FINAL
REPORT
CRIMINAL IDENTIFICATION AND ARRAIGNMENT OPTIONS FOR
ALLEGHENY COUNTY
Prepared
for
Office
of the County Manager
County of Allegheny
119 Courthouse
436 Grant Street
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15219
Prepared
by
CONSAD
Research Corporation
121 North Highland Avenue
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15206
July
2002
Table of Contents
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY *
1.0 Introduction *
2.0 The Current Process *
2.1 Organizational Structure *
2.2 The Identification and Booking Centers *
2.3 Temporal Differences in Operations *
2.3.1 Nighttime Operation *
2.3.2 Daytime Operations *
2.4 Program Costs *
2.5 Program Revenues *
2.6 Justice Network (JNET) *
2.7 Inefficient Aspects of the Current Process *
2.7.1 Swearing to the Accuracy of Affidavits of Probable Cause *
2.7.2 Conducting Preliminary Arraignments at Local District
Justice Courts *
2.7.3 Current Identification Procedures at the BCI *
2.7.4 Proposed Identification Facilities at the BCI *
2.7.5 Transportation Procedures at the RBCs *
2.7.6 Staffing at the BCI *
2.7.7 Staffing at the RBCs *
2.7.8 Potential Legal Liabilities *
3.0 Alternative Configurations *
3.1 Procedural and Administrative Alternatives *
3.1.1 Transfer of Custody Based on Information Received *
3.1.2 Improve Daytime Arraignment Procedures *
3.1.3 Allow Ample Time for Payment of Bond Prior to
Transportation to Jail *
3.1.4 Operational Changes at the BCI *
3.1.5 Staffing Changes at the RBCs *
3.1.6 Improve Hours of Operation *
3.1.7 Improve Administration and Coordination *
3.2 Physical Configuration Alternatives *
3.2.1 Configuration Option 1 *
3.2.2 Configuration Option 2 *
3.2.3 Configuration Option 3 *
3.2.4 Evaluation *
3.2.4.1 Geographic Factors *
3.2.4.2 Cost Effectiveness *
3.2.5 Conclusion *
4.0 Conclusions and Recommendations *
Appendix A: Technical Appendix on Models and Methods *
A.1 Model for Describing and Evaluating the Current Process *
A2.1 Assumptions in the Model *
A2.2 Data Used in the Model *
A2.3 Steps in Constructing the Model *
Appendix B: Detailed Data Tables *
The criminal identification and arraignment process that currently operates in Allegheny County contains notable inefficiencies. This study has identified the principal sources of the inefficiencies, and has analyzed alternative policies, procedures, or practices that can greatly reduce the inefficiencies and their adverse consequences. Alternative geographic arrangements of identification and booking centers have also been analyzed, and their implications for costs and for police officers’ travel time have been evaluated.
On the basis of those analyses, the following changes to the process are recommended:
· Discontinue operation of regional booking centers (RBCs) until the effects of the recommended procedural and administrative changes that are presented below have been observed in relation to the BCI; then reevaluate the cost-effectiveness of operating RBCs at specific locations.
· Simplify the procedures for transferring custody of arrestees from arresting officers to personnel at identification and booking centers.
· Mandate that all arrestees must be electronically identified on the basis of their fingerprints before they can be arraigned.
· Develop procedures that will make arraignments during daytime as convenient for arresting officers as they will be when the Night Court is in session and the procedures for transferring custody have been simplified.
· Improve operations at the Bureau of Criminal Identification (BCI) by:
· Relying exclusively on automated identification using the existing electronic fingerprinting, digital photography, and demographic data entry equipment.
· Eliminating the manual fingerprinting and card file system that it maintains as a backup.
· Discontinuing deliberations about acquiring an Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), and relying instead on the AFIS operated by the Pennsylvania State Police.
· Staffing the BCI solely with Fingerprint Technicians, and revising the management structure accordingly.
· Renegotiating the terms of the City-County Integrated Identification System Program (CCIISP) contract, as necessary, to accomplish these changes.
· Allow ample time for bail bonds to be paid before transporting arrestees to or processing them into the County Jail.
· If any RBCs are reestablished:
· Negotiate mutually acceptable arrangements for sharing the costs of staffing and operating the RBCs among the county and the municipalities that use them.
· Staff them with Fingerprint Technicians who have been suitably trained and certified that they can provide physical security, respond to emergencies, and accept custody of arrestees from arresting officers.
· Improve their hours of operation by either operating them full time or, if only two shifts per day are affordable, operating them during the day and evening shifts, when travel to and from the BCI is generally most time-consuming.
· Expand the use of video conferencing and telecommunication equipment within the criminal justice system, regardless of the final decisions about RBCs.
· Improve communication, cooperation, and administration within the criminal identification and arraignment process, including assignment of responsibility for overseeing the operation of identification and booking centers to a single county agency.
The bases for these recommendations are explained briefly below, and discussed in detail in the report.
Discontinue Operation of RBCs and Reevaluate their Cost-Effectiveness
The BCI in downtown Pittsburgh is situated at the most convenient single location for an identification and booking center in the county. As a result, despite the convenience that RBCs offer to certain municipal police departments, the BCI will likely continue to process all of the city arrestees and at least one-half of the non-city arrestees under any plausible configuration of identification and booking centers.
As explained in Section 3.2, even if all of the changes in policies, procedures, and practices that are recommended above were implemented, operating RBCs at Penn Hills, Hampton Township, and Robinson Township would clearly not be cost-effective due to geographic factors; and the operation of a RBC at McKeesport would, at best, be marginally cost-effective. For the county in the aggregate, it would be less expensive to compensate for the incremental travel time involved in transporting arrestees to the BCI by hiring additional police officers to patrol the streets, than to operate any of the RBCs. On this basis, it would be prudent to discontinue operation of the RBCs until the effects of the recommended procedural and administrative changes have been observed in relation to the BCI, and then to reevaluate the cost-effectiveness of specific RBCs taking that additional evidence into consideration.
It is also important to recognize that the reductions in travel time produced by operating RBCs are obtained by specific municipal police departments. Under these circumstances, it might be appropriate to conduct negotiations between the county and those municipalities seeking mutually acceptable arrangements for sharing the costs of staffing and operating RBCs. Such negotiation might well be successful in developing a financially feasible arrangement for reinstating, at least, the McKeesport RBC.
Simplify Transfer of Custody
Current policy in Allegheny County mandates that, before arresting officers may transfer custody of their arrestees to personnel at identification and booking centers, the officers must swear to the accuracy of their affidavits of probable cause before a District Justice. This policy should be replaced with one that allows suitably certified personnel at the identification and booking centers to accept custody of arrestees based on information received from the arresting officers.
Mandate Automated Identification Prior to Arraignment
During daytime, to save the time involved in traveling to and waiting for automated identification, arresting officers from municipal police department outside the city generally do not use the automated equipment to identify arrestees on the basis of their fingerprints before they are arraigned. Instead the officers rely on less accurate identification procedures that introduce the avoidable risk that arrestees with outstanding warrants or dangerous criminal histories might be mistakenly released from custody. A policy should be established mandating that all arrestees must be electronically identified on the basis of their fingerprints before they can be arraigned.
Improve Daytime Arraignment Procedures
Currently, during daytime, arresting officers from any municipal police department outside the city are required to take arrestees to a designated District Justice Court in or near their community for their preliminary arraignments. Thus, for arresting officers to identify arrestees on the basis of their fingerprints before they are arraigned, they must transport them to either the BCI or the McKeesport RBC, wait there until they are processed, and transport them back to the designated District Justice Court.
To reduce this burden, procedures should be developed that will make arraignments during daytime as convenient for arresting officers as they will be when the Night Court is in session and improved procedures for transferring custody have been adopted. During nighttime, arresting officers transport arrestees to an identification and booking center, transfer custody of the arrestees to personnel there, and return to duty in their communities. The arrestees subsequently are monitored through their preliminary arraignments by the personnel who have accepted their custody. There are several ways in which functionally equivalent procedures could be established for use during daytime, as discussed in Section 3.1.2 of the report.
Improve Operations at the BCI
The BCI currently maintains a manual fingerprinting and card file system as a backup to its automated system, and hires and trains Identification Officers to operate it. The manual system is technologically obsolete, less accurate than the automated system, and costly to operate and maintain. The BCI should eliminate its manual system and rely exclusively on automated identification.
Similarly, the BCI should rely solely on the AFIS operated by the Pennsylvania State Police. As explained in Section 2.7.4, purchasing and operating a separate AFIS at the BCI would involve substantial cost and potential legal liabilities, but would be unlikely to provide a discernible improvement in the timeliness and reliability of criminal identification for the city or the county.
In addition, the Identification Officers employed at the BCI should be replaced with Fingerprint Technicians. Fingerprint Technicians are fully capable of operating the automated equipment, and command lower wages than Identification Officers. Also, the staffing levels and management structure of the BCI should be revised to conform with the fully automated operations. A single Program Supervisor should be sufficient for overseeing the Fingerprint Technicians at the BCI.
