Yesterday was the first time in nine years anyone put a microphone in front of me and asked me to say what I actually saw inside Allegheny County Pretrial Services. I wrote the speech the way I used to write when I was 19 and freelancing—fast, then left it alone. The pieces that worked best back then were the ones I didn’t sit with and second-guess. Two of the three outlets that covered it ran short clips. A few of the details already came out wrong. I don’t blame them. If you’ve never worked inside that office, the who, what, when, where, and why are hard to line up. I’m afraid this stalls and nothing changes. So here’s the full livestream. Watch it yourself: facebook.com/repshaffer/vide… Posting what I saw is the only fighting chance this has.

HARSH TRUTH CHECK-IN: THE RUSE. Pretrial still recommended bond. Occasionally. That was the cover. If the feds had audited Allegheny County Pretrial Services, the files would have shown bond recommendations. No release. High risk. An auditor would have thought Pretrial was still holding the dangerous ones. Pretrial was not. The bond was parked on nonviolent people. One night, a young Black man came in. Small amount of marijuana. Rolling a stop sign. A few driving violations. One prior arrest, same charge. On probation for it. Employed. Respectful. In compliance. Nothing else. The assessment said no release. No ROR. No non-monetary. Scored high risk. Those cases were almost never brought to the jail. Cops summonsed them at the scene. Police only brought them to the ACJ if the defendant couldn’t find a ride or was uncooperative with police. That is why the tool was rigged to peg them high risk. A rare nonviolent file, scored as a bond, so an audit could say Pretrial still recommended bond. It just did not show who the bond was recommended for, and more importantly, for what charges. The cost was his. A nonviolent man, in compliance, treated as high risk so the paperwork looked clean. The violent defendant the grant money was written to release was not the one carrying that bond. It was a ruse. Nonviolent people paid for it. I wrote those recommendations for 14.5 years. I will say this on the record.

Federal audit. Not a county review. DOJ seizes the files, computers, emails, phones, property, and bank accounts of court administration, pretrial supervisors, the director, and the deputy director. Same for every agency and nonprofit that took the grant money. Then a real investigation. Then indictments. Then federal prison. Assets get sold. Pensions get stripped. That money goes to the families who sue for wrongful death. Follow the money. Name the names. Put them in a courtroom that isn’t theirs.

HARSH TRUTH CHECK-IN: THE DIRECTOR. I was working a Tuesday night at the Allegheny County Jail when I received a phone call from my then-deputy director, who is now the director of Allegheny County Pretrial Services. A man had been arrested on felony drug charges. He already had other cases pending for the same. The director’s wife was his defense attorney. He told me that if the recommendation came back as no release, meaning a bond, I was to request an underride from the on-call supervisor and recommend non-monetary release instead. I told him, “Since you’re already on the phone, why don’t I put you down as the supervisor approving the underride?” His response? And you cannot make this up. “It would be a conflict of interest.” Directing me to change the recommendation was not a conflict of interest. Having his name attached to the approval was. That is the man running Allegheny County Pretrial Services today. Where did the money go? Please share. Too many people have lost too much.

Jeremy Christopher Stover. OTN G 899038-0. Arrested November 9, 2021. Flight to avoid apprehension. He already had a conviction for flight to avoid. 2015. County prison. 27 prior adult arrests. 8 felony convictions. Robbery. Drug manufacture. Terroristic threats. 4 cases pending. One of them a felony retail theft, already out on ROR, $0. 6 failures to appear in two years. On pretrial release. On probation. The file says homeless. On the run. Pretrial recommendation: non-monetary. Medium supervision. Report in person. Here's why: 96 out of 100. No new violent arrest. 82 out of 100. No new arrest. 80 out of 100. Make every court date. The factor page marks pending charges and prior FTAs as No. He had 4 pending cases and 6 FTAs. That is the product. Flight from court, scored as likely to come back, recommended out for free. I will not stop posting these until this office, every pretrial office running this model, and the politicians on the Jail Board are audited. Where did the money go? @ZitoSalena @colin_dunlap

HARSH TRUTH CHECK-IN: ALLEGHENY COUNTY PRETRIAL SERVICES. Let me tell you how “supervision” worked at Allegheny County Pretrial Services. If you were released on non-monetary bond with a pending criminal case and were required to report to Pretrial Services, but never showed up, what happened? Nothing. If you DID report and showed up high or intoxicated, what happened? Nothing. The supervision officers knew. The supervisors knew. The deputy director and director, who were responsible for overseeing the operation, also knew. Failing to report or reporting under the influence violated the conditions of release. Yet, in my experience, Pretrial did not call the Sheriff's Office to have these defendants taken into custody. Think about that. Defendants were released into the community under the promise of supervision. But what good is supervision when violating the conditions of your release carries no consequences? To the defendants who figured out how the system worked, it was a joke. It was never a joke to the communities that suffered the consequences. I worked inside that office for 14½ years. I watched it happen. And I have a lot more stories to tell. @FoxNews @AmericaNewsroom @FoxNews @ZitoSalena @colin_dunlap

