Allegheny County Jail is known as a terrible place to do time. Especially since the pandemic, atrocities and brutality have been rampant at the facility, despite the alleged best intentions of progressive county executive Sara Innamorato and outgoing warden Trevor Wingard. The mainstream media hasn’t exactly ignored this situation, but their approach has been to treat every jail scandal as an isolated incident, studiously ignoring the broader pattern of abuse. To remedy this lack, we present here a timeline of recent deaths, lawsuits, and other disturbing incidents at ACJ.

September 29, 2023: Long-time warden Orlando Harper retires, getting out before he could be fired by Innamorato. Among Harper’s innovations was the practice of “releasing” terminally ill prisoners just before they died, so that their deaths would not be categorized as having occurred in the jail’s care. Harper was replaced on an interim basis by Shane Dady.

October 17, 2023: Abolitionist Law Center files a wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of the estate of Anthony Talotta, who died in ACJ as the result of a poorly treated foot infection. The jail doctor responsible for Talotta’s treatment had had his license revoked or suspended in eight states before being hired by Allegheny Health Network to work at ACJ.

December 1, 2023: The federal Department of Justice forces ACJ to begin offering methadone to prisoners suffering from opioid addiction. The county is also required to pay $10,000 to a former prisoner at ACJ whose rights under the Americans With Disabilities Act were violated by being denied access to their methadone prescription.

December 21, 2023: Richard Sciubba III is reported deceased at the jail, probably by suicide. This is the first known death on Dady’s watch. Jail officials refused to identify Sciubba, leaving that to his lawyer, Casey White. Since the media never followed up on the story, Sciubba’s cause of death remains unconfirmed.

January 10, 2024: William Kemp III, a guard at ACJ, is arrested for attempting to smuggle synthetic marijuana into the facility. Kemp was turned in by his coworkers, who noticed a strong smell of weed whenever he was in a room with them.

February 6, 2024: Aaron Tipton, a prisoner at ACJ, sues the county, Harper, and several guards for beating him, tasing him, and deliberately breaking his arm. He was then held in a cell for two hours before being sent to a hospital. His mother was not notified for another three days. Tipton had previously been denied an anti-seizure prescription on highly dubious grounds.

August 7, 2024: The county finally settles a class action suit brought by Abolitionist Law Center over the abysmal health care at ACJ. The suit was first filed in 2020, and was bitterly contested by both the Fitzgerald and Innamorato administrations. Terms of the settlement included filling health care vacancies, allowing medical professionals to make medical decisions instead of guards, providing private space for therapy sessions, and providing mental health treatment in a timely fashion, among other basic measures one would think would have been implemented as a matter of course.

September 14, 2024: Tracey Hickey dies in ACJ’s bullpen while awaiting processing. No cause of death was ever released, and Innamorato’s office refused to comment beyond a brief anodyne assurance that everyone was doing the best they possibly could.

November 22, 2024: Shawn Daniels, a former prisoner at ACJ, sues the county and two guards who let a pair of other prisoners into his cell to attack him. Daniels was stabbed 37 times with a shank made from a spork. The two guards left Daniels in his cell to bleed after the attack. He was not given any assistance until different guards found him a half hour later. The county didn’t settle the case until late December of 2025, for the amount of $85,000. Trib Live had to file a Right to Know Act request to pry details of the settlement from the Innamorato administration.

December 19, 2024: The county settles a lawsuit brought by a former ACJ guard alleging he was fired for objecting to racist treatment at work. The 1.5 million dollar settlement came nearly a year into Innamorato’s tenure as county executive. Note that the amount of the settlement was over ten times those for recent brutality against prisoners at ACJ, in spite of the guard not suffering any physical injury.

January 9, 2025: Trevor Wingard is hired as ACJ’s “permanent” warden. He barely lasts longer than his interim predecessor, recently announcing his retirement effective at the end of July 2026.

January 23, 2025: The county settles a lawsuit brought by Joanna Obuzor for $62,500. Obuzor was arrested for drunk driving by Pittsburgh cops who found her sleeping in her parked car, and repeatedly tased at the jail. She was then left alone in a cell for hours without receiving medical treatment. The city of Pittsburgh, also named in the suit, contributed an additional $7,500 to the settlement. In what seems to have become a pattern, county officials under Innamorato refused to comment on the details of the settlement, citing a confidentiality clause in the agreement.