To accomplish these changes, the county must renegotiate the terms of its City-County Integrated Identification System Program (CCIISP) contract with the City of Pittsburgh. The renegotiation should thoroughly review all aspects of the current agreement, which has not been materially changed since its adoption in 1978.
Allow Ample Time for Payment of Bail Bonds
Under current policy, arrestees who are arraigned at RBCs and who are not released on their own recognizance must be transported to and held at the County Jail until their bail bonds have been paid. In almost all cases, the bail bonds are paid and the arrestees are released, but they seldom are the people who make the payments. Thus, to avoid unnecessary transportation and processing, the current policy should be replaced with one that holds such arrestees at the RBCs long enough for their relatives, friends, or other delegated people to pay their bail bonds. Similarly, arrestees at the BCI should not be processed into jail until ample time has been allowed for their bonds to be paid.
Modify Staffing at RBCs
If any RBCs are reinstated, their staffing should be changed. The principal tasks performed at RBCs are the same tasks performed by Fingerprint Technicians at the BCI. Because RBCs do not have the same level of physical security that is routinely maintained within the County Jail at the BCI, the staff at a RBC should receive more training related to physical security and response to emergencies than is required for the BCI. They should also receive sufficient certification to accept custody of arrestees from arresting officers based on information received from the officers.
Improve Hours of Operation at RBCs
Ideally, any RBC that is established would be operated continuously: 24 hours per day and seven days per week. If financial limitations dictate that RBCs must be operated less than full-time, the hours of the day when they are closed should be hours when the Night Court is operating and when travel into downtown Pittsburgh is generally uncongested and unrestricted. Accordingly, if RBCs are operated only two shifts per day, those shifts should be the day shift and the evening shift.
Expand Use of Video Conferencing Equipment
Regardless of the decisions that are ultimately reached about RBCs, the county
should expand the use of video conferencing equipment within the criminal
justice system. Currently, video conferencing equipment is used in conducting
preliminary arraignments at the Night Court for arrestees processed at RBCs,
and in applying for and issuing emergency protection from abuse (PFA) orders
for people who request such assistance at RBCs. The equipment could also be
used by police officers in applying for arrest warrants and search warrants, or
by prosecutors or defense attorneys in conversing with the judiciary, with
arrestees, or with each other. Such services could be provided at any RBCs that
are reinstated. Moreover, all services that do not involve the physical
presence of arrestees could be provided at facilities that only have video
conferencing and ancillary telecommunication equipment, and do not take custody
of arrestees. Because those services do not require extra physical security,
such facilities could be established, for example, in municipal police stations
that operate 24 hours per day, and could be staffed by the police officers
normally assigned to those stations. Thus, the services could be provided at
much lower cost than the cost of operating RBCs.
Improve Process Administration and Coordination
The current criminal identification and arraignment process is characterized by poor communication and coordination among the many relatively independent organizations that participate in the process. To realize fully the potential that is offered by the automated identification equipment and other improved technologies that are becoming available for use in the process, it is essential to establish improved methods for communicating among the various program participants, for coordinating decisions so that all pertinent consequences are identified and taken into account before choices are made and implemented, and for administering the routine operation of the processes and making adjustments as appropriate. Developing such methods is an appropriate assignment for the Criminal Justice Policy Board that is being founded in the county.
In addition, the administration of the identification and booking centers should be consolidated. A single county agency should be assigned responsibility for overseeing and supervising the operation of the BCI and all RBCs.
(End of Executive Summary)
This report presents the results of a study of options for the criminal identification and arraignment process in Allegheny County. Automated identification systems using livescan electronic fingerprinting, digital photography, and demographic data entry equipment are capable of rapidly determining the identities and criminal histories of arrestees. Arresting officers in municipal police departments outside the city of Pittsburgh, however, are not always taking advantage of this capability prior to presenting arrestees to District Justices for preliminary arraignments during daytime. Instead, the arresting officers rely on less accurate identification procedures that introduce the avoidable risk that arrestees with outstanding warrants or dangerous criminal histories might be mistakenly released from custody. The study has examined the sources for this and other ineffective behaviors within the current criminal identification and arraignment process, and then has identified and analyzed alternatives that have potential for greatly improving the process.
Accordingly, a description and evaluation of the current process is presented in Section 2.0 below. Then, Section 3.0 considers alternative configurations of the process, including both changes in policies, procedures, and practices and changes in the geographic arrangement of facilities, that are capable of mitigating the main inefficiencies in the process. Conclusions and recommendations are presented in Section 4.0. The models and methods used in the study and tabulations of detailed data are included in appendices.
A large number of relatively independent organizations are involved in the criminal identification and arraignment process in Allegheny County. Three basic types of organizations participate directly in the process. They are: police agencies, identification and booking centers, and the minor judiciary.
The police agencies arrest people, charge them with crimes, and present them to the other two types of organizations for identification and adjudication. The principal police agencies are the 119 municipal police departments in the county, including the Pittsburgh Police Department. There also are several county, state, and private arresting agencies, including the Allegheny County Police, the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP), the Sheriff’s Office, the District Attorney’s Office, Port Authority Transit, college and university police departments, and constables who serve warrants for the court system.
The identification and booking centers determine the identities and the criminal histories of arrestees. There currently are four such centers in the county. The Bureau of Criminal Identification (BCI) in Pittsburgh is the central facility. Three Regional Booking Centers (RBCs) are located in Hampton Township, Penn Hills, and McKeesport.
The minor judiciary administers the initial steps in the criminal justice process, including affidavits of probable cause, criminal complaints, arrest and search warrants, preliminary arraignments, and preliminary hearings. The pertinent agencies within the minor judiciary are the District Justice Courts, the City Court unit of the Pittsburgh Magistrates Court, and the Night Court. The District Justice Courts and the City Court operate during normal daytime and weekday hours. There are 55 District Justice Courts throughout the county. Of those, 16 serve areas totally within the boundaries of Pittsburgh, 38 serve communities outside the city, and one serves an area than spans the city limits. The City Court is staffed with seven magistrates, and operates solely within the city. The Night Court is in session from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM on weekdays, and 24 hours per day on weekends and holidays. It is staffed on a rotating basis by the 55 District Justices and by 12 Senior District Justice Court Judges.
2.2 The
Identification and Booking Centers
The BCI and the RBCs perform largely the same functions within the criminal identification and arraignment process. First, they use livescan fingerprinting to capture digital images of arrestees’ fingerprint ridges electronically, and transmit the images to the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) operated by the PSP. Second, they take digital photographs of arrestees’ faces, scars, marks, and tattoos, and transmit the photographs electronically to the Commonwealth Photo Image Network (CPIN). Third, they record arrestees’ names and demographic information at standard computer keyboards, and transmit that information to the state’s Criminal History Record Information System (CHRIS). When arrestees with criminal histories are processed in this manner, the system identifies them on the basis of their fingerprints within a few minutes, and provides rap sheets summarizing their histories through the Commonwealth Law Enforcement Assistance Network (CLEAN).
Despite the similarity of their basic functions, there are substantial differences between the BCI and the RBCs in terms of their hours of operation, their staffing, and their facilities and equipment. There also are important differences in relation to their involvement in arrestees’ preliminary arraignments.
Under the City-County Integrated Identification System Program (CCIISP), the BCI has provided its services to all law enforcement agencies in the city and the county since 1978. It is funded jointly by the city and the county, and is staffed with personnel employed by the city. It is located within the County Jail and Municipal Courts Building complex in downtown Pittsburgh, and operates continuously: 24 hours per day and seven days per week.
To perform the basic functions described above, the BCI uses three sets of livescan fingerprinting, digital photography, and demographic data entry equipment. Two sets are installed within the County Jail, and are used to identify arrestees before their preliminary arraignments. After their processing at the BCI, the arrestees are taken to the City Court, the Night Court, or the appropriate District Justice Court to be arraigned. The other set of equipment is installed in the Municipal Courts Building and is used to identify various other people. Those people include: juveniles, applicants for security clearances, applicants for certain jobs and permits, and arrestees who have been arraigned and released by District Justice Courts without first being identified on the basis of their fingerprints. In general, the identification of these people is scheduled in advance.
In addition, the BCI maintains a manual fingerprinting and card file system based on the Henry classification method, and hires and trains Identification Officers to operate this backup system. In conjunction with this system, it also has a specialized printer that produces fingerprint cards containing copies of the electronic images captured by the livescan equipment. Finally, the BCI operates and maintains a separate records management system, in which it records additional demographic information about arrestees and detailed information about crimes that cannot be entered into CHRIS.
