Report criticizes PIRC, city's anti-crime initiative
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An ambitious crime-fighting strategy aimed at reducing the city's homicide rate is too narrowly focused on gang violence and needs to widen its scope, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh's Center on Race and Social Problems.
A draft report points to several flaws in both the concept and the execution of the Pittsburgh Initiative to Reduce Crime, a comprehensive approach that enlists law enforcement, social services and community leaders in an effort to quell gang gunplay, which police have said accounts for most of the city's violence. However, the city's homicide rate has not declined since the program started.
The message of the program is simple. Police and victims confront gang members at a "call-in" meeting and tell them to stop killing or face massive group punishment the next time someone pulls a trigger. Service providers then offer an array of help.
The city-commissioned report is not the final assessment of the program. Ralph Bangs, the center's associate director and the lead author on the report, described it as an internal draft that has not been released to the public and is subject to change. He declined to comment.
City officials said many changes already have been proposed for the program.
Among their findings, researchers wrote that Pittsburgh police have focused too narrowly on gang members listed in a "tightly guarded central gang database" and not enough on members of other groups that are at risk for violence, such as parolees.
City police, for example, hardly relied on a report by the University of Cincinnati Policing Institute that identified 35 "violent groups" in Pittsburgh and determined that 69 percent of the city's homicides from 2007 to early 2010 were "group-related."
First Published June 15, 2011 12:00 am
