with a total of 35 officers and supervisors in 
each of the citys six police zones.4 In addition to the focus groups, we also conducted an 
anonymous written survey and a separate focus group with African-American officers. 
In the last year of the decree, we had conducted several focus groups attended by both 
white and African-American officers in Zone 2 only. It has been our observation that 
such focus groups are dominated by a few officers with strong feelings. Literature on 
focus groups suggests that responses in groups are influenced by the social context, 
including the opinions of other participants.5 We felt that an anonymous survey would 
give us a different perspective and would minimize the effect of social influence on 
responses. We added the special focus group of African-American officers because we 
noticed that these officers seldom spoke in the racially mixed sessions. We hoped they 
would feel freer to express divergent opinions if they were in a group with only other 
African Americans. 
In fact, the results validated our use of multiple methods. Opinions expressed in the 
first round of focus groups during the last year of the decree were largely negative. The 
anonymous survey and the African-American focus groups conducted for this report 
generated more balanced opinions about the decree and the reforms that resulted from it. 
This post-decree round of officer focus groups was conducted within one-and-a-half 
years of the first round. In that first set of focus groups conducted in Zone 2 we had 
found a good deal of resentment about the decree among both officers and supervisors. 
Officers said they felt betrayed when the city signed the decree and wondered why they 
were not interviewed or consulted by the Justice Department or city officials. We heard 
that the decree had substantially lowered officer morale and productivity. We heard that 
officers were hesitant to intervene in situations involving conflict because they were 
afraid of having a citizen file an unwarranted anonymous complaint against them or of 
having to use force that would be perceived as unjustified by the command staff. Patrol 
officers complained that the multitude of new forms required by the decree were time-
consuming and confusing, while supervisors told us that their time in the field was being 
reduced by PARS-related demands. And we heard that, even in the fifth year of the 
decree, officers felt that communication with the command staff was poor and that there 
was little chance to suggest changes or express their opinions and ideas for change. 
4 Focus groups were conducted before the department restructuring to five zones instead of six. 
5 P.S. Kidd and M.B. Parshall, Getting the focus and the group: Enhancing analytical rigor in focus group 
research, Qualitative Health Research 10, no. 3 (2000): 293-308. 

In this second round of focus groups, the officers clearly indicatedas had the 
command staffthat the accountability mechanisms remained intact after the lifting of 
the decree. Officers and supervisors alike said that the new incident forms for traffic 
stops, search and seizures, use of force, and subject resistance were still required and 
closely monitored. Officers continued to be disciplined for omitting forms or filling them 
out incorrectly and continued to fear being indicated by PARS. In one focus group, all 
officers said that they had been counseled for not filling out forms correctly. 
We had some indication from supervisorsbut not from officersthat the 
accountability procedures were becoming accepted as part of the job of Pittsburgh cops. 
There was recognition by some supervisors that tracking use of force and other changes 
brought on by the decree had been and continued to be useful. Some contended that the 
decree led to better record keeping as well as improved access to information and that 
administrative data were both up to date and easy to find. According to one supervisor, 
We needed the indicatorsSome of the changes were necessary to modernize. 
Another added, Supervisors should know if something is wrong. But in the past a lot of 
people wouldnt take action even when it was needed. They only moved [transferred the 
officer] the problem in the past. So in that way the consent decree was good. 
The overwhelming reaction to the reforms among officers in the focus groups, 
however, continued to be negative. Even six years after the decree was signed there 
remained confusion about how the system works and the meaning of being indicated by 
PARS. Low morale continued to be the dominant theme in the focus groups, reinforced 
by layoffs, aging equipment, and the Bureaus policy of annually rotating 20 percent of 
officers in each zone. Resentment about the decree still ran strong, with many officers 
expressing the belief that the rank and file had been sold out by the administration. 
Other officers related stories about being unfairly targeted by the Office of Municipal 
Investigation as a result of baseless complaints filed anonymously by criminals or 
citizens with a grudge against the Bureau. We continued to hear claims that fear of 
complaints and disciplinary actions for minor infractions kept officers from being 
effective. One sergeant lamented that police officers are afraid to arrest people; they 
give people too many chances. Officers and supervisors alike continued to complain 
about the amount of paperwork required by the new accountability mechanisms. 
 
A Written Survey to Tap Officer Perspectives 
As the preceding discussion suggests, the salient opinion we heard expressed in focus 
groups was strong and negative in regards to morale. But, since participation in the 
sessions was voluntary, and since some of the participants spoke minimally, we were 
aware that we might be getting largely the opinions of the most disgruntled officers. 
Moreover, the focus groups gave us insight into officers shared understandings of how 
they experience their jobs under the consent decree, not necessarily their individual 

opinions.6 In an attempt to obtain the individual feelings of officers regarding the 
reforms, we sought permission of the command staff to conduct an anonymous written 
survey, a method we felt would yield a high rate of participation and elicit opinions that 
officers might be reluctant to express in a group setting. 
On November 10, 2003, we administered a written survey to Pittsburgh officers and 
supervisors who worked the second shift in all zones. A researcher was present in each 
zone at the 3 p.m., 4 p.m., and 8 p.m. roll calls. The researchers addressed the officers to 
introduce the survey and request their cooperation. They told the officers that the survey 
was part of an effort sponsored by the U.S. Justice Department to determine how the 
consent decree had affected policing in Pittsburgh, that the survey was anonymous, and 
that results would be reported only in aggregate or anonymous form. After the short 
presentation, the researchers distributed the survey. The officers turned in the forms on 
their way out of the station house.7 
In each administration of the survey, some officers expressed suspicions that the 
answers might be used against them in spite of the promise of anonymity. Nonetheless, 
129 completed surveys were returned and just seven officers refused to participate. The 
129 responses represent about one in six officers in the Bureau of Police. Following are 
the tabulated results as well as representative comments from individual officers or 
amalgamated from two or more officers. 
Survey results echoed themes from the focus groups. Both methods revealed strong 
officer resentment of the reforms introduced under the consent decree. While officers 
who completed the survey tended to agree that the reforms had brought about significant 
change, many viewed the change in negative terms, claiming that fear of consequences 
made officers less proactive and less willing to engage the public and that increased 
paperwork made them less efficient. Yet, at the same time, a majority of officers agreed 
that the reforms had increased accountability and that central review of officer actions 
could have positive consequences. 
 
Effect of the reforms on officer performance. We first asked officers whether the 
programs introduced under the consent decree (such as the early warning system; new 
training programs; and new forms for traffic stops, use of force, and search and seizure) 
had affected the way in which they perform their jobs. Sixty-one percent said the reforms 
had brought about major changes in their approach to their jobs, while 24 percent 
believed that the reforms had brought about minor changes (see Figure 4). Just 14 percent 
answered that the reforms had not affected their approach to their jobs. 
 
6 A. Gibbs, Focus Groups, Social Research Update, Department of Sociology, University of Surrey 
Winter (1997). 
7 To maintain confidentiality the survey form used did not include any identifying information or questions 
about rank. 

Figure 4: Did programs introduced under consent decree affect officer job performance? 
No change	14%
Minor change	24%
Major change	61%
 TYPE OF CHANGE
 Officers less active (n=42)
 Officers less efficient (n=31)
 Improved performance (n=2)
The most common type of change noted was that officers had become less active and 
more sensitive to the appearance of unequal enforcement. This was especially noted in 
traffic stops. For example: 
 A lot of officers quit pulling over cars and other officers try to maintain a balance 
of race and sex in traffic stops, and that should not be. 
 The other common response was that veteran officers initially responded to the 
paperwork requirements that accompanied the reforms by being less active, and that 
supervision had become less efficient: 
 At first most officers, especially the veterans, did not want to do anything so they 
would not have to complete the new forms. As time passed, officers got used to the 
new forms and started to do more. There was no change when recruits came out 
of the academy; they did not know any better. 
 A few officers noted positive changes in their experience on the job: 
 [The reforms brought about an] increase in communication, increase in 
accountability, and a decrease in citizen complaints. 
 Effect of reforms on officer interaction with citizens. We next asked whether the new 
programs introduced under the decree had affected the way in which officers interacted 

with citizens. A majority (58 percent) said that there had been little or no change, but a 
substantial minority (42 percent) said that there had been major changes in how they dealt 
with citizens (see Figure 5). 
 