April 15, 2022. Allegheny County Pretrial Services. Edmund Bruce Fields. McKees Rocks. Charged with aggravated assault, simple assault, and harassment. Recommendation: NON-MONETARY release. No contact. Stay away. No override. “Here’s why”: 96 out of 100 defendants with similar factors have no new arrest for a violent crime. Same report: • 4 felony convictions, including federal drug manufacturing (210 months) and a firearms ban • 13 prior adult arrests • Already on pretrial release and on probation • Pending DUI, out on ROR • 3 prior failures to appear • Person charge Six months later, Oct. 15, 2022, Edmund Fields, 49, of McKees Rocks was arrested after a man was shot in the hip on O’Donovan Street. Attempted criminal homicide. Aggravated assault. Carrying a firearm without a license. He gave police the name “Mike Platts” and ran. Nobody overrode it. The recommendation was to let him out. @DailyCaller @LawEnforceToday @WashTimes @AmericanThinker

MacArthur paid Allegheny County $5,504,000 to shrink the jail. $2 million in 2018. $2 million in 2020. $1.17 million in 2022. $334,000 in 2024. The goal was 20 percent. They announced 33 to 36 percent and got renewed. Matthew Darby was already out on bond for a rape case. He raped several other women before Alina Sheykhet was killed and after. I did the case. My supervisor declined the override. I went over her head. The magistrate kept the bond low so she would not set off our office. He posted and walked out. I said it before he was released: if he gets out, he will kill her. After she was killed, I went to every Pittsburgh newsroom. No one would touch it. Alina Sheykhet did not have to die either. What happened to Dr. Evans started with her. Dr. Idris Evans was 46. Killed in his bed September 24, 2026. His wife was critically injured. Their children were told to run. Elijah Hemingway walked out July 10 on nonmonetary bail, after a felony burglary. Docket MJ-05003-CR-0000741-2026. Where did the money go? Into a smaller jail count. Pretrial was the front door. The dockets are the audit. @colin_dunlap @ZitoSalena @FoxNews

@ZitoSalena thank you for covering this. Be careful of the local media on this. I spent years calling them when these cases would happen, and they refused to do their job. Maybe they were afraid for their careers. Their lives. Or they just weren’t good enough to dig. The magistrates get overruled by Pretrial Services. There is an entire unit in the main office for this. It was called the Arnold unit, named after the grant. They ran the jail population report to see who got a bail over the weekend or overnight. Anyone we recommended non-monetary was prepared for motions court, so whatever bond the magistrate gave, outside of what we asked for, got overruled. They used to put it in the annual reports. Page 11 of the 2019 report is still on the court server. Bond modifications every year: 1,628, 2,139, 1,875, 1,750, 2,056. And bond modified after the preliminary hearing when the bond wasn’t posted: 493 in 2019. The caption says bail investigators were running Arnold’s PSA to all 35 magisterial district judges. Those reports are off the website now. The unit is still there. @colin_dunlap @FoxNews

I spent 14.5 years in Allegheny County Pretrial. November 20, 2019, Bail Supervisor Garrett J. Larkin emailed investigators, including me. “You NEED to figure out a way to communicate with each other, because it is screwing up what we are trying to accomplish with our MacArthur Foundation Grant.” He said our. A qualified mark on the assessment wasn’t about the defendant. Get it wrong and you screwed up the grant. MacArthur paid Allegheny County $5,504,000 to shrink the jail. $2 million in 2018. $2 million in 2020. $1.17 million in 2022. $334,000 in 2024. The count dropped. They got renewed. It didn’t go to investigators. Pay started in the low 30s. Under $42,000 for ten years. Then $65,000. It didn’t go to our office in the jail. Ceiling leaking. Pieces coming down. Broken equipment. Chairs held together with fishing line. Beginning of Covid, the deputy director, now the director, wouldn’t heat a 24/7 building overnight. Told us to bring space heaters. They bragged. Vacations. Houses. Said it out loud. @colin_dunlap @ZitoSalena @FoxNews

People keep screaming about Judge Anthony Ceoffe. It wasn’t him. It was Allegheny County Pretrial Services. I worked there 14.5 years. I left my career over what they built. October 25, 2018. My old boss Janice Dean emailed the entire unit. Subject line: County Awarded $2M by MacArthur Foundation Safety and Justice Challenge. Her words: “implementing our strategies to reduce over incarceration.” That is the policy. Not one man’s personality. Elijah Hemingway was arrested July 9 for breaking into a house. He walked out the next day on non-monetary bail. That is not a judge going rogue. That is the system I sat in. A father is dead. His wife was stabbed next to him in their own bed. Their kids ran to a neighbor in the dark. I knew this MDJ. I didn’t like him. His ego would love the national headline. It still wasn’t him who put Hemingway back on the street. I will name the rest of my old bosses. I will not do it without counsel. I already paid once for telling the truth in that building. Stop making this about one man. Start making it about the rules that keep letting this happen. for @FoxNews @MattWalshBlog @nickshirleyy