Dalton has been running DHS since early 2021, a tenure marked by an emphasis on authoritarian approaches to homelessness, addiction, and mental illness, but disguised with pseudo-scientific language and gestures. One example serves to illustrate the Dalton Way. Last April, the Post-Gazette reported that DHS was redoing the county’s point-in-time homeless census for no other reason than Erin Dalton didn’t like the results of the first count. Dalton was quoted saying “We found ourselves in a situation where I thought it would be really, really difficult to explain [the results], so we wanted to collect another data point.” The second count was deliberately crippled, with volunteers prohibited from including individuals known to be homeless unless they managed to encounter them during the brief survey period. The apparently lower population of unhoused people generated by the second count makes DHS look more effective, and reduces pressure on the county to spend more money on shelters. For Dalton, “data-driven” means using data to justify her own preferences, manipulating or ignoring it as necessary.
An explanation for increased homelessness in Pittsburgh was readily at hand, for anyone actually interested in one. The deteriorating economy, rising rents, ongoing eviction crisis, among other factors, combine to drive more previously housed neighbors into the streets every month. Yet Erin Dalton would rather sweep the homeless under the carpet with methodological chicanery than admit that the county needs to spend more money on the problem.
Dalton takes a similar approach to other vulnerable populations. Her “accomplishments” listed in the Public Source article include “decommissioning” encampments, closing the Smithfield Street winter shelter, opening a smaller winter shelter a year and a half later over two miles from downtown, and essentially ignoring a study that found that involuntary hospitalization of mental health patients did more harm than good. The Post-Gazette (of all papers!) published a sharply critical editorial series on her destruction of residential inpatient services for patients with serious mental illnesses. A 2018 book by Virginia Eubanks called Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor included a section on how the county Office of Children, Youth, and Families discriminates against low-income parents through the use of an app called Allegheny Family Screening Tool. Development of ASFT was spearheaded by Dalton back when she held Jutka’s job with DHS. She blithely admits to Eubanks ‘”We definitely oversample the poor,” says Erin Dalton, Director of Allegheny County’s Office of Data Analysis, Research and Evaluation. “All of the data systems we have are biased. We still think this data can be helpful in protecting kids.”’ Yet making ASFT less biased herself apparently never occurred to her.
We posted about another of Dalton’s projects last May, her push to make Allegheny County the guinea pig for Accelerated Outpatient Treatment, a coercive program intended to force supposedly mentally disturbed residents into treatment against their will. Since then DHS has announced they are definitely going forward with AOT.
Dalton’s interim replacement is set to be Alex Jutca, currently Deputy Director of Analytics, Technology and Planning. In other words, he’s the guy who has been doing Dalton’s statistical dirty work. Don’t expect any changes during Jutca’s tenure, and don’t be surprised when the “nation-wide search” for a permanent director just happens to land on him. DHS clients in Pittsburgh will thus see little relief from Dalton’s departure, and their counterparts in NYC are in for the same treatment. Mamdani’s first personnel decision, announced before he even took office, was to retain his predecessor’s police chief Jessica Tisch, a crony of disgraced ex-mayor Eric Adams. At the time, the mayor-elect’s supporters argued that the move was a compromise with the city’s powerful police unions and conservative voters. But absolutely nobody in NYC was clamoring for Erin Dalton to move north to run the Big Apple’s social services. Her selection therefore reflects Mamdani’s true agenda — not one of socialist abundance, but of austerity cloaked in technocratic jargon. Mamdani recently announced he was reneging on his campaign promise to end homeless camp sweeps in NYC. Dalton’s experience in Pittsburgh will come in very handy in managing the fallout from this betrayal.