Figure 5: Did programs introduced under the decree change 
how officers interact with citizens? 
No change	39%
Minor change	19%
Major change	42%
TYPE OF CHANGE
Officers interact less with citizens (n=31)
Officers more circumspect in dealing with citizens (n=6)
Officers more professional with citizens (n=6)
 The most common type of change noted by officers was less interaction with citizens: 
 In some ways it made officers more careful (which is good) in how they interact 
with all groups of people. However, it has also made some officers less prone to 
interact with people at all because they fear being booked. 
 In a similar vein, some officers said that, since the decree, they were more guarded in 
their interactions with citizens. 
 Most officers are not aggressive with people who are breaking the law. Officers 
are afraid that people will complain of their civil rights being violated. 
 Some officers also stated that, as the parties to the decree had intended, officers had 
become more professional in their encounters with citizens. 
 The city introduced new trainingconflict resolution, ethics, verbal judo, etc. 
These programs emphasized a friendlier approach to policing. 

Effect of reforms on accountability. The third question asked whether the reforms 
had, in fact, increased accountability within the Bureau of Police, as intended by the 
architects of the agreement. A majority (54 percent) said that the reforms had increased 
accountability (see Figure 6). 
 
Figure 6: Did new programs introduced under the decree increase 
accountability of officers? 
 
Less Accountability 	11% 
No Change 		36%
More Accountability  	54% 
 
 One officer noted that, Every incident now has a paper trail. But officers reactions 
to the increased accountability were not necessarily favorable: 
 [Accountability] increased to the point that officers are almost afraid to say 
anything in fear of punishment. 
 Effect of reforms on officer aggressiveness. Nearly three in four officers stated that 
the reforms introduced under the decree had reduced the aggressiveness with which they 
pursued their jobs (see Figure 7). 

Figure 7: Did new programs introduced under the decree affect the degree to which officers 
take a proactive approach in their jobs? 
Less Proactive 	79% 
No Change 	10%
More Proactive	1% 
 I think the decree limited officers ability to perform their jobs. And criminals 
know this and take advantage. But at the same time the decree was beneficial 
because it preventedofficers from violating the rights of others. [the] decree 
is not good for the good officer, which is 99 percent of the department. But it is 
necessary for that one percent. 
 Opinions of centralized review of performance. Officers were asked whether the 
added central review of officer actions that was a large part of the departmental reforms 
was positive or negative. The responses were fairly evenly split: 46 percent felt that the 
additional supervision was a positive thing, and 54 percent felt it was negative (see 
Figure 8). 
 

Figure 8: The programs introduced under the decree mandate that central 
administrators as well as local supervisors review officer behavior. Do you 
view that as a positive or negative development? 
Positive	46%
Identifies problem officers (n=21)
Officers need supervision (n=15)
Negative	54%
Adds unneeded layer of scrutiny/usurps role of first line supervisors (n=24)
Review not fairly conducted (n=15)
The most common reason given by those who felt the additional review was 
beneficial was that it increases the likelihood that poor officer performance will be 
corrected: 
 Its a good idea for supervisors to keep an eye on officers behavior and address 
any minor problems before they become too great. 
 Others who viewed central review of officer actions in a positive manner emphasized 
that the added supervision makes officers more accountable: 
 Feedback from bosses to patrolmen is necessary so the patrolman knows if he/she 
is doing an appropriate job and what needs to be changed or improved. 
 Among those who felt that the additional supervision was detrimental, the most 
common reaction was that the process usurps the authority of first line supervisors: 
 The administration has taken away the front line supervisors ability to make a 
decision on their own. They want to micromanage the way that supervisors do 
their job. The experience Ive witnessed from central supervisors is that they are 
out of touch and scrutinize the wrong areas of behavior. 
 

Other officers complained that reviews were not uniform or not fairly conducted: 
 Certain officers are dealt with differently because of who they are and their 
associations as opposed to their guilt or innocence. 
 Ways to have improved response to the decree. The final question was whether the 
Bureaus response to the decree could have been improved. Of those responding, nearly 
three in four thought that there was room for improvement (see Figure 9). 
 
Figure 9: Are there ways in which the Bureaus response to the consent 
decree could have been improved? 
No	28%
Yes	72%
Fight decree/involve officers in settlement (n=28)
Address morale problems (n=14)
Reduce paperwork associated with reforms (n=10)
Work harder to educate officers about decree (n=4)
Work to make complaint investigation process fairer to officers (n=3)
 
By far the most common suggestion was that the Bureau should have fought the 
decree and/or included the police union in negotiations with Justice Department officials: 
 Patrol officers directly affected by the decree were never given the opportunity to 
make positive changes in department policy. [The decree was] implemented by 
supervisors that did not participate in patrol functions or understand the day-to-
day routines of street patrol work. 
 Closely related was the feeling that the Bureau should have addressed the effects of 
the decree on officer morale: 
 It lowered morale on the job. The officers who were once go-getters and very 
good officers slowed down. 

The next most common suggestion was that the amount of paperwork needed to 
document incidents and problems of officers be reduced: 
 Officers spend too much time doing paperwork as opposed to doing their job. 
 A few officers said that the Bureau could have done a better job of educating the rank 
and file about the decree or that the Bureau should have worked to make investigation of 
citizen complaints fairer to officers: 
 One of the worst decisions made is anonymous complaints. A complaint filed 
against an officer should be a sworn statement pursued with charges when the 
complaint is proven to be a false accusation. 
 As with the focus groups that we conducted in the last year of the decree, the opinions 
expressed by officers in the post-decree period sometimes contradict official data of the 
Bureau. For example, although officers believed that discipline was frequently meted out, 
the consent decree neither establishes nor requires specific levels of discipline. Moreover, 
Bureau data suggest that Disciplinary Action Reports declined with the filing of the 
decree and remained at a lower level during the post-decree period (see Figure 10). 
 
 
Figure 10: Disciplinary Actions in 1995-2003, Bureau of Police 
1995	1996	1997	1998	1999	2000	2001*	2002	2003
145	146	85	82	92	86	100	114	90 
*According to the Police Bureau, disciplinary actions rose in 2001 when the Bureau was able to 
determine whether officers involved in accidents were violating the seat belt law. 
In the last year of the decree, we noted that sick timeone indicator of low officer 
moralehad declined with the advent of the consent decree. Figure 11 shows that use of 

sick time climbed in the post-decree period, during the time of massive layoffs and 
restructuring. Even so, it did not exceed use of sick time in the years prior to the consent 
decree. 
 Figure 11: Officer Sick Time Usage 1995-2003, Pittsburgh Bureau of Police 
Bar Graph
 
 The Perspectives of African-American Police Officers 
During the focus groups we began to notice that, with the exception of one zone, the few 
participating African-American officers were silent during our discussions. We wondered 
whether they might have felt uncomfortable speaking in support of the consent decree in 
the presence of their fellow officers. 
As noted above, focus group results arise out of shared frames of reference. In this 
case, the focus group conducted with nine African-American officers revealed that while 
black and white officers may share some of the same experiences as police officers, 
historically they have very different frames of reference. The main distinction arose from 
the history of racial tension within the Bureau. The African-American officers described 
a pre-decree atmosphere in which they experienced reprisals for speaking up, certain 
white officers were protected, and African-American officers were not welcomed socially 
by fellow officers. One officer noted, There is still a racial divide that people have not 
forgotten. 
Most black officers were more sympathetic to the concerns of the black community 
that led to the consent decree, and, overall, the focus group of black officers was far more 
positive about the decree than the groups dominated by white officers. While these 

officers echoed many of the views we had heard in earlier focus groups, they praised the 
decree for leading to increased accountability and community awareness and raising the 
level of professionalism within the Bureau. As one officer said: 
 The consent decree has brought about behavioral compliance. The notion is that 
you will behave a certain way when you are in uniform. Supervisors cannot turn 
away from this. 
 While many white officers objected to the impersonality and unforgiving nature of 
the new centralized review system, black officers welcomed the impartiality of the 
process. One said that prior to the decree, There was no discipline for white officers, 
and that, Its only recently that the discipline has come down on both white and black 
officers. Another said, Im pro consent decree because the discipline is more equitable, 
level, and equal. 
Despite the consensus within the group of African-American officers that, overall, the 
consent decree brought about positive changes within the Bureau, these officers, like their 
white colleagues, were concerned that the new accountability processes resulted in 
micromanagement and left officers little room for discretion or decision-making. Some 
expressed concern that discipline for minor offenses, such as incorrectly filling out forms, 
was inflexible and often unwarranted. Several expressed concern that officers were 
reluctant to intervene in situations with the public for fear of being indicated by PARS or 
becoming the target of an unwarranted complaint by a vengeful citizen. Some of the 
officers reported a drastic slowdown soon after the decree was signed. Others worried 
that the increased scrutiny of officer behavior discouraged officers from acting quickly in 
potentially lethal situations. As one officer put it, Will my department back me up on 
this decision? I suspect a lot of officers would say no. 
Regarding review of complaints, the black officersunlike their white 
counterpartshad positive things to say about the changes at OMI. There are some 
officers that were never called down to OMI until the consent decree was put in place, 
one participant noted. Several officers acknowledged that, although there will never be 
complete trust between the police and citizens, OMI does a relatively decent job. 
 

