In our last post we reported on the sharp increase in arrests by the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police (PBP) this year, but we had little information beyond what was offered by the cops’ own dashboard. Here, we dig deeper by looking into the nitty-gritty of hundreds of individual court cases. What we found was startling. Not only is the PBP making arrests at twice the rate of last year, but there are more charges for each case, and those charges are more serious than in 2024. This is putting pressure on the court system, forcing defendants to spend more time in jail before their cases are heard, and saddling them with criminal charges for behavior that would previously have been charged only as summary offenses. Read on for details…
Starting with our methodology, all data was sourced from Pennsylvania’s Unified Judicial System web portal. We looked at all criminal cases filed in the months of October 2024 and October 2025, that were processed in Pittsburgh Municipal Court (MDJ-05-0-03), in which the arresting agency was the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, and the defendant was arraigned and/or had a bail hearing. This procedure eliminated most cases that were initiated by a citation without the defendant being taken into custody, as well as removing arrests by other departments such as UPMC police or Allegheny County sheriffs. While not completely random, we believe the sample we obtained is representative of arrests by Pittsburgh police in the months searched. We chose a year-over-year comparison to eliminate any seasonal variations that might influence the trends we examined. October was picked because it was the most recent full month at the time we began our study (although in hindsight we wouldn’t have lost any time by waiting until the end of November).
Data was recorded in a spreadsheet (LibreOffice Calc, version 24.7.2, running on Ubuntu Linux). For each case we recorded the Offense Tracking Number (OTN), the offense grade of the most serious charge (Summary, Misdemeanor, Felony, or Homicide), whether or not cash bail was imposed, and the number of days from arraignment to preliminary hearing. The OTN was included so that we could go back and get more data from each case, should that become desirable. In addition, we kept a running tally of charges, recording the name of the offense, its grade and subgrade (2nd degree misdemeanor, 3rd degree felony, etc.), and updating the tally as new cases containing the charge were found. The flaw in the running tally approach is that it doesn’t allow calculation of the standard deviation of charges/case, making it impossible to determine the statistical significance of between-sample variation in this ratio. This oversight will be rectified in an upcoming followup study. In other comparisons, statistical significance was assessed with a Chi-Squared test or a two-tailed t test as appropriate.
Please email us at 412swineflu AT proton.me to obtain a copy of our spreadsheet.
Taken by itself, even the relatively lenient month of October 2024 showed some disturbing patterns. Arrests for summary offenses were rampant, even though summaries are the legal equivalent of traffic tickets, with no criminal penalty attached. If you don’t get arrested for running a stop sign, why would you get arrested for summary Harassment? Worse, summary-only defendants were often held on bail, being forced to pay to avoid confinement 57.3 percent of the time. This is actually more often than for misdemeanor defendants, who were only assessed cash bail at a rate of 48.6 percent. This difference was found to be statistically significant at greater than 99% confidence. We found 199 arrests that fit our criteria, containing 554 charges, for an average of 2.78 charges per case.
For October 2025 we observed a dramatic change. Not a single summary-only arrest appeared in our searches, but the number of cases ballooned to 370. The charge count increased even more dramatically, more than doubling to 1,172 for an average of 3.17 charges per case, a 14 percent leap. On the surface, this might seem like a positive development. Aficionados of law and order might applaud the cops for “doing their jobs right” and “focusing on real crimes.” Abolitionists might be slightly relieved that fewer unfortunates were being subjected to arrest, detention, and sometimes bail for the most minor of offenses. Both would be wrong. A closer look at the charges involved shows that police are arresting people for the same petty crap as always, but charging it more harshly.
The most common charge by far in October 2024 was summary Disorderly Conduct, which comprised over 13 percent of all charges. A year later, Disorderly Conduct had dropped back to the number six spot at less than three percent, replaced atop the leader board by Simple Assault, a second degree misdemeanor. This is not because Pittsburgh’s hooligans all got together on December 31st last year and made a collective New Year’s resolution to step up their game. Rather it’s because Pennsylvania’s Simple Assault statute is written so broadly as to define harsh language as an “assault.” In any verbal conflict between two or more individuals, cops have the discretion to charge summary Disorderly Conduct, second degree misdemeanor Simple Assault, or first degree misdemeanor Terroristic Threats. In October 2025, they chose the second of those options far more often than the first compared to a year earlier. (Terroristic Threats on the other hand, was quite common in both samples, ranking second in 2024 and third in 2025.)
Another telling example was the offense of Retail Theft, which can be charged as a summary, misdemeanor, or felony. October 2024 saw only a single charge of felony Retail Theft, but 15 counts of the summary version. A year later, felony Retail Theft had leaped to 20 charges, while its summary equivalent had dropped to a mere 6.
