Christopher Shepherd was the first to die.
SWAT officers fatally shot him in January, a mentally ill man in crisis in the affluent suburb of Upper St. Clair.
Austyn Cousins was next, shot dead later that month by Pittsburgh police as he reached into his trunk, which held guns.
In June, police killed two peoplein the South Hills — Charles McGrath and Selwyn Brown — in less than a week. Both men attacked police.
And in July, a Churchill officer killed Gregory Carlson, 48, a construction manager who they said was armed outside his house.
These five men, all mortally wounded by authorities this year in Allegheny County, joined hundreds of others killed by police in 2024 in the U.S.
Their names appeared in obituaries, lawsuits, media stories and releases from the county medical examiner’s office.
But the officers who pulled the trigger?
In many cases, few know who they are because law enforcement isn’t telling.
Anonymity for police who use deadly force is part of a national phenomenon, one that often keeps officers’ names — and the details of their actions in fatal encounters — shielded from public scrutiny.
The pain of not knowing can be acute for relatives of those killed, such as Shepherd’s half-sister, Michelle Kippelen of Upper St. Clair.
“To this day, several days after my birthday, and nine months after my brother’s death, we have received absolutely nothing,” Kippelen told TribLive on Thursday. “Not a call, not a letter, nor a knock on the door, not the names of the officers who shot Christopher, not a single (bit of) body camera footage, not even a simple police report, even for the sake of much needed insurance benefits. Absolutely nothing.”
Blocking transparency
No government agency publicly tracks police killings, leaving news organizations and researchers to compile their own databases. The nonprofit group Mapping Police Violence puts the number of people killed by police in America last year at 1,247, which it said was a record.
In roughly 86% of these cases, the officers who used deadly force were not named, the group estimates. It based that number on an analysis of media reports followed by open-records requests to police departments for information.
Since at least 2020, Mapping Police Violence said, the number of people killed by police has steadily increased.
Meanwhile, the percentage of cases in which officers were named slid to 14% last year, down from 39% in 2020, according to the group.
The reasons offered for shielding officers are various.
Police unions seek to protect their members. Some departments prefer to operate in secrecy. And, in many states, including Pennsylvania, weak open-records laws don’t provide a way for the public to pry the names loose.
In Harrisburg, the state’s open-records office is increasingly stymieing efforts by media and the public to identify law enforcement officers. Government officials are finding merit in arguments that officers’ names must be kept secret in order to keep them safe, even in cases where there have been no specific threats to the officer who pulls the trigger.
As a result, taxpayer-funded officers who wield the ultimate power sometimes avoid public accountability.
Prosecutors maintain they treat police officers the same as they do private citizens: Their names are released only if criminal charges are filed.
“If the shooting is deemed justified, the officers involved will not be named,” Kelly Callihan, executive director of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association, told TribLive. “This follows the general rule that citizens who are not charged with a crime are not identified publicly.”
John G. Peters, a former York County police officer who formed the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Death in 2005, disagrees with that approach.
“I think transparency is the best policy,” Peters said. “In today’s world, there’s enough distrust between the community and the police. Hiding these officers’ names just increases that distrust.”
Peters is among a range of observers, from open-records advocates to law professors to civil rights groups, who claim this routine lack of identification in some places, including Southwestern Pennsylvania, raises critical questions about transparency, accountability and public confidence in police.
Many also believe the trend toward secrecy illustrates how some agencies constrict the flow of information, unraveling what journalists — and, by extension, the public — started gaining in 1966 when the federal Freedom of Information Act triggered what some christened a new era of transparency.
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“Of all the different agencies out there, law enforcement should be No. 1 in terms of transparency, but it seems to be going in the opposite direction,” said David Cuillier, a former journalist now working at University of Florida’s Brechner Center for the Advancement of the First Amendment.
Doe Police Officers 1-4
On Jan. 7, four police officers on a regional SWAT team fatally shot Shepherd, 48, who battled bipolar and schizoaffective disorders, outside his Upper St. Clair home. His mother was sitting in a squad car nearby.
Police had tried to commit Shepherd to a psychiatric facility that day. They said he had a knife when officers fired at him.
Shepherd’s mother is suing four of the officers, claiming that a private autopsy shows they shot Shepherd eight times in the back after a three-hour standoff.
But Susan Shepherd was forced to name the defendants “Doe Police Officers 1-4.”
Her efforts to discover the officers’ identities were blocked by their departments in Bethel Park and Baldwin Borough, Allegheny County Police and the county district attorney.
Now, uncovering the officers’ names has become a critical part of the court battle.
“The complaint cannot be served — and this case literally cannot proceed — unless plaintiff determines the identity of the Doe Police Officers,” according to a court filing.