Has the Office of Municipal Investigations Made Progress Toward Meeting 
the Requirements of the Consent Decree? 
 One of the principal arguments in the law suits that preceded the consent decree was that 
complaints against the police were not investigated fully. From the beginning, the Office 
of Municipal Investigations (OMI) has remained central to the process of reform. While 
the consent decree was lifted from the Police Bureau in September 2002, it remained in 
place for OMI. At that time the court modified the remaining decree by removing 25 
requirements and adding eight tasks that specifically addressed concerns about OMI. The 
new tasks were: improving the agencys automated database; appointment of a manager 
responsible for daily operations; completion of investigations on backlogged cases by 
February 28, 2003; staffing levels of at least 16 investigators assigned to police 
complaints; preclusion of the development of a new backlog of cases; improvement of 
quality control; training for OMI investigators within six months of employment, and 
enhanced monthly reporting of case intake, staffing, and dispositions. 
 Management changes at OMI 
Recognizing that significant changes had to be made within OMI, city officials appointed 
a commander from the Police Bureaus Zone 2 to bring OMI into compliance with the 
conditions of the consent decree. The commander was a progressive administrator who 
had helped the police chief plan the reforms of the Police Bureau. He also had recently 
completed a masters program in management. The commander was to take over the reins 
at OMI temporarily until the agency was on a clear path of sustained compliance with the 
terms of the decree. 
The first task facing OMIs new interim director when he began in September 2002 
was to eliminate the backlog that had long plagued the agency and that was, according to 
the monitor, the primary reason for its persistent non-compliance. But the director 
quickly found that record-keeping was in such a state of disarray that it was impossible to 
know with accuracy how many cases were open and to whom they were assigned. Four 
hundred fifty open cases in the database actually proved to be 380 cases once the 
database was updated with current information from the case files. 
Still, the backlog was larger than the annual rate of intake for the agency, and it was 
clear that additional investigators would be needed. Applying queuing theory to the 
problem, the director calculated that it would take six additional investigators to clear the 
backlog within the time frame set by the judge who issued the decree. The OMI director 
and the monitor agreed to the February 28 deadline, and six additional staff were 
borrowed from the Bureau of Police. 
Even with the new staff, it proved to be a challenge to meet the deadline. According 
to the new director, OMI had developed a woe is me attitude. Some investigators were 

carrying caseloads of 18 or 19 cases when an optimum number was closer to six cases. 
The result was that staff felt overwhelmed and had ceased making serious attempts to 
complete investigations within the time required to meet agency goals. The addition of 
the six new investigators brought the caseload per investigator down to a manageable 
level but was not sufficient to get the OMI working smoothly. According to the director, 
a change in culture was needed. 
One of the most significant developments within the agency has been the hiring of a 
competent, trained staff of investigators, each of whom has a manageable caseload. One 
of the civilian investigators with whom we spoke estimated that her average caseload is 
now seven, as opposed to 18 just a year ago. The office now employs a staff of 12 
investigatorseight police officers and four civiliansone intake manager, one police 
sergeant, two administrative personnel, and a civilian manager. 
To increase staff accountability, the interim director developed several new reports. 
First, he required investigators to submit daily activity reports. Second, investigators are 
now required to submit bi-weekly reports detailing the status of each case and progress 
made in the investigation since the last report. Third, the director developed a weekly 
report from the automated information system that lists cases closed and the number and 
age of open cases for each investigator. 
Finally, in an effort to professionalize the working atmosphere the interim director 
instituted a change in the dress code, requiring business attire Monday through Thursday 
with casual Fridays. Employees (with one exception who resigned in anticipation of 
being terminated) came to accept the new way of doing things. According to the director, 
the changes resulted in a change of attitude among employees. The new work ethic was, 
Lets get this done on time. 
 Another major change was in the case review process. The director must sign all 
completed investigations at OMI. Under the old system, one staff person reviewed 
completed investigations for thoroughness prior to giving them to the director for 
approval. The review became a bottleneck: It was taking six weeks once investigations 
were complete for cases to be forwarded to the director for his signature. Moreover, the 
director had to send most cases back to the investigators for additional work. 
The interim director eliminated the preliminary review and began doing all reviews 
himself, thereby shortening the process from six weeks to a single day. He also brought 
in the monitor to explain to staff how to improve the investigational quality of reports and 
what pieces of information needed to be included. And he helped to clarify for 
investigators the meaning of OMIs various dispositions in order to improve the 
consistency of findings from one investigator to another. The agency currently can make 
one of four possible dispositions. Complaints can be sustained, meaning that the 
investigation showed that allegations of misconduct were supported by facts and 
represent a violation of department rules; unresolved, a determination in which the 
allegations cannot be proven or disproved; exonerated, when the investigation shows that 

the police employee acted within the guidelines of authority; or unfounded, when 
allegations are determined to be false or inaccurate. 
There was apparent confusion among staff regarding the meaning of unfounded 
dispositions. The unfounded rate had soared to an all time high during the 19th quarter of 
the decree, primarily because investigators did not understand that unfounded by 
definition means that the allegation did not occur or was fabricated. Evidence of the 
problem is reflected in the monitors 19th report covering the period from February 16 to 
May 16, 2002. The monitor states that the office unfounded four citizen complaints, 
even though the officers admitted to the behaviors alleged in the complaint. This raised 
serious concerns about the training of investigators and the level of oversight within the 
office. The monitor expressed deep concern with OMI performancewith problems 
evident in staffing, training, and now oversight of the investigative process. To remedy 
the problem, the monitor met with OMI managers and painstakingly detailed his review 
process, step-by-step, so that investigators could understand how they were being judged. 
The investigators were made aware that it was their responsibility to be finders of fact, 
and the agency retrained them, specifically addressing investigative policy and practice. 
As the agency moved towards compliance, the backlog was eliminated on February 
27, 2003, a day before the agreed-upon deadline. However, according to the OMI interim 
director, the Justice Department and the monitor raised the bar and added a new batch of 
cases to the backlog totals.8 These were so-called C-files, false arrest cases in which 
defendants had pled guilty. OMI had understood that, because the guilty pleas negated 
the false arrest charge, there was no reason to investigate these 38 cases. Justice officials 
and the monitor disagreed, and OMI agreed to investigate these cases. All of these 
backlogged cases had been cleared as of the quarter ending August 31, 2003. 
8 This characterization is disputed by a Justice Department spokesperson, who maintains that C-files 
were always understood to be included in backlog tallies. 
The monitor had expressed concern during the interim period about whether OMIs 
ability to judge police behavior had been compromised by the appointment of a police 
official as director and six new police officers as investigators. (That did not seem to be a 
concern, however, among community leaders with whom we spoke.) The city handed 
control of the agency back to a civilian in September 2003. The new manager is the 
former acting director of the Public Safety Office, having served in that position for 10 
years. She also served on the committee that selected the monitor. Based on her 
knowledge of OMI before the decree, she noted that she has seen a tremendous 
improvement in the quality and thoroughness of investigations. 
 
OMI comes into compliance 
As the interim director predicted, OMI did in fact come into compliance shortly after he 
began his tenure in September 2002. By the 23rd quarterly report which covered the 
quarter ending May 31, 2003, the monitor noted that the City has, finally, developed an 

Office of Municipal Investigations staffing and process function that has allowed the 
Office to fulfill its responsibilities of fairly and impartially investigating allegations of 
police misconduct.9 These improvements are further validated in the 24th report, wherein 
the monitor states that for the first time the City has achieved complete compliance with 
all aspects of the decree. 
Another new development has been the return of OMI to the Public Safety Office 
from the City Solicitors Office. There was some concern that requiring OMI to report to 
the Law Department represented a conflict of interest, as the departments primary 
mission is to protect the city from liability. Nonetheless, locating the office under Public 
Safety represents a similar potential conflict of interest, since it is the same agency under 
which the Bureau of Police resides. 
The federal monitor remains in frequent contact with OMI and continues to conduct 
audits of the office, which include a site visit to Pittsburgh, on a quarterly basis. The new 
manager views the monitor as a valuable resource and was keen on involving him in any 
reform efforts or policy questions. 
 
