LARRY SCIROTTO WAS NOMINATED AS THE NEXT CHIEF OF POLICE FOR THE CITY OF PITTSBURGH ON MAY 3. (PHOTO BY J.L. MARTELLO)
Gainey nominates Larry Scirotto to become Pittsburgh’s next Chief of Police
The moment seemingly everyone—or at least, every local media member—was waiting for finally came on the morning of May 3.
Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, standing on the first floor of the City-County Building, cameras rolling, announced his nominee for Chief of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police.
“I’m proud to stand here today to nominate Larry Scirotto to be the next police chief for the City of Pittsburgh,” Mayor Gainey, engulfed with his usual voice of passion, said.
Pittsburgh City Council will formally interview Scirotto during a public hearing on Thursday, May 18. All indications are that City Council will confirm Scirotto, though not 100 percent a guarantee.
Scirotto told the New Pittsburgh Courier that he is African American. That makes him the first Black police chief for Pittsburgh since Nate Harper, who left the force in 2013. The “permanent” police chiefs since Harper have been Cameron McLay and Scott Schubert.
Schubert retired to start the summer of 2022, and Thomas Stangrecki had served as acting police chief since July 2022. Mayor Gainey reiterated his “admiration and appreciation” he had for Stangrecki, in his “excellent job” leading the bureau while the mayor, his executive team, and the search committee looked near and far for the city’s next top cop.
MAYOR ED GAINEY
“Every single candidate that we interviewed was great,” Mayor Gainey said. “Larry rose to the top. His deep ties to the city, inside knowledge of the bureau, and his outside perspective makes him the right choice to be Chief of Police and to continue on with our right policing strategy. Larry has shown in his 25 years of service that he is a capable leader, whose policies and work have made a direct impact on the lives of the people he served.”
Scirotto was terminated from his post as Chief of Police in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., in 2022 because of what was deemed “discriminatory promotion practices.” Certainly, not something a person gets fired for every day, for allegedly trying to diversify an organization’s higher-level positions. In today’s climate, many companies and organizations are looking to diversify its workplace and promote candidates who are African American or other classified minority groups.
LARRY SCIROTTO
During the news conference in Downtown Pittsburgh, Scirotto said he promoted 15 people during his short time as Ft. Lauderdale police chief, and 6 of those were minorities. In an interview in March 2022 with CNN, Scirotto said that “none of them were promoted because they were in a protected class. They were promoted because they were the best candidates.”
He added: “If promoting diversity is the hill I’m going to die on, I will sleep well tonight. I won’t allow them to tarnish my reputation. I won’t allow them to tarnish the work that I’ve done in the 24 years I’ve been in this profession.”
While it was not confirmed by Mayor Gainey, multiple local news outlets reported that Scirotto beat out two other finalists for the Pittsburgh job—Jason Lando and Ryan Lee. Lando had led with the Zone 5 Police Station in East Liberty before becoming police chief in Frederick, Md., and Lee was the former police chief in Boise, Idaho.
Scirotto called getting the job as top cop in Pittsburgh “a dream come true, a true opportunity to serve with the men and women of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police.”
Scirotto spent 23 years with the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, starting in 1995, until leaving in 2018. He worked everything from with the K-9 unit, to internal affairs, to sergeant. “I know this city, I know this organization, I know its strengths and weaknesses,” he said.
There had been a microscope placed on who would be selected as Pittsburgh’s Chief of Police. Homicides jumped to 71 for 2022 in the city, the most in a decade. Shootings occurred in seemingly brazen fashion—the more than 130 shots fired during an AirBnB teen party on the North Side on Easter Sunday morning; the shooting near the Sunoco gas station on Cedar Avenue on the North Side, killing two innocent women who were sitting at a bus stop, along with a 20-year-old Black man; and weeks later, a funeral service interrupted by gunfire, striking six people.
Mayor Gainey has been pleading with Pittsburghers—and especially those in some of Pittsburgh’s Black neighborhoods—for the gun violence to stop. He’s challenged everyone in the community, from parents, community leaders, other elected officials, and young people themselves, to change the status quo in the Black community.
The New Pittsburgh Courier has continuously advocated to its majority-Black readership to quell the violence, as the vast majority of homicide victims in the city and Allegheny County are Black. While Mayor Gainey said he and his team vetted the three finalists for police chief, it’s unclear if the mayor took the finalists’ ethnicity into consideration when ultimately selecting Scirotto, who was the only African American among the three reported finalists. Taking ethnicity into consideration isn’t something the mayor would be expected to publicly state when selecting a police chief. However, in a number of community forums that the mayor’s office held in late 2022, many in the audience told the Courier (and publicly) that they “preferred” a Black police chief, who may be able to resonate better with Pittsburgh’s African American communities.
Scirotto said the department will undergo a complete reorganization over the next several months, “to ensure that we are appropriately aligning our resources to best serve this city.”
He has four priorities for the police department: Create a violent crime reduction strategy focused on gun violence; Officer wellness; Building community-police partnerships; and Work toward increasing the quality of life for all of Pittsburgh.
“I live a simple mantra —be bold, and in that we will accomplish great things,” Scirotto said.
He also answered the question he’s been getting the most for the past months: Why come back (to policing) now when it’s probably the most tumultuous time in the profession? “Because what we do matters,” he said. “Who we do it for matters. Policing isn’t just a job, it gives me purpose. This is an opportunity for me to do something bigger than myself.”
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