More city homicides solved in 2018
Pittsburgh police also report drop in gun violence
Pittsburgh police solved more homicides in 2018 than in any one of the previous five years as gun violence dropped across the city, according to numbers released by police Monday.
The Bureau of Police recorded 55 homicides and 114 nonfatal shootings in the city during 2018. That’s down from 58 homicides in 2017 and 140 nonfatal shootings, and continues a downward trend in the city’s gun violence for at least the past three years.
Police credited community cooperation, improved technology and the bureau’s Group Violence Intervention, or GVI, strategy for the decline during a news conference at city hall Monday.
“There’s a lot of good work being done in the city of Pittsburgh,” Chief Scott Schubert said. “But I want to preface it by saying one homicide and one shooting is too many in the city of Pittsburgh. And we need to think about the victims, and their families, and what they go through when someone is murdered.”
Investigators solved 39 of the 55 homicides in 2018, creating a “clearance rate” of 71 percent — much higher than any of the past five years, in which clearance rates hovered around 50 percent. A homicide case is typically considered “cleared” when a suspect is arrested, but it can also be cleared under other circumstances, such as if a suspect is dead.
The clearance rate was slightly higher in 2018 because 11 people were killed in one attack at the Tree of Life Congregation in Squirrel Hill; a man was arrested in that incident.
Cmdr. Victor Joseph, who heads the bureau’s violent crime unit, said Monday that police are benefiting from better relationships with community members, who are providing detectives with more information than in the past.
He said the decline in violence matches up with the city’s relaunching of the Group Violence Intervention strategy, which aims to reduce gun violence by focusing on the small group of individuals who are responsible for the vast majority of the violence. The bureau offers help to those individuals who agree to stop shooting and punishment for those who continue to be violent.
“We remove specific violent individuals from our streets, those who commit violent acts in our city,” Cmdr. Joseph said.
The intervention team also works to prevent disputes from escalating into shootings by talking directly with those involved in the disputes, and it tries to prevent retaliatory violence by working with victims and would-be retaliatory shooters immediately after a shooting occurs, sometimes visiting victims in the hospital or at their homes.
Mayor Bill Peduto on Monday applauded police for the drop in shootings and said reducing the city’s violence — which he called a symptom of poverty — requires a holistic approach.
“It’s not simply how many people you can arrest — but that is really important because there are only a small number of people who will pick up a gun and shoot at another living human being — but it’s what other opportunities are you providing in those areas,” he said. “So when you look at this, it really becomes not only a function of public safety but a function of everything we do as a city.”