Since the shooting, police and municipal officials have refused to answer questions or release records about the incident in response to formal requests.
Three of the South Hills communities whose officers were involved in the incident — Baldwin Borough, Bethel Park and Brentwood — have refused to name them to TribLive or provide their ranks, lengths of service or whether they had any history of discipline.
Upper St. Clair officials wouldn’t identify officers who have served on the regional SWAT team (called the Critical Incident Response Team), whether or not they were directly involved in the Shepherd incident. Some denied TribLive requests under the state’s Right-to-Know Law about how they use, fund or recruit for the specialized team.
Upper St. Clair also wouldn’t release 911 records from the Shepherd call or information about why their police chief requested the critical incident team on the day of Shepherd’s shooting.
That team, led by a government-funded consortium of 22 Pittsburgh-area municipalities in the South Hills, refused to release training materials.
The result: a black hole of public information about the circumstances surrounding Shepherd’s death and the people involved.
Allegheny County Councilman Dan Grzybek, whose district includes Upper St. Clair and Bethel Park, said it’s “disappointing to see such a lack of transparency.”
“Quickly moving on from such a serious incident without providing sufficient information to the public only serves to erode trust in law enforcement,” Grzybek said. “Providing the complete picture would allow the community to have full confidence in their own safety and protection.”
‘Dark ages of policing’
TribLive appealed those denials to the state Office of Open Records. The office sided with police.
The officers’ safety trumps transparency, officials in Harrisburg said. That’s the case even when there is no specific or credible threat.
“Actual evidence of physical harm is not required,” according to the office’s decision denying release of the records.
Instead, an open-records office official said, police testimony “carries great weight.”
“The public must be informed but not at the expense of preventing law enforcement from performing their duties effectively and safely,” said Executive Director Liz Wagenseller, when asked about citing safety exemptions to block access to records. “Striking a balance between the two is not always simple.”
Timothy O’Brien, a civil rights attorney in Pittsburgh who has spent decades suing police officers over use of force, called the office’s 16-page decision a throwback to “the dark ages of policing.”
He believes “there is no reason” officers who fatally shoot civilians should not be named publicly and held accountable.
“There has to be something more than ‘We think there could a threat against an officer’ to not disclose that information,” said O’Brien, who teaches civil rights law at the University of Pittsburgh.
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He added: “It’s nonsensical for that information to be withheld. That raises some questions here about why that’s not happening. In terms of contemporary best practices, in terms of policy, it strikes me as being in the dark ages of policing.”
Chicago-based attorney Antonio Romanucci, who filed lawsuits in George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, was similarly baffled about the silence surrounding the Shepherd shooting.
“I don’t understand why the big secrecy on this case,” Romanucci said. “If it’s justified and there’s no criminal component to it … it’s time to release that information.”
“The public deserves to know,” added Pittsburgh attorney Joel Sansone, who helped win a $28 million award in federal court for the family of Michael Ellerbe, a 12-year-old Uniontown boy fatally shot in the back in 2002 by Pennsylvania State Police. “When a citizen dies at your hands, you have to defend it.”
Information block
The state open-records office last year invoked personal or public safety exemptions in 27 Right-To-Know Law appeals, online data showed.
That number is up from 16 times in 2022 and 12 in 2021, online data showed. In sharp contrast, the office didn’t cite the safety exemption a single time in 2008, its first year of hearing appeals under the Right-To-Know Law.
So far this year, they’ve cited safety concerns in 21 appeals. They’ve granted access twice.
“When you constantly act this way — ‘No, we won’t name the officers. No, we won’t give you bodycam footage. No, no, no!’ — it simply reinforces the public perception that police are not accountable,” said University of Pittsburgh law professor David Harris, who specializes in police behavior and law enforcement.
“That attitude is just not helpful to the police because, ultimately, the police rely on the public to help them,” Harris said. “It’s hard not to feel like something wrong is being hidden.”
Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, called Pennsylvania’s Right-To-Know Law one of the weakest in the nation when it comes to providing information about law enforcement. Court rulings in the state, she said, have reinforced that.
“Courts here will generally err on the side of no access if the release of a record could result in harm,” Melewsky said. “There needs to be a very careful balancing act between the need for transparency and the safety of law enforcement. It’s a very careful line the courts and the Office of Open Records have to walk.”
Safety vs. transparency
Some union leaders pushed back against calls for transparency.
Carl Bailey, head of Teamsters Local Union No. 205, said police shootings impact the officers who pull the trigger.
“When an officer shoots a civilian, it’s hard for that officer to live with that — their life is hard enough as it is,” said Bailey, who represents police in Brentwood and Baldwin, two of the departments whose officers shot Shepherd.
