By Nina McCambridge
The Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, in a press release last month, announced a few changes. These include a switch from a five-day, eight-hour workday to a four-day, 10-hour workday, changes to the structure of the night shift, and an expansion of online services. One controversial part of the press release was the “Creation of an enhanced Telephone Reporting Unit (TRU) operating from 7 to 3 a.m. daily, including weekends. Dispatch will assign reports to the TRU for calls that do not require an in-person response by officers.” This means that for many police calls that occur at night, no officers will be dispatched. Luckily, “TRU will NOT be assigned to any ‘In Progress’ call where a suspect may be on scene, any crime where a person may need medical aid, any domestic dispute, calls with evidence, or where the Mobile Crime Unit will be requested to process a scene.”
It seems somewhat odd to reduce police presence during the night, as violent crimes peaks around midnight in Pittsburgh. The FBI reports that in 2019, property crime peaked between midnight and 1 a.m. (The change will presumably apply more to property crimes than violent crimes, but property crime data does not tend to have as much information about the time of the crime.) However, according to police chief Larry Scirotto, “Data said from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. that we had eight percent of our call volume, yet we had 33 percent of our personnel working during that time.” These percentages are not exactly comparable metrics, however; their relation depends on the percentage of work hours that occurred during that time, as well as the types of crime that were occuring.
In a recent WPXI article, Scirotto said that the new policy “allows our officers to be engaged in community in a way, now they’re at the YMCA instead of sitting on the 10th Street bypass with a bike complaint.” This almost sounds like satire. The job of police is to arrest criminals. Are they arresting criminals at the YMCA? The state should not be a social science experiment, but should perform the basic duties it was set up for. The police chief might think it’s ridiculous that people expect the police to care about their bikes being stolen, but this is in the core purview of the police whereas community engagement is not. On the other hand, if community engagement is an effective way to recruit more officers, then perhaps it is a good investment. The Pittsburgh police department — as is the case in many other cities — is failing to hire enough police officers to replace those who resign or retire. Is the limited supply of police officers being allocated efficiently?
It is also true that a report (albeit, a controversial one) indicated that Pittsburgh has sufficient patrol staffing. Pittsburgh is a relatively safe city. Violent crime has been declining since a peak during the pandemic, as it has across the nation. (Violent crime data tends to be more accurate than property crime data.)
It may be a good political move to frame the decline in the number of police officers as a policy choice. The police chief is no stranger to political disasters. Scirotto became police chief of Pittsburgh after being fired as police chief of Fort Lauderdale after four police officers filed suit, alleging that he had discriminated against them in favor of minorities. (They ended up settling with the city.) Scirotto then attempted a wrongful termination lawsuit, but this was dismissed.
It is good that the Bureau is adding more data and services to their website. Currently, their Violent Crimes Dashboard is a very good resource. It would be interesting to see the same level of detail applied to property crime data, although it is more difficult to do this in an accurate way.
The Pittsburgh police should not sacrifice any of their main services before it is strictly necessary — and if they have the staffing to do community engagement, it is probably not strictly necessary.
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