Cultural Trust, mayor clash over public safety
Mayor Bill Peduto is pushing back against Pittsburgh Cultural Trust concerns about a “declining level of public safety” Downtown, vowing that he won’t criminalize homelessness or mental health issues.
In a scathing rebuttal to a July 10 letter from Cultural Trust CEO Kevin McMahon, Mr. Peduto said the city is working with Allegheny County and nonprofit agencies to address issues such as homelessness Downtown and to get people into housing.
“But it doesn’t happen at the snap of a finger, and we’re not going to attack this national epidemic by criminalizing the status of those that have the least,” he said. “If Mr. McMahon wishes us to round up the homeless, the addicted and those with mental health [ issues] with police officers and thinks that that’s the way you solve the problem, well, then, we’re just going to have to disagree.”
Mr. McMahon wrote his letter after a double shooting July 4 in the trust- owned Katz Plaza.
He also raised concerns about seeing in the Cultural District an increase over the past year in homeless people, aggressive panhandling, disorderly youth, open marijuana use, lewd acts in alleyways and the number of people who are publicly intoxicated or under the influence of controlled substances — all “unchecked by law enforcement.”
The issues, he maintained, threatened “to undo the reputation and the achievements” created over the past 35 years during which the trust has been the driving force behind the transformation of a once-seedy red- light district spanning Liberty and Penn avenues around the region’s premier cultural destination, with venues such as Heinz Hall and the Benedum Center.
“Please do not mistake this recent incident as just another isolated holiday spike in crime in the city’s Downtown area — it is NOT. I can assure you that the decline in safety in the Cultural District has been consistent, coming to a tipping point with this recent double shooting,” Mr. McMahon wrote.
Mr. Peduto, in an interview Wednesday, took issue with the characterizations.
“Unlike what the letter describes, we will not criminalize mental health issues or homelessness. We’ll work with those people as our neighbors to help them. I couldn’t be more diametrically opposed to his characterization of people who need help as criminals,” he maintained.
Mr. Peduto blamed many of the problems on the failure of the federal government to provide funding to combat them.
“Do we have more homeless people? Do we have more people with mental illness on our streets? Do we have people that are addicted? Yes,” he said.
“And it’s not just Downtown. It’s all throughout — not just this city but every city in the United States. We have no domestic agenda. Zero. There’s no program at the federal level to be able to help us with this epidemic. And instead of providing additional resources to help the growing numbers of those that are facing mental health [ issues], homelessness and addiction, we are cutting the programs and expecting that by doing less it will solve the problem.”
In his letter, Mr. McMahon urged Mr. Peduto to adequately staff a Downtown police substation, which is provided free of charge by the trust; to increase the number of bicycle officers, beat officers and police supervisors; and to assign narcotics investigators and officers to conduct “park- n- walks” in “more problematic areas” like Katz Plaza, Tito Way and Exchange Place.
While Mr. Peduto did not specifically address those suggestions, he said previously in a statement in response to Mr. McMahon’s letter that city homicides have been down every year since 2014 and that the latest statistics for 2019 for Downtown show a 3% drop in violent and property crime.
He also said the city now employs the largest number of police officers in 15 years.
In the interview this week, the mayor also suggested the “prosperity that we’re seeing Downtown and the record amount of investment has direct correlation to keeping Downtown safe.”
Mr. McMahon, in a statement Thursday, said, “The mayor has always been a strong supporter of revitalizing Downtown and a supporter of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. Both the mayor and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust are dedicated to providing an increased quality of life for all Pittsburghers.
“The letter was a call for help in areas that are in need of attention and we are grateful that we have met with some of the city’s health and safety officials, and we are working together to address the points raised in the letter.”
Mr. McMahon had said patrons and subscribers to the district’s entertainment venues had expressed concerns for their safety. In June, a trust employee was assaulted after leaving the organization’s offices on Liberty Avenue. Several others have been harassed by youths, he has said.
Since his July 10 letter became public, some other Downtown stakeholders have echoed the Cultural Trust’s concerns.
Mr. Peduto said he had no plans to meet with Mr. McMahon to discuss his letter.
“What he did is that he sent it to over 100 people knowing that it would get out to the media, and if I were to enable that type of behavior in order to get a meeting, others would use the same amateurish tactic,” he said.