Swine Flu Pittsburgh

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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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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