Following an especially violent year in Pittsburgh, city and police leaders are grasping for some type of immediate solution to stop the bloodshed, particularly among the city’s teenagers.
That’s included a move toward returning to and reversing some practices: Some city council members want to explore enforcing an existing but not used curfew for kids and young teens, and Pittsburgh police have resumed making traffic stops for minor violations, something banned by a 2021 city ordinance.
But these measures have been controversial in the past and remain so today. And there is continued debate about whether such approaches actually work in reducing crime and violence.
“What we see again and again when police are given this kind of discretion is that it disproportionately affects people of color and people in disadvantaged neighborhoods,” said Sara Rose, deputy director of the ACLU in Pittsburgh.
Both potential tactics — curfews and so-called secondary or pretext stops — give law enforcement officers a wide breadth of discretion when it comes to carrying out enforcement.
“Not everyone who appears to be 14 is 14 — they could be 18,” Ms. Rose said in regard to curfews. “How do [law enforcement officers] decide whether to stop people? There are a lot of legitimate reasons people can be out after curfew, but police can’t know that without stopping them.”
The potential enforcement tactics come on the heels of a particularly deadly year. There were 71 homicides in Pittsburgh last year, and 14 victims were 18 or younger.
Pittsburgh Council President Theresa Kail-Smith cited such violence as the chief reason to explore curfew possibilities: Youth violence, she wrote in the new legislation, is “deterring business owners, customers and residents from remaining, visiting or relocating to these areas, or otherwise encroaching on the quiet enjoyment of their communities.”
“I don’t know why cities keep going back to [the curfew]. It shows a lack of imagination in crime prevention,” said Mike Males, a researcher at the California-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. “The research is clear: it’s not a solution.”
Ms. Kail-Smith defended her legislation and stressed during a council meeting Wednesday that it was simply to get the conversation started, and she’s not married to any one idea in particular right now. She said she wants to do something and have somewhere for kids to go – ideally, drop-in centers where kids could go and where they’d been taken if picked up after curfew.
“I did not propose [using] the current legislation,” she said. “All I did was say, ‘Let’s have a conversation.’”
She said the mayor’s office has been receptive to drawing together a committee and having those talks.
Mayor Ed Gainey’s office did not respond to a request for comment regarding either issue, nor did they respond to requests for an interview with Mr. Gainey.
Ms. Kail-Smith pointed to other cities that have implemented curfews for youths, some with success and others without. She pointed to Washington D.C., and Chicago, noting “two Black female mayors put [those curfews] in place.” She pointed to Wilkes-Barre and Philadelphia and Erie.
“If we can’t even have a conversation without the barrage of accusations and comments, then our kids are in more trouble,” she said.
While the legislation is simply to create a type of exploratory committee, some council members expressed their doubts, including Barbara Warwick and Erika Strassburger, with Ms. Warwick noting there is “ample evidence about why curfews don’t work.
Indeed, myriad studies have concluded that curfews do little to cut down on the amount of violence affecting youth, either those perpetrating it or those victimized by it.
“The overwhelming consensus is curfews are useless. They’re worse than useless,” said Mr. Males, the juvenile justice researcher.
“What we found is that curfews are amazingly effective at wasting police time and taking law abiding youth off the street,” he continued. “Removing law-abiding people from public is a bad idea.”
In 2016, the Campbell Collaboration, a nonprofit criminal justice policy group, reviewed 12 studies on the effectiveness of curfews for city youth.
“The pattern of evidence suggests that juvenile curfews are ineffective at reducing crime and victimization,” the review concluded. “The average effect on juvenile crime during curfew hours was slightly positive — that is, a slight increase in crime — and close to zero for crime during all hours.”
David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh School of Law professor, said that, intuitively, it seems like curfews should work.
“Take kids off the street, less kids are on the street, they won’t do anything to each other,” he said. “The data don’t prove that it works.”
A 2015 study by researchers at the University of Virginia and Purdue University looked at the impact of Washington D.C.’s curfew. It noted that incidents of gunfire increased by almost 70% during curfew hours. On top of that, most youth violence happens in the hours right after school, according to data kept by the Department of Justice.
And a curfew would have been irrelevant when an 18-year-old was accused of a mid-afternoon fatal shooting Thursday on a busy Downtown street.
Return to some traffic stops
The issue regarding traffic stops came to light earlier this month in the form of a memo issued by Pittsburgh’s Acting Chief Thomas Stangrecki.
That memo, according to Public Safety spokeswoman Cara Cruz, instructs officers to follow general police policy for traffic stops.
That general policy does not include any language related to a 2021 city ordinance barring police from making stops based solely on minor infractions. Officers, under the 2021 law, could still issue citations for minor infractions so long as that was not the only reason for the traffic stop.
