In no particular order, Gainey has done the following:
Tried to get the 2024 Republican National Convention to come to Pittsburgh. Yes, really. No, not the Democratic convention, the Republican one. One might ask what, exactly, this has to do with policing, and we’ll tell you. Major televised events such as Formula One, the Olympics, and to a lesser extent party conventions, universally induce the host city to try to pretty itself up for the cameras, which means massive crackdowns on street vendors, homeless people, panhandlers, and anyone else not considered telegenic enough for prime time. The fact that Gainey not only was willing to tolerate such repression, but actively sought out the opportunity to impose it, told us everything we needed to know about his priorities.
And for anyone who didn’t get the message, the mayor is bringing the NFL draft ceremony to Pittsburgh next year. While the draft is only a one day event, this has not dissuaded Pittsburgh police from sweeping homeless camps and cracking down on squatters, all to keep rich football fans from having to lay eyes on the poors during their evening in town.
But Gainey didn’t need an impending spectacle to make him order the sweeps of homeless camps – he was doing that well before landing the NFL draft. We first commented on the practice in November of 2022 during the opening of the Second Avenue Commons shelter, an occasion exploited by the Gainey administration to justify evicting camps all over downtown.
Then there’s the police staffing issue. This one probably deserves a post of its own, but for now we will just summarize. As recently as 2018, the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police boasted over 900 sworn officers, a number that at points during Gainey’s tenure dropped below 750. The decline was largely due to Covid-19, with a post-pandemic spike in retirements also playing a part, but this did not stop conservative critics from accusing Gainey of deliberately defunding the police. The complaints grew louder after 2023, when the administration saved a little money by cutting the PBP’s officer allotment from 850 to 800, in recognition that the former number was unachievable in the short term. 2023 was also the year that the Matrix Consulting Group report on PBP staffing dropped. As we reported, Matrix found that Pittsburgh had the quickest responses to 911 calls in the country, and recommended that officers be transferred from patrol duty to (mostly nonexistent) other roles. In other words, Pittsburgh is heavily over-policed even with the lowest number of officers it’s had in years.
For an abolitionist trying to shrink the force by any means available, or even a pragmatic progressive looking to free up money for other priorities, this should have been a golden opportunity. Here after all was a scientific study presenting hard evidence that the city already had more cops than it needed. Yet Gainey and his allies stood silent while then-chief Larry Scirotto led a media crusade denying the efficiency of his own force. Even after Scirotto quit unexpectedly to go referee NCAA basketball games, Gainey never made an issue of the report.
In addition to doing everything in his power to increase the porcine population of Pittsburgh, Gainey has also done his level best to get them more toys. He insisted on continuing the cop city project he inherited from Bill Peduto, including the urban warfare training ground hilariously dubbed the Public Safety Training Village. The “village” was supposedly eliminated last month following a heated city council meeting, but there are grounds for skepticism. The master list of facility components published in the article linked above includes an entry for “Outdoor multipurpose training areas,” a vague catchall that could easily include the allegedly-canceled urban warfare playground.
Gainey’s affinity for police facilities does not end with cop city. He’s also responsible for the construction of police substations in Southside and downtown. In an amazing coincidence, both areas just happen to be known for high concentrations of homeless people.
Let’s not neglect Gainey’s sins of omission, either. There are a lot of actions he could have taken as mayor to reduce the burden of police oppression on Pittsburgh’s residents, but didn’t. One instructive one is his response to Trump’s recent trip to Pittsburgh for the so-called Energy and Innovation summit at CMU last month. As a presidential visit, the summit required a very high level of police protection involving hundreds of Pittsburgh cops. Gainey could have easily thrown a wrench in Trump’s plans, and maybe even gotten the summit canceled, simply by ordering the PBP not to provide security.
