Swine Flu Pittsburgh

Public Source and the New York Times are reporting that Allegheny County Department of Human Services executive director Erin Dalton is leaving to take a similar position in New York City under new NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani. She will not be missed by Pittsburgh’s unhoused population.

Dalton has been running DHS since early 2021, a tenure marked by an emphasis on authoritarian approaches to homelessness, addiction, and mental illness, but disguised with pseudo-scientific language and gestures. One example serves to illustrate the Dalton Way. Last April, the Post-Gazette reported that DHS was redoing the county’s point-in-time homeless census for no other reason than Erin Dalton didn’t like the results of the first count. Dalton was quoted saying “We found ourselves in a situation where I thought it would be really, really difficult to explain [the results], so we wanted to collect another data point.” The second count was deliberately crippled, with volunteers prohibited from including individuals known to be homeless unless they managed to encounter them during the brief survey period. The apparently lower population of unhoused people generated by the second count makes DHS look more effective, and reduces pressure on the county to spend more money on shelters. For Dalton, “data-driven” means using data to justify her own preferences, manipulating or ignoring it as necessary.

An explanation for increased homelessness in Pittsburgh was readily at hand, for anyone actually interested in one. The deteriorating economy, rising rents, ongoing eviction crisis, among other factors, combine to drive more previously housed neighbors into the streets every month. Yet Erin Dalton would rather sweep the homeless under the carpet with methodological chicanery than admit that the county needs to spend more money on the problem.

Dalton takes a similar approach to other vulnerable populations. Her “accomplishments” listed in the Public Source article include “decommissioning” encampments, closing the Smithfield Street winter shelter, opening a smaller winter shelter a year and a half later over two miles from downtown, and essentially ignoring a study that found that involuntary hospitalization of mental health patients did more harm than good. The Post-Gazette (of all papers!) published a sharply critical editorial series on her destruction of residential inpatient services for patients with serious mental illnesses. A 2018 book by Virginia Eubanks called Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor included a section on how the county Office of Children, Youth, and Families discriminates against low-income parents through the use of an app called Allegheny Family Screening Tool. Development of ASFT was spearheaded by Dalton back when she held Jutka’s job with DHS. She blithely admits to Eubanks ‘”We definitely oversample the poor,” says Erin Dalton, Director of Allegheny County’s Office of Data Analysis, Research and Evaluation. “All of the data systems we have are biased. We still think this data can be helpful in protecting kids.”’ Yet making ASFT less biased herself apparently never occurred to her.

We posted about another of Dalton’s projects last May, her push to make Allegheny County the guinea pig for Accelerated Outpatient Treatment, a coercive program intended to force supposedly mentally disturbed residents into treatment against their will. Since then DHS has announced they are definitely going forward with AOT.

Dalton’s interim replacement is set to be Alex Jutca, currently Deputy Director of Analytics, Technology and Planning. In other words, he’s the guy who has been doing Dalton’s statistical dirty work. Don’t expect any changes during Jutca’s tenure, and don’t be surprised when the “nation-wide search” for a permanent director just happens to land on him.

DHS clients in Pittsburgh will thus see little relief from Dalton’s departure, and their counterparts in NYC are in for the same treatment she meted out here. Mamdani’s first personnel decision, announced before he even took office, was to retain his predecessor’s police chief Jessica Tisch, a crony of disgraced ex-mayor Eric Adams. At the time, the mayor-elect’s supporters argued that the move was a compromise meant to appease the city’s powerful police unions and conservative voters. But absolutely nobody in NYC was clamoring for Erin Dalton to move north to run the Big Apple’s social services. Her selection therefore reflects Mamdani’s true agenda — not one of socialist abundance, but of austerity cloaked in technocratic jargon. Mamdani recently announced he was reneging on his campaign promise to end homeless camp sweeps in NYC. Dalton’s experience in Pittsburgh will come in very handy in managing the fallout from this betrayal.

Informup, a new local media nonprofit focusing on city council proceedings, is reporting that the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police has a contract with a company called LeadsOnline for the use of software called CellHawk, which exploits bulk cell tower data obtained from phone companies to track cell phones.

