Swine Flu Pittsburgh

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 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 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.

A clue to the nature of that policy shift comes from the Allegheny County jail dashboard, which shows the jail’s prisoner population holding roughly steady into May, before beginning a moderate climb that lasts until mid-November, and then drops sharply. The jail population at this writing is 2,002, nearly the highest number since the Covid-19 pandemic, but nowhere near as great as one would expect if jailings had kept pace with arrests in the largest city in the county. This indicates that this year’s excess arrests have seldom lead to long term confinement, meaning they are likely for minor offenses.

One potential explanation is the increased oppression of Pittsburgh’s homeless community in an attempt to clear the city of undesirables in advance of the NFL draft next April, which we have noted previously. In arrests for petty crimes such as trespassing and disorderly conduct, the defendants are usually released on nonmonetary bond or personal recognizance instead of being held on bail. Such charges are typically penalized with probation instead of a jail sentence. However, if the defendant violates the terms of their probation they are often sent to jail for months to await a revocation hearing. This practice imposes a far harsher penalty on many defendants than any they could have received as a sentence. The delayed and muted increase in the jail population could be explained by the initial wave of new arrestees having to work their way through the arrest-court-settlement-probation-violation pipeline before ending up in ACJ. This theory would explain the available facts, but those facts are pretty sparse. More information is needed.

If we’re right we can expect the jail population to reach an equilibrium and level off as revocation hearings are completed and defendants are released back to probation. We might also hope that after the draft the police will calm down and return to normal levels of arrests, but this is less certain. The authoritarian mindset is always more oriented toward punishment than lenience, and once a new baseline of oppression has been established a return to the old ways is likely to be seen as coddling. In addition, the incoming O’Connor administration is likely to be even more hostile toward the homeless than was current mayor Ed Gainey.

 

CHARTS

PBP arrests since 2015. The 2016 entry had to be estimated by eyeballing graphs because that year’s annual report didn’t include the total number of arrests. The 2025 entry is also an estimate, since November and December’s totals had to be extrapolated from the preceding ten months. It is still obvious that the department is on track to arrest more people in 2025 than in any of the previous ten years

 

Calls for service 2015 – 2023. These data are not available in the PBP’s dashboard, only from annual reports. This means we won’t get the 2024 and 2025 numbers for a long time, given the department’s usual delay in reporting. If service calls turn out to have increased in those years, it will mark the reversal of a long downward trend.

 

Allegheny County Jail population changes in 2025. It will be interesting to see what happens to the steep drop we  see in the last half of November.

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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Last Wednesday, WESA dropped a story entitled Allegheny County D.A.’s office offers ‘Combating Antisemitism’ training for universities, authored by one Matt Eidson. The story is about a seemingly inocuous training recently given by a seemingly benevolent nonprofit to local university officials on identifying and fighting antisemitism. The nonprofit, StandWithUs Center for Combating Antisemitism, is described as ‘an international organization founded in 2001 that seeks to address “the continued rise of antisemitism within the culture and around the globe” through education and collaboration.’

Sounds perfectly worthy and unobjectional, doesn’t it? Who could possibly complain about education and collaboration in the service of addressing the continued rise of antisemitism? Unfortunately, StandWithUs’ Wikipedia page tells a very different story. There the group is revealed as a “right-wing, pro-Israel advocacy organization” that “actively works to counter Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaigns on campuses and beyond.” Elsewhere in the page we learn that SWU “does not believe the West Bank is occupied” and is ‘opposed to J Street, a self-declared “dovish” pro-Israel lobby.’

None of these positions is remotely hinted at in the WESA article. We are told however, that the training was specific to law enforcement, and that it was spearheaded by the deputy district attorney with the Violent Crimes, Firearms, and Narcotics Unit in the Allegheny County DA’s Office.

In addition to the misleading information the piece included, it is noteworthy for the context it left out. Let’s fill in some gaps. On the international level, the “continued rise of antisemitism” is in large part not antisemitism at all, but protests against Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip and beyond. Here in Pittsburgh, the author makes no mention of the nearly two dozen people being prosecuted in connection with a Palestinian solidarity encampment at Pitt last June. Nor is there anything in the story about the two local white supremacists recently unmasked by Idavox. The pair are members of Patriot Front and White Lives Matter, two deeply antisemitic organizations.

Taking the above into account, it is clear that the SWU training was not simply a generic this-what-antisemitism-looks-like affair. Its purpose was obviously to mobilize university cops to repress pro-Palestinian speech on campus even more harshly that they do already, with the able assistance of the district attorney. That WESA, an ostensibly liberal outlet, is behind the piece is not too surprising in a time when many news organizations are caving in to Trump. That doesn’t mean we need to fall for such obvious deception.

The Gainey administration is planning to build a massive police training and administrative compound on the site of the former Veterans Administration hospital in Lincoln-Lemington. Local activists discovered a so-called request for qualifications web page inviting contractors to show they have the capacity to take on the project. An RFQ is the first step in the formal procurement process. According to the above-linked page, qualified vendors will receive a request for proposals by January 10th, 2025. The city is facing a May 2026 deadline to finalize a development plan as part of its agreement with the federal government to acquire the site.

Two documents linked on the RFQ page (re-hosted on this blog) reveal the scope of the project. Included in so-called Option B, the preferred approach, are a firing range, emergency vehicle driving course, and K-9 training facility, along with a burn tower for the Bureau of Fire and several other training and logistical operations. Of particular concern is the so-called Public Safety Training Village, which will incorporate “storefronts, low rise buildings and streets/intersections.” The “village” is an obvious attempt to imitate Atlanta’s Cop City, a training environment and mock city for riot cops that has sparked widespread opposition.

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Well, that was fast. Pittsburgh police chief Larry Scirotto has announced his resignation, barely a year and a half after taking the job. Unlike the departures of his two most recent predecessors, it’s not entirely clear why. Scirotto has not had any public disputes with the Fraternal Order of Police, mayor Ed Gainey, local activists, or any of Pittsburgh’s other movers and shakers. Sure, FOP president Bob Swartzwelder rants regularly about staffing levels and officer pay, but that’s normal, nothing that anyone would expect a chief to quit over.

On the surface of course, Scirotto resigned because he would rather continue his side job as a referee at college basketball games than continue as chief. Maybe it’s even true. Scirotto’s year off from refereeing last season may have reminded him how much he enjoys it, and with his pension from his previous career as a Pittsburgh cop locked in, he may well be financially secure enough to follow his heart. Maybe there’s more going on, though. We can never rule out behind-the-scenes conflicts and tensions in these cases, and if Scirotto was always so devoted to refereeing, why did he want the Pittsburgh chief’s job in the first place? One possibility is that he never intended to hold the position longer than it took to juice his pension (which increases with salary), but we can’t know for sure.

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