By Steve Bohnel
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
PITTSBURGH — A Pittsburgh social worker’s attempt to reinstate the use of leg shackles by jail officials in hospital transports cleared a major hurdle Tuesday — getting enough signatures from county residents to get the issue to be considered by County Council.
John Kenstowicz has worked for months to get council to consider reinstating leg shackles after a referendum passed by county voters years ago banned the practice. Mr. Kenstowicz and Brian Englert, president of the correctional officers’ union at the county jail, have traveled across the county in recent months, gathering well over the 500 signatures needed to use a not-often-used part of the county charter.
According to the charter, if a person gathers 500 signatures from registered county voters on petitions on a single subject “germane to County government,” then council must consider the proposed subject within 60 days of receiving it. Mr. Kenstowicz told County Council Tuesday he and others had gotten more than 1,000 signatures, well over the minimum required.
Mr. Englert delivered those in a cardboard box to County Council staff as Mr. Kenstowicz delivered comments to council.
Those signatures still need to undergo a legal review, and Council President Patrick Catena would not comment on that process. A similar process using the same provision of the charter happened in 2016 and 2017.
Residents around Allegheny County were concerned about voting machines at that time, the Post-Gazette reported. In July 2017 , a coalition led by the League of Women Voters and election transparency group Vote Allegheny worked on gathering enough petition signatures to create a 13-person " Voter Process Review Commission " that would have been tasked with reviewing the county’s thousands of voting machines.
By August 2017, the coalition said it had the 500 signatures to get it on the council agenda. Council staff said that petition was presented to council on July 24, 2017 , but the county solicitor’s office deemed it was legally insufficient in the following weeks, so it never reached a council vote.
Mr. Catena said that he has heard from both supporters and opponents of reinstating the leg shackles, and did not commit to a position Tuesday. He added he wants to hear cost estimates from the sheriff’s office, which is exploring whether it could take over hospital transports from the jail.
“There’s a lot of information still lacking at this point in time in order to me to make a good faith judgment in either direction,” Mr. Catena said.
No matter if and how council act, Mr. Kenstowicz and Mr. Englert were in high spirits after delivering the petitions to council on Tuesday. They had spoken about recent escape attempts that could have been stopped if a leg shackles policy was in place.
“This event is truly historical,” Mr. Kenstowicz said. “There has never been such a mobilization of people, resources and time on behalf of our officers to achieve this kind of outcome.”
Mr. Englert said that despite the outcome, he, correctional officers and others would continue talking about the issue with county residents.
“We have 370 [correctional] officers at the jail, and we’re going to spend the next 11 weeks in the districts in your communities, going door to door to ask them to talk to you about this issue,” he told council.
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