Trend Data 
As mentioned above, there was some concern during the interim period that a high 
number of cases were classified as unfounded. The pattern has been reversed; that is, the 
number of unfounded dispositions has decreased, and the number of not resolved 
dispositions has risen (see Figure 12). This is corroborated by the monitors 23rd quarterly 
report in which he mentions that previous quarters showed large numbers of unfounded 
and exonerated dispositions while in the 23rd quarter OMI produced a more equal 
distribution of dispositions that more closely reflect adequate investigations of 
complaints of police behavior. 
 
9 Auditors 23rd Quarterly Report, August 2003 Public Management Resources, San Antonio, Texas. 

Figure 12: Percent of Resolved Complaints by Disposition, by Quarter (1997-2003) 
Bar Graph
OMI staff members anecdotally reported an increase in the number of sustained 
complaints, a claim that is supported by the monitors 23rd report. According to that 
report, there has been a gradual increase in the substantiation rate and an accelerated 
increase in the past three quarters. The monitor attributes the increase to a positive 
change in the quality of OMI investigations. The monitor reports that in the 24th quarter 
cases took an average of 109 days to investigate, falling within the 120-day limit agreed 
upon in the consent decree. As a result of the shortened time to case disposition, OMI 
began to clear more complaints than were received (see Figure 13). 
 
Figure 13: Received v. Cleared Complaints by Quarter (1997-2003) 
Bar Graph
Source: Electronic database provided by City of Pittsburgh, CIS and calculations by the monitor. 

New directions and challenges going forward 
Now that OMI is in compliance and the backlog of cases has been dissolved, the agency 
can focus on streamlining the investigation process even further and addressing other 
challenges, including maintaining impartiality in its investigations. The new manager has 
begun to think about how OMI can work on tasks such as linking Police Bureau data, 
including 911 data, incident numbers, arrest histories, and police reports, with OMI 
computers. This would allow investigators to access important information early in an 
investigation and facilitate initial questioning of complainants at case intake. 
The manager also has expressed interest in becoming more involved in the front end 
of the investigation process. Investigators begin a case by drawing up an investigation 
plan and outlining the allegations. The manager would like to review these plans in order 
to avoid the need for additional information in the future, when witnesses and 
complainants might not be easily located. 
One key issue of particular concern to the manager was deciding what constitutes an 
investigable complaint. Several OMI staff members suggested that there should be some 
way to discern at intake whether or not a complaint in fact alleges any kind of 
misconduct. If it does not, there might be a way to conserve resources by diverting it and 
making a separate determination. This would only involve complaints with no apparent 
allegation of misconduct. The manager gave several examples; one involved a young 
family member of a police officer throwing a pebble onto a complainants driveway. In 
this case the complainant did not allege any violation of law or Police Bureau rules and 
regulations. A staff member added that anonymous complaints, a form of complaint that 
the agency was mandated to take as a result of the consent decree, pose challenges when 
investigators are unable to interview complainants and witnesses. Other OMI staff 
mentioned that complaints based on incidents years in the past are virtually impossible to 
investigate well. 
One of the more crucial challenges facing OMI is maintaining impartiality in the 
investigative process. With a ratio of nine police personnel to six civilians, the 
investigations cannot be characterized wholly as civilian reviewed or independent. 
Officers rotate in and out of OMI and return to other assignments. As a result, they are 
likely to know some of the officers accused of misconduct and/or may work with accused 
officers after their stint at OMI. 
Under these circumstances, it would be easy for biases to creep into investigators 
decisions. One of the police staff members characterized the role of OMI as being here 
to protect the integrity of the Police Bureau. Other investigators mentioned that in order 
to avoid not resolved dispositions, they would be inclined to give preference to the 
officers statement. This sentiment conflicts with the current mandate, which instructs 
investigators to give no automatic preference to an officers statement over a 
complainants statement. Moreover, there are casesofficer-involved shootings, for 
examplein which complainants could be averse to dealing with a police officer. If staff 

members view themselves as serving the Bureau first and the public second, it is difficult 
to see how findings can be completely impartial. 
Another challenge for OMI is coming to an accommodation with its rival complaint 
agency, the Citizen Police Review Board (CPRB). CPRB was formed in 1997 as a result 
of a voter referendum because the city council had lost confidence in OMI. With OMI 
now firmly on the road to conducting credible investigations, there is sentiment from 
some city council members that the two agencies should, at some point, merge. Further, 
in July 2002, a judge ruled that the CPRB could not compel officers to testify, a ruling 
that has greatly limited its power and effectiveness. Preliminary talks have not resulted in 
an agreement, but it seems inevitable that duplicative complaint investigations will prove 
an expensive luxury in a city that is strapped for cash. 
Not mandated to compile an annual report or to publish statistics, OMI has not 
completed an annual report since the beginning of the consent decree. According to the 
manager, the office believes that the monitor provides sufficient information in his 
reports. A community group made a formal appeal to the mayor and the police chief to 
permit access to police performance and citizen complaint data. The group received data 
from the interim OMI director (primarily information from the monitors report) but did 
not get a commitment from the city to share information with the public on an ongoing 
basis. Community group members argue that, if the public were able to make an accurate 
comparison of OMI and CPRB investigations and dispositions, then the public itself 
could make a determination as to whether the city needs two complaint agencies. It is 
unclear whether OMI will produce its own reports after the monitor is no longer in 
business. 
OMI has turned the corner and is in compliance with the requirements of the consent 
decree. The biggest challenge for the agency now is to be released from the decree. OMI 
has made positive changes in case management within the past year and has shown great 
improvement in the quality of its investigations. With a recent favorable monitors report 
and with the addition of a new civilian manager, OMI appears to be much closer to being 
released from the decree. 
 

Community Views on the Conclusion of the Consent Decree and the 
Current State of Policing  
The community has been a major stakeholder in the consent decree from the beginning. 
Concerns about police brutality and misconduct drove the lawsuits and public outcry that 
ultimately led to the consent decree. 
In the year after the decree was lifted from the Police Bureau, we attempted to speak 
with the same community members we had interviewed during the decree as well as 
some newly formed community groups. In all, we spoke with individuals or 
representatives of nine community groups concerned about police reform in Pittsburgh: 
the head of the Citizens Police Review Board, a City Council member, the director of 
the ACLU, a community organizer who runs a youth outreach program, two members of 
a community group focusing on police violence, three representatives from an inter-faith 
community group working on civil rights issues, the head of the Urban League, a public 
school advocate and member of the NAACP, and a member of a neighborhood civic 
group. Eight of the leaders were African Americans; six were women. 
 
The Perspectives of Community Leaders 
Bureau of Police. The majority of community leaders with whom we spoke 
acknowledged that the Bureau had made several key changes as a result of the consent 
decree and appeared to be more diligent in monitoring behavior and doing a great 
job. Where we had previously found deep distrust of the police, local leaders felt that the 
relationship between the community and police was less antagonistic and that the highly-
charged atmosphere in the city had been defused. The council member pointed to the 
decline in complaints at OMI and CPRB as evidence of this advance. These observations 
seemed to validate the guarded optimism we had found in our earlier interviews that the 
reforms introduced with the decree were making a major difference. 
Generally speaking, community leaders felt the Police Bureau remained committed to 
consent decree goals even after most requirements of the decree had been lifted. Praising 
the progress made by the Bureau, one local leader said, I dont think there is a need to 
aggressively monitor them. Several leaders voiced their support for the police chief and 
attributed some of the consent decrees success to his management. As one leader 
remarked, He tries to hold officers to a higher standard. He said that the chiefs public 
statements went a long way to reassure the community that the Bureau would continue to 
follow the guidelines set in the decree. 
To be sure, the leaders we spoke with still had concerns about policing. One worried 
that, although accountability had greatly improved, there might be backsliding without 
federal monitoring. Another argued that the reforms were aimed at the rank and file only: 
There is no improved accountability for high ranking administrators. Another worried 
that the recent deaths of two young black males at the hands of Pittsburgh police 

reinforced mistrust of the police within the black community.10 Still another faulted the 
police for their handling of one recent large-scale demonstration. He noted that police 
behavior, which he characterized as including massive false arrests, was out of 
character for the Bureau. Several leaders spoke out in favor of greater diversity within 
the ranks, an especially sensitive issue in light of the Bureaus layoffs. According to one, 
Black cops need to be supported. 
It was noteworthy, however, that several of the leaders who had been passionate 
about police misconduct during our previous interview had little knowledge of or 
opinions about current policing practices. It was clear that some of the leaders we spoke 
with had moved on from focusing on the consent decree and police reform to other local 
issues. One leader commented, The community is apathetic, a response we did not hear 
during our interviews in the last year of the decree. In fact, the crime and justice issue 
that seemed most on the minds of the people we spoke to was a recent rash of homicides. 
For the first time in our experience in Pittsburgh, community leaders seemed more 
concerned about the police stopping crime than about whether they violated the civil 
rights of citizens. 
Several community leaders lamented that the Bureau of Police did not make public 
information on use of force, traffic stops, search and seizures, subject resistance, and 
other police activities. Under the decree, these data had been made available on a 
quarterly basis to the monitor and were included in his reports (albeit not in a user-
friendly form) and irregularly published on the ACLU web site. One leader offered the 
following perspective: 
 It makes sense to promote transparency, and its in the citys best interest to 
publicize good results. They are losing credibility when they refuse to publish. 
Public perception is very important, and distrust will grow if the public feels 
information is being withheld. 
 One community leader argued that with racial profiling a significant issue, both 
locally and nationally, the Bureau should be especially sensitive to requests to release 
information in order to quell fears of the African-American community: 
 Most police departments have a problem with racial profiling even if they dont 
engage in it because the perception creates the problem. You hope there isnt any 
profiling, but you cant credibly say you dont engage in it unless you have data. 
If you have data, then you can effectively move on to building bridges with the 
community. 
 