This sort of overcharging could go some way toward explaining the increase in overall arrests in 2025. In 2024 the PBP arrested far too many summary-only defendants, but they didn’t arrest all of them. Some were given citations and allowed to make their own way to court on the appointed date. But for defendants charged with felonies citation is not an option, and it’s far less common even with misdemeanors. Overcharging doesn’t just lead to harsher sentences upon conviction, it is also often the difference between walking away with a summons or spending a night (or a month) in jail.
Not only does overcharging lead to more arrests, but the arrests can lead to additional charges. A defendant who gets arrested instead of cited will be searched, and the police will find any concealed guns or illegal drugs the person was carrying. This phenomenon could well explain at least part of the year-on-year increases we observed in charges for Intentional Possession of a Controlled Substance, Firearms Not to be Carried Without a License, and even Resisting Arrest (since defendants are presumably less likely to resist arrest if they aren’t getting arrested).
One would expect such a massive crackdown on petty crime to stretch the resources of Pittsburgh Municipal Court. The PBP is by far the largest police department in the county, and they can hardly start dumping twice their usual numbers of defendants into magisterial district courts without straining the system to some degree. Regardless, it would appear that the disruption, at PMC at least, has been fairly minimal. In October 2024 defendants had their preliminary hearings scheduled an average of 13.4 days after arraignment. In October 2025 that stretched only to 14.2 days, a fairly negligible delay. Breaking down the numbers a little further is revealing, however. Examining the time to prelim when cash bail had been imposed for October 2024 shows an average of about 11.5 days, versus over 16 days when the defendant was released without payment (a difference calculated to be statistically significant with over 99% confidence). This discrepancy just maybe means that magistrate judges were prioritizing defendants stuck in jail in an attempt to move their cases through the system a little faster. In October 2025 there was virtually no difference between the two groups, with both clocking in at about 14 days (14.0 to 14.3, a statistically and functionally insignificant gap). One possible explanation for the change is that judges who might in the past have reserved some earlier slots in their schedules for incarcerated defendants are now simply scheduling everyone for the next available opening. This practice would eliminate wasted slots when fewer jailed defendants appear than expected, at the expense of making those folks languish inside longer.
Another potential effect of the upsurge in overcharging could be that the prosecution’s cases become relatively weaker, possibly leading magistrate judges to release more defendants without bail. This is in fact what we find. Felony defendants in October 2024 were released without bail 34.9 percent of the time. In October 2025 that percentage rose to 43.8. For misdemeanor cases the leap was even more pronounced, at 51.4 percent in October 2024 to 65.5 percent in October 2025. These differences were calculated to be statistically significant with greater than 99% confidence (see graphic for details). We suspect this upswelling of leniency stems from magistrate judges recognizing that many of the cases before them are complete bullshit, but we can’t rule out a deliberate policy shift. Magistrate judges work for the county, which of course also runs Allegheny County Jail. The possibility exists that these judges are being encouraged from above to keep the jail population down in order to save money. More on this below.
We might also expect that weaker cases would lead to more charges getting dismissed or dropped at the preliminary hearing stage, but unfortunately too many cases from October 2025 are still open for us to make an accurate assessment of this possibility. More on this problem in a bit.
Some other things we still don’t know:
Why did so many charges of various versions of the Prohibited Acts law pop up in October 2025? The charge was completely absent in the 2024 sample. Belying its ridiculously vague name, Prohibited Acts is mostly related to drug possession, but the year-on-year jump in those charges is too big to be explained solely by arrests that lead to searches.
How are prosecutors justifying all those felony Retail Theft charges? Retail Theft is only a felony if the value of the stolen goods was over $2,000 or if the defendant has at least two prior convictions for shoplifting. Were prosecutors in 2024 neglecting to examine defendants’ criminal histories in shoplifting cases? Or did they start overcharging Retail Theft in 2025 and hoping defense attorneys wouldn’t notice? Answering this one will require delving into individual cases with followup searches.
What is going on with the jail population? We still have not answered the questions of either why it didn’t skyrocket at the beginning of the year along with arrests, or why it began its steady climb in May. In our last post, we speculated that minor charges eventually result in probation violations, which tend to incur more jail time than pre-trial detention, but we have not tested this theory. The UJS portal does not allow users to search for past probation violation hearings, only upcoming ones.
Looking more closely at the jail population graph from our last post (republished below), we see an initial leap in January, which was promptly squelched in February, followed by a very slight and highly volatile decline until early May, when a fairly steady rise began. It’s difficult to tell how much of this movement was due to the 2025 Pittsburgh arrest wave, for several reasons. One, the jail’s population has been increasing unevenly since early 2023, gradually returning to “normal” following the lean years of the pandemic. We can’t tell how much of this year’s increase we would have seen even with 2024 levels of arrests. Two, prisoner numbers fluctuate wildly on a week to week and even month to month basis. Separating the signal from the noise requires taking a long view, examining trends in three month or more increments. Three, county officials are taking steps to limit the number of prisoners they have to pay for. Their efforts might be obscuring the effects of this year’s increased arrests. A recent article in the Post-Gazette describes some of the tactics the county has instituted, such as pre-arraignment diversion, expedited bond modification hearings, and in-house competency restoration. These measures might help explain the sharp drop we see in November. They also raise the possibility that the county is trying to limit jailings by less formal methods. The PG piece mentions reduction in bookings from 805 in October to 658 in November, which is confirmed by the jail dashboard. Yet most of the tactics reported by the PG are aimed at releasing prisoners sooner, not preventing initial bookings.
