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City seeks better background checks on police candidates
Thursday, January 21, 1999 By Timothy McNulty, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
City Council moved yesterday toward requiring more thorough background checks on prospective police officers.
Council gave preliminary approval to a bill calling for a study of the city's method of scrutinizing candidates for police officer positions.
It deferred action on a separate bill that would expand the jurisdiction of the Citizen Police Review Board to include complaints involving Pittsburgh Housing Authority police. That bill was held for a public hearing.
The bills were introduced last week in the wake of investigations into two fatal police shootings Downtown.
One was the 1995 shooting by city and Housing Authority police of Jerry Jackson in the Armstrong Tunnels after a high-speed chase. The case was reopened recently when new evidence surfaced. A coroner's inquest was concluded yesterday.
The Dec. 21 fatal shooting of Deron S. Grimmitt Sr. on Second Avenue, Downtown, by Pittsburgh Officer Jeffrey Cooperstein during a chase, is the subject of an inquest next week.
Reports in a Colorado newspaper said Cooperstein, before being hired in Pittsburgh, had acknowledged a cocaine problem.
The information was provided by Cooperstein's attorney in a civil court case, the newspaper said.
Cooperstein's personnel file is confidential, but a 1993 background check by the city apparently did not turn up information about the drug problem, which was revealed during a lawsuit Cooperstein filed against the city of Loveland, Colo., and a former police chief. The city doesn't check civil court records outside Allegheny County.
Councilwoman Valerie A. McDonald's legislation would direct the Personnel and Civil Service Department to study the feasibility and cost of performing such civil litigation checks on police candidates. She said it was needed to keep officers such as Cooperstein off the force.
"We may not catch everybody ... but it wouldn't be right if we didn't do everything to make sure we don't have another Cooperstein case," she said.
Solicitor Jacqueline Morrow said a civil litigation check wouldn't have revealed the information about Cooperstein's drug use because the information was divulged in court rather than in court filings. But she said the city could implement checks of newspaper databases that might yield such information.
Personnel Director Barbara Parees said the checks would be difficult because of the cost and the lack of complete and/or accessible court records nationwide.
Council unanimously supported McDonald's bill in a preliminary vote.
A final vote is scheduled for Tuesday.
A bill authored by Jim Ferlo asks the county Board of Elections to hold a referendum on whether to add oversight of Housing Authority police to the work of the Citizen Police Review Board.
The review board was created pursuant to a referendum.
Ferlo said his bill was not related to the Jackson case.
He said he wanted residents of public housing to have the same opportunity as other city residents to initiate complaints about police misconduct.
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