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.
