Police shut down Fifth Avenue for hours outside of Central Catholic High School after false alarms of active shooter events there and at nearby Oakland Catholic High School on Wednesday, March 29, 2023, in Oakland. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)
The Gainey administration’s implementation of new disciplinary rules and the impending hire of a police chief come as metrics point to decreased tension between police and citizens.
Complaints against Pittsburgh police dropped last year to their second-lowest level in a decade.
Total allegations made in 2022 against police to the city’s Office of Municipal Investigations [OMI], which is charged with probing complaints against city employees, ran 22% lower than the average of the prior nine years. Last year, OMI received two-thirds as many allegations against police as it did in the high-water year of 2020.
That’s one of several metrics suggesting that police interactions with residents were less conflictual than usual during the first year of Mayor Ed Gainey’s tenure. In the wake of protests stemming from the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Gainey ran and won in 2021 on a platform of speeding up reform of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police.
There is no unanimity, though, about what’s driving the statistical trend.
“Better training for officers, the body-worn cameras [now used by all officers] and less officers,” summarized Lee Schmidt, director of Pittsburgh’s Department of Public Safety, when asked what he thought was behind the drop in complaints.
Brandi Fisher, president and CEO of the Alliance for Police Accountability [APA], said lack of faith in OMI and other official police accountability mechanisms, and a natural ebb as Floyd’s death and related protest recedes, may have contributed to the lower complaint numbers.
The city’s data “is not reflective of what’s actually happening in our communities,” Fisher said. Few of the people who report police complaints to her umbrella group also bring them to OMI, she added.
PublicSource’s third analysis, since 2020, of police accountability data is built on data the city provided in response to a Right-to-Know Law request. (Recognizing that the city may face legal bars from revealing the names of accused officers, the request asked that officers instead be assigned numbers.)
The data comes at a pivotal moment for Pittsburgh’s bureau.
In March, the city and the Fraternal Order of Police [FOP] Fort Pitt Lodge #1 approved a new contract that imposes a disciplinary matrix on officers.
The city also appears to be completing its search for a new police chief, through a process that has included input from members of organizations that have historically been critical of the city’s handling of officer malfeasance.
Read entire story here
About Post Author
