Pittsburgh police defend handling of suspected officer
Pittsburgh police said on Monday they would add charges to the growing criminal case against an officer accused of bribery and sexual misconduct, and defended their decision to keep him in uniform after the first accusations surfaced.
Police expect to charge Officer Adam Skweres, 34, of Lincoln Place in connection with marijuana and crack cocaine found in his vehicle, Chief Nate Harper said. Skweres remained jailed, but his attorney, Phillip DiLucente, expected him to be released on house arrest today.
DiLucente said the officers were looking for Skweres' uniforms, duty bag and other evidence when they searched his home and car this weekend.
Police last week arrested Skweres on charges he tried to exchange leniency or influence for sexual favors from two women in 2008, one in 2011 and one this month. Although one of the women complained to city investigators in 2008, Skweres remained on active duty out of the Zone 3 station in Allentown until last week, when the city suspended him without pay following his arrest.
Harper declined to say whether police provided extra supervision or monitoring of Skweres after the initial complaint.
"It's a criminal investigation — you have to do it thoroughly," Harper said. "Would we like to put him in a glass house? Sure. Could we have? No. You have to look at reality."
Police brass can't remove an officer from active duty as a disciplinary measure without cause, said Officer Dan O'Hara, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Fort Pitt Lodge No. 1. Officers can face additional scrutiny, but O'Hara said he couldn't say if that was the case with Skweres.
In the most recent incident, Skweres gave indications he knew he was being watched. He asked the victim if she was wearing a wire and told her to pull up her shirt to show him she wasn't when he went to her house in uniform on Feb, 11, according to a criminal complaint. He began to "act strangely," telling her not to talk, writing messages on paper and telling her to turn her phone off, the complaint said.
There's no national policy on how to treat an officer under investigation for sexual misconduct, said Ocean City police Chief Bernadette DiPino, a member of the executive committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police who helped write a guide on addressing police sexual misconduct.
"You're going to have to trust and depend on your supervisors," DiPino said. "They should be monitoring police officers' behavior. Police officers are pretty much by themselves the majority of the time, but with advances in technology there are ways of monitoring behaviors."
DiPino said that in Maryland, if police have a credible allegation against an officer, they can remove him or her before criminal charges are filed. Still, she said, "There are advantages to an officer still being out there in the public," such as the potential to catch the officer in the act.
"You have to be very careful in how you proceed in these cases," DiPino said.
A police accountability expert said he thinks Skweres should have been removed from active duty much sooner.
"Common sense would say if you have suspicions about this person's conduct, you take them off the street, period," said Samuel Walker, a professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who studies police issues. "If there were two back in 2008, that raises the significance of it even further. There should've been something done."
Harper previously said police did not have enough evidence to remove Skweres from duty until his arrest.