June 24, 2025: Allegheny County and the town of McCandless settle a lawsuit from Brian Estep, who was beaten and repeatedly tased at the jail after being arrested by McCandless police. The county denied all liability. Trib Live’s piece on the settlement revealed that the county maintains a 1.7 million dollar fund for settling lawsuits.

July 2, 2025: Kush Wilkerson files a lawsuit from inside ACJ alleging excessive force and violations of the ADA. He is represented by Abolitionist Law Center. Wilkerson was repeatedly tased and beaten while handcuffed. One of the defendants, William Kemp, is likely the same guard who was charged with smuggling narcotics into the jail.

August 27, 2025: Daronte Brown, a former prisoner at ACJ, files a lawsuit against multiple guards and former officials at the jail, as well as the county. He is represented by the Abolitionist Law Center and Alec Wright. Brown was beaten and tased on two separate occasions during his stay in jail, as well as being held for a month in solitary confinement. Only one of his attackers, former guard Robert Veith, was fired over the incident.

November 10, 2025: Nathan Piernik dies in a housing unit at ACJ. No cause of death was ever made public. Both jail officials and the Allegheny County Police said they were launching investigations, but no results were ever released.

December 16, 2025: County Council passes a resolution requiring the medical examiners office to prioritize autopsies of those who die in ACJ. It does not appear to have occurred to anyone to pass a resolution requiring the jail to stop killing people.

February 1, 2026: Mark Schwartz dies in his cell. Schwartz had been held without bail on charges of simple assault and summary harassment. Once again, no cause of death was ever announced. Once again, an investigation was promised with no results ever made public.

March 5, 2026: A rookie guard manages to accidently bring a gun into ACJ, despite whatever security measures were in place. Bethany Hallam is quoted saying multiple people were suspended over the incident.

March 7, 2026: Yet another prisoner dies at ACJ. This time the jail refused to even identify him, and the media never pursued the matter. Nor did they follow up on the increasingly hollow promise of an investigation.

May 13, 2026: Tyrone Good is murdered in his cell by eight other prisoners. Accused of homicide, Good was placed in a housing unit with friends of his alleged victim, instead of being housed in protective custody. Unlike previous deaths at ACJ, this one caught the media’s attention. The exact circumstances of Good’s death, including autopsy results, were revealed in fairly short order, proving the county can release such information when it wants to. We should keep in mind however, that the county administration has a couple of advantages in the discussion. One, as an accused murderer, nobody is going to ask what Good was doing there in the first place, a question it would be very reasonable to pose about most of ACJ’s other fatalities. And two, because Good was killed by prisoners instead of guards, the worst the jail can be accused of is negligence and incompetence, not actual brutality.

July 6, 2026: Trevor Wingard announces his resignation in order to, wait for it, be closer to his family. He is leaving at the end of July to take a new job in North Carolina where he grew up, a supposedly irresistable opportunity. Note however that North Carolina has 157 correctional institutions within its borders (according to World Population Review). Wingard could have gotten a job running one of them pretty much any time he wanted, although to be fair his new position is a step up from just being a warden. Still, why would he leave so soon? A potential answer to this question came just days after his announcement…

July 10, 2026: A woman sues the county government and multiple guards at ACJ, alleging she was sexually assaulted in her cell by a guard on several occasions and suffered retaliation, including being placed in solitary confinement, when she reported the attacks. The abuse happened last year during Wingard’s stint as warden. It’s quite likely that Wingard got wind of the suit and bailed out before his reputation became too damaged to land a job elsewhere. Discovery can be a bitch…

July 14, 2026: Deputy Warden Connie Clark is appointed interim warden, meaning she gets to clean up the mess Wingard is leaving behind and deal with the fallout from the latest lawsuit. It will be very interesting to find out what she knew and when she knew it.

