Community policing pilot emphasizes relationships

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pittsburgh police will move 18 officers into neighborhood-oriented roles as part of a community policing pilot program, angling to strengthen ties with residents and to prevent crime, Mayor Bill Peduto’s office announced Thursday.

“We had talked about it for a while but didn’t really have the numbers of officers in order to be able to implement it,” Mr. Peduto said shortly after swearing in 26 police recruits.

Including those recruits, Pittsburgh now counts 912 police officers — the first time the city has crossed the 900 threshold in 15 years, Mr. Peduto said.

Police Chief Scott Schubert said new officers will begin field training Monday, and that additional manpower will allow him to shift other officers into the neighborhood-specific roles. He hopes to have the neighborhood officers in place in about 90 days — roughly the same time those 26 new officers finish field training, he said.

The neighborhood officers will patrol, answer radio calls and back up other officers, Chief Schubert said. But each of them will focus on a single neighborhood and prioritize building personal relationships with residents.

Typically, when officers patrol a neighborhood, the chief said, residents see just a passing patrol car.

“They’re not getting to see that officer,” he said. “And when they do have an interaction with an officer, it may be six or seven different encounters with six or seven different officers, so they’re not getting to know any one particular officer.”

The neighborhood officers, on the other hand, will be so concentrated in a single neighborhood that they should become familiar