George Spencer leads the Greater Pittsburgh Area MAD DADS in street patrols focused on reducing violence with positive interactions. (Photo by Quinn Glabicki/PublicSource)
by Charlie Wolfson, PublicSource
The July 4 holiday has historically turned violent in some parts of Pittsburgh, but in a year of increased violence in the city and nationwide, one community group saw a breakthrough that day.
MAD DADS, a group focused on street outreach, presided over a more or less nonviolent scene Downtown that night. When a confrontation started brewing between groups of young men, they got to work with their signature strategy: inserting themselves into a potentially violent situation, unarmed, until cooler heads prevail.
“We kept hanging around until the groups dispersed, to the point where we said we had a good night tonight,” said George Spencer, the group’s president. There were no reports of violence downtown that night.“That was several years in the making.”
The group teamed up with the city’s Group Violence Intervention unit and city police to respond proactively to potential problems.
“We try to say encouraging things,” Spencer said. “‘We want everyone to get home safe,’ ‘ We don’t want to see anyone get arrested.’”
Spencer and his group are part of a large, loosely connected set of community organizations working to curb gun violence in Pittsburgh. While they are driven by successes like Spencer saw on July 4, this year and particularly this summer have been all too tragic.
There were 43 homicides from January through September this year in the city, a 30% increase from the same period in 2020 and a 38% increase from the same period in 2019. (Weapon data is available through August; 34 of the 38 homicides that occurred up to that point were committed with guns.)
The rise in gun violence has coincided with a campaign for mayor of Pittsburgh that pits a state representative against a former police detective. In separate events and at the first debate of the campaign, Democrat Ed Gainey and Republican Tony Moreno have made public safety the top issue of the campaign.
But community groups and activists, who work in the neighborhoods year after year without regard for the political calendar, say the issue doesn’t fall neatly along political lines and requires a community-led approach that goes beyond the mayor’s office.
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