The BCI operates all three sets of automated equipment during the day shift (from 7:00 AM to 3:00 PM) and the evening shift (from 3:00 PM to 11:00 PM), but only operates the two sets in the County Jail during the night shift (from 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM). Accordingly, it staffs its operations with six people during the day and evening shifts, and five people during the night shift. Three of the people assigned to each shift are Identification Officers, and the others are Fingerprint Technicians, who are trained to operate the automated equipment, but are not qualified to use the Henry classification method. In addition, clerks and light-duty police officers with work-related injuries are used to perform clerical functions such as retrieving and copying records and photographs in response to authorized requests, and collecting associated fees.
In contrast, until recently, the RBCs have only been operated from 3:00 PM to 7:00 AM on weekdays and 24 hours per day on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays. Since March 11, 2002, the McKeesport RBC has expanded its hours of operation to include the day shift on weekdays; it now operates continuously. Each RBC has a set of livescan fingerprinting, digital photography, and demographic data entry equipment. They also have video conferencing equipment that is linked to similar equipment installed at the Night Court in the Municipal Courts Building. Thus, after arrestees have been processed at any RBC, they are taken in front of the video conferencing equipment, where they participate in preliminary arraignments conducted by the District Justice serving at the Night Court. These remote proceedings are viewed concurrently in a split-screen format on the video conferencing equipment at the participating RBC and the Night Court. The video conferencing equipment is also used to enable people to apply for and obtain emergency protection from abuse (PFA) orders at the RBCs, thereby avoiding the difficulties involved in traveling to the Night Court to submit PFA applications.
Each RBC is staffed with two Sheriff’s Deputies during each shift when the center is operating. Sheriff’s Deputies are also used to transport arrestees from the RBCs to the County Jail whenever the arrestees are not released on their own recognizance. Current policy does not allow bail bond to be paid at the RBCs. Rather, it requires that all arrestees for whom bail has been either set or denied in their video arraignments must be transported to and held at the jail until their bonds have been posted.
2.3 Temporal
Differences in Operations
The operation of the current criminal identification and arraignment process during nighttime and on weekends and holidays (referred to hereafter as nighttime) is notably different from its operation during daytime on normal weekdays (referred to hereafter as daytime). Typical nighttime and daytime operations are described in Sections 2.3.1 and 2.3.2 below.
At any time of day, the criminal identification and arraignment process is initiated by the arrest of a person by a law enforcement officer. The arresting officer is then required to prepare an affidavit of probable cause and a criminal complaint for submission to a District Justice or Magistrate. During nighttime, officers can either prepare the documents themselves or relate the pertinent information by telephone or in person to clerks working at the Night Court, who then produce the documents and deliver them to the officers. If the officers transport the arrestees to the BCI, they receive the original documents directly from the clerks; whereas if they transport the arrestees to any of the RBCs, they receive copies that have been transmitted to the RBCs by fax.
Current policy mandates that the officers must next sign the documents and swear to their accuracy, either in person or in a video conference, before the District Justice serving at the Night Court. The arresting officers are not permitted to transfer custody of their arrestees to personnel at the RBCs or the Night Court until they have affirmed their affidavits. How rapidly this task can be accomplished depends upon the availability of the District Justice. If the District Justice is engaged in other activities, the arresting officers must wait until the District Justice becomes available. After the arresting officers have sworn to the accuracy of their affidavits, they transfer custody of their arrestees to personnel at the sites where they have testified and return to duty in their communities.
A survey of municipal police departments conducted as part of this study indicates that the average waiting time at the Night Court and the RBCs is quite variable and can be substantial. Many police departments complain about occasional extremely long waiting times caused by the unavailability of District Justices. Notably, police departments that take large numbers of arrestees to the Night Court generally report average waiting times of 20 minutes or less, while departments that take few arrestees there often report average waiting times of one hour or more. These results might merely indicate that the occasional extremely long waiting times have little effect on the average waiting times of frequent users of the Night Court, but have a large impact on the average waiting times of the infrequent users who happen to experience them. Alternatively, the results might also indicate that at least some frequent users have developed tactics that avoid long waiting times when District Justices are unavailable. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some arresting officers are able to transfer custody of their arrestees to personnel at the Night Court without swearing to the accuracy of their affidavits when District Justices are absent, even though this practice is contrary to current policy. To the extent that this practice is applied, it is more likely to be applied by frequent users than by infrequent users.
While the arresting officers are arranging to transfer custody, the arrestees enter the identification process. The personnel at the RBC or the BCI use the livescan fingerprinting, digital photography, and demographic data entry equipment to determine the identities and criminal histories of the arrestees. The rap sheets printed at the CLEAN terminals are delivered to investigators from the Bail Agency, who then review the available information about the arrestees and develop bail recommendations that they propose to the District Justice. The Bail Agency develops recommendations for all arrestees whose preliminary arraignments are performed at the City Court or the Night Court, including arrestees processed at the RBCs. It does not develop recommendations, however, for arrestees who are arraigned at District Justice Courts.
The arrestees are then brought before the District Justice for their preliminary arraignments. If they are at the Night Court, they appear before the District Justice in person. If they are at RBCs, they appear in video conferences. After the preliminary arraignments have been completed, the clerks at the Night Court forward the documentation for the arrestees to the specific courts where the subsequent preliminary hearings will be conducted. Thus, as appropriate, the documents will be transferred to the City Court or to a particular District Justice Court.
The law mandates that people’s preliminary arraignments should occur within six hours after their arrests. Although this law is not rigorously enforced, it represents a procedural restriction on the criminal identification and arraignment process. In Philadelphia, persistent failure to comply with this requirement provoked a lawsuit that resulted in a consent decree that imposed restrictions on numerous aspects of their process. In particular, the consent decree includes constraints on processing times, medical and psychiatric care, provision of food and water, crowding and sanitary conditions, and access to telephones and legal counsel.
In the preliminary arraignments, informed by the recommendations from the Bail Agency, the District Justice sets bail for the arrestees. Under current policy, however, bail bond cannot be accepted at the RBCs. Rather, current policy dictates that, if arrestees at the RBCs are not released on their own recognizance, they must be transported to and held at the County Jail until their bail bonds have been paid at the Bond Counter located in the Municipal Courts Building.
The identification and arraignment activities that have been performed at the three RBCs since their inception are summarized in Table 1. Detailed compilations of the specific police agencies for which the activities have been conducted at each of the three RBCs are presented in Tables B1, B2, and B3 in Appendix B.
Table 1 indicates that the types and volumes of specific activities that are conducted at the three RBCs are notably different. Almost two-thirds of the people who have been processed at the Hampton RBC involve court-ordered identifications of arrestees who have been arraigned and released by District Justice Courts without first being identified on the basis of their fingerprints, whereas less than 30 percent are arrestees who have been identified on that basis prior to their preliminary arraignments. Also, a comparatively large percentage of the people who have used the Hampton RBC have applied for PFA orders. At the McKeesport RBC, conversely, more than 80 percent of the people are arrestees who have been fingerprinted electronically before being arraigned. The pattern of activities at the Penn Hills RBC is intermediate between those observed at the other two locations.
Most notably, Table 1 reveals that only between 17.8 and 23.4 percent of the arrestees who have been arraigned at the three RBCs have been released on their own recognizance. Data reported in the Annual Report of the Court of Common Pleas of Allegheny County for 1998, 1999, and 2000 indicate, in contrast, that 61.8 percent of the arrestees processed by the Bail Agency in those years have been released without bail. The Bail Agency does not have an explanation for this large disparity, which clearly has major implications in regard to the number of arrestees who are transported to jail from the RBCs.
For the Pittsburgh Police Department, the operation of the criminal identification and arraignment process during daytime is very similar to its operation during nighttime. After arrestees have been processed by the BCI, instead of being taken to the Night Court in the Municipal Courts Building, they are taken to the City Court in the same building for their preliminary arraignments. Thus, except for a change in courtrooms and the substitution of
politically appointed Magistrates for elected District Justices, the operations are essentially identical.
For the other municipal police departments in Allegheny County, however, substantially different situations prevail during daytime and nighttime. Most importantly, during daytime there is no central court like the Night Court to which all people arrested by those departments can be presented for preliminary arraignment. Rather, during that time, preliminary arraignments are conducted for people arrested by those departments at the 39 District Justice Courts that serve communities outside the city. Moreover, a specific District Justice Court is designated for each of those municipal police departments, and the police department is directed to take its arrestees to that court whenever the court is open. Respondents to the survey of police departments report that officers commonly wait with their arrestees for as long as one hour at their designated courts before the District Justices conduct their preliminary arraignments. If the District Justice sets bail for an arrestee in a preliminary arraignment, however, bond can be paid at either that District Justice Court or at the Bond Counter in the Municipal Courts Building. As explained in Section 2.3.1 above, bail is set in these arraignments without any recommendations from the Bail Agency.
Thus, during daytime the judicial proceedings for specific arrestees occur in courts that are in or near the municipalities whose police officers have made arrests. Until March 2002, however, the BCI has been the only facility where the livescan fingerprinting, digital photography, and demographic data entry equipment have been available for use during daytime; and since then only the McKeesport RBC has been opened during that shift to provide an additional option.
