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Witness protection program gets funds
Tuesday, February 12, 2002 By M. Ferguson Tinsley, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
State Attorney General Mike Fisher, U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter and other officials announced yesterday that $633,000 in federal and state funds would be used to start a statewide witness protection program.
"Where the city can move witnesses from East Liberty to McKeesport, we'll be able to move people from East Liberty to Reading," Fisher said. The program is designed to pay for at least a month's expenses for a witness.
The state program is modeled after one run by city police, Fisher said. The city program started in 1994 after a Hazelwood resident, Verna Robinson, 30, was killed before she could testify against a man who eventually was convicted of another killing.
Pittsburgh police Sgt. Jim Malloy said the city program limped along on $60,000 last year. A spike in homicides through the summer inspired City Council to increase the program's budget to $120,000 this year.
Sgt. Lavonnie Bickerstaff heads the city program. She said 25 witnesses were enrolled, with the average stay being a year and a half. She said the state's witness protection program would augment the city's. The average cost of protecting a witness in the city program is about $25 a day.
Homewood resident Sarah B. Campbell said the new money represented a good start.
"A little bit is better than none at all," she said when the meeting ended. "But it's going to take more than $600,000 to relocate witnesses."
Campbell, public safety chairwoman for the Homewood-Brushton Comprehensive Community Organization, said she had lived in Homewood for 52 years. She said drug dealing, violence and fear took root in the community because the city did not act quickly enough to combat the problems.
In 2001 alone, police figures show that the three neighborhoods that make up Homewood -- Homewood North, Homewood South and Homewood West -- were the scenes of four homicides, seven rapes, 90 robberies and 115 aggravated assaults.
On Jan. 25, a triple homicide at a North Homewood Avenue diner took the lives of an 8-year-old girl, her father and a man who was paralyzed in a shooting 10 years ago.
Last year, Malloy said, sustaining 24 witnesses devoured $95,000, $35,000 more than was budgeted. County police, however, later paid the city $20,000 for sheltering seven of their witnesses last year, he said.
"I wish Attorney General Fisher luck, but the fact of the matter is there isn't enough money there to cover the whole state of Pennsylvania," Malloy said. "Philadelphia alone will drain that baby dry."
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