A new blue line

Good steps to help city police adapt to the times

Pittsburgh’s universities are full of students earning degrees in computer science, engineering and other cutting-edge fields. Why not lure some of them into the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, where techsavvy officers are needed to crack increasingly sophisticated criminal enterprises?

That is just one idea for the city to consider as the bureau manages a demographic change in the force.

Over the past five years, as the Post-Gazette’s Shelly Bradbury reported Friday, the bureau has seen its ranks grow markedly younger and greener. Last year, about 30 percent of officers were in their first five years on the job. In 2012, 16 percent had fewer than five years’ experience.

The city continues to wrestle with the years-long problem of losing veterans to suburban police departments offering higher pay and better working conditions, but simple demographics also account for the infusion of newcomers. The current cohort of officers is graying, and a new one is taking its place. While loss of experience is a concern, the turnover should be reviewed as a once-in-ageneration opportunity to reimagine one of the city’s most important functions.

Police zones, investigative branches, rules and procedures established long ago can be restructured and fine-tuned with a corps of younger, more flexible officers. Zero tolerance for domestic violence, respect for civil rights, an appreciation for diversity and simple honesty can be woven more tightly into the culture of a bureau that from 1997 to 2002 was under federal oversight for abusive practices and in 2014 saw its former police chief, Nate Harper, sentenced to federal prison for theft-related charges.

Those are some of the opportunities on the horizon. New recruits, like many residents drawn to new Pittsburgh, are tech-savvy and that’s an asset for a bureau that now must investigate cybercrime, manage a growing network of security cameras, monitor illegal activity via social media and analyze evidence taken from computers and cell phones while performing traditional tasks of patrolling neighborhoods and combating violent crime. The city shouldn’t merely hope for more of such applicants to materialize but attempt to tap directly into the pool of computer, engineering and science whizzes studying at the city’s universities and working at its high-tech firms.

Much as the city has tried over the years to build diversity into the bureau with recruitment outreach at Pittsburgh high schools, it should develop a pipeline through the universities and high-tech sector. With the right pitch from the city, some new graduates might decide to go into law enforcement instead of academia or the private sector and use their high-demand skills in an unusual way, while early- to mid-career workers with cutting-edge talents might veer into police work as a fulfilling second career. These are the kinds of recruits who might stay with the bureau no matter what suburban departments offer.

Mayor Bill Peduto is right to reject the idea of trying to penalize officers who flee for the suburbs when their city-paid training is over. The bureau should be a place where people want to work, not have to be, and it offers more variation in opportunity and work assignment than any other department in the area. That’s a selling point.

Ideally, a police department should look like the city it serves. So it’s good that, as Pittsburgh changes, its police bureau does too. City leaders should reach deep into the talent pool to mold tomorrow’s thin blue line.