Consequently, for arresting officers to identify arrestees on the basis of their fingerprints during daytime, they must transport the arrestees either to the BCI or the McKeesport RBC, and must wait there until the arrestees have been processed. Next, they must transport the arrestees back to the designated District Justice Court for their community for their preliminary arraignments. Then, if the District Justice denies bail to the arrestees or if they are unable to pay their required bonds, the arrestees must be transported to the County Jail. With authorization from the District Justice or the municipal police department, however, the transportation to jail may be performed by a constable.
Because it is very time consuming to transport arrestees to the BCI or the McKeesport RBC, to wait there while they are processed, and to transport them back to the District Justice Court, these tasks are seldom performed. Rather, during daytime, arresting officers almost always attempt to identify and determine the criminal histories of arrestees on the basis of name checks. Specifically, they obtain from the arrestees such information as their names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers. They then use that information to search the automated CLEAN and National Crime Information Center (NCIC) databases for evidence of previous criminal activity. This alternative procedure fails to determine arrestees’ true identities and criminal histories whenever the arrestees have provided erroneous information to the arresting officers without being detected. When this occurs, the decisions made by the District Justices in the corresponding preliminary arraignments will likely also be inaccurate. At a minimum, bails will be set too low. At worst, people with outstanding warrants or with dangerous criminal histories will be mistakenly set free.
When arrestees are identified on the basis of name checks, the District Justices at their preliminary arraignments generally order them to schedule appointments for identification at the BCI or a RBC on the basis of their fingerprints. This is the source of the court-ordered identifications listed in Table 1 and discussed in Section 2.3.1 above.
In general, the data used in analyzing the costs of ongoing programs are historical records of actual expenditures made and resources used. Such data are not available for the criminal identification and arraignment process in Allegheny County, however.
For the BCI, the only historical data that have been provided by the City of Pittsburgh are records of the total expenditures that have been billed to Allegheny County under the CCIISP for specific periods. Those data indicate that the annual total expenses billed under the program have fluctuated from $1,564,144 in 1996 to $1,807,341 in 1997, $1,570,830 in 1998, $1,781,242 in 1999, and $1,539,104 in 2000. The amount billed for the first three quarters of 2001 has totaled $1,065,888. Under the CCIISP agreement, the county is responsible for paying 50 percent of those costs. Thus, between 1996 and 2000, the county’s share of those expenses has ranged from $769,552 and $903,671. No information has been provided about the composition of the costs, however.
Rather, the only available data that contain details about the composition of the costs of operating the CCIISP at the BCI are budget estimates from the Operating Budget of the City of Pittsburgh. Those data provide information about projected or proposed activity levels, but do not necessarily describe the actual activity levels that have subsequently occurred.
The expenditures and associated uses of resources that have been budgeted for the CCIISP by the City of Pittsburgh for 2001 are summarized in Table 2. The table indicates that operation of the BCI is very labor intensive. Including premium pay and fringe benefits, 83.2 percent of the budgeted costs of operating the CCIISP (i.e., $1,480,255 of $1,777,341) are directly or indirectly related to labor. Those costs include expenditures for three levels of management: a Commander, a Police Lieutenant, and two Support Services Shift Supervisors. All costs associated with those personnel have been attributed to the program. It is also notable that more than 25 percent of the cost of operating the program consist of costs attributed to Criminal History Identification. These costs are doubtless largely associated with operating and maintaining the manual fingerprinting and card file system.
According to data from the PSP and the BCI, a total of 43,131 people have been fingerprinted at the BCI during 2001, including 28,047 people who have been fingerprinted by the three livescan machines and an additional 15,084 people who have been fingerprinted
manually. Thus, the average budgetary cost per person fingerprinted at the BCI during 2001 was $41.21.
There are no historical data documenting the actual costs incurred in operating the RBCs. Moreover, the budgets that have been provided to the Department of Budget and Finance by the Sheriff’s Office have not described the level and composition of staffing that has actually been implemented for the RBCs. As a result, those budgets cannot be used directly as estimates of the costs of operating the established configuration of RBCs. Instead, data contained in those budgets have been used to produce a set of operating budgets for the configuration of RBCs that has actually been operated during 2001.
In particular, Table 3 presents the projected staffing for operating a RBC, the projected staffing for transporting arrestees from the RBCs to the County Jail and to Shuman Center, and the observed staffing for supervising those activities. The table describes the hours of operation of each activity, the levels of personnel involved (Sheriff’s Deputy Level 1, Level 2, or Lieutenant), the associated hourly wage rates, and the corresponding total annual salaries.
Table 4 then contains the estimated budgetary costs of operating the RBCs in Hampton Township and Penn Hills throughout the year, operating the RBC in McKeesport from mid-July through the end of the year, transporting arrestees throughout the year, and supervising all of those activities throughout the year. Similar to the BCI, the operation of the RBCs is very labor intensive. Total labor costs represent 85.9 percent of the estimated total costs (i.e., $1,038,292 of $1,208,523) of operating the RBCs.
The estimates in Table 4 are based on data and associated assumptions developed by the Sheriff’s Office. Those assumptions include, most notably, that vehicles travel 1,728 miles per week (or, equivalently, 89,856 miles during the year) transporting arrestees from the RBCs to the County Jail and Shuman Center. During 2001, a total of 1,179 arrestees have been transported from the RBCs, including 1,173 who have been transported to the jail and six who have been transported to Shuman Center. Thus, the assumed total travel corresponds to an average distance of 76.2 miles per arrestee. Further, the 1,179 arrestees transported correspond to 3.2 arrestees per day or 1.4 arrestees per shift (including weekends and holidays), on average. Thus, contrary to the staffing projected in Table 3, transporting arrestees does not represent a full-time activity for two Sheriff’s Deputies, and the transportation costs that have been budgeted for the RBCs have been greatly overestimated.
According to the PSP, 2,586 people in total have been fingerprinted at the three RBCs during 2001. Thus, the average budgetary cost per person fingerprinted at the RBCs during that year has been $467.33. Even if the transportation costs were assumed to be zero, the average cost would still be $333.69. It can therefore be confidently concluded that the average cost of fingerprinting people at the RBCs during 2001 has been much higher than the average cost at the BCI. Because the cost estimates are uniformly based on budgetary projections rather than historical observations, however, the exact difference between those average costs cannot be reliably determined.
A fee of $75 has been imposed by the Court of Common Pleas on all arrestees who are processed at a RBC and are ultimately convicted of the crimes with which they have been charged. The fee, however, is only one of the many charges that the court generally imposes on people who are convicted of crimes. Each of those charges has been assigned a priority for payment from the funds remitted by the arrestee. Among the various charges that might be imposed as court costs, the priority assigned to the fee imposed on behalf of the RBCs is in the top ten. Nevertheless, many other charges must be fully reimbursed by the convicted arrestee before any funds are paid to the criminal identification and arraignment program. As a result, to date, few if any payments have been made to the program from this source. Moreover, even if the priority assigned to this fee were increased, there would be no increase in the total revenues received by the county. Rather, the only effect would be a slight redistribution of funds among the programs that receive reimbursements out of remitted court costs.
A similar but somewhat higher fee has been imposed in Cumberland County. Specifically, a fee of $200 is imposed on all arrestees who are convicted of a felony or a misdemeanor. To date, it has been applied to roughly 3,000 people per year, and payments have been received from approximately 37 percent of the people to whom it has been applied. The priority for reimbursement that has been assigned to the RBC program, however, is among the lowest in the county. Thus, the experience of the program in Cumberland County with this potential source of revenue has been similar to the experience in Allegheny County.
It is also important to note that, on March 13, 2002, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled against the imposition of fees against defendants in criminal proceedings for the use of advanced communication technology. If this ruling is interpreted as a relevant precedent in relation to the fee imposed on behalf of the RBCs, that fee might be prohibited also.
Finally, some revenues associated with criminal identification are collected by the BCI. In particular, according to the 2001 Operating Budget of the City of Pittsburgh, in 1999 $33,604 was collected from charges for identification records and $186,581 was collected from charges for police records. The city’s Department of Public Safety acknowledges that both sets of charges are collected by clerks in the Police Bureau’s record room, but contends that only the charges for identification records are attributable to the CCIISP. The city further claims that, after the costs of the clerks who collect the fees are taken into account, the net revenues from those charges were less than $25,000. The city also notes that the original CCIISP agreement does not specify how those funds should be taken into account in the sharing of BCI costs between the city and the county.
According to the FBI and the PSP there are no current plans to physically link JNET directly to any federal databases. CLEAN is used by Pennsylvania’s criminal justice agencies to access state criminal history information from the PSP’s repository, driver and motor vehicle information, protection from abuse orders, and other files. CLEAN is also the sole channel that the PSP uses to deliver information from the FBI’s NCIC to requesting agencies. It should be noted that the FBI is a JNET user. Federal agencies currently use state systems, such as JNET, in their investigations.