Details about CellHawk’s capabilities can be found in a 2020 article from The Intercept. The app ingests huge spreadsheets of raw cell tower data to present in viewable, searchable, and digestible formats, making the data useful not only for tracking of individuals, but for mapping the movements of groups within a particular area during a particular time period. Like a protest, for example.

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WPXI is reporting that a prisoner has died in Allegheny County Jail. Mark Schwartz, 55, was allegedly found unresponsive in his cell on Sunday morning and pronounced dead shortly thereafter. Schwartz had been held without bail for the last six months on charges of second degree misdemeanor Simple Assault and summary Harassment.

Schwartz’s cause of death is not yet publicly known, but there are only two possibilities. Either he died of a sudden medical emergency like a stroke or heart attack, or he took his own life. Either way, his death could have probably been prevented by jail officials. All prisoners are supposed to undergo a medical evaluation upon entry, which should reveal any life-threatening conditions and allow provision of appropriate care. If Schwartz did die of a heart attack or similar crisis, it should not have been in ACJ but in a hospital.

Suicide would constitute an even greater failure on the jail’s part. Schwartz’s docket shows he was denied bail in part because he was supposed to have a “BC Eval”, short for behavioral competency evaluation. This evaluation should have discovered if he was suicidal and taken steps to keep him alive while he was in their care if so.

The Allegheny County Jail Oversight Board is meeting this Thursday, February 5th at 436 Grant St. downtown in the 4th floor Gold Room at 4:00 PM. Anyone wishing to make a public comment must register in advance on their web site. Note that in a cynical and obvious attempt to limit comments, registration is cut off 24 hours before the meeting, so plan ahead.

UPDATE January 22, 2026: It turns out that October 2025 was an anomalous month for arrests, especially in Zone 2. Arrests there ballooned to 454 from September’s 178, and dropped back to 212 in November. Since Zone 2 includes downtown, arrests there are likely to be handled in the nearby Pittsburgh Municipal Court, from where we drew our data. This means our sample is not representative of arrests city-wide in 2025.

The study is still of interest however. Why did arrests in Zone 2 spike so hard, and why did they settle back down again? Are the the shifts we observed in charging patterns also anomalous, or do they reflect a long term policy change? More investigation will be necessary to answer these questions.

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UPDATE January 22, 2026: Revisiting the dashboard in January 2026 shows that the arrest totals were far lower in 2025 than we extrapolated, coming to only 8,886. This is still a nineteen percent increase over 2024, but a long way from the 2.5-fold jump we originally reported. We are not sure what caused this error – whether the dashboard numbers changed in the interim, or we made some mistake in navigating the web site or adding up the zone arrests. We considered removing this post, but decided to leave it up to remind ourselves to be more cautious in the future.

A look at the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police monthly dashboard reveals that the department is on track to arrest over twice as many people in 2025 as in 2024. The monthly arrest totals from January through October of this year add up to 15,172. Extrapolating through December yields over 18,000 arrests, compared to 7,476 in all of 2024. It’s actually only 8,889, still a substantial jump.

It is not yet clear what is driving the increase, but we can rule a few things out. It’s not a two and a half fold nineteen percent increase in crime that began precisely on January first. The mainstream media would have been screaming their heads off for months if any such crime wave was happening, or even if they had a decent excuse to pretend it was. In addition, we know from the city controller’s audit of Shotspotter that shootings at least have been virtually constant for years, although it says nothing about other types of crime. We can also rule out an increase in 911 calls leading to a concomitant jump in arrests. Per the controllers audit, 911 calls about shootings have actually been in decline, and a review of PBP annual reports through 2023 (the last year available) shows overall requests for service declining as well. With the caveat that when the 2025 annual report drops (likely in early 2028) we might have to change our minds, right now it does not look like any external factor is responsible for this year’s leap in arrests. This leaves only a change in police policy as an explanation.

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The books have not yet been closed on Ed Gainey’s single term as mayor of Pittsburgh, but they’re getting close, and a recent argument on social media prompted us to list all (most of?) the ways that Gainey has exacerbated the city’s ongoing Swine Flu pandemic.

