Going dark: City transparency websites quietly dropped
The City of Pittsburgh has taken offline, or stopped updating, multiple websites that were meant to enhance the city government’s accountability and transparency to the people of the city and region. These actions are part of a troubling trend of city government receding from the public eye under the leadership of Mayor Ed Gainey.
The most obvious absence is Dashburgh, which the administration of former Mayor Bill Peduto launched after years of work as one of its final actions in December 2021. Dashburgh organized and presented data collected by the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center at the University of Pittsburgh so the public could access information and learn about about their city’s affairs.
Information available on Dashburgh included everything from city budget figures to the number and species of city trees. Accountability features included how many 311 requests had been placed to the city and how many had been resolved; the number and type of complaints about matters like missed garbage collections; and data about policing such as officer-involved shootings and closed investigations.
The city stopped updating the non-automatic data that populated the Dashburgh interface, and removed all public safety data, shortly after Mr. Gainey took office. Now the site is completely removed from the internet: All old links to it redirect to the City of Pittsburgh’s homepage. An invaluable and irreplaceable source of public information and accountability has vanished without a trace, and with no explanation.
Another city accountability website, this one specifically related to policing, has also been neglected: the progress report site for the Police’s Response to Mayor’s Community Task Force Recommendations. Mr. Peduto created the Task Force in June 2020 in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, and later that year it produced dozens of recommendations in areas such as racial disparities in policing, officer wellness and use of force policies. The website provided updates on the Bureau’s implementation of each of the Task Force’s proposals, but it is now years behind. It doesn’t appear to have been updated since Mr. Gainey took office.
The first recommendation under “eliminating racial disparities,” for instance, involves police collecting and making available better data on “routine police actions.” The accountability website indicates that the data had been made available in the Burgh’s Eye View application, which was a 2016 project that presented map- based information about the city. But the link to Burgh’s Eye View leads to an error message, and all other attempts to access the site failed. It seems to have met the same fate as Dashburgh.
To its credit, the Peduto administration had created several online windows through which to view — and judge — the workings of city government. Mr. Gainey is quietly and systematically boarding up those windows. The people of Pittsburgh must wonder just what he doesn’t want them to see.