PITTSBURGH — The problem for the ICE officers entangled with a suspect outside a Pittsburgh police station in the city’s Allentown neighborhood didn’t begin when several city officers allegedly stood down.
Their problem began a handful of miles away, behind a podium, when newly sworn-in Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor said that his officers wouldn’t cooperate with ICE under any circumstances. It was the same position that his predecessor, Ed Gainey, took before O’Connor defeated his fellow Democrat. Both men campaigned as progressives.
“We’re not going to cooperate,” O’Connor dryly said, reinforcing what he said during his campaign against Gainey.
Allegations surfaced that city officers stood around and watched as immigration officers struggled with the suspect on Wednesday. Reporters, including me, received a flurry of calls from the city officers who witnessed the struggle. One of the ICE officers was a former Pittsburgh police officer who had served in the bureau.
In keeping with the mayor’s politics, Pittsburgh police chief Jason Lando, liked by the rank and file when he was coming into the job, has been strident since he was sworn in that his officers would not collaborate with ICE, whether for roundups or to check suspects’ immigration statuses.
Lando repeated this stance at a neighborhood meeting in Greenfield last month at the Magee Recreation Center in Councilwoman Barbara Warwick’s district. When an activist brought up the subject of ICE, the audience, packed with Warwick’s far-left supporters, yelled “Nazis” and that ICE is “kidnapping U.S. citizens.” In a matter-of-fact fashion, Lando explained to the crowd that his force would have nothing to do with ICE.
Last month, hundreds of ICE protesters brandished signs that read “ICE ARE DOMESTIC TERRORISTS” and “F*** ICE” and walked for blocks on the city’s south side, chanting “What do we want now? No ICE! When do we want it? Now!” The protest was sponsored by Indivisible, a national far-left group. Lando, along with a few dozen officers, was there in a protective stance for the protestors as they stopped traffic while they chanted.
At a February press conference, O’Connor adamantly repeated his refusal to work with ICE.
“If an organization like that calls us, we are not going, we are not supporting, we’ve said it a number of times,” the mayor said.
Joseph Sabino Mistick, a Duquesne University law professor and former deputy mayor of Pittsburgh to Democrat Sophie Maslof, said there is a temptation for a mayor to weigh in on national politics.
“Especially when you are suddenly given a bully pulpit and you see other mayors in big cities doing that,” Mistick said. “The better way to frame it is for mayors to say, ‘We are going to worry about the things that are the mayor’s responsibility, and we are going to do our job.'”
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The non-cooperation went county-wide last week. The Allegheny County Council voted with broad strokes to not only bar law enforcement, but also bar multiple county-wide agencies, such as the Department of Human Services, from cooperating with ICE.
Allegheny County Councilman DeWitt Walton said that the ban didn’t go far enough.
“Lock them up,” Walton said on the council floor. “What we should be doing now is drafting a resolution to clearly state, wherever ICE violates a person’s civil rights, legal rights, they violate Pennsylvania criminal code, we arrest their ass. Lock them up.”
The entire situation has created two conflicting emotions for officers whose instinct is to get in there and defuse the situation or follow orders, explained Robert Swartzwelder, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police’s Fort Pitt Lodge No. 1, which represents the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police.
“If that were me, I would have jumped in and helped and got the situation under control, then dealt with the consequences later with the higher ups,” Swartzwelder said.
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On Wednesday evening, Swartzwelder sent a letter that said the FOP was aware of the incident.
“The FOP will be requesting preservation of all video evidence surrounding the incident in order to protect those FOP members involved in the event of any discipline, litigation, or further political [or] media hype developments,” he said.
Swartzwelder reminded officers that, for over 33 years, Bureau of Police policy has been that police officers within the city of Pittsburgh do not utilize “immigration status” to develop reasonable suspicion, probable cause, or even to initiate an encounter. Swartzwelder said that, in a meeting after Lando was sworn in as chief, he was assured that policy would continue.
Swartzwelder said that, to the FOP’s knowledge, the chief has never directed members of the Bureau of Police to abandon their duties to assist law enforcement officers, especially during an arrest or other lawful seizure of a citizen. Both Pennsylvania and federal laws specifically protect officers assisting fellow law enforcement officers who are being assaulted, making an arrest, or are summoned to assist under the laws of the commonwealth.
To the FOP’s knowledge, Lando has never given a directive to not assist nor avoid intervening when a fellow law enforcement officer needs assistance. And if any of his members felt otherwise, they should let him know, Swartzwelder said.
Lando said that he ordered a review of what transpired when Pittsburgh officers outside of their station observed a struggle between immigration authorities and the person they were taking into custody.
“It has been alleged by some individuals that Pittsburgh Police officers were ordered not to intervene and were forced to stand by and watch,” the chief said in a statement. “While our officers did not intervene in this particular situation, I am not aware of any order given that forbid them from doing so.”
The review will include footage from the officer’s body cameras. Lando announced that he asked the Zone 3 commander to conduct an administrative review and report back to his office.
The moral struggle of municipal officers to help ICE agents has been a conflict we’ve seen play out across the country. And it almost always happens in Democratic-ruled cities, counties, or municipalities — particularly when protesters follow ICE agents and film their arrests, often swarming them or getting into physical confrontations.
It is rare in municipalities, cities, and boroughs where the mayor or manager doesn’t have higher political aspirations and isn’t beholden to an activist base.
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Case in point: On Thursday, the chief of the Glassport Borough Police Department, on the edge of Allegheny County, said ICE has made 17 arrests in the borough over the last two weeks. Shawn DeVerse, police chief in the tiny Mon Valley town of under 5,000 built around a mill called The United States Glass Company, said that none of the arrests led to any violence. He told KDKA that Glassport is not part of the 287(g) program, which allows state and local agencies to act as immigration enforcement agents.
“We recognize that ICE is a federal law enforcement agency, and as such, we would provide the same assist or support that we would provide any agency operating within our community, when needed, just as they would extend the same cooperation to us,” Chief Shawn DeVerse said in a statement.
The city of Glassport had long been the home of blue-collar Democrats. But that has changed as the Democratic Party has shifted away from its priorities. Now, the city is slightly more Republican. It is a place where protestors don’t show up, so the political pressure is virtually non-existent.
