Pittsburgh City Council members say the city must do what it can to get more police officers on the streets, and on Wednesday, they signaled they were ready to invest in the effort.
Voting 7-0 with two members absent, Council gave preliminary approval to a one-year contract with Phoenix, Arizona company Performance Protocol, which will teach recruitment and retention strategies in the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police.
The $38,000 contract retains the firm to identify and implement recruitment and retention strategies with the department, which has faced staffing struggles in recent years.
Hiring has not kept pace with retirements and departures from the department, as some officers have been enticed to leave for other nearby suburban departments. The department currently employs 763 officers out of a budgeted 850.
According to police Commander and Chief of Staff Anthony Palermo, Performance Protocol will teach the department better recruitment and retention strategies, so Pittsburgh can hire more new officers — and keep them working at the department.
“It’s stuff that we will learn, and then can carry forward as the years go on,” he said.
Performance Protocol was chosen from a field of three candidates. The firm will train the bureau’s existing recruitment team, Palermo said. The bureau has one full-time recruiter, another who handles both recruiting and wellness, and 15 adjunct part-time recruiters.
Prior to last year, the bureau did not have its own internal organized recruitment team, Palermo said. The department used state grant money to seek expertise from a company that specializes in training police departments on recruitment and retention.
Performance “will come in and they will look at what we're doing right now” in the city’s human relations and civil service offices, Palermo said. “They will talk to the chief on his goals, what is the goal, what are we looking to attract, and then they will help us tailor that approach.”
The bureau communicates frequently with people who apply to take the exam to become an officer, Palermo said. They’ve held practice physical fitness tests and stepped up visibility at career fairs and universities in the past few months.
Councilor Anthony Coghill hopes the contract will help improve staffing conditions at the bureau, and acknowledged that it is an “early step.”
“Certainly, we need an aggressive recruitment strategy,” he said. “I'm hoping this company will help in that way and at least teach us what other cities have done that has been successful.”
Councilor Bob Charland liked that the contract will train police within the department on recruitment instead of hiring outside recruiters. Constituents often ask him about police numbers, he said.
“It's a need that comes up literally in every single community meeting, what our police staffing is,” he said.
Longer-term goals
Released at the end of September, Mayor Gainey’s draft $657 million spending plan for next year seeks to set staffing levels to 800 officers — a decline from the 850 budgeted officer spots for the current year. That staffing level was itself scaled back from the 900 officers previously regarded as the city’s ideal force size.
The proposed decline in budgeted police numbers was fresh on Coghill’s mind Wednesday.
He said he agreed with last year’s budget move to decrease the officer goal from 900 to 850 because the city was not realistically going to have 900 officers on the force anyway. Similarly, Coghill said, “The reality is that we're not going to get to 800 this year with officers that we're going to lose. So next year, 800 hopefully will be the right number with a couple more recruiting classes.”
Coghill said he would have concerns about any further reductions in the budgeted force size. He said he hoped to see the city eventually reach 900 officers again but acknowledged that could take several years.
Councilor Theresa Kail-Smith expressed broader concerns about the structure and management of the department. She said she is looking into bringing in legislation to council aimed at restructuring the department. She also criticized the decreased number of officers in this year’s budget proposal, noting that she voted no on last year’s budget because the projected officer number was too low.
"What I'm seeing happen is a lot of people are getting promoted and off the streets, but there’s not a lot of people on the streets, and we aren’t doing a lot to maintain and to retain officers that we have,” she said. “A lot of officers feel devalued, a lot of them are leaving the bureau.”
Hiring Performance Protocol isn’t likely to address those larger-scale issues, she said, but “any little piece can help.”
When it comes to retention, Councilor Barb Warwick said she hopes the firm and the department’s work can help bring longtime police department employees “into the fold” and encourage more focus on a community-policing model, in which police engage in more community interactions.
"I think where we need to get now is in this kind of change management, of getting folks who normally have been in a very specific task more comfortable with the idea of being out in the community,” she said.
“[It’s] so that we have officers who are able to stop in at the businesses, and get to know the neighbors,” she added. “So that when they're in the community and encountering folks in the community, it is not at that person's very worst moment that they're meeting them for the first time.”