The real intent behind the resumption remains somewhat unclear. Ms. Cruz and Mayor Ed Gainey have said Chief Stangrecki’s memo applied only to training, though Ms. Cruz also said the training memo for the 2021 ordinance was sent out in February 2022.
In statements made earlier this month to WESA FM, Chief Stangrecki made no mention of training in his justification for telling officers to resume traffic stops as they were prior to the 2021 ordinance.
He said feedback from officers indicated they felt the ordinance was “preventing them from doing their jobs.”
“The officers who are employed here come here for a reason, and that’s to enforce the law,” Chief Stangrecki told the radio station. “I thought it was imperative that I send out some strong message to the officers that are still here on this police force that you can do your job, you can enforce the law.”
Mr. Harris, the Pitt professor, said the data show that this approach does little for public safety, too.
“Discretion is not a bad thing in itself. It couldn’t be eliminated even if you wanted to,” Mr. Harris said. “But we should want it exercised wisely and with restraint and for good purposes.”
He said the numbers are clear: “Traffic stops happen hugely disproportionately to people of color given the presence of Black drivers on the road.”
He continued: “Intention doesn’t matter, the data tell the story of who’s getting stopped.”
A study by New York University’s Policing Project studied five years of traffic stop data in Nashville, Tenn., looking at racial disparities and the effect, if any, stops for minor violations had on crime. The study found that as traffic stops by Nashville police declined from 2012 to 2017, “crime rates remained quite flat.”
“As officers increase the number of stops in a particular area, crime does not necessarily fall as a result,” the study concluded. “In some weeks, officers made an above average number of stops — and crime indeed went down. But sometimes crime went down without any change in the number of stops, and sometimes crime would go up despite the stops.”
Researchers with the Policing Project also looked at arrests or the seizure of drugs or guns borne out of traffic stops.
“For every 1,000 non-moving violation stops, just over 2% (or 21) resulted in an arrest or the recovery of drugs or other contraband,” researchers wrote. Another 61 stops led to non-drug-related misdemeanor citation, according to the study, and most of those were for driving with a suspended or revoked license.
A larger study from North Carolina found similar results.
Frank Baumgartner, a political science and policy professor at the University of North Carolina, analyzed the outcomes of more than 9.5 million traffic stops in the state between 2013 and 2019.
From those traffic stops, according to the data, 526,947 non-traffic-related charges were filed — that could mean drug or gun charges, resisting arrest, or any other non-traffic charge.
Those charges resulted in around 90,466 convictions, Mr. Baumgartner’s research found.
“Traffic stops where no one is obviously injured are not without injury. These costs must be weighed against any evidence of benefit or harm prevention,” Mr. Baumgartner concludes. “Evidence suggests that crime fighting benefits are minimal. At least, very few serious criminals are apprehended as a result of a traffic stop.”
Mr. Harris said his own work has shown this as well.
“If this is all about getting guns off the street, those [pretext] stops find guns in less than 1% of all those stops,” he said. “Some small percentage finds small amounts of marijuana. What they do is aggravate lots of people who are just going to the store for a quart of milk and they have to deal with the police.”
Sounds like 1995
The conversations in Pittsburgh City Council today are the same conversations the 1995 city council had in the lead-up to the vote on the curfew ordinance. At the time, homicides in the city were in the second year of a three-year decline after a massive spike from 44 homicides in 1992 to 80 in 1993.
Glimpses into the decision-making process captured in 1995 show one thing has not changed: There are no simple solutions to violence in any form let alone among young people.
In September 1995, then-Councilmember Joe Cusick told a sharply divided council that the bill to establish the ordinance was “less punitive and more family oriented.”
“We’re trying to give them hope, not a [criminal] record,” Ms. Kail-Smith said Wednesday.
While homicide numbers have seen both peaks and valleys over the past three decades, violent crime as a whole remains far lower than it was in the 1980s and 1990s.
In 1995, Pittsburgh police investigated nearly 3,500 incidents of violent crime in the city, according to data collected by the FBI.
Since then, violent crime has steadily decreased in the city, save for slight bumps in a handful of years and, as a whole, it remains lower than it has been for decades.
In 2019, the most recent year for which federal data was available, city police investigated roughly 1,450 violent crimes. Data kept at the local level shows that decrease continued through the pandemic: 1,376 in 2020 and 1,369 in 2021.
“Where is the response — a comprehensive response, an effective response,” then-Councilmember Sala Udin said 28 years ago. “We are dealing with a community in crisis.”
Current Councilmember the Rev. Ricky Burgess made a similar point Wednesday.
“The solutions — we already know what they are,” he said. “It’s investing in these families, it’s providing them with jobs. It’s providing them with social services. It’s giving them fair housing. But when we look at our city, let’s be honest, we are a segregated city. A vast majority of African-Americans are living in third-world situations.”
First Published: January 22, 2023, 11:00 a.m.
Updated: January 23, 2023, 11:28 a.m.