10 Jim McKinnon, Inquest begins in Sheraden shooting: Police say slain youth fired first, Pittsburgh Post-
Gazette, June 26, 2003; Jim McKinnon, Inquest: Police fired 19 shots at suspect in North Side shooting, 
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 5, 2002. 

On March 10, 2003, members of a civic group met with the police chief, 
representatives from the city, and the interim director of OMI to get aggregate officer 
activity data and other information from the Bureau and from OMI. Their stated goal was 
to educate the community by providing the public with police performance data. So far, 
they have received only cursory data on OMI and say they were told that the other data 
they requested is off the table. 
 
Office of Municipal Investigations. Opinions about the complaint process, the Office of 
Municipal Investigations (OMI), and the Civilian Police Review Board (CPRB) varied 
from suggesting merging the two entities to making the CPRB the primary complaint 
agency. Several of the leaders we spoke with were aware of the leadership change that 
occurred at OMI and commended the interim directors efforts. Leaders were similarly 
encouraged by the elimination of the backlog of complaints. 
While community leaders acknowledged the progress made by OMI, some expressed 
concerns and offered suggestions. A major concern revolved around the ability of a city 
agency staffed mainly by sworn officers to make impartial determinations. One leader 
likened the situation to the fox guarding the hen house. Another maintained that 
CPRB is more important because they are truly civilian oversight. 
Lack of transparency was a significant concern about OMI, just as it was about the 
Bureau of Police. Leaders pointed to the fact that OMI never published any reports and 
there is no annual report. Requests for non-personally identifiable information such as 
traffic stops by zone, search and seizure reports, and use of force statistics were turned 
down by city officials who told the community groups that they would not be able to 
adequately interpret police activity information. 
The community continues to struggle with roles for seemingly duplicative citizen 
complaint agencies. A city councilman who believes that OMI and CPRB should have 
been combined a long time ago arranged a meeting to discuss a possible merger. The 
meeting ended in acrimony without any progress toward a solution. 
 
The Perspectives of Ordinary Citizens 
In an effort to assess changes in public perception of the Pittsburgh police since the 
lifting of the consent decree, we created an updated version of the comprehensive survey 
of community members that we conducted in February 2002. Many of the questions were 
identical to those used in the earlier survey and assessed police performance in such areas 
as fairness, effectiveness, visibility, and responsiveness. 
Both the 2002 and 2003 surveys consisted of 32 questions, 20 of which were 
identical. In each case, telephone interviews were conducted with more than 400 
randomly-selected residents of Zone 2, a racially mixed area, using telephone numbers 
purchased from a commercial source. Individual respondents from each household were 
chosen based on the alphabetical order of their first names. 

On three questions responses of Zone 2 residents changed significantly between 
surveys. Perceptions of the ability of the police to fight crime and the thoroughness and 
fairness of complaint investigations were both lower in 2003 than in 2002. A significantly 
greater number of respondents reported being treated well when being stopped by the 
police in 2003 than in 2002. 
On other questions there was little change. Citizens in both surveys held high 
opinions of the police in the areas of fairness/courtesy and responsiveness. However, a 
majority of respondents believed that whites received better treatment from the police 
than blacks, and nearly half believed that the police used excessive physical force at least 
some of the time. About a third reported improvement in excessive use of force and 
police responsiveness to the community since the signing of the consent decree. As is 
typically the case in big city surveys of attitudes toward the police, blacks held more 
negative attitudes than whites and were less likely to believe that positive change had 
occurred since the signing of the decree. 
In both surveys the harshest criticism was reserved for OMI: only about one in three 
respondents believed that it would be easy to file a complaint against an officer in 
Pittsburgh and or that OMI investigations were thorough and fair. (For a full discussion 
of survey results see Appendix B.) 
The survey also included seven questions about perceptions of police effectiveness 
and police misconduct that had been used in surveys of other cities.11 Four questions 
measured perceptions of effectiveness and three measured perceptions of misconduct. 
The results indicate that Pittsburgh residents had positive opinions about police 
effectiveness. Sixty-three percent of respondents reported that the police do a good job of 
preventing crime; 67 percent reported that the police are helpful to crime victims; 59 
percent reported that the police are effective in dealing with problems that concern 
people, and 53 percent reported that the police effectively work together with residents to 
solve local problems. 
However, a majority of Pittsburgh residents also believed that the police in their city 
engaged in various forms of misconduct. Sixty-three percent of the sample reported that 
Pittsburgh police stop people without a good reason; 51 percent say the police use 
offensive language, and 67 percent say the police are verbally or physically abusive with 
citizens. 
We wondered whether the opinions about police effectivenessand particularly 
about police misconductwere overstated by people who had not had first-hand 
experience with the police. To see if this was true, we disaggregated opinions according 
to whether respondents had had either a voluntary or involuntary contact with the police 
within the past two years. These results are presented in Tables 3 and 4. The tables do not 
indicate a significant difference in opinions between respondents who had experience 
with the police and those who did not. 
11 Questions were developed by Wes Skogan of Northwestern University. 

Table 3: Opinions of Police Effectiveness in Pittsburgh for those who have had experience 
with the police in the past two years** 
 
			No experience 					Experience within past 2 years 
			Strongly  Agree  Disagree  Strongly 		Strongly  Agree  Disagree  Strongly 	
			agree 			   disagree		agree 			   disagree 
			
Do a good job of 
preventing crime* 	9.5% 	  59.7%	  19.9%    8.5% 		10.7% 	  48.8%    26.8%    11.2% 
Are helpful to crime 
victims 		9.0%      56.9%   12.3%    6.6% 		17.6% 	  48.8%    20.0%     6.3% 
Are effective in dealing 
with problems that 
concern people* 	8.5%      56.9%   19.9%    7.6% 		11.2%     45.4%    30.7%     9.3% 
Work together with 
residents to solve local 
problems* 		8.1%      54.5%	  21.8%    6.6% 		13.7%     35.6%    31.2%    11.7% 
* p  .10 for the dichotomized answer strongly agree versus all other responses. 
**Experience was defined as those people reporting that they had called the police or had been stopped 
by the police within the previous two years. 
 Table 4: Opinions of Police Misconduct in Pittsburgh for those who have had experience 
with the police in the past two years** 
 			No Experience 			Experience in past 2 years 
			Major 	Minor 	No		Major 	Minor 	No
			problem problem problem 	problem problem problem 
Stopping people 
without good reason 	26.5% 	28.4% 	31.8% 		30.7% 	38.0% 	27.3% 
Using offensive 
language 		17.5% 	24.2% 	39.3% 		19.0% 	32.7% 	40.0% 
Being verbally or 
physically abusive 	30.3% 	28.4% 	28.4% 		36.6% 	33.2% 	24.9% 
**Experience was defined as those people reporting that they had called the police or had been 
stopped by the police within the previous two years. 

