Swine Flu Pittsburgh

The last few months have witnessed a sharp increase in the surveillance technology used by local police, or at least knowledge and awareness of it. Stories about multiple types of cameras and other surveillance tools have hit local news recently, but nothing has been done to tie them all together, or paint a broader picture of the extent to which residents’ privacy and security is being invaded. To fill this gap, we present here a brief and possibly incomplete roundup of police surveillance tech in the Steel City.

CellHawk. We’ve written about this one before. CellHawk is an app for analyzing location data sourced from cell tower records and data brokers. Pittsburgh police were found to be using CellHawk by Councilwoman Deb Gross in February, but except for our bare bones piece there has been no followup from the media or City Council. The app is disturbing for a couple of reasons – one because it gives technicians the ability to track multiple devices at once within a precisely delineated area, and two because the police have been keeping its use a secret for nearly a decade. Supposedly CellHawk’s cell tower data can’t be accessed without a warrant, but we don’t know how strictly the vendor enforces that requirement. In addition, CellHawk can work with GPS-based location data purchased from data brokers without a warrant.

Countering CellHawk involves some inconvenience. For starters, users should remove the advertising ID from their phones. This won’t keep data brokers from collecting your GPS location data, but it will prevent them from identifying that data as yours, making it useless for tracking purposes. Avoiding tracking via cell tower records is more difficult. All phones leave a record of tower pings regardless of what apps they have installed – this is how the device decides which tower to connect with to send messages. The only defenses are to either leave your phone at home and treat it like a landline, or make sure service is not in your name. To do the latter, find a cellular dealer that doesn’t require ID and accepts cash, put a fake name on the account, get a new phone number instead of porting your old one (told you it was inconvenient!), and always pay the bill with cash or prepaid cards bought with cash. Avoid AT&T dealers, as they require customers to show ID.

License Plate Readers. LPRs sold by Flock Safety have been in the news lately, both for their exploitation by ICE and for the comically porous security of the cameras themselves. Pittsburgh doesn’t use Flock, however. Instead they have contracted with a competing LPR vendor called PlateSmart, a software-only company whose apps can run on most models of camera. It is not known which other police forces Pittsburgh shares LPR data with. Nor do we know for how long the data is stored, or what is done to secure it.

PlateSmart’s bring-your-own-cameras approach presents some problems for anyone hoping to avoid having their license plate scanned wherever they travel. PlateSmart cameras are harder to recognize, since they don’t use a standard model. In addition, since they’re installed by the city the devices tend to be harder to reach than Flock’s, who does their own installations using their own (very short) poles.

The county is in on the LPR act as well. Back in 2019, Lancaster Online reported on DA Stephen Zappala’s buildout of an LPR network in Pittsburgh and the surrounding boroughs. Like Pittsburgh’s use of CellHawk, the county made no announcement of the cameras, forcing the Lancaster Online reporter to base his story on documents obtained through an RTK request. Even more disturbing is that there are apparently no restrictions on who the county is allowed to share footage with. A followup piece by The Appeal revealed that in 2019 the DA’s office was already salivating over the potential for facial recognition to geofence minors on probation. Seven years later, it is still unknown if this capability has been implemented. The Pittsburgh city ordinance prohibiting the use of facial recognition does not apply to the county. It is also unknown whether or not data from county LPRs is shared with ICE.

The best way to defeat LPRs of any model is to avoid traveling by car. If this is infeasible for a particular trip, you can try to follow a route that avoids cameras. Deflock.me has a crowd-sourced map of LPR locations, but it is incomplete. More ambitious travelers can obscure their license plates with rear-mounted bike racks or racks attached to trailer hitches.

Red light cameras. The city will be rolling out traffic light cameras sometime this summer. These devices photograph your license plate and send you a ticket in the mail if you enter an intersection even a split second after the light has turned red. While the locations of the first six cameras to be installed have been made public, another 24 of the devices are planned, and there is no guarantee some of them won’t be in secret locations. Red light cameras are a particularly insidious form of surveillance because they generate revenue for the city. There is always a financial incentive to install more of them, especially now that the city government is facing a revenue crunch. Worse, officials might be tempted to shorten yellow light durations to lure drivers into running lights more often, as happened in Chicago beginning in 2007. The boost in revenue comes at the expense of more rear-end accidents, as drivers slam on the brakes at yellow lights instead of continuing on and getting a ticket. Vendors of red light cameras claim that the devices reduce t-bone collisions enough to improve traffic safety overall, but numerous studies show either no decrease or even an increase in injuries arising from traffic light accidents.