JNET provides virtual access to CLEAN. Using JNET, authorized users can access criminal history information, arrest data, protection from abuse information, and ‘hot’ files from CLEAN. JNET can also provide photo arrays from CPIN. Furthermore, JNET provides access to information from all participating agencies through a single user interface. In addition to select local police departments, current JNET participants include:
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JNET, therefore, can make the arraignment structure more efficient (and possibly more effective) through its information retrieval and verification capabilities. By providing a single interface by which information can be requested, the user should receive all the relevant, available information needed to make a decision. As referenced above, criminal histories, some NCIC information, and mug shots are available through JNET. In addition to mug shots, inmate, parolee, driver’s license photos, and photo line-ups are accessible to authorized users.
Booking centers using livescan devices automatically send fingerprints to the PSP and data to the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts (AOPC). If there is a match between the detainee’s fingerprints and a fingerprint on file, the PSP returns the state identification number (SID) and the criminal history of the individual. The AOPC returns the offender tracking number (OTN) and history. If there is no match, the PSP issues a new SID. The PSP publishes the arrest information to JNET and notifies the AOPC.
If the booking center is not a JNET agency, the information is returned via CLEAN. If the booking center is a JNET agency, then the information is returned via JNET. Furthermore, JNET automatically contacts other criminal justice agencies electronically for information matching the SID or OTN. Therefore, more information is available, more quickly from a larger number of sources without the booking center personnel making specific requests for the information.
In addition to security issues, addressed in documentation referenced below, JNET requires no specialized hardware or software and runs in an Internet browser. JNET is written in JAVA and JAVA applications must be downloaded from servers to the client’s machines to be executed. After the applets are downloaded, performance is not a problem. JNET requires ample bandwidth. Thus, a minimum bandwidth of a 128k is recommended.
Although livescan terminals only provide limited information through CLEAN, all magistrates in the state of Pennsylvania have JNET terminals in their offices. Therefore, JNET is already part of the arraignment process and can be used to access information on the detainee assuming the individual has been properly identified.
The JNET County Deployment Checklist outlines policy, administrative, and technical issues that must be addressed for a county to gain access to and use JNET. This document can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.pajnet.state.pa.us/jnet/site/. The JNET County Deployment Checklist is a 41-step checklist with links to supporting documentation and forms to be completed by county personnel. The policy related steps involve securing political and executive support for the initiative. Furthermore, participant roles and responsibilities are defined. Administrative steps are also outlined. Administrative issues include legal compliance and control. The forms and agreements that must be completed are provided. The technical steps include verifying that minimum hardware and software requirements are met. Furthermore, a complete infrastructure assessment must be performed. This includes telecommunication, local area network and wide area network (LAN/WAN), desktop, and software assessments. It should be noted that data security is a significant technical issue.
The JNET County Coordinator can be contacted by phone at (717) 705-0760 or by email at JNET@state.pa.us.
2.7 Inefficient
Aspects of the Current Process
Several policies, procedures, and practices that have been established within the current criminal identification and arraignment process greatly reduce the efficiency or increase the cost of the process. The sources of the most important inefficiencies and their practical consequences are discussed in Sections 2.7.1 through 2.7.8 below.
2.7.1 Swearing
to the Accuracy of Affidavits of Probable Cause
Current policy in Allegheny County mandates that, before arresting officers may transfer custody of their arrestees to personnel at the RBCs, the BCI, or the Night Court, the officers must swear to the accuracy of their affidavits of probable cause before a District Justice, either in person or in a video conference. Because District Justices often are engaged in other activities when police officers arrive with their arrestees, the officers frequently have to wait until the District Justices become available before they are able to affirm their affidavits, transfer custody of their arrestees, and return to duty in their communities.
Respondents to the survey of municipal police departments have commonly asserted that these waiting times have, on some occasions, been extensive for their officers. The waiting times are totally unproductive for the arresting officers, and sometimes impose overtime costs on their police departments.
More importantly, the waiting times are readily avoidable. Many political jurisdictions throughout the state have eliminated unnecessary waiting times through the simple expedient of allowing suitably certified personnel at their courts or booking centers to accept custody of arrestees from arresting officers on the basis of information received from the officers. Specifically, the certified personnel receive from the arresting officers signed affidavits of probable cause and criminal complaints, and present those documents to the District Justices for their review when the District Justices become accessible. The District Justices then review and sign the documents at their convenience. In Cumberland County, District Justices indicate that they have followed this procedure by writing the word "reviewed" in parentheses after their signatures.
2.7.2 Conducting
Preliminary Arraignments at Local District Justice Courts
Currently, during daytime, arresting officers from any municipal police department outside the city are required to take arrestees to a designated District Justice Court in or near their community for their preliminary arraignments. This requirement assures that all judicial proceedings administered by the minor judiciary in relation to a particular daytime arrest will be conducted in the same court. The justification offered for this requirement is that it averts the need to transfer documentation about the proceedings between different District Justice Courts.
As explained in Section 2.3.2, however, the requirement also has the perilous effect of discouraging police officers from taking advantage of the automated identification equipment that is available in the county to identify arrestees on the basis of their fingerprints before they are arraigned. Instead, during daytime, arresting officers have relied primarily on name checks as the basis for identifying and determining the criminal histories of arrestees. Whenever arrestees furnish incorrect names and demographic data, this procedure fails to determine their actual identities and criminal histories.
Thus, reliance on this outmoded and inferior identification procedure introduces the avoidable risk that arrestees with outstanding warrants or dangerous criminal histories will be mistakenly released from custody. Dire consequences have resulted from such mistakes on at least two recent occasions elsewhere in Pennsylvania. Early this year in Delaware County, a police officer died of a gunshot wound to the face inflicted by a man with an extensive history of violent crimes who had been released from custody in 1998 without being identified on the basis of his fingerprints. In Cumberland County, a police officer was murdered under similar circumstances several years ago.
Estimates of the extent to which Allegheny County has been exposed to such risks in 2001 are presented in Table 5. The data sets used to develop the values in the table have been obtained from several independent sources, as documented in the footnotes to the table. The data for individual rows in the table have been accumulated, adjusted for missing observations, and projected as necessary to produce aggregate values or estimates for 2001. Appropriate differences among those numbers have then been calculated to produce the remaining values in the table.
In particular, since all criminal cases processed in District Justice Courts [A] must have been arraigned somewhere in the county court system, the number of people arraigned in those courts [D] has been estimated by subtracting the numbers arraigned in the Night Court [B] and in the RBCs [C] from the total number of cases processed. Then, recognizing that almost all of the people fingerprinted by livescan machines in the county [E] have also been arraigned, and that everyone arraigned in the Night Court [B] and the RBCs [C] has also been fingerprinted by livescan machines, the number of people arraigned in District Justice Courts and fingerprinted by livescan machines [F] and the number arraigned in those courts but never fingerprinted by livescan machines [G] have been estimated by subtraction. Finally, subtracting the number of people who did not appear for scheduled interviews [J] from the estimated number never fingerprinted [G] yields a lower bound estimate of the number of people arraigned without prior fingerprint identification who did not subsequently schedule that fingerprinting [K].
The estimates in Table 5 indicate that, in 2001, 49.4 percent of the arrestees processed in District Justice Courts outside of the city or, equivalently, 80.8 percent of the people arraigned in those courts were subsequently scheduled for fingerprinting. Further, at least an additional 6.5 percent of the arrestees processed, or 10.6 percent of the people arraigned, in those courts were never scheduled for fingerprinting. Thus, in total, at least 55.9 percent of the arrestees processed, or 91.4 percent of the people arraigned, in District Justice Courts outside the city in 2001 were not fingerprinted by livescan machines before their preliminary arraignments. Also, 2,500 of the 8,400 people (29.8 percent) scheduled for fingerprinting after their preliminary arraignments did not appear at the scheduled times.
These estimates clearly indicate that the county’s current process for criminal identification and arraignment during daytime involves high risks of mistakenly releasing arrestees with outstanding warrants or dangerous criminal histories from custody. The process should therefore be changed to assure that all arrestees throughout the county will be identified on the basis of their fingerprints prior to their preliminary arraignments. In addition, the changes that are adopted should be expressly designed to minimize the amount of time that arresting officers are involved in the identification and arraignment activities that are performed at identification and booking centers and in the courts. To the degree possible, the time commitment of arresting officers should be restricted to travel time, and the travel time should be limited, as feasible, within budgetary constraints. Specific suggestions about possible forms for such changes are presented in Section 3.0 below.
2.7.3 Current
Identification Procedures at the BCI
The data that the BCI has compiled on its identification activities indicate that, in total, 43,131 people have been identified there during 2001. In marked contrast, data furnished by the PSP indicate that only 28,047 sets of fingerprint images have been submitted to its AFIS during that year from the three livescan machines installed at the BCI. In combination, these data indicate that 15,084 sets of fingerprints, or almost 35 percent of the fingerprints collected at the BCI in that year, have been taken manually.