The exception is pre-arraignment diversion, which in theory could extricate some defendants before they have a chance to be held in ACJ pending trial. However, there are reasons to think diversion might not be having much effect yet. For starters, the job of Pre-Arraignment Diversion Coordinator is still open on the county’s web site as of this writing. It’s also unclear how many of the divertees would have ended up in jail had they been arraigned. Presumably the program is only available to defendants with minor charges, exactly the ones most likely to be released on nonmonetary bond or own recognizance. There is therefore a distinct possibility that magistrate judges are being ordered, or at least pressured, to cut down on the number of people they stick in ACJ on unaffordable bonds. The proportional reduction in cash bail we found would seem to support this idea.
Despite the problems noted above, we can say a few things for sure. Yes, there is definitely a roughly two-fold increase in arrest rate by the PBP in 2025. It’s not just an artifact of changes in record keeping or some other technical factor. We also see verifiable increases in the number and severity of charges. In October 2025 we observed a distinct reduction in the proportion of defendants held on cash bail, which is almost certainly related to the increase in arrests, even if we don’t know how yet.
Our speculation in our last post that Pittsburgh’s war on the homeless might account for the arrest wave was obviously short of the mark. We are not looking at a temporary crackdown on a small sector of the population, but rather a broad policy shift toward greater criminalization of the city’s lower classes. Even if the county manages to limit the number of prisoners in ACJ through other means, more people are going to end up with more serious criminal records, limiting their options for employment and housing in the future.
Such a broad change in law enforcement policy does not happen without significant advance preparation. The PBP did not decide on a whim to double its arrest volume without consulting with the District Attorney’s office at a minimum, and probably other county entities such as the Pre-Trial Services office and President Judge Susan Evashevik DiLucente as well. One official that apparently didn’t make in on to the email thread was County Executive Sara Innamorato, however. She was quoted in the PG piece linked above as saying “…we had incurred $9 million in unplanned expenses because of an increased population in jail…” On one level this is kind of ridiculous. If the jail population had risen in both 2023 and 2024, why would anyone assume it wouldn’t continue to do so in 2025? Innamorato’s statement is revealing in another way, though. Either nobody involved thought to inform the county’s leader about an impending major expense, or she was deliberately kept in the dark (and might still be) to avoid pushback. We hazard a guess that nobody looped in the Public Defenders, either.
In summary, what’s coming into focus looks like a tug of war between the city and county, with DA Stephen Zappala likely betraying his nominal masters to side with the cops. The county’s objective is obvious – they want to navigate a budget crunch without raising taxes, and holding prisoners is expensive. The PBP’s motivation is murkier. All cops want to crack down on poor Black people of course, but not if it involves extra work, and arresting people is highly labor intensive. Every individual taken into custody has to be transported, booked, and possibly transported again, either to ACJ or maybe PBP headquarters for interrogation. It’s a lot easier to just give them a ticket and go back to playing Solitaire on the squad car laptop. And yet working they are. If the numbers are anything to go by, the entire department is beavering away arresting as many people as they can get their hands on.
It wouldn’t be fair to say we told you so, because we didn’t exactly, but we spotted something ominous on the horizon back in November 2024, when we wrote our postmortem on Larry Scirotto’s tenure as Pittsburgh’s police chief. As we concluded, “Scirotto thus leaves behind a police department that is smaller but more efficient than he found it. The officer time his reforms have freed up will continue to be used for repressive activities like sweeps of homeless camps far into the future…” “Far into the future” is now. Scirotto inherited a department that already boasted the most “proactivity time” for officers anywhere in the country, and his reforms only pushed that number higher. Now we are seeing how the ex-chief meant to spend his new-found bounty. While he is no longer here to steer it, Scirotto’s plan is proceeding appallingly smoothly without him.
Coming up: A similar study comparing December 2024 to January 2025. This will let us look at the transition to the new policy and collect some of the data we didn’t think to gather this time. It will also give us a chance to see how many more charges are getting dropped under the PBP’s new policy, since most of the cases from those months will have wrapped up by now.
Tables and Charts
A repost of a screenshot of the ACJ dashboard from our last article. the most recent updates can found at the source.
Days wait between arraignment and preliminary hearing.
Bail in 2024 vs. 2025
