This was our first post, inspired by the departure of former Pittsburgh police chief Scott Schubert following Mayor Gainey’s ascension to office. Published originally on June 14, 2022.
Well, we won’t have Scott Schubert to kick around anymore. The Pittsburgh Bureau of Police chief announced his retirement just hours ahead of an impending mayoral press conference to make a major announcement concerning the police. He is, of course, claiming that his decision was made far in advance of the press conference and that the timing was purely coincidental, and he might not even be lying. Speculation that Schubert’s job was on the line had been flying since new mayor Ed Gainey replaced Public Safety director Wendell Hissrich, and it intensified with the release of the new administration’s transition team report recommending Schubert be fired. Schubert’s announcement a mere 10 days later that he was taking a job with the FBI indicates he was likely circulating his resume well in advance of his “retirement.” Hell, he might have seen the writing on the wall as early as Gainey’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary last summer.
Schubert essentially inherited the top spot in early 2017, after his predecessor Cameron McLay resigned following several years of conflict with the Fraternal Order of Police and Hissrich. McLay’s fate was probably sealed after he posed with activists from Whats Up? Pittsburgh while holding a sign reading “I Resolve to Challenge Racism @ Work.” FOP members, incensed at being called racist (lol), issued a vote of no confidence in McLay the following year, and he was gone a few months later.
That left Schubert as the safe, uncontroversial choice to be McLay’s successor. He had spent a quarter century in the PBP, going along to get along under corrupt dinosaurs like McLay’s predecessor Nate Harper, but with a masters degree in criminal justice administration, he could speak the language of inclusivity and antiracism. His mission was to project an image of a modern, data driven, community oriented police department, while, behind the scenes, maintaining the old reality of an oppressive force occupying Black neighborhoods. Challenging racism at work was right out. The goal was rather to defend it.
He might have pulled off this balancing act if not for the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing riot. The protests two years earlier over Antwon Rose II’s slaying at the hands of a suburban cop stretched the department’s resources and cost the city a small fortune in overtime, but were never large or intense enough to overwhelm police logistics (or PR efforts). This time was different. Pittsburgh’s downtown was smashed to shit on the afternoon of May 30, 2020, and after that the cops were way more interested in payback than public relations, Schubert included. Throughout the summer, the city saw protesters maimed by police projectiles, kidnapped by plainclothes cops in unmarked vans, and subjected to previously unimaginable amounts of tear gas. The chief’s efforts at spin control were inconsistent, to say the least. Following a protest in East Liberty a couple of days after the riot, his department swore up and down that no tear gas had been used, in spite of numerous eyewitness accounts to the contrary, only to reverse themselves the next day and admit that they had deployed gas after all. All this in spite of Schubert having been at the protest in person. Later in the summer the chief attempted to defend the black-bagging of a protester on misdemeanor charges as a “low visibility arrest” – as if disappearing someone off a sidewalk in broad daylight was perfectly OK as long as no one noticed.
Schubert’s missteps during the protests in 2020 made him easy prey for the progressives on Gainey’s transition team, just as McLay’s botched attempt to connect with the activist community left him vulnerable to attack by conservatives and the FOP. One chief can be said to have crashed on the rock, the other on the hard place. Yet the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police itself sailed on unscathed through the turmoil, enjoying regular budget and personnel increases, even in the face of a nation-wide campaign to defund police. (Fun fact: Their bicycle unit recently received brand new e-bikes.) It’s hard to see what either side gained from either firing besides a notch on their belt. Was the FOP really any better off during Schubert’s tenure than McLay’s? It was McLay after all, who pushed to eliminate the hated residency requirement for police, finally allowing them to live outside the city.
More importantly, will Pittsburgh’s poor Black neighborhoods see any relief from a post-Schubert PBP? The open chief’s position is now the subject of the proverbial nationwide search for the perfect candidate. Those searches have a history of concluding that the perfect candidate just happens to be the guy already holding down the job on a (supposedly) temporary basis, but this one might be different. As a new broom sweeping clean, Gainey might well conclude that swapping out one time-serving careerist for another (Deputy Chief Thomas Stangrecki in this case) isn’t quite the look he’s going for. Regardless of who is running the PBP however, cops are cops, especially in this town. A recent audit showed that 85 percent of marijuana arrests by the PBP were of Black people – even though only 22 percent of the the city’s population is Black. The audit is only the latest in a string (1, 2) of studies showing racist arrest patterns by the department.
The FOP and PBP leaders can thus be seen as pulling a good cop, bad cop routine. Which one is which depends on one’s point of view. Community members are told by whoever is occupying the chief’s hot seat that he would love to make his officers turn on their body cameras, if that darned union contract wasn’t tying his hands – but if he had a bigger budget he could at least do more implicit bias training. Meanwhile the FOP is, for example, telling racist yuppies “We’d love to round up all the homeless people along the river and stick them in Allegheny County Jail, but those woke socialists in management won’t let us. And by the way, we could use more money for tear gas, we almost ran out during the riot.”
They’re both lying, of course. The chief knows that if body cameras were always on his department would become enmeshed in regular scandals, while sweeping crackdowns on the surplus population, as satisfying as they might be to the city’s more reactionary elements, would require far more work than any cop wants to put in. By pointing fingers at each other, both the police union and city officials can mollify their respective bases of support and continue using the PBP to maintain racial capitalism in its current form. The process does sometimes require a sacrifice at the top, but this is a very small price to pay to keep business humming along as usual. Activists should recognize how little difference it makes who occupies the top spot in the PBP, and focus their efforts more on systemic change than symbolic personnel changes.