Conversations with personnel at the BCI have disclosed that those fingerprints have been taken primarily to confirm the identities of people whose fingerprint cards are already on file in the manual backup system maintained by the BCI. Such people include, most notably, people for whom warrants have been issued because they have failed to appear for various judicial proceedings. Most of those people were fingerprinted when they were originally arrested, and their fingerprints are therefore on file at the BCI and catalogued under their names.
Because the data compiled by the BCI do not include separate tabulations for fingerprints captured electronically and fingerprints taken manually, it is not feasible to verify directly this possible reconciliation of the observed differences between the BCI data and the AFIS data. The general plausibility of the proposed reconciliation is demonstrated, however, by data presented in the 2000 Caseload Statistics of the Unified Judicial System of Pennsylvania compiled by the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts. Those data indicate that, in 2000, a total of 24,990 arrest warrants were issued and 12,163 arrest warrants were served in Allegheny County. These values for 2000 are broadly equivalent to the estimated number of fingerprints taken manually at the BCI during 2001.
The personnel at the BCI contend that their manual confirmation of such arrestees’ identities takes less time than automated confirmation using AFIS. This contention is specious, however. Although the elapsed time for manual confirmation may be shorter than the elapsed time for automated confirmation, the time that BCI personnel are actively involved in manual confirmation is appreciably longer than the time that they are actively involved in automated confirmation. The time required to capture fingerprint images is roughly the same using either method. The time involved in retrieving and matching fingerprint records manually represents effort actively exerted by Identification Officers, however. Conversely, the time involved in matching fingerprint records electronically does not entail any active effort by any BCI personnel. They merely wait until the system delivers its results. In addition, manual confirmation requires ongoing maintenance of the manual fingerprinting and card file system and periodic training of Identification Officers, while automated confirmation requires no incremental maintenance or training.
The cost of operating the BCI could therefore be greatly reduced by discontinuing manual identification activities, eliminating the manual fingerprinting and card file system, and relying exclusively on automated identification using its existing livescan fingerprinting, digital photography, and demographic data entry equipment. Moreover, the quality of the identification services provided by the BCI should also increase, because automated identification is much more accurate than manual identification.
2.7.4 Proposed
Identification Facilities at the BCI
The BCI is considering replacing its manual fingerprinting and card file system with a local AFIS. The management of the BCI acknowledges that automated identification is considerably more accurate than manual identification, and hence is willing to dispose of its manual system so long as it can replace it with a new backup system.
The main reason that the BCI advances for wanting to acquire its own AFIS is its perception that the AFIS operated by the PSP experiences unacceptably large amounts of downtime. This perception is historically accurate in relation to the early performance of the PSP’s original AFIS. Since then, the operators of the system have become more experienced, the operating procedures and practices have been improved, and the original system has been replaced and upgraded.
As a result, during the period from January 2001 through April 2002, the system has been down only two hours per month for scheduled maintenance. This maintenance is performed when use of the system is typically lowest. During that time, the existing data can be searched, but new data cannot be entered. In addition, there were four occasions when emergency maintenance and unscheduled upgrades were performed. Those events lasted between three and 17 hours, and totaled 33 hours. Thus, during the entire 16 months, the AFIS was down for scheduled or emergency maintenance a total of 65 hours out of the 11,496 hours in the period, and hence was operational 99.7 percent of the time during that period. Finally, the system was down for 81 hours in January 2001, when the second phase of the new system was installed. Even if this major system expansion is taken into account, the AFIS has been operational 99.1 percent of the time since January 2001. Thus, recent experience clearly indicates that the AFIS currently operated by the PSP is highly reliable.
In addition, the reported experiences of other police agencies that have operated their own AFISs indicate that acquiring a separate AFIS for the BCI would involve much higher maintenance costs and much more personnel time devoted to system operation than BCI management currently anticipates. More importantly, operating a separate AFIS would expose the city and the county to avoidable legal liabilities that might result from identifying a criminal suspect on the basis of expunged records that BCI personnel erroneously failed to delete from its database. If, instead, the BCI relies exclusively on the AFIS operated by the PSP, that potential liability is transferred solely to the PSP.
Thus, in summary, purchasing and operating a separate AFIS at the BCI would involve substantial cost and potential legal liabilities, but would be unlikely to provide a discernible improvement in the timeliness and reliability of criminal identification for the city or the county.
2.7.5 Transportation
Procedures at the RBCs
Preliminary arraignments for arrestees who are taken to RBCs are conducted in video conferences with District Justices serving at the Night Court. In those proceedings, with advice from the Bail Agency, the District Justice determines the bail assessed on each arrestee. Under current policy, however, bail bond cannot be paid to the personnel at the RBCs. More importantly, current policy also mandates that arrestees who are not released on their own recognizance must be transported to and held at the County Jail until their bail bonds have been paid at the Bond Counter in the Municipal Courts Building.
This policy would facilitate the posting of bonds if arrestees commonly were able to pay their bail bonds with funds that they had in their possession when they were arrested. Personnel from the Bond Counter report, however, that only a tiny fraction of arrestees are able to make such payments. Rather, in general, someone else must travel to the Bond Counter to pay the bail bond for the arrestee. Moreover, arrestees usually are successful in arranging for others to pay their bonds for them. Ultimately, only a small fraction of arrestees are confined in jail because they have been unable to pay their bail bonds.
Thus, in brief, arrestees generally are released after their bail bonds have been paid, but they seldom are the people who make the payments. Consequently, in almost all cases, transporting arrestees from the RBCs to the jail serves no constructive purpose. Rather, it generally imposes unnecessary and avoidable burdens on the arrestees, the people who pay their bonds, and the staff at the County Jail.
These burdens are incurred because all arrestees who are transported from the RBCs to the jail are processed into the jail, and cannot be released from the jail until their processing has been completed, regardless of how promptly their bail bonds are paid for them. As a result, before they are released, such arrestees often spend more than six hours in custody after their preliminary arraignments have been completed. Similarly, the people who have actually posted the bonds commonly spend several hours in the Municipal Courts Building after they have made the payments, awaiting the release of the people whose bonds they have paid. Further, processing the arrestees into the jail entails additional work efforts by personnel at the jail and, at the margin, exacerbates the problem of jail overcrowding.
Moreover, all of these problems are amplified by the small percentage of the arrestees arraigned through the RBCs who are released on their own recognizance. As noted in Section 2.3.1 above, only 21.8 percent of those arrestees have been released on that basis, whereas 61.8 percent of all arrestees processed by the Bail Agency have been treated in that fashion. Finally, fuel and effort are wasted by the Sheriff’s Deputies who perform the excessive transportation.
The majority of the personnel who perform criminal identification activities at the BCI are Identification Officers who operate the manual fingerprinting and card file system that is based on the Henry classification method. On a typical day, nine of the 17 people who perform such activities at the BCI are Identification Officers. As explained in Section 2.7.3 above, the manual system is much less accurate and reliable than the automated identification system that integrates livescan fingerprinting, digital photography, and demographic data entry equipment. Indeed, the manual system is so antiquated and inferior that the FBI no longer provides training on the Henry classification method to local police agencies. As a result, to sustain its staff of Identification Officers, the BCI has been obliged to develop its own training program on the Henry method and on its manual card file system.
In contrast, the automated system can be operated by Fingerprint Technicians. Thus, the more accurate and more reliable technology requires personnel with less refined skills, and hence involves less costly and less difficult training, than does the obsolete technology.
Moreover, in addition to requiring more expensive training, Identification Officers are paid higher wages than Fingerprint Technicians. At present, the basic annual income of an Identification Officer is $32,000 per year including benefits. Including overtime, the income rises into the range from $44,000 to $55,000 on average, and to $70,000 at the maximum. In comparison, the Fingerprint Technicians currently working at the BCI are all part-time employees with no benefits and no eligibility for overtime. They are paid between $10 and $11 per hour, which would involve total payments in the range from $24,000 to $25,000 for the average number of hours worked annually by an Identification Officer, including overtime.
Accordingly, in conjunction with the elimination of the manual fingerprinting and card file system at the BCI, the Identification Officers employed at the BCI should be replaced with Fingerprint Technicians. In addition, since the manual system requires training and labor-intensive file management that is not required by the automated system, the total number of full-time equivalent employees at the BCI should also be suitably reduced. These changes should appreciably reduce the labor costs involved in operating the BCI. In fact, the savings should be substantial even if it is decided that some or all of the Fingerprint Technicians employed at the BCI should be hired on a full-time basis, with benefits and eligibility for overtime.