Since the beginning of the year, we’ve been posting intermittently on Bluesky about the inscrutable fluctuations of the population of Allegheny County Jail. That number peaked at 2,181 prisoners on November 5th of last year, before plummeting to 1,860 in less than two months. After a modest recovery in the first week of 2026, the population graph shows a step by step reduction, holding relatively steady for a few weeks, dropping sharply for a few days, and re-stabilizing at a slightly lower level. As of this writing, the number sits at 1,856, slightly lower than the trough it hit in late December following the initial plunge.

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Back in February we reported on Informup’s discovery of a contract between the city and a company called LeadsOnline. The contract was for surveillance software called CellHawk, a proprietary web app that analyzes location data obtained from cell towers and other sources in order to trace the movements of multiple targeted users, an alarming and hitherto unknown capability in Pittsburgh.

At the time, neither we nor the Informup team could find the LeadsOnline contract in the city’s data portals, leading to suspicion it was being deliberately concealed. But it turns out there’s a simpler, if equally shady, explanation – the contract never existed in the first place. Invoices from LeadsOnline obtained through a Right to Know request show the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police has been paying for CellHawk with a series of annual or biannual subscription purchases, avoiding leaving a paper trail that might have exposed the app’s purchase.

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The last few months have witnessed a sharp increase in the surveillance technology used by local police, or at least knowledge and awareness of it. Stories about multiple types of cameras and other surveillance tools have hit local news recently, but nothing has been done to tie them all together, or paint a broader picture of the extent to which residents’ privacy and security is being invaded. To fill this gap, we present here a brief and possibly incomplete roundup of police surveillance tech in the Steel City.

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TribLive is reporting the names of all the cops involved in the bar fight in Pleasant Hills last month. The four are Jake Flickinger, Kyle Briggs, Brayden Davies, and Richard L. Dilimone, Jr. Interestingly, they’re all pretty inexperienced, having joined the force no earlier than 2015. Yet all of them made detective, even Briggs, who only signed up in 2019. As was revealed when the story broke, the four were not just ordinary detectives either, but part of the Violence Prevention Unit, an elite roving street crime squad started by former chief Larry Scirotto in 2024.

These types of units have a disturbing history of excessive force, corruption, and other abuses. The NYPD’s street crime unit was temporarily disbanded after one of its officers murdered Amadou Diallo in 1999. A similar unit in LA was responsible for the Rampart scandal. More recently, Memphis’ so-called SCORPION unit was shut down after five of its members beat Tyre Nichols to death in 2023. Scirotto claimed to have solved this problem when he created Pittsburgh’s version of SCORPION, telling city council “It can be done with the appropriate training, the appropriate selection of personnel and the appropriate oversight.”

The ex-chief’s strategy is now a little clearer – to select favored officers not long from the academy, who would presumably be less indoctrinated with an old-school culture of brutality and impunity, and more amenable to training in modern, constitutional policing. But if that was the plan, it obviously didn’t work. Dilimone reportedly smashed a full bottle of beer against a bouncers head in a drunken rage, after the group chased another patron out of the bar. If “violence prevention” detectives can’t even prevent themselves from committing violence in a bar after work, what are they like on duty?

Public Source and the New York Times are reporting that Allegheny County Department of Human Services executive director Erin Dalton is leaving to take a similar position in New York City under new NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani. She will not be missed by Pittsburgh’s unhoused population.

Dalton has been running DHS since early 2021, a tenure marked by an emphasis on authoritarian approaches to homelessness, addiction, and mental illness, but disguised with pseudo-scientific language and gestures. One example serves to illustrate the Dalton Way. Last April, the Post-Gazette reported that DHS was redoing the county’s point-in-time homeless census for no other reason than Erin Dalton didn’t like the results of the first count. Dalton was quoted saying “We found ourselves in a situation where I thought it would be really, really difficult to explain [the results], so we wanted to collect another data point.” The second count was deliberately crippled, with volunteers prohibited from including individuals known to be homeless unless they managed to encounter them during the brief survey period. The apparently lower population of unhoused people generated by the second count makes DHS look more effective, and reduces pressure on the county to spend more money on shelters. For Dalton, “data-driven” means using data to justify her own preferences, manipulating or ignoring it as necessary.

