Advice on Pittsburgh Police Department Personnel Issues, Recruitment Initiative

Pittsburgh City Council members say the city must do everything it can to put more police officers on the streets, and on Wednesday they signaled they are ready to invest in that effort.

The council voted 7-0, with two members absent, to tentatively approve a one-year contract with a Phoenix, Arizona, company Performance logwhich will teach recruitment and retention strategies in the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police.

The $38,000 contract requires the company to develop and implement recruiting and retention strategies in the department, which has struggled with staffing issues in recent years.

Hiring did not keep pace with retirements and departures from the department, as some officers were enticed to transfer to 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, the performance protocol will teach the department better recruiting and retention strategies, allowing Pittsburgh to hire more new officers and retain them in the department.

“These are things we learn and then carry forward over the years,” he said.

Performance Protocol was selected from a field of three candidates. The company will train the office’s existing recruiting team, Palermo said. The office has one full-time recruiter, another who handles both recruitment and wellbeing, and 15 part-time part-time recruiters.

Before last year, the office did not have its own internally organized recruiting team, Palermo said. The department used federal grants to seek expertise from a company that specializes in training police departments in recruitment and retention.

The benefit “will come in and look at what we’re doing right now,” Palermo said at the city’s human resources and civil service offices. “They will talk to the boss about his goals, what the goal is, what we want to attract, and then they will help us tailor that approach.”

The office frequently communicates with people applying for the officer exam, Palermo said. They have been conducting physical fitness practice tests and increasing their visibility at career fairs and universities in recent months.

Councilor Anthony Coghill hopes the contract will help improve staffing conditions in the office and acknowledged it is an “early step.”

“Of course we need an aggressive recruiting strategy,” he said. “I hope this company helps in that way and at least shows us what other cities have done successfully.”

Councilman Bob Charland liked that the contract will train police within the department to recruit, rather than hiring outside recruiters. Voters often asked him for police numbers, he said.

“It’s a need that comes up at literally every single community meeting when it comes to our police staffing,” he said.

Longer term goals

Mayor Gainey’s $657 million draft spending plan for next year, released in late September, aims to set staffing levels at 800 officers – a decrease from the 850 officer positions budgeted for this year. This staffing level itself was reduced from the 900 officers previously considered the city’s ideal force size.

The proposed decline in planned police numbers was still fresh in Coghill’s mind Wednesday.

He said he agreed with last year’s budget amendment to lower the target number of officers from 900 to 850 because realistically the city wouldn’t have 900 officers on the force anyway. Similarly, Coghill said, “The reality is we’re not going to get to 800 this year, with officers we’re going to lose. “Next year, hopefully 800 will be the right number, with a few more recruiting classes.”

Coghill said he had concerns about further reductions in budgeted troop levels. He said he hopes the city will eventually get back to 900 officers, but acknowledged that could take several years.

Councilor Theresa Kail-Smith raised broader concerns about the structure and management of the department. She said she is considering bringing legislation to council to restructure the department. She also criticized the lower number of civil servants in this year’s budget proposal and pointed out that she voted “no” in last year’s budget because the planned number of civil servants was too low.

“What I’m seeing is a lot of people are getting promoted and getting off the streets, but there aren’t a lot of people on the streets, and we’re not doing much to retain and retain the officers that we have.” They said: “Many civil servants feel devalued, many of them leave the office.”

Retiring a performance protocol likely won’t solve these larger problems, she said, but “every little bit can help.”

When it comes to retention, Councilwoman Barb Warwick said she hopes the company and the department’s work can help bring longtime police department employees “into the fold” and encourage a greater focus on a community policing model , in which police become more involved in interacting with the community.

“I think we need to start doing this kind of change management now to get people who normally had a very specific job more comfortable with the idea of ​​being out in the community,” she said.

“[It’s] So that we have officers who can stop by the stores and get to know the neighbors,” she added. “So when they’re in the community and they meet people in the community, they’re not meeting them for the first time at the worst possible moment.”