Conclusion 
 
The overarching question in Pittsburgh was whether a reform process that relies on 
legitimacy not from local sources, but from a federal court, could succeed and continue 
after the federal court withdrew. The simple answer to that question is yes. There is no 
question that the implementation of the consent decree requirements in Pittsburgh 
dramatically changed the culture of the Bureau of Police. Since 2001, we have 
documented the improvements in accountability: tracking of use of force, traffic stops, 
searches and seizures, and subject resistance; development of a comprehensive early 
warning system; centralized review of all data tracked in the early warning system; 
creation of a management meeting to review officers who might be headed for trouble, 
and improved training in use of force and cultural awareness. 
We found that the sweeping management changes went a long way towards helping 
the Bureau regain the trust of the community. Community leaders who believed that the 
police had been undisciplined and out of control were willing to give the chief and the 
reforms he backed the benefit of the doubt. Our first survey of community residents 
found that about half of whites and a quarter of blacks believed that police dealings with 
citizens had improved and that police use of excessive force had decreased since the 
decree was instated. 
By any standard we used, the reforms introduced in Pittsburgh under the consent 
decree in 1997 remained in full force in 2003, a year after most requirements of the 
decree had been lifted and the monitor had been withdrawn from the Police Bureau. The 
documentation of traffic stops, use of force, search and seizures, and subject resistance 
continued. Centralized review of the forms continued to be just as stringent. The early 
warning system continued to capture information from these forms and to indicate 
officers who exceeded thresholds or deviated significantly from their peers. Quarterly 
COMPSTAR meetings continued to ensure that officers indicated by the early warning 
system received attention and appropriate remediation. 
An in-house inspections unit funded by the Community Oriented Policing Services 
office mimicked the functions that the monitor had served, making quarterly inspections 
to verify that each command displays required notices and brochures and checking 
personnel files to ensure that they contain required reports. Training programs begun 
under the decree continue largely intact despite severe budget and staff cuts. 
Focus groups and a survey of officers reinforced our impressions that accountability 
mechanisms introduced under the decree remained in full force. While officers continued 
to express resentment towards the city for acquiescing to the Justice Departments 
demands and disparaged the strict scrutiny of their actions, many acknowledged that the 
reforms did, in fact, increase police accountability. 
Community leaders acknowledged that a qualitative change in accountability had 
taken place and that the relationship between the community and police had become less 

antagonistic. We heard no indication from civic leaders that any backsliding had occurred 
since many of the decrees requirements had been lifted. The survey of Pittsburgh 
residents found that, with a few exceptions, improvements accompanying the decree that 
we had noted in the 2002 survey still held a year later after the policing provisions of the 
decree had been lifted. Similarly, we noted no change in the proportion of people who 
had contact with the police or in their satisfaction with those interactions. 
The Office of Municipal Investigations, which had lagged in adopting reforms under 
the consent decree, finally came into compliance. Under the guidance of a new director, a 
new information system was installed, case review procedures were streamlined, and the 
backlog disappeared. 
So it appears that the Justice Department was correct in betting that pattern or practice 
suits could engender substantial accountability reforms in a short time and that the 
reforms would survive the life of the decree intact. Pittsburgh did undergo major change 
and, so far, the changes have remained in place. 
The reform process, initiated from the outside, has built up a commitment to reform 
within the Bureau of Police administration, among at least black members of the rank and 
file, and among community leaders. But two important groups were not specifically 
brought into the decree process in Pittsburgh. As a result, our work indicates that 
acceptance by white officers is still being largely withheld, and there is still skepticism 
about the Bureau within the African-American community. Buy-in from these groups 
will be key to continued efforts to build an effective and respectful police force in 
Pittsburgh. 
 
Last reflections on the Pittsburgh reform process 
The consent decree enjoined the city from engaging in a pattern or practice of conduct 
by law enforcement officers of the [Pittsburgh Bureau of Police] that deprives persons of 
rights, privileges, and immunities secured and protected by the Constitution and laws of 
the United States. Thus, the essential aim of the decree was to change the way in which 
police officers deal with citizens. Routine interactions between police and citizens seldom 
can be monitored directly by police supervisors or administrators. Therefore, the way the 
decree sought to change officer behavior was by redesigning management systems for 
training, misconduct investigations, supervision, and discipline. 
Using consent decrees to change behavior was a new use of this legal instrument. 
Consent decrees have been commonly used to change procedures or rulesprison 
conditions, prison grievance procedures, and police hiring practices, for exampleoften 
with successful outcomes.12 However, most of these earlier decrees were not aimed at 

changing the behavior of large groups of employees. In this sense, the pattern or practice 
cases brought against police departments were treading on new ground. 
12 C.R. Blakely, The Effects of the Duran Consent Decree, Corrections Today February (1997); L.S. 
Gottfredson, Racially Gerrymandering the Content of Police Tests to Satisfy U.S. Justice Department: A 
Case Study, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 2, no. 3/4 (1996): 418-446; H. Reske, Lessons in 
Rewriting Consent Decrees, American Bar Association Journal (1992): 16; T.S. Whetstone, Post 
Consent Decree Minority Promotions: Discrimination, Disinterest, Disenfranchisement or Unrealistic 
Expectations?, International Journal of Police Science & Management 1, no. 4 (1999): 403-418. 
Because record-keeping was so bad in Pittsburgh before the decree, it is difficult to 
assess the effectiveness of reducing misconduct through changing training programs and 
accountability systems. We do not know, for example, whether citizen complaints or use 
of force declined after the decree was signed because pre-decree data were not available 
to us. The citizen surveys and interviews with community leaders suggest that change in 
police conduct did occur over the course of the decree, but our evidence is not definitive 
because we did not conduct a community survey prior to the signing of the decree. 
There were strong hints that the decrees intent to radically change management 
systems resulted in unintended effects as well. According to police officers, morale sunk 
dramatically because the city was seen as selling them out. Officers said they retreated 
from unnecessary contacts with the public because they feared abuse of the liberalized 
citizen complaint procedures. Officers said they avoided being proactive in their work 
because they feared they would be disciplined for filling out forms improperly or be 
indicated by the early warning system. Officers complained of duplicative paperwork and 
supervisors complained about reduced time on the street because they had to gather 
extensive data on numerous indicated officers for each COMPSTAR meeting. We do not 
have independent proof of these undesired effects and, indeed, our earlier report 
presented data calling into question some of these assertions. But the fact that we heard 
these things so many times in different forums suggests that there is some basis to them. 
Many of the unintended effects of the decree on officers are directly tied to the new 
management systems that the decree required. The decree does not specifically mandate 
that commanders and line supervisors have less discretion, but the reforms as instituted in 
Pittsburgh essentially took responsibility and flexibility away from the individual 
commands and created a centralized review structure. Compliance with proper 
completion of the new forms was reviewed centrally. Decisions about discipline were 
either made or reviewed centrally. COMPSTAR is a way for the central command to 
make sure that decisions of local commanders and supervisors are consistent with 
departmental policy. 
This centralized approach to identifying and responding to officer misconduct makes 
good sense in the wake of allegations of civil rights violations on a level that triggers 
federal intervention, but the approach runs counter to the decentralizing imperative of the 
other major police reform of the past two decades: community policing. As law professor 
Debra Livingston has pointed out, consent decrees like those in Pittsburgh rely on 
adherence to professional standards as the best safeguard against police misconduct, 
rather than engagement of local communities in setting standards and monitoring police 

conduct.13 Indeed, among the many successful and praiseworthy initiatives of local 
officials in Pittsburgh we did not find substantial efforts to engage community residents 
and organizations and to give them a defined role in assuring the proper functioning of 
the Police Bureau. We found no citizen councils that help set police priorities in 
Pittsburgh, and we heard complaints that aggregate data on uses of force, traffic stops, 
searches, and other performance measures are not made easily available to city residents. 
The centralized accountability model that was adopted in Pittsburgh also runs counter to 
another tenet of community policingallowing local commanders and even line officers 
more responsibility and discretion in their work. 
Whether the notions of centralized accountability practices demanded by consent 
decrees and decentralization of decision-making entailed in the community policing 
philosophy can be reconciled is an open question. The challenge going forward will be to 
develop a model that incorporates the advantages of community policing while 
monitoring officer behavior and holding officers accountable for wrongdoing. This 
process may have begun in the complex reforms underway in Cincinnati under federal 
court oversight, which contain explicit requirements for community participation and the 
adoption of community policing strategies. 
In Pittsburgh, local policing is again a local matter, but its future may depend as much 
on the engagement of citizens and police supervisors as it does on senior managements 
ability to sustain the procedural improvements put in place over the past six years. 
 13 Rewriting Consent Decrees, American Bar Association Journal (1992): 16; T.S. Whetstone, Post 
Consent Decree Minority Promotions: Discrimination, Disinterest, Disenfranchisement or Unrealistic 
Expectations? International Journal of Police Science & Management 1, no. 4 (1999): 403-418. 