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Informup, a new local media nonprofit focusing on city council proceedings, is reporting that the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police has a contract with a company called LeadsOnline for the use of software called CellHawk, which exploits bulk cell tower data obtained from phone companies to track cell phones.

Details about CellHawk’s capabilities can be found in a 2020 article from The Intercept. The app ingests huge spreadsheets of raw cell tower data to present in viewable, searchable, and digestible formats, making the data useful not only for tracking of individuals, but for mapping the movements of groups within a particular area during a particular time period. Like a protest, for example.

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WPXI is reporting that a prisoner has died in Allegheny County Jail. Mark Schwartz, 55, was allegedly found unresponsive in his cell on Sunday morning and pronounced dead shortly thereafter. Schwartz had been held without bail for the last six months on charges of second degree misdemeanor Simple Assault and summary Harassment.

Schwartz’s cause of death is not yet publicly known, but there are only two possibilities. Either he died of a sudden medical emergency like a stroke or heart attack, or he took his own life. Either way, his death could have probably been prevented by jail officials. All prisoners are supposed to undergo a medical evaluation upon entry, which should reveal any life-threatening conditions and allow provision of appropriate care. If Schwartz did die of a heart attack or similar crisis, it should not have been in ACJ but in a hospital.

Suicide would constitute an even greater failure on the jail’s part. Schwartz’s docket shows he was denied bail in part because he was supposed to have a “BC Eval”, short for behavioral competency evaluation. This evaluation should have discovered if he was suicidal and taken steps to keep him alive while he was in their care if so.

The Allegheny County Jail Oversight Board is meeting this Thursday, February 5th at 436 Grant St. downtown in the 4th floor Gold Room at 4:00 PM. Anyone wishing to make a public comment must register in advance on their web site. Note that in a cynical and obvious attempt to limit comments, registration is cut off 24 hours before the meeting, so plan ahead.

UPDATE January 22, 2026: It turns out that October 2025 was an anomalous month for arrests, especially in Zone 2. Arrests there ballooned to 454 from September’s 178, and dropped back to 212 in November. Since Zone 2 includes downtown, arrests there are likely to be handled in the nearby Pittsburgh Municipal Court, from where we drew our data. This means our sample is not representative of arrests city-wide in 2025.

The study is still of interest however. Why did arrests in Zone 2 spike so hard, and why did they settle back down again? Are the the shifts we observed in charging patterns also anomalous, or do they reflect a long term policy change? More investigation will be necessary to answer these questions.

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UPDATE January 22, 2026: Revisiting the dashboard in January 2026 shows that the arrest totals were far lower in 2025 than we extrapolated, coming to only 8,886. This is still a nineteen percent increase over 2024, but a long way from the 2.5-fold jump we originally reported. We are not sure what caused this error – whether the dashboard numbers changed in the interim, or we made some mistake in navigating the web site or adding up the zone arrests. We considered removing this post, but decided to leave it up to remind ourselves to be more cautious in the future.

A look at the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police monthly dashboard reveals that the department is on track to arrest over twice as many people in 2025 as in 2024. The monthly arrest totals from January through October of this year add up to 15,172. Extrapolating through December yields over 18,000 arrests, compared to 7,476 in all of 2024. It’s actually only 8,889, still a substantial jump.

It is not yet clear what is driving the increase, but we can rule a few things out. It’s not a two and a half fold nineteen percent increase in crime that began precisely on January first. The mainstream media would have been screaming their heads off for months if any such crime wave was happening, or even if they had a decent excuse to pretend it was. In addition, we know from the city controller’s audit of Shotspotter that shootings at least have been virtually constant for years, although it says nothing about other types of crime. We can also rule out an increase in 911 calls leading to a concomitant jump in arrests. Per the controllers audit, 911 calls about shootings have actually been in decline, and a review of PBP annual reports through 2023 (the last year available) shows overall requests for service declining as well. With the caveat that when the 2025 annual report drops (likely in early 2028) we might have to change our minds, right now it does not look like any external factor is responsible for this year’s leap in arrests. This leaves only a change in police policy as an explanation.

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