Gainey expands on plan to boost Downtown police presence

Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey said Thursday that by the end of March he will boost the police presence Downtown, increasing the number of officers patrolling the Central Business District from as few as 3 to a total of 18, plus supervising officers.

The mayor also expanded on plans to open a new Downtown public safety center that would operate separately from the Zone 2 substation on Liberty Avenue, and said he looks forward to welcoming recruits from the first Pittsburgh police class in two years.

“I’m not bringing you a hypothetical and making it sound good. I’m going to show you the plan and let you be the judge,” Gainey said during a Downtown morning attended by 400 residents and business owners.

“We did increase police Downtown … but this one will be overlapping where the gaps were,” he added. “I’m not here to lie to you. I’m here to give it to you straight.”

Gainey updated the crowd on the search for a police chief, saying one would be in place by April. The force is now being led by Acting Chief Thomas Stangrecki.

After an event hosted by the Allegheny County Chiefs of Police Association on Thursday afternoon, District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. reminded Pittsburghers that officials have taken similar steps in the past.

“We did the ‘Taking Back Downtown’ under the O’Connor and Ravenstahl administrations,” Zappala said. “We can plan this fairly quickly (but) it’s problematic too. I know everybody wants to help.”

He also questioned the benefits of county police patrolling the central business district.

“There’s going to be all kinds of issues with that,” Zappala said. “And I don’t know how realistic that is, but I guess the upside is we’ve identified an incoming class for the Pittsburgh police. Defunding these guys, I think, is over, I hope.”

At the Downtown forum, Gainey fielded a host of questions from the audience, going more than an hour over the event’s scheduled running time. Questions ranged from how to tackle Pittsburgh’s homelessness problem to how to create more incentives for converting unused office space into Downtown homes.

Cleanliness and the building of a more robust Department of Public Works also were touted during the city forum.

The Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership’s Clean Team removed more than 760,000 lbs. of trash in the city’s central business district in 2022, according to the organization’s president and CEO, Jeremy Waldrup. It also removed nearly 5,000 graffiti tags last year.

Downtown residency now stands at about 21,000 with a residential occupancy rate of more than 93%, Waldrup added. There are just more than 9,000 residential units in the central business district, with about 6,000 units in the pipeline.

Gainey said DPW personnel is down about 21% and those working in the department are stuck with equipment that is 10 to 15 years old. The mayor stressed that he has allocating about $4 million in this year’s budget for additional service funds and buying or renting new snow removal vehicles.

But public safety loomed larger.

The mayor laid out plans for the new public safety center, which will be located temporarily in the Lantern Building​ at 600 Liberty Ave. That building — also known as the former Liberty Travel building — had fallen into disrepair before PNC Bank recently bought and renovated it.

Gainey said the city is looking at locations on Wood Street for a permanent public safety center location.

The mayor became animated as he addressed the issue of youth and guns.

“This is probably, from a personal standpoint, what hurts me more than anything else — and there’s no easy answer,” said Gainey, who was a gun-reform advocate as a state representative and whose sister, Janese Jackson, was shot and killed in Homewood in 2016.

“The environment we live in right now, (youth) don’t fight, they shoot,” he added. “This isn’t just Downtown. This isn’t just Pittsburgh. This isn’t just Pennsylvania. This is all over … and we refuse as a society to change the law to deal with gun violence even though the killers are getting younger.”

Tribune-Review staff writer Paula Reed Ward contributed.