Appendix A: Community Survey: Weighting Decisions 
 Because no meaningful comparison group existed at the time, the results of the 2002 
community survey were reported in their weighted form in our first Pittsburgh report. The 
decision to weight the results was made in an effort to match the Census 2000 figures for 
Zone 2. 
 In the current analysis, we present unweighted figures for both the 2002 and 2003 
surveys. Both surveys used a random selection scheme, making the results unbiased 
predictors of the true population. This made direct, unweighted comparisons possible. 
 The 2002 and 2003 surveys matched quite well. Both over-represented females and 
older people and underrepresented males and younger people. More importantly, both 
surveys matched census data for race, our primary demographic variable of interest. 
 
Table A1: Comparison of survey demographics to Pittsburgh census data 
 
		2000 		2002 		2003 
		CENSUS 		SURVEY 		SURVEY 
		ZONE 2 
Male 		47% 		34% 		34% 
Female 		53% 		66% 		66% 
18-24 		24%  		8%  		7% 
25-44 		32% 		27% 		24% 
45-65 		23% 		33% 		36% 
65+ 		21% 		31% 		32% 
White 		52% 		57% 		52% 
Black 		44% 		40% 		43% 

Appendix B: Survey Results 
 
Changes in citizen opinions from 2002 to 2003. In both surveys, eight questions were 
employed to measure public perceptions of the police. In the analysis, we focus on 
changes in perceptions from 2002 to 2003 for the entire sample and for whites and blacks 
separately. 
Figure B1 below depicts the percentage of respondents who reported that the 
Pittsburgh Bureau of Police does a very good or somewhat good job of dealing with 
citizens in a fair and courteous manner. In the 2003 survey, 69 percent of respondents 
reported favorable opinions. This is a slight (but not statistically significant) decrease of 
four percent from 2002 when 72 percent were favorable.14 
Figure B1 also breaks down responses by race. Clearly, white respondents have a 
more favorable perception of police. On the 2003 survey, 80 percent of white respondents 
reported that the police do a very good or somewhat good job of dealing with citizens in a 
fair and courteous manner compared to 53 percent of African-American respondents.15 
Neither whites nor blacks showed significant changes in perceptions of fairness and 
courtesy from 2002 to 2003.16 
 
 
Figure B1: Percentage of citizens reporting that the 
Pittsburgh Bureau of Police is doing a very good job or somewhat 
good job of dealing with citizens in a fair and courteous manner. 
			Very good job	Somewhat good job
Total 2003		24		45
Total 2002		31		41
Whites 2003		35		45
Whites 2002		41		39
Blacks 2003		11		42
Blacks 2002		15		46
 
14 Pearson chi-square = .845 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .358 
15 Pearson chi-square = 52.514 at 2 degrees of freedom, p = .000 
16 Pearson chi-square for African Americans = 2.559 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .110 

The second question common to the 2002 and 2003 surveys measured respondents 
belief in the ability of the Pittsburgh police to fight crime (see Figure B2). Sixty-four 
percent of the 2003 respondents rated the police positively, with 15 percent 
characterizing the police as doing a very good job and 49 percent characterizing them 
as doing a somewhat good job. This was significantly lower than reported in the 2002 
survey when 71 percent of respondents gave a positive response, but still nearly a two-
thirds majority.17 
Whites tended to rate the police significantly higher than African Americans. On the 
2003 survey, a total of 77 percent of white respondents reported that the police are doing 
a very good or somewhat good job of fighting crime in Pittsburgh while just 48 
percent of African Americans held the same opinion.18 Moreover, separate analysis of the 
change from 2002 to 2003 by race revealed that African Americans opinions of police 
crime fighting abilities has decreased significantly.19 The percentage of African-
American respondents reporting that the police are doing a very good job or 
somewhat good job dropped 12 percentage points, from 60 to 48 percent. In contrast, 
opinions of the police crime fighting ability changed imperceptibly among whites from 
2002 to 2003, but the change did not approach statistical significance.20 
 
Figure B2: Percentage of respondents reporting that the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police is 
doing a very good job or somewhat good job of fighting crime. 
		Very goodjob	Somewhatgood job 
Total 2003	15		49
Total 2002	25		46
Whites2003	21		56
Whites2002	30		48
Blacks2003	7		41
Blacks2002	14		46
17 Pearson chi-square = 4.062 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .044 
18 Pearson chi-square = 52.570 at 2 degrees of freedom, p = .000 
19 Pearson chi-square = 4.733 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .030 
20 Pearson chi-square = .012 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .914 

The next question asked respondents whether they believed that use of excessive 
force by Pittsburgh police officers was common or uncommon (see Figure B3). The 
proportion that believed that use of excessive force was common did not differ 
significantly between the 2002 and 2003 surveys, increasing very slightly from 45 to 47 
percent.21 
Large differences by race were evident on this question. The proportion of whites 
who believed that excessive force was common decreased from 35 percent in 2002 to 26 
percent in 2003 (a statistically significant decrease).22 In contrast, the proportion of 
blacks who believed that excessive force was common increased significantly from 60 
percent in 2002 to 70 percent 2003.23 
Figure B3: Percentage of respondents reporting that it is very common or somewhat 
common for police officers in Pittsburgh to use excessive force. 
		Verycommon	Somewhatcommon 
Total 2003	21		26
Total 2002	17		28
Whites2003	6		20
Whites2002	11		24
Blacks2003	40		30
Blacks2002	24		35
The fourth question concerned the responsiveness of the police to the needs of the 
community. Figure B4 shows that 69 percent of the respondents in both the 2003 and 
2002 survey reported that the Pittsburgh police are doing a very good or somewhat 
good job.24 
Differences between blacks and whites were again statistically significant.25 On the 
2003 survey, 80 percent of white respondents reported that the police are doing a very 
good or somewhat good job of responding to the needs of the community compared to 

56 percent of African Americans. The change from 2002 to 2003 did not approach 
statistical significance within race for either whites or blacks.26 
 21 Pearson chi-square = .338 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .561 
22 Pearson chi-square = 3.444 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .063 
23 Pearson chi-square = 4.334 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .037 
24Pearson chi-square = .078 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .779 
25 Pearson chi-square = 40.436 at 2 degrees of freedom, p = .000 
Figure B4: Percentage of respondents reporting that the 
Pittsburgh Bureau of Police is doing a very good job or somewhat 
good job of responding to the needs of the community. 
Bar Graph
 The fifth question asked respondents when they last saw a police officer on patrol in 
their neighborhood. The proportion that reported seeing an officer within the past week 
increased slightly from 73 percent in 2002 to 76 percent in 2003, but this increase was 
not statistically significant (see Figure B5).27 
In the second survey, 78 percent of whites and 72 percent of blacks reported seeing an 
officer on patrol within the past week. This difference is statistically significant.28 
Changes from 2002 to 2003 did not approach statistical significance among either whites 
or blacks.29  
 
26 Pearson chi-square for white respondents = 1.549 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .213 
 Pearson chi-square for African-American respondents = .030 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .864 
27Pearson chi-square = 1.760 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .185 
28 Pearson chi-square = 6.458 at 2 degrees of freedom, p = .040 
29 Pearson chi-square for white respondents = .981 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .327 
 Pearson chi-square for African-American respondents = .704 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .401 

Figure B5: Percentage of respondents reporting that the last time they saw a police officer 
in Pittsburgh was today or within the previous week. 
		Today	In previousweek
Total 2003	29	46
Total 2002	33	38
Whites2003	31	47
Whites2002	35	40
Blacks2003	26	46
Blacks2002	32	36
 
In response to question six, the proportion of respondents who believed that it would 
be very or somewhat easy to file a complaint against a police officer decreased 
slightly and non-significantly by five percentage points (see Figure B6).30 
In 2003, whites were twice as likely as blacks to believe that it was easy to file a 
complaint, 40 percent compared to 20 percent.31 The decrease from 2002 to 2003 did not 
approach statistical significance for either racial group.32 
 
30Pearson chi-square = 1.795 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .180 
31 Pearson chi-square = 32.455 at 2 degrees of freedom, p = .000 
32 Pearson chi-square for white respondents = 1.305 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .253 
 Pearson chi-square for African-American respondents = 1.629 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .202 

Figure B6: Percentage of respondents reporting that it is very easy or somewhat easy to 
make a complaint against a police officer in Pittsburgh. 
		Very easy	Somewhat easy
Total 2003	12		20
Total 2002	16		21
Whites2003	17		23
Whites2002	19		26
Blacks2003	7		13
Blacks2002	12		14
 
