For a shrinking police force, co-response should be a top priority
The nationwide struggle to recruit police officers is shifting the nature of policing, nowhere more clearly than in Pittsburgh. The police bureau’s protocol updates, which dictate that officers will be dispatched only for crimes in progress, have drawn widespread critical attention in recent days.
Specifically, right-wing social media personalities and news outlets are now capitalizing on Pittsburgh’s struggles. One X account, for instance, published a clip from a local news station while declaring that Pittsburgh police would no longer protect residents and urging residents to buy guns. Over 10 million people viewed the segment, and X CEO Elon Musk joined in the comments section.
While the city’s staffing struggles are rightly troubling, the Pittsburgh pile-on, with its partisan point-scoring, has been sensational and simplistic. The situation requires creative proposals that respond to the reality of staffing declines, while reimagining what law enforcement can and should be.
One such proposal is “co- response,” in which a professional social worker accompanies police officers to suitable calls. To be clear, coresponse is not about replacing officers, but supplementing them with a professional presence who can provide care and services police are neither trained nor equipped to provide.
This was, in part, the vision when former Mayor Bill Peduto formed the Office of Community Health and Safety ( OCHS) in 2020. Unfortunately, however, growth of the program has been slow — as one tragic incident just this January demonstrates.
West End tragedy
In the early hours of Jan. 27, according to media reports, 44-year-old Faye McCoy was a passenger in a car that crashed into a median near the West End Circle. When officers arrived on scene, they took the driver into custody. As Ms. McCoy wasn’t behind the wheel, she wasn’t under arrest.
Ms. McCoy, a Black woman, repeatedly refused officers’ request to drive her somewhere more safe. Officers said she was intoxicated. She said she was afraid of them.
Twelve minutes after the police left, as Ms. McCoy walked along the bridge, a car hit her and threw her over the railing. She was declared dead at 8:45 the next morning, and the suspect remains at large.
In situations like this, law enforcement has little practical recourse. Faye McCoy hadn’t broken the law. She was coherent enough to share her personal information, including her name and address, with police, and to decline their offers for help.
But she needed help — the kind of help police are unable to provide, and that she wouldn’t accept from police even if they could.
Building up the team
Elizabeth Pittinger, executive director of the Citizen Police Review Board, questioned why the officers hadn’t called in a social worker to manage the situation. She contends that this is exactly the kind of situation non- police responders are meant to address. City officials have disagreed with this assessment, explaining that 3 a.m. intoxication incidents are beyond the scope of social worker co-response.
In a sense, both are right: Right now, OCHS only employs about half a dozen community social workers, which serve police Zones 1 and 2. It’s not reasonable to expect one to be available for a marginal call in the middle of the night.
However, Ms. Pittinger is correct that this is the type of case a fully implemented co-response program should be ready to handle. A social work professional would have been able to present Ms. McCoy with options and services (not to mention being less threatening) much more suited to her condition than a ride in a police cruiser — which officers offered but Ms. McCoy declined. It’s possible, and maybe even probable, that a co-response unit could have saved her life that night.
Smothered momentum
Unfortunately, however, under Mayor Ed Gainey, OCHS has struggled to build on its early momentum. As the Post-Gazette Editorial Board has previously reported, $10 million in federal funds set aside for the office’s Reaching Out On The Streets (ROOTS) collaboration with the Allegheny Health Network was never spent, despite public reports indicating the money had been expended. The whereabouts of those funds is still unknown.
As for co-response, the city budgeted for six community social workers in the office’s first full year of 2021, and budgeted for five, plus two team leads, this year. In other words, despite the predictable decline in police officers and promises to move toward a more holistic model of policing, the Gainey administration has allowed the co-response program to stagnate.
This is not due to a lack of interest among the police themselves. Numerous officers have completed the federal Crisis Response and Intervention Training (CRIT), which is required before working as part of a co-response team. There are many more available officers than there are social workers.
The stagnation of the co-response program is particularly frustrating given its success. In a Nov. 2023 report to City Council, Assistant Director Camila Alarcon-Chelecki said that co-responding social workers had served 107 people since April, including preventing suicides, reversing overdoses and reuniting unhoused people with their families.
Moving forward
Social worker co-response is not about replacing or displacing police officers. It’s about supplementing police with professionals who can fill gaps in officer training and competency. In fact, it’s about liberating cops to do their jobs, instead of being forced to become the front lines of social services, in addition to all their other responsibilities.
This complicated reality will never be captured in hysterical media coverage trying to make Pittsburgh the poster child for “liberalism.” It can’t be addressed in a simplistic national conversation with only two sides: pro- or anti-police. Neither side proposes anything that could have helped Faye McCoy.
Pittsburgh and its police force are changing, whether we like it or not. The question is whether the city’s leaders have a plan to ensure those changes are forward-thinking, and not merely reactive to crises. An expanded co-response program must be key part of those plans.