Presently, each RBC is staffed with two Sheriff’s Deputies during each shift when the center is open. To date, the deputies who have worked at the RBCs have been either Level 1 or Level 2 personnel, who are paid annual base salaries of $24,900.30 and $30,381.10, respectively. Staffing the RBCs with personnel at these levels has been possible because a group of new deputies was hired expressly to operate the centers. To continue staffing the RBCs with personnel who have such low experience levels, the Sheriff’s Office would need to achieve a sufficient combination of growth and attrition that it could maintain a suitable annual volume of new hires. Unless such balance is attained, normal career progression among the Sheriff’s deputies will cause the average salaries of personnel at the RBCs to rise. The annual base salaries for Levels 3, 4, and 5 personnel are $32,101.68, $43,995.95, and $44,898.97. Thus, it appears likely that, if the RBCs continue to be staffed with Sheriff’s Deputies, the labor costs involved in operating the centers will rise appreciably over time.
More importantly, the skills required to perform the identification activities conducted at the RBCs are much more limited than the skills in which the Sheriff’s Deputies are trained. The training provided to Sheriff’s Deputies qualifies them for Act 120 certification. It therefore includes training in such topics as: the state’s criminal law, Rules of Criminal Procedure, and Vehicle Code; firearms; Visual Average Speed Computer and Recorder (VASCAR); investigative techniques; self-defense; first aid; and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Only the final three topics in the list are relevant to tasks that might be performed at the RBCs.
The principal tasks performed at the RBCs are the same tasks performed by the Fingerprint Technicians at the BCI. The jobs are not identical, however. Although all of the RBCs are located in municipal police stations, they do not have the same level of physical security that is routinely maintained within the County Jail at the BCI. The staff at the RBCs should therefore receive more training related to physical security and response to emergencies than is required by the Fingerprint Technicians at the BCI. In addition, effective procedures should be established for summoning assistance, when needed, from local police officers in the host police station or on patrol in the host community, and for controlling unruly prisoners while awaiting that assistance.
The accumulated experience of the RBCs in Cumberland County clearly demonstrates that thorough training related to those topics and to the operation of the automated identification equipment are sufficient preparation for operating the equipment and controlling the arrestees at the facilities. In addition, the potential risks to physical security dictate that RBCs should be staffed with at least two fully trained people whenever they are open. It is not necessary, however, for the personnel to earn Act 120 certification. Cumberland County has determined, on the basis of Federal judicial precedent, that Act 120 certification is not even required for personnel to accept custody of arrestees from arresting officers on the basis of information received from the officers. Personnel can be suitably trained, sworn, and certified to perform that function without obtaining full Act 120 certification.
2.7.8 Potential
Legal Liabilities
Several procedures and practices that are frequently applied in Allegheny County’s criminal identification and arraignment process expose the county to unnecessarily high potential for legal liability. Most importantly, the county might be liable for crimes, including especially violent crimes, that are committed by arrestees who have not been identified on the basis of their fingerprints prior to their preliminary arraignments. Such liability might be established if those arrestees had outstanding warrants or dangerous criminal histories that would have been discovered if they had been identified using the automated equipment that is routinely available for use at the BCI and the RBCs.
Second, the county might be liable for damages caused by arrestees who have escaped from custody while being detained within the process. The risk of escape is particularly high while arrestees are being transported. This potential liability would therefore be increased by procedures that increase the frequency or duration of transportation of arrestees. For example, current policy dictates that, if arrestees at the RBCs are not released on their own recognizance in their preliminary arraignments, they must be transported to and held at the County Jail until their bail bonds have been paid at the Bond Counter in the Municipal Courts Building. The risk of escape would be reduced if, as discussed in Section 2.7.5 above, such arrestees were detained at the RBCs for a reasonable amount of time while awaiting the payment of their bail bonds by relatives, friends, or other delegated people.
Third, the county might be liable for false arrests of people other than the individuals actually sought under arrest warrants. The potential for such liability is particularly great when warrants are issued for arrestees who have not been identified on the basis of their fingerprints before their preliminary arraignments. The absence of fingerprint images for such arrestees in the PSP’s AFIS database makes it more difficult for other people who have been mistakenly arrested under the warrants to demonstrate that they are not the people who are actually being sought. The detention of people who would have been released if such fingerprint images had been taken creates potential liability for the county.
Finally, the county might be liable for medical emergencies that befall arrestees while they are wards of the county at the RBCs or at the County Jail. This potential liability is needlessly increased by the practice of processing into the jail all arrestees who are transported from the RBCs to the jail, regardless of how promptly their bail bonds are paid for them.
3.0 Alternative
Configurations
The description and evaluation of Allegheny County’s current criminal identification and arraignment process, summarized in Section 2.0 above, has uncovered several aspects of the process that are inefficient. These inefficiencies either increase the costs of operating the process, increase the potential legal liabilities associated with the process, or increase the amounts of time that arresting officers are involved in the process.
Mitigation or elimination of the inefficiencies will require changes in specific policies, procedures, and practices in the current process. Alternative policies, procedures, or practices that will markedly improve the process are presented and discussed in Section 3.1 below.
In addition, the time expended by arresting officers can be reduced by suitably changing the spatial configuration of the process. Alternative geographic arrangements of RBCs and their implications for officers’ travel time are presented and evaluated in Section 3.2.
3.1 Procedural
and Administrative Alternatives
Seven specific alternatives to policies, procedures, and practices used in the current identification and arraignment process are strongly recommended. They are presented in Sections 3.1.1 through 3.1.7 below.
3.1.1 Transfer
of Custody Based on Information Received
Current policy in Allegheny County mandates that, before arresting officers may transfer custody of their arrestees to other personnel within the identification and arraignment process, they must swear to the accuracy of their affidavits of probable cause before a District Justice, either in person or in a video conference. This policy often causes officers to wait for extended periods before they are able to affirm their affidavits, transfer custody of their arrestees, and return to duty in their communities. These unnecessary and unproductive waiting times should be eliminated by replacing the current policy with one that allows suitably certified personnel at the RBCs, the BCI, or the Night Court to accept custody of arrestees from arresting officers upon receiving signed affidavits of probable cause and criminal complaints from the officers.
3.1.2 Improve
Daytime Arraignment Procedures
Currently, during daytime, arresting officers from any municipal police department outside the city are required to take arrestees to a designated District Justice Court in or near their community for their preliminary arraignments. This requirement discourages police officers from identifying arrestees on the basis of their fingerprints before they are arraigned. Instead, arresting officers rely on less accurate identification procedures that introduce the avoidable risk that arrestees with outstanding warrants or dangerous criminal histories might be mistakenly released from custody.
Procedures should be established that eliminate this perilous behavior. Most importantly, to assure that electronic identification on the basis of fingerprints is uniformly performed prior to preliminary arraignments, a policy should be established mandating that arrestees must be identified on that basis before they can be arraigned.
Then, to reduce the burden that this mandate would otherwise impose on municipal police departments, procedures should be developed that will make arraignments during daytime as convenient for arresting officers as they will be when the Night Court is in session and improved procedures for transferring custody have been adopted. During nighttime, arresting officers transport arrestees to the BCI or one of the RBCs, transfer custody of the arrestees to personnel there, and return to duty in their communities. The arrestees subsequently participate in preliminary arraignments conducted by District Justices, either in person or in video conferences. They are monitored through their preliminary arraignments by the personnel who have accepted their custody. There are several ways in which functionally equivalent procedures could be established for use during daytime.
First, as advocated by the District Attorney’s Office in relation to the McKeesport RBC, a District Justice Court could be collocated with each RBC and the BCI and staffed with nearby District Justices on a rotating basis. This alternative is similar to the current arrangement at the Night Court.
Second, the Night Court could be operated during daytime. This would permit the video conferencing equipment that is already installed at the Night Court to be used for conducting video arraignments of arrestees held at any of the RBCs during the day. The paperwork associated with the arraignments could then be distributed to the appropriate District Justice Courts by the clerks at the Night Court in the same way that they now distribute the paperwork generated during nighttime.
Third, video conferencing equipment could be installed in all District Justice Courts outside the city. Arrestees held at the BCI or at any RBC could then be arraigned in video conferences before the specific District Justices who will later conduct their preliminary hearings. Such an arrangement is currently used in Montgomery County, where video conferencing equipment has been installed in all 30 District Justice Courts throughout the county. This alternative would be quite expensive, however, because it would entail the purchase and operation of 39 additional sets of video conferencing equipment.
Finally, video conferencing equipment could be installed in selected District Justice Courts (e.g., in different geographic areas around the county). Arrangements would then need to be established for staffing those facilities (e.g., on a rotating basis among the District Justices in the surrounding areas), and for distributing the associated paperwork to the appropriate District Justice Courts (e.g., through the clerks at the Night Court).
With any of these options, the preliminary arraignments could, if preferred, be conducted on a predetermined schedule (e.g., every several hours). For example, in Cumberland County, video arraignments are conducted by District Justices, on a rotating basis, at 6:00 AM, 2:00 PM, and 10:00 PM daily. Other communities are experimenting with shorter intervals.
In comparison with the current procedures, adoption of any of these options would greatly reduce the amount of time that arresting officers would have to expend during daytime to identify arrestees on the basis of their fingerprints prior to their preliminary arraignments. In combination with the proposed mandate that such identification must be uniformly performed, these policy changes should virtually eliminate the risk that arrestees with outstanding warrants or dangerous criminal histories might be mistakenly released from custody in their preliminary arraignments.