We observed a significant change in citizen perceptions of the fairness and 
thoroughness of investigations into complaints against the police (see Figure B7). Forty 
percent of all respondents reported that the police did a very good job or a reasonably 
good job of investigating complaints in 2003, a significant decrease from 2002 when 46 
percent felt that investigations were fair.33 
Whites were far more optimistic about the fairness of investigations than blacks. In 
2003, 53 percent of white respondents believed that investigations were fair compared to 
24 percent of African Americans.34 Differences between the racial groups held relatively 
constant between surveys.35 
33 Pearson chi-square = 3.759 at 1 degree of freedom, p =.053 
34 Pearson chi-square = 57.284 at 2 degrees of freedom, p = .000 
35Pearson chi-square for white respondents = .314 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .576 
 Pearson chi-square for African-American respondents = 2.483 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .115 

Figure B7: Percentage of respondents reporting that the authorities in Pittsburgh do a very 
good or reasonably good job of investigating complaints against police officers. 
		A very good job	A reasonably good job
Total 2003	7		33
Total 2002	10		36
Whites2003	9		44
Whites2002	13		42
Blacks2003	3		21
Blacks2002	4		27
 
The last trend comparison asked whether the police treat African Americans better, 
the same, or worse than other racial groups (see Figure B8). There was no change from 
2002 to 2003 in the proportion of respondents who believed that the police treat African 
Americans the same or better than whites (39 percent for both surveys).36 
Blacks were only one-third as likely as whites to believe that blacks received fair 
treatment from the police. Only 17 percent of blacks in 2003 thought that blacks were 
treated as well or better than whites compared to 55 percent of whites.37 Comparisons of 
responses between 2002 and 2003 revealed little change for either group. Scores for 
whites remained the same while scores for blacks increased by only two percentage 
points.38 
 
36 Pearson chi-square = .001 at 1 degree of freedom, p =.974 
37 Pearson chi-square = 120.668 at 2 degrees of freedom, p = .000 
38 Pearson chi-square for white respondents = .039 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .843 
 Pearson chi-square for African-American respondents = .220 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .639 

Figure B8: Percentage of respondents reporting that the 
Pittsburgh Bureau of Police treats African-American citizens 
a lot/a little better than whites and about the same as whites. 
		A lot/little better	About the same 
Total 2003	3			36						
Total 2002	3			36
Whites2003	4			51
Whites2002	5			50
Blacks2003	1			16
Blacks2002	1			14
Changes in citizen evaluations of police encounters 2002-2003. As part of the 2002 and 
2003 surveys, we asked a number of questions to measure the publics experience with 
police in Pittsburgh. Respondents were first asked if they had approached the police in 
the past two years. This contact could have stemmed from the respondents desire to file 
a police report, report a crime, or seek any other assistance. Next, respondents were asked 
if they had been approached by the police in the past two years. This could have been in 
the form of an enforcement action such as being stopped for a traffic violation, as part of 
an investigation, or just a routine encounter on the street. Respondents who indicated that 
they had approached the police or had been approached were asked how well they were 
treated by the contact officer(s). 
Thirty-nine percent of the respondents in the 2003 survey reported that they had 
approached the police within the past two years, and 28 percent reported that they had 
been approached or stopped by the police in the same period. Overall, the number of 
respondents reporting that they had approached the police and the number of respondents 
reporting that they had been stopped by the police both decreased by two percentage 
points. Neither decrease proved to be statistically significant.39 Table B1 displays the 
percentages for both surveys. 
 
39Pearson chi-square for those approaching police = .202 at 1 degrees of freedom, p = .653 
 Pearson chi-square for those approached by the police = .446 at 1 degrees of freedom, p = .504 

Table B1: Percentage approached or stopped by police in last year, 2002-2003 
 
					2002 	2003 
Approached Police in last 2 years 	41 	39 
Stopped by Police in last 2 years 	30 	28 
 Figure B9 below displays respondents perceptions of how they were treated in their 
encounters with the police in Pittsburgh. Seventy-six percent of the 2002 and 2003 
respondents who approached the police believed that they were treated very well or well 
in the encounter.40 
Also seen in Figure B9 is a noticeable difference between white respondents and 
African-American respondents in their perceptions of how they were treated when they 
approached the police. Eighty-six percent of white respondents to the 2003 survey report 
that they were treated well while 63 percent of African Americans report the same. This 
difference proved to be significant.41 The proportion of black and white respondents who 
reported that they were treated well in their contact with police changed only slightly 
between 2002 and 2003. Among white respondents, there was a seven percentage point 
increase. Among blacks, there was a six percentage point decrease. Neither change 
approached significance.42 
 
Figure B9: Percentage of respondents reporting they were treated very well or reasonably 
well when approaching the police. 
		Reasonably well	Very well
2003 Total 	33		43
2002 Total 	31		45
2003whites	31		55
2002whites	29		50
2003blacks	34		29
2002blacks	36		33
 
40Pearson chi-square = .205 at 1 degrees of freedom, p = .651 
41Pearson chi-square = 14.787 at 2 degrees of freedom, p = .000 
42 Pearson chi-square for white respondents = .619 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .431 
 Pearson chi-square for African-American respondents = .209 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .648 

Figure B10 depicts the percentage of respondents that reported being treated well 
when they were approached or stopped by the police in Pittsburgh. Of the 174 people on 
the 2003 survey who reported being stopped, 66 percent reported being treated well, an 
eight percentage point gain over 2002, enough to attain statistical significance.43 
There is a noticeable gap between the proportion of white and black respondents 
reporting that they were treated well during stops in the 2003 survey. Seventy-eight 
percent of white respondents believed that they were treated well when stopped compared 
to 54 percent of blacks.44 Differences also were noted within the racial groups between 
the two surveys. The proportion of whites that reported being treated well in the 2003 
survey was 11 percentage points greater than in 2002 and the proportion of blacks that 
reported being treated well increased by six percentage points. For both whites and 
blacks, the difference between surveys proved to be significant.45 
 
Figure B10: Percentage of those who reported being treated very well or 
reasonably well when approached by the police. 
		Very well 	Reasonably well
2003 Total 	39		27
2002 Total 	29		29
2003whites	49		29
2002whites	37		30
2003blacks	28		26
2002blacks 	17		31
 
 Public reaction to the consent decree. The 2003 survey asked if respondents were aware 
that the consent decree had been largely lifted in Pittsburgh. The vast majority were 
unaware that the decree had been lifted. Only 22 percent of Zone 2 respondents knew that 
the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police had successfully complied with the requirements of the 
43 Pearson chi-square = 4.887 at 1 degree of freedom, p = .027 
44Pearson chi-square = 8.338 at 2 degrees of freedom, p = .015 
45Pearson chi-square = 2.976 at 1 degree of freedom, p =.084; Pearson chi-square = 3.227 at 1 degree of 
freedom, p = .072 

consent decree. Twenty-seven percent of whites were aware compared to 18 percent of 
African Americans. This difference was statistically significant.46 
We then asked all respondents if they were satisfied with the results of the consent 
decree and if policing in Pittsburgh had indeed improved under the decree. Forty-eight 
percent of 2003 respondents reported that they were satisfied with the results of the 
consent decree, but only 32 percent reported that policing in Pittsburgh had improved. 
The most important finding regarding these two questions involves the disparate 
responses of whites and African Americans. Of all white respondents, 37 percent reported 
that policing had improved in Pittsburgh while only 23 percent of African Americans 
held the same belief.47 
46 Pearson chi-square = 7.785 at 2 degrees of freedom, p = .020 
47 Pearson chi-square = 11.296 at 2 degrees of freedom, p = .004 

References 
 
Blakely, C. R. The Effects of the Duran Consent Decree. Corrections Today (February 
1997). 
Gibbs, A. Focus Groups. Social Research Update. (Surrey, England: Department of 
Sociology, University of Surrey, Winter 1997). 
Gottfredson, L. S. Racially Gerrymandering the Content of Police Tests to Satisfy U.S. 
Justice Department: A Case Study. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 2, nos. 3/4 
(1996): 418-446. 
Kidd, P.S., and M.B. Parshall. Getting the focus and the group: Enhancing analytical 
rigor in focus group research. Qualitative Health Research 10, no. 3 (2000): 293-
308. 
Livingston, D. Police Reform and the Department of Justice: An Essay on 
Accountability. Buffalo Criminal Law Review, 2 Buff. Crim. L. Rev. 815. (1999). 
Reske, H. Lessons in rewriting consent decrees. American Bar Association Journal, 
(1992): 16. 
Whetstone, T.S. Post Consent Decree Minority Promotions: Discrimination, Disinterest, 
Disenfranchisement or Unrealistic Expectations? International Journal of Police 
Science & Management 1, no. 4 (1999): 403-418.