A Quick Look at the New Chief

Please note that this post contains two links to articles in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. We regret the necessity of linking to an outlet whose writers and other employees are on strike, but the Wayback Machine is not working for the PG’s web site at time of writing and the links are essential to provide context for our piece.

It’s finally official. Last Tuesday the Pittsburgh City Council confirmed Larry Scirotto as the new chief of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police. While, as we’ve said before, it doesn’t make a lot of difference who is running the PBP, the process surrounding Scirotto’s selection is revealing.

For starters, we finally know what’s been going through former acting chief Thomas Stangrecki’s mind for the last five months. Back in January Stangrecki instructed his officers to ignore a city ordinance prohibiting them from using minor vehicle violations like tinted windows as pretexts for traffic stops, on the flimsy excuse that the ordinance was in violation of state law. This was an odd move from a man hoping to ascend to the permanent chief’s job. Why would he risk pissing off Mayor Gainey with such a blatantly defiant policy shift? Had Stangrecki been tipped off that he was out the running for the permanent spot and was lashing out in frustration? Or had he been informed that the job was his, that the search was a sham, and he was starting to reshape the PBP to his liking? We now know it was likely the former.

The choice of Scirotto is interesting for other reasons as well. Last month, the names of the three finalists for the chief’s position were leaked to the Post-Gazette, Scirotto’s among them. The other two were former Pittsburgh police commander Jason Lando, and former Boise, Idaho police chief Ryan Lee. It’s a fascinating group. Two of them, Scirotto and Lando, were former high-ranking Pittsburgh cops who had moved on to run police departments in other cities (Lando in Frederick, Maryland and Scirotto in Fort Lauderdale). Lee, in sharp contrast, was an outsider who had been fired in Boise for seriously injuring a fellow cop’s neck during an impromptu chokehold demonstration. Were there really only two other candidates in the whole country as qualified as him?

Thanks to the extraordinary secrecy under which the search was conducted, we may never know for sure. It’s possible that Lee never had a chance and was only included on the list to temporarily mollify conservatives on the City Council and police force. It is unclear how many of those conservatives would have known anything about who was under consideration, but a team from the police union was involved in the selection process. It was supposedly bound by nondisclosure agreements, but Strangecki’s January tantrum would seem to indicate that these might not have been scrupulously adhered to.

It’s also possible that Lee was just the third-best of a bad lot, that no serious candidate without ties to Pittsburgh who had any other options wanted the job. The one thing all three finalists had in common was previous experience as a police chief, meaning that such experience was probably a requirement. Lee may only have been a finalist because only three current or former chiefs even bothered applying. It wouldn’t be too surprising if many top cops didn’t want to risk working for a progressive Black mayor in a city with a history of high turnover at the chief’s position.

Either way, we can assume Lee was never under serious consideration. Gainey still had the rare luxury of choosing between two candidates with the dual advantages of experience running a police department outside the city, and long years serving in Pittsburgh’s own force. He went with the one who was gay, biracial, and got fired from his last position for being too committed to diversity in hiring. Scirotto is insulated from criticism from liberals because on paper he’s exactly what they want. The Fraternal Order of Police can’t complain too much either, at least initially, because they never expressed any problem with Scirotto during his 23-year previous tenure with the PBP.

What the new chief does with his honeymoon remains to be seen, but we’re starting to get some clues. In an extensive interview last week with the Post-Gazette, Scirotto complained bitterly about the amount of time his officers waste responding to parking complaints and false burglar alarms, along with taking theft reports. He was sending two messages in the interview, one explicit, the other more obscure but still obvious to the intended recipients.

The obscure one was granting an interview to the PG at all. Gainey’s administration has been boycotting the newspaper since the PG’s employees went on strike and were replaced by scabs. Scirotto could just as easily have given his interview to the Pittsburgh Union Progress, a web publication run by the striking PG journalists – or at least to Trib Live. His choice of news outlets is a coded missive to the FOP that he doesn’t share Gainey’s politics and is willing to stand up to the mayor, and one delivered so subtly that Gainey can’t complain without looking like an overbearing nitpicker.

Scirotto’s explicit message was even more eye-opening, at least to anyone  not intimately familiar with local police procedures. Pittsburgh police spend 45,000 cop-hours responding to 10,000 complaints about parking every year. An additional 70,000 cop-hours go to dealing with the 7,000 annual burglar alarm alerts, 99% of which are false. (The burglar alarms take more time per incident because they require two cars in response.) Many Pittsburghers, your humble correspondents included, had no idea that calling 911 over a shitty parking job was even a thing. But as hilarious as it is that the kind of Karens who call the cops over an expired meter are actually crippling the operations of the police they love so much, we have to be wary. If Scirotto gets what he wants, the parking issues will be dealt with by a different agency (presumably the Pittsburgh Parking Authority), and the theft reports will be taken on line. While Scirotto didn’t say how many cop-hours are currently being consumed by theft reports, a rough estimate indicates that both these measures would free up about 30 officers worth of time a year (assuming 2,000 annual working hours per cop), nearly equivalent to a full police academy class.

Initially these newfound hours might go mostly toward reducing the PBP’s overtime bill, but as recruiting efforts ramp up, more and more cops would be available to pull over Black drivers for having frames on their license plates and other such racist and discriminatory practices. It’s worth noting that Scirotto has not reversed Stangrecki’s policy and gone back to obeying the ordinance that prevents this. Nonetheless, the clear lesson here is that Pittsburgh cops spend a lot of time on administrative tasks that might otherwise be spent on active repression. We can think of ways to make them waste even more time, but we will save these for another post.