'People hate that about us.' Pittsburgh politician and radio host forge unlikely bond

Updated November 24, 2024 at 06:00 AM ET

Over the last few years and through this year's contentious campaign season, which was rooted in America's deep divisions, there has been a coarsening in the way people talk to each other. We wanted to explore how some are trying to bridge divides. We asked our reporters across the NPR Network to look for examples of people working through their differences. We're sharing those stories in our series Seeking Common Ground.

PITTSBURGH — Radio host Marty Griffin is arguing with Allegheny County Councilor Bethany Hallam about the color of inmate uniforms outside a jail in Pittsburgh.

"This color looks good on you," Hallam teases. She's convinced Griffin to put on one of the uniforms.

"We're paying for maybe the dumbest thing I ever heard," Griffin retorts.

The conversation was broadcast on a livestream earlier this year. Hallam, serving her second term, is progressive on most issues and has made reforming the county jail her biggest cause. A former heroin addict who spent time behind bars, she led the charge to budget $500,000 for new inmate uniforms that are lime green. They used to be red, a color she argues has subtle but pernicious effects on mood.

Griffin often champions conservative causes on his radio talk show. In recent years, he and Hallam have been on opposite sides of how to respond to issues such as crime, homelessness and drug addiction. Many of Hallam's friends and colleagues choose not to engage with Griffin because they say he's dehumanizing and exploitive in the way he speaks about vulnerable people.

At the end of the video, Griffin still says, "This is so stupid," when talking about the jail uniforms.

"He didn't call me stupid," Hallam says. "I didn't call him stupid. We didn't attack each other about it. We just vehemently disagreed on this issue."

Neither of their minds was changed that day — but through a series of subsequent conversations, they developed a friendship. During a time when people with different views rarely engage with each other, Griffin and Hallam began to talk through seemingly intractable issues with respect, and in some cases, find common ground.

Walking downtown

Griffin has tried to draw attention to crime in downtown Pittsburgh, putting together videos of homeless encampments and drug users nodding off and posting pictures of human excrement.

Hallam, who has worked directly with the homeless population in the city, was incensed when she saw the videos.

"I got pissed about it, and I told him about it," she says. "I was like, stop doing this. Stop filming them. Stop. These are their homes. They're vulnerable. Some of these people are fleeing abusive situations or maybe even fleeing the law. They don't want their video on TV."

That's when Griffin invited Hallam to walk through downtown and make a video with him.

"Everybody told me not to do it. All of my friends, all the political people were like, 'Don't, why would you do this? This dude is just stoking hate and fear all the time. Why would you go and give him a platform?" she says.

Hallam says she had nothing to lose because Griffin's audience already opposed her. So she decided to do it. She brought her boyfriend to provide support. Hallam and Griffin started broadcasting live as they argued their way through downtown for more than half an hour.

Although the conversation was supposed to be about the state of downtown Pittsburgh, Griffin couldn't help but start their first video by commenting on what a spectacle it was that they were together at all.

"Would you agree that we're both rather divisive figures?" Griffin asks in the video.

"We both speak our minds," Hallam says. "I think that we disagree on what those positions are a lot of the time. But I think that we both always are who we are."

Then they got to it. At one point, Griffin brought up someone who he says had been arrested four times for groping women going to work. "And he's out now," Griffin says, criticizing the judges who allowed him out on bail while awaiting trial.

"In this country you're innocent until proven guilty," Hallam responds in the video, which was viewed more than 135,000 times on the social network platform X.

Tanisha Long, an organizer for the Abolitionist Law Center who worked with Hallam on criminal justice reform issues, says she texted Hallam after seeing the video. "I was so mad," Long says. "I'd already established not just my dislike, but how I felt it was harmful, and I was like — why would you do that?'"

During their next video together, outside the county jail, two homeless people approached them and Griffin said later he was impressed by the exchange.

"They all knew [Hallam] by name," Griffin says. "They all said, 'Can you get me some water?' They all said, 'Can you get me some medicine?' They knew her by name, and she helped them right there," Griffin says. "That changed my mind immediately about her."

A homeless woman showed Griffin some of her recent injuries, including a deep burn from sleeping next to a space heater in her tent. The woman had also been bitten by a recluse spider. Griffin called a friend of his who practiced medicine to come help her. Hallam says Griffin was able to see a different side of the issue — and once that happened, his instinct was to help.

Oliver Morrison/ WESA /

"You've never talked to them, you've only seen them with a camera on their face, not with someone that they respect and that they know is there to help them," she says.

Still needs convincing

Griffin began to blur out the faces of the homeless people in his videos after Hallam asked. And Griffin admits that he's recently begun to question his own law and order approach to issues facing downtown.

"She opened my eyes," he says. "You can't arrest your way out of a lot of this stuff. You can't. And she changed my mind in a big way about that."

Griffin has also changed Hallam's views. She believes all drugs should be legal, for example, but through conversations with Griffin, she says she now frames her ideas in terms of public safety. "Marty convinced me that you're not going to win any support by being an abolitionist," she says. "The people who are abolitionists, most of them already are."

They have also formed an unlikely friendship. As Hallam puts it in one of their videos, "People hate that about us."

Nonetheless, Griffin, who is 65, will sometimes ask Hallam, who is 35, her opinions or text Hallam with unsolicited advice.

When a would-be assassin tried to take the life of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, just an hour from Pittsburgh in Butler, Hallam made a joke about it on social media, saying the assassination was proof that the predominantly rural white area had a crime problem.

Griffin texted Hallam to take the post down, and she did.

"I believe that even though Marty will never say that, he truly sees me as if I'm his daughter and that's how he treats me," she says.

Mike Mikus, a Pittsburgh political operative who advised candidates who unsuccessfully ran against Hallam, says he was shocked to see Hallam and Griffin be so chummy. When he first saw their videos, "I thought I was in Bizarro World," he says. "These are the last two people that you would expect to be friendly with one another."

Still, he thinks Griffin and Hallam's videos have improved the local political discourse, even if their arguments haven't changed any views.

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