Joseph Sabino Mistick: Now is Gainey's leadership moment

Most Pittsburghers are sickened and exhausted every time they turn on the news and see another street killing in our town. There was another fatal shooting Thursday in broad daylight on Liberty Avenue in Downtown Pittsburgh.

Mayor Ed Gainey, a man who knows the personal tragedy of random gun violence, has called for the community to come together and stop the insanity after each one. No one can doubt his sincerity.

Gainey speaks constantly about the need to give young people hope for a promising future. And he speaks out for social programs that will help them get there.

We all know implementing that strategy will take considerable time. To buy us the time we need for that strategy to work, leadership must also give us a short-term plan to stop the gun violence now.

That means a plan for ramped-up law enforcement: more police, more visible police presence and coordinated law enforcement campaigns to confiscate illegal guns and jail the shooters. Pittsburghers need tangible actions, not just long-term plans.

Gainey’s victory was a surprise to many, maybe even to himself. He won with the support of progressives in labor and the Democratic Party, plus many regular Pittsburghers who had enough of Bill Peduto’s administrative failures.

Gainey quickly filled the top positions in his administration with the progressives who had helped elect him. Well-intentioned and dedicated, many of them have little experience running a modern city. And many of them distrust the police.

Progressive mayors have purposefully defunded the police in places like Burlington, Vt., and San Francisco, only to rehire officers and expand their police forces when progressive programs failed to address violent crime.

In Pittsburgh, the police have been defunded by default — stealth defunding — by not paying enough to keep officers here and by failing to train or attract enough officers to replenish a force diminished by attrition. While Gainey inherited many of these problems, they are his problems now.

In order to solve them — by implementing a law enforcement strategy alongside his social programming strategy — Gainey will have to break with some in his progressive base, as other Pittsburgh mayors have done for the good of the city.

In the late 1940s, David L. Lawrence banned coal-burning furnaces in homes throughout the city, losing much of the union support that first got him elected. Pittsburghers were dying from smoke-filled air, and the business community demanded smoke control before they would make big investments in the city.

Then, in the 1980s, Richard S. Caliguiri, a genuine neighborhood guy, had to make Downtown his priority. He created Renaissance II, a building boom that saved the city from the economic slide experienced by other Rust Belt cities. Then he could focus on the neighborhood groups, giving them unprecedented power and funding.

In the 1990s, Sophie Masloff learned that young families were discouraged from living within the city because the wage tax was way too high. She cut the wage tax twice to attract those young families, swapping it for a small real estate tax increase that hurt her base — senior citizen homeowners. They howled, but she did not blink.

Finally, following Masloff, Tom Murphy fought small-town thinking and risked his political future by supporting a new convention center and two new stadiums, assuring that Pittsburgh would remain a major league city.

These were all leadership moments. And now Mayor Gainey has his own leadership moment.