3.1.3 Allow
Ample Time for Payment of Bond Prior to Transportation to Jail
Under current policy, arrestees who are arraigned at RBCs and who are not released on their own recognizance must be transported to and held at the County Jail until their bail bonds have been paid at the Bond Counter in the Municipal Courts Building. As explained in Section 2.7.5 above, in almost all cases this policy serves no constructive purpose. Rather, it generally imposes unnecessary and avoidable burdens on the arrestees, the people who pay their bonds, and the staff at the County Jail. To minimize those burdens, the current policy should be replaced with one that holds such arrestees at the RBCs long enough for their relatives, friends, or other delegated people to pay their bail bonds. Similarly, arrestees taken to the BCI should not be processed into jail until ample time has been allowed for their bonds to be paid.
In Philadelphia, arrestees are detained for as long as six hours at regional centers before they are transported to jail for non-payment of their bonds. Under that policy, only one percent of arrestees has been transported to jail for that reason. Adoption of a similar policy in Allegheny County would likely provide comparable reductions in transportation volumes, costs, and potential legal liabilities.
3.1.4 Operational
Changes at the BCI
As explained previously, the BCI currently maintains a manual fingerprinting and card file system as a backup to its automated system, and hires and trains Identification Officers to operate it. The manual system is technologically obsolete. It is much less accurate than the automated system, and is more costly to operate and maintain. It also needlessly exposes the county and the city to potential legal liabilities. It is therefore recommended that the BCI should discontinue its manual identification activities, eliminate its manual system, and rely exclusively on automated identification using its existing livescan fingerprinting, digital photography, and demographic data entry equipment.
Similarly, the BCI should discontinue its deliberations about acquiring its own AFIS. Purchasing and operating a separate AFIS at the BCI would involve substantial cost and potential legal liabilities, but would be unlikely to provide a discernible improvement in the timeliness and reliability of criminal identification for the city or the county.
Moreover, in conjunction with the elimination of the manual system, the Identification Officers employed at the BCI should be replaced with Fingerprint Technicians. Fingerprint Technicians are fully capable of operating the automated equipment, and command lower wages than Identification Officers. Also, since the manual system requires training and labor-intensive file management that is not required by the automated system, this substitution should appreciably reduce the labor costs involved in operating the BCI.
Finally, the management structure of the BCI should be revised to conform with the fully automated operations. In particular, as explained in Section 3.2.1 below, a single Program Supervisor should be sufficient for overseeing the Fingerprint Technicians at the BCI.
To accomplish these changes, the county must renegotiate the terms of its CCIISP contract with the City of Pittsburgh. The renegotiation should thoroughly review all aspects of the current agreement, which has not been materially changed since its adoption in 1978.
The terms for sharing costs between the city and the county, in particular,
should be addressed. Under the existing contract, city taxpayers bear all of
the cost of identifying city arrestees through their city taxes, and they bear
a portion of the cost of identifying non-city arrestees through their county
taxes. In contrast, at present no taxpayers in any other municipality bear any
portion of the costs of identifying any arrestees through their municipal
taxes. This inequity should be reconciled.
3.1.5 Staffing
Changes at the RBCs
As explained in Section 2.7.7, the Sheriff’s Deputies who are currently employed have received training that is much more extensive than the skills required for the activities conducted at the RBCs. The principal tasks performed at the RBCs are the same tasks performed by the Fingerprint Technicians at the BCI. The staff assigned to the RBCs should therefore be Fingerprint Technicians who have received additional training related to physical security and response to emergencies, and sufficient certification to accept custody of arrestees from arresting officers based on information received from the officers. Staffing the RBCs with such specialized personnel will assure that the labor costs of the RBCs will not rise as rapidly as they probably would as a result of normal career progression among Sheriff’s Deputies, as discussed in Section 2.7.7.
3.1.6 Improve
Hours of Operation
Ideally, any RBC that is established would be operated continuously: 24 hours per day and seven days per week. Financial limitations, however, might compel choosing between the number of RBCs that are established and the numbers of hours that those RBCs are operated.
If RBCs are operated less than full-time, the hours of the day when they are closed should be hours when the Night Court is operating and when travel into downtown Pittsburgh is generally uncongested and unrestricted. Accordingly, if RBCs are operated only two shifts per day, those shifts should be the day shift and the evening shift. Those shifts include the morning and evening rush hours, when travel time to and from the BCI is longest and most unpredictable.
3.1.7 Improve
Administration and Coordination
The current criminal identification and arraignment process is characterized by poor communication and coordination among the many relatively independent organizations that participate in the process. In establishing policies, procedures, and practices, individual organizations often fail to consider the consequences of their decisions for others involved in the process. To realize fully the potential that is offered by the automated identification equipment and other improved technologies that are becoming available for use in the process, it is essential to establish improved methods for communicating among the various program participants, for coordinating decisions so that all pertinent consequences are identified and taken into account before choices are made and implemented, and for administering the routine operation of the processes and making adjustments as appropriate. Developing such methods is an appropriate assignment for the Criminal Justice Policy Board that is being founded in the county.
In addition, the administration of the identification and booking centers should be consolidated. A single county agency should be assigned responsibility for overseeing and supervising the operation of the BCI and all RBCs.
3.2 Physical
Configuration Alternatives
Three possible alternative configurations of identification centers are described in Sections 3.2.1 through 3.2.3 below. Then, in Section 3.2.4, these options are evaluated on the basis of geographic factors and their comparative cost-effectiveness.
In evaluating these options, it is assumed that a suitable version of the procedural changes recommended in Section 3.1 has been adopted. Without such changes, the ability of any configuration of identification centers to function cost-effectively and to protect against legal liability will be compromised.
In particular, the analysis of physical configuration alternatives relies on three procedural assumptions. First, it is assumed that a "drop and go" policy has been instituted so that police officers no longer have to wait to swear to the affidavit of probable cause. This eliminates the need to consider processing time (largely, the time for affirming the affidavit of probable cause), in addition to transportation time, as a factor in the analysis. Second, it is assumed that identification on the basis of fingerprints prior to preliminary arraignment becomes mandatory. Each arresting officer will be required to take each arrestee to be fingerprinted electronically, regardless of the amount of travel time that is involved. Third, it is assumed that all RBCs operate 24 hours per day. Thus, RBCs are compared on the basis of their full potential for processing arrestees and for providing services throughout the entire day, including especially the periods when the use of the RBCs would generate the largest savings in travel time.
The analysis is based on: the travel time model described in Section A2 of Appendix A; cost data developed by the County Controller's Office, presented in Section 3.2.1; and arrest data provided by the PSP. The PSP arrest data describe the geographic distribution of arrests by municipal police departments throughout the county. They are displayed graphically in Figure 1 and summarized in Table B11 of Appendix B.
This option consists of a single identification center, the BCI, located in the County Jail and Municipal Courts Building complex, which would process all arrestees in Allegheny County. Arrestees would then be presented to a District Justice, either in person or by video conference, for their preliminary arraignments.
Under this one-center configuration, as shown in Figure 2, all arrestees from the City of Pittsburgh (hereafter referred to as city arrestees) and from elsewhere in the county (hereafter referred to as non-city arrestees), with the exception of juvenile arrestees, would be processed through the two livescan machines that are currently located in the County Jail. The volume of arrestees, as estimated using data from the PSP, would be roughly 26,000 per year. Juvenile arrestees would be processed separately, through a third livescan machine located in the Municipal Courts building. Alternatively, that machine could be located at Juvenile Court, at Shuman Center, or at some other location.
The estimated roundtrip transportation time for arresting officers traveling to and from the BCI is roughly 31 minutes when averaged across all municipal police departments in the county, and is about 42 minutes if the Pittsburgh Police Department is excluded from the group. In this regard, comparison of Figures 1 and 2 indicates that, with few exceptions, municipal police departments with high average travel times to the BCI also have comparatively low volumes of arrestees. It is also important to note, however, that the average roundtrip travel times used in the model probably are underestimates, because the data were gathered from municipal police departments that primarily travel to and from the BCI during the evening and nighttime.
The cost estimates for the BCI are presented in Table 6. They include $65,000 per year for a single Program Supervisor. This would be a full time position intended to oversee the Fingerprint Technicians at the BCI. This individual would also be responsible for supervising the Fingerprint Technicians hired to operate RBCs under Option 2 or Option 3. The cost estimates do not include costs for transportation, as the recommended changes in bond payment policy will likely make those costs negligible. The cost estimates also exclude certain costs that have historically been billed under the CCIISP (as discussed in Section 2.4 above).
The total costs associated with operating this configuration would be approximately $833,391 per year, which would be shared between the county and the City of Pittsburgh on the basis of their established cost-sharing agreement. Assuming that the costs of the BCI continue to
be shared evenly, the county's share