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.
Scirotto’s tenure as chief was marked by two signature moments. The first was in July of last year, when a city-commissioned study by a firm called Matrix Consulting Group found that the city employed 188 more cops than it really needed. Matrix didn’t recommend layoffs, only suggesting the excess officers be transferred to more specialized duties, but this stance is contradicted simply by adding up the report’s own numbers. According to our analysis of the report, its total recommended additions and subtractions across all units would have resulted in nearly 100 officers losing their jobs, even taking into account the 26 cops who had already left the department between the report’s commissioning and release.
This conclusion flew directly in the face of the narrative long promoted by Scirotto and the FOP that the department was understaffed and struggling. A comment from Swartzwelder to local media was revealing: ‘“Why did I just have 22 officers forced into double shift in the last 24 hours if that statement is true?” he asked. “Either the study is invalid, or police command is mismanaging its force.”’ The correct answer of course is mismanagement. Scirotto was handing out overtime left and right because one, he had the budget for it; two, overtime manipulation is a tried and true tactic for managing beat cops; and three, all police chiefs want the biggest departments they can get, regardless of need. To schedule less overtime would have been an admission that the department was overstaffed all along, and the 900 officers it was theoretically allotted represented complete overkill, considering the department only had 787 cops when the report dropped.
The report examined response times to 911 calls and other “civilian-initiated” calls for service, breaking down the data by zone, time of day/day of week, and seriousness of the incident. Pittsburgh’s average response time to even the most minor calls was found to be extraordinarily low, at less than 16 minutes. The authors termed this “an extreme statistical outlier among large metropolitan police agencies.” This rapid service left Pittsburgh patrol officers with nothing to do for an average of 71% of their time on duty, far higher than the 40% considered ideal by Matrix’s experts.
Under these circumstances, it’s understandable that Scirotto flatly rejected Matrix’s main conclusion. Accepting it would have meant shrinking his force by about 11%, an utterly unacceptable outcome. Assisted by the city council, the FOP, the media, and DA Stephen Zappala, Scirotto launched a PR blitz against the report, one that carefully avoided examining the study’s methodology and instead focused heavily on emotionally laden rants and questions about whether the city had violated its own procurement rules in contracting with Matrix in the first place. Their efforts proved successful, with even the city’s progressive activist groups declining to make an issue of the study.
Scirotto did however implement some version of many of Matrix’s other suggestions, leading to his second major accomplishment – the reconfiguration of the department’s call priorities and officer shift schedules. Even before Matrix compiled their findings, Scirotto was complaining about police time being wasted on tasks that could be more cheaply done by civilians, and the report expressed similar concerns.
The chief made his move in late February, announcing three major changes. One, patrol officers would no longer respond to most burglar alarms without confirmation of an actual break-in. Two, the department would work toward having parking complaints resolved by the Pittsburgh Parking Authority. And most significantly, officers would switch to ten-hour shifts four days per week, with only a skeleton crew on duty from three to seven in the morning. Desk officers would no longer be on duty in zone stations during the wee hours. This measure schedules more officers during the times of day that see the most activity, no longer wasting a third of the force on the night shift when nothing much goes on.
Per media reports, the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police employed around 750 officers in late September, 37 fewer than when the Matrix report was released. However, Scirotto’s efficiency improvements should go a long way toward closing that gap. That 71% “proactivity time” Matrix was concerned about is likely to be at least as high as it was in the summer of last year. This is not a positive development. As we pointed out when Scirotto was hired, too much free time for cops just leads to more racist broken-windows policing, in a city where the criminal justice system is already heavily biased against Black people.
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, and his success in discrediting the Matrix report will help ensure that the narrative of police understaffing continues to dominate budget discussions. In the short term, department staffing is likely to remain static, thanks to a looming budget crunch and a spike in retirements. In the longer term, Scirotto has positioned the department to expand its operations both logistically and politically.
Let’s remember though, that no matter how bloated no police department can have cops everywhere at once. The price of Scirotto’s efficiency improvements is that gaping four-hour hole in city coverage every morning. If enough nocturnal clandestine mischief were to occur in those hours, eventually the department would have to go back to a normal three-shift schedule and give the city a break during the day.