Ordinarily of course, such a move would be politically perilous. A sitting mayor that stuck his thumb so blatantly in the president’s eye could expect the special enmity of Trump voters that normally only show up to the polls when their favorite orange pedophile is on the ballot himself. Centrists already uneasy over the mayor’s rhetoric would be truly horrified if he actually backed it up. But Gainey was already a lame duck, having lost the Democratic mayoral primary to white centrist Corey O’Connor in May. Not only did he have nothing to lose, but the notoriety he might have gained from drawing Trump’s ire could conceivably have restored him to political relevance. A public attack by the fascist-in-chief might well have scored Gainey a book deal and a chance to run for something in 2026. The role model here is Newark mayor Ras Baraka, who got himself arrested in May protesting an ICE detention center, giving a huge boost to his gubernatorial bid. Yet rather than make a similar attempt, Pittsburgh’s mayor went along to get along even in his twilight months.
Gainey has shown similar passivity even when the president was not involved. One measure he has never attempted is ordering the PBP to issue citations for nonviolent misdemeanor charges. Instead of dragging those accused of weed possession or shoplifting off to jail and forcing them to spend hours waiting to be arraigned, they could just be given tickets to show up in court for their preliminary hearings. This is standard practice in most of Allehgeny County’s municipalities. Its adoption in Pittsburgh would take an enormous logistical load off the jail, arraignment court, and the PBP itself (since officers would spend fewer hours booking defendants and bringing them to the jail). It would also take a large bite out of the population of Allegheny County Jail, since defendants are more likely to be released without bail if they were cited instead of arrested.
In a similar vein, Gainey has never imposed a housing first policy in the city’s dealings with homeless people, preferring to mollify yuppie Karens by sweeping (literally) the unhoused under the rug while only offering the bare minimum in services. They took a different approach in, of all cities, Houston, Texas. Despite being one of the most conservative cities in the country, Houston embraced housing first enthusiastically, with the result of almost eliminating homelessness in the city. Gainey can’t claim not to have heard of Houston’s success – he traveled there early in his term to see how it worked. Yet in the end, he decided that law enforcement would be his main tool for homelessness management, with provision of housing a mere afterthought.
Gainey’s devotion to the police does not extend to any attempt to reduce their workload, however. Late last year, the county launched its A-Team diversion project. Much like Eugene, Oregon’s CAHOOTS, the A-Team is a branch of emergency services specializing in mental health crises, responding to select 911 calls without police interference. Currently the A-Team is being piloted in Penn Hills, Monroeville, McKees Rocks and some Allegheny County Housing Authority properties. As the astute reader will have discerned, Pittsburgh is not on that list. Buy-in and funding from the county’s largest city could have launched the A-Team to instant prominence and saved countless sufferers from mental afflictions from unnecessary arrest and confinement, but that plan never came together. We pity the fool who thinks that under Gainey it ever could have.
There’s an obvious political strategy embedded in every one of these moves, the same centrist calculation that failed Kamala Harris’ presidential bid. Take your base for granted because they have nowhere else to go, while reaching out to traditional conservatives and Reagan Democrat types. As we’ve pointed out before, in the county where Harris drew her largest majority in Pennsylvania, this strategy may have looked attractive, but only if you ignore the fact that Gainey wasn’t running against a Trump. O’Connor is a bland technocrat who was never going to inspire an anybody-but-Corey movement, at least not before taking office. Gainey’s only hope to defeat O’Connor’s out-of-state money would have been to govern to the left to mobilize his base, hold continuous voter registration drives in liberal neighborhoods, and show enough love to the city’s infrastructure to placate voters who are fed up with Pittsburgh’s crumbling roads and leaky water mains. That he didn’t do so speaks more to who he is as a person and a politician than to any calculated strategy from his advisers. What we have seen for the last four years is the real Ed Gainey – a man with no principles besides accommodating power and not rocking the boat. It’s not surprising that in a city as racist as Pittsburgh, he lost to what is basically just a whiter and better-funded version of himself.