Police to increase patrols in pair of public housing sites
Northview Heights, Allegheny Dwellings to have city officers
Two Pittsburgh public housing complexes may soon be regularly patrolled by city police officers instead of private security in a bid to improve safety and community-police relations on the North Side.
Housing Authority officials took the first step toward a threeyear, $4.5 million agreement with city police to provide “above baseline patrols” to Northview Heights and Allegheny Dwellings last week when the authority’s board voted to allow executive director Caster Binion to enter the agreement with the city.
Details still are being negotiated, but people familiar with the proposal said the hope is to create several new city police officer positions and have those officers work solely with the communities in Northview Heights and Allegheny Dwellings, as well as to open at least one mini-station as a base for those officers.
Diana Bucco, president of the Buhl Foundation, which has made a 20-year commitment to improving quality of life on the North Side, said the potential deal is a “real commitment” to community policing.
“It’s about enabling our police to focus more on public safety,” she said. “In recent history, we as the public tend to think about policing as law enforcement, and what the police want is to be about public safety. So community policing is about having beat cops in a