Pittsburgh is on track to have another deadly year, officials said Friday.
There were 43 killings in the city from January through August. That's two shy of the number recorded during the same period in 2014, when officials marked their highest homicide rate in six years. As in many previous years, most of the victims this year were black males.
"Taken in total, it's a really sad picture," Police Chief Cameron McLay said during an afternoon press conference. He said many of the killings seem to involve "retaliatory violence between young people."
While killings and reports of gunshots being fired were up this year compared to last, the number of non-fatal shootings was down. Officials recorded 122 non-fatal shootings in the first eight months of 2015, compared to 97 during that time this year.
"It's an interesting phenomenon. I wish I could explain it to you, but I can't," Chief McLay said.
At least a quarter of the killings occurred in the neighborhoods patrolled by the Zone 1 station on the city’s North Side. Cmdr. Lavonnie Bickerstaff, who headed the station for much of the year until she transferred recently to the Major Crimes Unit, said the violence seemed to escalate in the spring and summer.
Police said much of that violence appeared to be driven by people who did not live in neighborhoods where the crimes were occurring. Though police did not say precisely where those people were coming from, arrest documents from some cases have hinted at feuds between groups of juveniles in North Side and East End neighborhoods.
Cmdr. Bickerstaff said zone officers worked closely with detectives in the bureau’s Group Violence Intervention Unit, anchored in its headquarters, to try to pinpoint people who were involved in most of the violence. Chief McLay said the bureau focused on people based on their criminal history, associations with other known criminals and tips from residents.
Cmdr. Bickerstaff said the group -— known as a Violent Crime Response Team -— often sent officers to arraignment hearings or called judges handling arraignments for people on their list of those who might be driving the crime. The goal, Cmdr. Bickerstaff said, was to “make sure that their bond was strong enough to keep them...locked up so that we would have a little bit of a time where we could develop cases on the individuals.”
After that team began working, police said, all of the North Side neighborhoods experienced decreases in homicides or had them at the same rate -— except for Northview Heights, where there was an increase.
Police said they also saw a drastic increase in crime in the Zone 2 station, which covers Downtown, during the month of August -— when many large events took place. Chief McLay said he plans to meet Oct. 11 with officials from various local offices, including the U.S. Attorney’s Office, school officials and others, to discuss plans for violence there. He said police have been working with Allegheny County juvenile probation and school police to try to curb violence in Zone 2, some of which has been driven by feuding teenagers.
“Our goal is to take away their anonymity,” he said, noting that he hoped that would encourage them to behave.
Kevin Acklin, chief of staff to Mayor Bill Peduto, has been involved in some of the meetings about Downtown safety. He said residents should expect to see “probably as soon as next week an update on what we've been doing to address some of the issues relating to the perception of safety in Downtown Pittsburgh."
It's unclear how other violent crimes compared to previous years. The chief's presentation included statistics on homicides, shootings and aggravated assaults in which someone used a gun. It did not include numbers for other other aggravated assaults, rapes and robberies, among others.
Chief McLay and Public Safety Director Wendell Hissrich both said the bureau does track those crimes, but they did not have the statistics with them. The chief said the bureau plans to announce “further crime data transparency efforts” in “the very near future.”
Staff Reporter Adam Smeltz contributed. Liz Navratil: lnavratil@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1438 or on Twitter @LizNavratil.
First Published: October 1, 2016, 4:17 a.m.