In no particular order, Gainey has done the following:

Tried to get the 2024 Republican National Convention to come to Pittsburgh. Yes, really. No, not the Democratic convention, the Republican one. One might ask what, exactly, this has to do with policing, and we’ll tell you. Major televised events such as Formula One, the Olympics, and to a lesser extent party conventions, universally induce the host city to try to pretty itself up for the cameras, which means massive crackdowns on street vendors, homeless people, panhandlers, and anyone else not considered telegenic enough for prime time. The fact that Gainey not only was willing to tolerate such repression, but actively sought out the opportunity to impose it, told us everything we needed to know about his priorities.

And for anyone who didn’t get the message, the mayor is bringing the NFL draft ceremony to Pittsburgh next year. While the draft is only a one day event, this has not dissuaded Pittsburgh police from sweeping homeless camps and cracking down on squatters, all to keep rich football fans from having to lay eyes on the poors during their evening in town.

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Trib Live is reporting that Pittsburgh Controller Rachel Heisler’s audit of the city’s ShotSpotter program found that it did not reduce crime significantly. Needless to say, the Gainey administration has no plans to discontinue the program, despite this ineffectiveness. Public Safety PR flack Cara Cruz is quoted saying “This shows the effectiveness of the system, as well as the necessity of employing the technology in Pittsburgh.”

Cruz was primarily talking about the improved response time the automated gunshot detection system affords police, a reported 63% quicker than responses to 911 calls. This would be a bigger deal if Pittsburgh police didn’t already have the fastest responses of any major city in the country, per a study by Matrix Consulting Group commissioned by city council last year. The controller’s audit shows that even in 2022, the slowest year they examined, police were en route to the scene within seven minutes on average even for gunshot reports obtained through 911 calls, an outstanding performance. Nonetheless, ShotSpotter alerts lead to arrests less than one percent of the time, and have not been correlated with any decrease in shootings.

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Recently a controversy has erupted over the Allegheny County Department of Human Services’ (DHS) attempt to implement so-called Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) for certain mental health patients. The “Assisted” part is a euphemism for “court-ordered and involuntary”, a coercive practice that few other counties in the state employ. According to Pennsylvania’s Mental Health Procedures Act, counties have the right to opt out of AOT each year. In 2018 the MHPA was amended to reduce the barriers for involuntary treatment. Since then, no counties have adopted AOT, although a few carry on the practice under the old, more restrictive standard.

A Public Source article from May 13th revealed the health department’s plans. From this and some other sources a few things are apparent.

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Months after its self-imposed deadline, Pittsburgh’s Office of Management and Budget has finally identified three contractors who are qualified to bid on the Gainey administration’s Cop City project, more formally known as the Public Safety Training Campus. According to an email received by Swine Flu Pittsburgh, the three firms are:

– Manns Woodward Studios, Inc., of Nottingham, Maryland.

– MCF Architecture, located at 437 Grant Street, Suite 1600 here in Pittsburgh.

– HDR Architecture, Inc., a global firm with a Pittsburgh office at 301 Grant Street, Suite 1700.

An associated Request for Proposals titled “2025-RFP-049: Public Safety Training Campus Phase I Master Planning” is referred to in one of the emails we received from the city in our Right to Know request. However, as of this writing no record of this RFP appears to be available in either Pittsburgh’s Beacon portal or their OpenGov account. More competent investigators than ourselves are encouraged to assist. We can be reached at 412swineflu AT riseup D0T net.

A friendly reader has provided Swine Flu Pittsburgh with a trove of emails concerning the Cop City project, obtained from the Gainey administration via a Right to Know request. We are still in the process of sifting through them (attachments especially), and will post all relevant messages in the coming weeks. Some developments are becoming clear already, however. For starters, the administration has been purposely misleading Highland Park residents about replacing the outdoor police firing range.

For background, Pittsburgh is one of the only major cities in the US that trains its police on an outdoor shooting range near a residential neighborhood. The Highland Park range has been a thorn in the side of residents since at least 1989, but they have never convinced the city to transition to a quieter alternative, such as an indoor range or a more remote location. Emails from high ranking officials in the Gainey administration shed some light on the persistence of the outdoor range, as well as the administration’s approach to community relations.

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