Parking cameras. Pittsburgh has been shifting its parking enforcement from human meter maids to automated plate scanners, both attached to vehicles and stationary. The stationary cameras enforce former mayor Ed Gainey’s loathed purple curb program, in which the 30 minute loading zones in front of businesses were changed to minute-by-minute charging, so that anyone parking in front of a purple curb will be charged a small amount even if they are only there momentarily. Similar cameras automatically ticket drivers who park in a bike lane for more than 90 seconds. This system disproportionately affects rideshare and delivery drivers, the folks most in need of a few free minutes at a curb. A pizza delivery driver who just has to park at the restaurant long enough to run in and grab his next orders may well find that the tip from his last delivery is wiped out by the parking charge incurred while picking up his next one. A disabled Uber passenger who takes 91 seconds to make it into the car can end up costing the driver more than the amount of the fare.

The mobile, car-mounted parking cameras, while not enforcing any new restrictions, have problems of their own. WPXI, in an uncharacteristic fit of investigative fervor, uncovered an incident in which one such device couldn’t even figure out which side of the street a car was parked on. Many more such glitches have undoubtedly avoided media scrutiny.

The same measures that can defeat license plate readers are also effective against parking and red light cameras – but suffer from the same inconveniences. In addition, continuous use of a bike rack to obscure a license plate will eventually draw the attention of a human cop or meter maid. In New York City, which recently instituted congestion pricing, a cottage industry in so-called ghost plates has sprung up, featuring shady car dealers selling temporary paper license plates linked to false names and addresses. These things can save drivers money in tickets and tolls, but they have to be renewed every month or two, and using them can get you arrested if you get caught. Various mechanical devices that obscure a car’s plates are available on the internet, but these too can get you in bigger trouble if a cop pulls you over. The take-home lesson is that anonymous driving is feasible for occasional trips, but risky and expensive if done regularly.

Good old fashioned surveillance cameras. Pittsburgh opened its so-called Real Time Crime Center in early 2020 to monitor feeds from Shotspotter, LPRs, police body cams, and its own network of high resolution cameras. These last devices can be spotted in ever greater numbers on light and telephone poles around the city. Most are found along heavily trafficked streets, but some are inexplicably positioned in quiet residential neighborhoods (hello Chautauqua Street!). More elaborate stand-alone versions featuring their own solar panels, battery packs, and flashing blue police lights have recently popped up in the parking lots of local retailers like Home Depot. Footage is normally retained for ten days according to city ordinance, but will preserved for longer if the cops need it for anything. Another city ordinance says this about sharing footage: Access to data from City Public Security Cameras shall be available upon written request only as set forth herein or in regulations and procedures promulgated by the Director of the Department of Public Safety and the Chief of Police. In short, the cops can give the data to anyone they want.

It is clear from the above compendium that our beloved city is swiftly turning into a dystopian police state. The hoops an ordinary person has to jump through to maintain the same privacy while traveling we enjoyed in 2015 make normal life nearly impossible. Even the PRT buses have surveillance cameras now. Individualized approaches to resistance have slowly tightening limits that make getting from one place to another without leaving a digital trail more and more time-consuming, expensive, and inconvenient. At some point somebody’s going to have to start going on offense. We hope to explore what that might look like in a future post.

TribLive is reporting the names of all the cops involved in the bar fight in Pleasant Hills last month. The four are Jake Flickinger, Kyle Briggs, Brayden Davies, and Richard L. Dilimone, Jr. Interestingly, they’re all pretty inexperienced, having joined the force no earlier than 2015. Yet all of them made detective, even Briggs, who only signed up in 2019. As was revealed when the story broke, the four were not just ordinary detectives either, but part of the Violence Prevention Unit, an elite roving street crime squad started by former chief Larry Scirotto in 2024.

These types of units have a disturbing history of excessive force, corruption, and other abuses. The NYPD’s street crime unit was temporarily disbanded after one of its officers murdered Amadou Diallo in 1999. A similar unit in LA was responsible for the Rampart scandal. More recently, Memphis’ so-called SCORPION unit was shut down after five of its members beat Tyre Nichols to death in 2023. Scirotto claimed to have solved this problem when he created Pittsburgh’s version of SCORPION, telling city council “It can be done with the appropriate training, the appropriate selection of personnel and the appropriate oversight.”

The ex-chief’s strategy is now a little clearer – to select favored officers not long from the academy, who would presumably be less indoctrinated with an old-school culture of brutality and impunity, and more amenable to training in modern, constitutional policing. But if that was the plan, it obviously didn’t work. Dilimone reportedly smashed a full bottle of beer against a bouncers head in a drunken rage, after the group chased another patron out of the bar. If “violence prevention” detectives can’t even prevent themselves from committing violence in a bar after work, what are they like on duty?

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.

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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 three 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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