Allegheny County Police assisting Pittsburgh officers in patrolling Downtown

The Allegheny County Police Department is sending officers into Downtown Pittsburgh to assist an understaffed Pittsburgh Bureau of Police.

Officials with the county police and Pittsburgh’s public safety department confirmed that county police began assisting in the Downtown area Monday.

Allegheny County uniformed police officers in marked cars will be patrolling in the Central Business District, said Christopher Kearns, the county police superintendent.

The exact number of county officers working in the area will vary, Kearns said.

Pittsburgh Public Safety Director Lee Schmidt holds regular briefings with police from the city and county, as well as officers for Pittsburgh Regional Transit and others who may operate in the area, said Maria Montaño, a spokesperson for Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey.

She declined to provide further comment on county police patrolling Downtown Pittsburgh.

This comes as Pittsburgh officials have voiced concerns about staffing shortages in the police bureau. The city currently has about 820 active officers, which is less than the 900 budgeted for and far less than the roughly 1,700 officers who policed the city’s streets in the 1990s.

Beth Pittinger, who leads the city’s Citizens Police Review Board, said it’s hard to use staffing as an excuse to bring in outside officers — something that brings about complex jurisdictional and accountability concerns — when the police bureau does not have a set requirement for how many officers need to be on duty at any specific zone.

“There is no established minimum manpower standard in the city of Pittsburgh per shift, per zone,” she said.

She acknowledged that officers she has spoken to are “exhausted” from working extra hours to make up for the depleted numbers, but pointed out that there is no set number the city uses to determine when there’s a staffing problem.

Firefighters, she said, have established a four-minute response time marker. But the police — whose response time now averages around seven minutes — haven’t set a specific minimum response time to gauge their staffing needs.

Aside from the question of whether the city can show it really needs another department to assist in policing its Downtown area, Pittinger raised questions about potential jurisdictional disputes and issues with accountability in the event a county officer is accused of misconduct while working in an area that should be policed by the city.

“We’ve got a lot of questions about it,” she said, noting that the Citizens Police Review Board has jurisdiction only over Pittsburgh police officers. “If there’s a situation where there’s a problem Downtown and both departments are involved in it, how are we going to be able to hold the officers accountable for whatever is alleged to have happened?”

Pittinger and Pittsburgh Fraternal Order of Police President Bob Swartzwelder also questioned why the county is assisting only in Downtown.

Pittinger said she believes the measure is officials’ attempt to “get a handle on” recent violence that has occurred in Downtown, which is “an unusual place” for such problems to arise.

“That’s where people come to patronize businesses,” she said. “It’s an area visitors come to and frequent.”

Swartzwelder, who is pushing officials to bolster the police department’s numbers, said there is no emergency presenting itself in Downtown that would warrant county police stepping in to patrol the area.

“It’s not just short-staffed in Downtown,” he said. “It’s short-staffed in all the neighborhoods of the city. One neighborhood should not take priority over another neighborhood.”

Like Pittinger, Swartzwelder voiced concerns about accountability and jurisdiction.

The police union, he said, is considering filing a grievance or unfair labor practice claim against the city for using county officers in an area the city’s police bureau is meant to patrol.

“The city is now subcontracting bargaining unit work where we have primary jurisdiction,” Swartzwelder said.

He said city officials did not discuss the arrangement with the union before bringing in county police.