He declined to name the officers or discuss their employment status.
“They’re trained and they can deal with it, for the most part,” Bailey said. “But they don’t want their families to deal with it.”
Bailey, a former undercover narcotics detective in McKeesport, remembers having tough conversations with his son, who played baseball with kids whose fathers Bailey arrested.
He argues that officers’ safety outweighs the public’s right to know. Robert Swartzwelder, head of the Pittsburgh police union, also believes officers who kill civilians should not be named unless they are charged with a crime.
Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey said that while the public has a right to expect an investigation into the use of deadly force, if there are no criminal charges, “like all other employees of the city of Pittsburgh, police officers have the right to expect that their privacy will be protected.”
Pittsburgh police Chief Larry Scirotto said the decision to name officers involved in fatal shootings is made on a case-by-case basis.
“They have power unlike any profession in this country. They have the ability to take away freedom and life,” Scirotto said. “But does that mean they should surrender their constitutional rights in the process? Absolutely not.”
O’Brien, the civil rights attorney, countered that naming these officers “is a matter of public importance.”
“If there’s a legitimate reason to not name that officer, they should state it,” O’Brien said. “Why shouldn’t the citizens of the state or someone’s loved ones know why someone was killed by the state? It almost seems common sense to me.”
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‘Stonewalled’
Jonathan Faidley is tired of the silent treatment.
Last summer, the U.S. Army veteran went to the Ligonier Valley police station after he learned through the news that an officer had fatally shot his father, Robbie Saunders.
Police in July 2023 shot the 59-year-old, who was disabled and had a history of substance abuse, when he stepped onto his porch wielding a machete. At the time, one officer was several feet away from the front door; his partner, who fired the fatal shot, was at the bottom of Saunders’ front steps.
Faidley, 41, of Somerset County, said police refused to answer questions or give him a report on the incident. He said Westmoreland County District Attorney Nicole Ziccarelli never returned his calls.
“We were stonewalled every which way. No names, no nothing. … Never saw a report, never touched one,” Faidley said last week. “I wanted a police report. I wanted the bodycam footage. I wanted statements. I wanted it all — and all they gave me was the runaround.”
The DA’s office told TribLive that its chief county detective returned a phone call from Faidley and left a message. Faidley disputes that.
Ziccarelli, who ruled the use of force justified, refused to comment for this article.
Faidley is disgusted.
“It’s just offensive, really,” the combat veteran said. “I’ve sacrificed for this country, and you can’t give me a straight answer?”
In August 2023, police named the two officers involved in the encounter and released body camera footage showing what happened in response to a TribLive open-records request.
Balancing act
Approaches to releasing information differ within Pennsylvania. Westmoreland County’s Ziccarelli leans toward supporting officers’ rights and safety over the release of information.
“A person will not be identified by our office if criminal charges are not filed,” Ziccarelli said in a statement. “That applies to both police officers and private citizens.”
Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr.’s office did not respond to multiple inquiries about his stance on the issue.
Pittsburgh police have no written policy on how — or whether — to name officers involved in a shooting, spokeswoman Cara Cruz said.
“The general practice for not naming the involved officer or officers centers around security for them and for their families, whether or not the shooting is deemed ‘justified’ by the outside agency,” Cruz said.
Instead, the department is guided, at least in part, by its collective bargaining agreement with its union. The contract mandates that officers’ personal information remains secret while being investigated internally, union leaders said.
Scirotto, the Pittsburgh police chief, said there is a balancing act he considers.
“I have to make the decision on what the greater benefit is — is there a greater benefit or a greater harm?” Scirotto said. “My obligation is to protect our communities and our officers, and that doesn’t have to contradict each other.”
In Philadelphia, the fourth-largest municipal police department in the country with its roughly 6,300 sworn employees, policy dictates that police must release an officer’s name, years of service, assignment and duty status within 72 hours of a shooting incident.
Former Philadelphia police Commissioner Charles Ramsey signed off on that policy in 2015, a year after President Barack Obama chose him to lead a presidential task force on “21st Century Policing.”
A whistleblower weighs in
James “Bear” Baranowski understands that questioning an officer’s actions in a fatal shooting can be dangerous.
The former state police sergeant said he was “forced out” of his job in 2003 after blowing the whistle on troopers whose testimony “wasn’t lining up with the evidence” in the Michael Ellerbe shooting in Uniontown.
“In almost every case of egregious use of force, there’s a background. There’s something that should’ve been seen,” Baranowski told TribLive. “And, a lot of times, the delay of releasing information is an indication to me — as an investigator, as a use-of-force expert — that there’s problems.
“And when you do this long term, people believe you’re hiding something.”