Gangs to face 'smarter' police
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About 40 gangs haunt Pittsburgh's streets, with their 875 members involved in myriad crimes, from graffiti to armed robberies to homicides.
Pittsburgh Police have been dealing with gangs for decades, with gang activity peaking in the '90s, and Sgt. Mona Wallace, head of the Pittsburgh Police Intelligence and Crime Analysis Unit, predicts a lengthy struggle.
"They're not going to go away anytime soon," she said. "It's something we're going to have to deal with far into the future."
Still, she hopes to equip police officers with another tool to help them act more proactively in the fight against gang activity: better intelligence.
Yesterday, the bureau announced the creation of the Pittsburgh Intelligence Task Force which will enlist about 60 officers specially trained to gather intelligence on top of performing their normal duties. Two of these officers will be assigned to each zone during each shift.
This comes after the bureau implemented an effort at the beginning of this year to centralize all intelligence data, creating a "one-stop shop" for gang intelligence and a more complete picture of gang activity citywide.
Now, all the information also will be shared with Pennsylvania State Police.
"The information is so disparate now," Sgt. Wallace said in an interview after the announcement of the task force at police headquarters.
She noted that there was previously no formal system to gather intelligence unless a crime was committed.
"It's bringing it all together to get a common picture of what's going on," she said. "... It's like doing a jigsaw puzzle."
The task force also will focus on gathering intelligence related to investigations of illegal narcotics, organized crime and security threat groups.
City police have been tracking gangs since the 1990s, when the crack explosion served as the impetus for a rash of gangs. While gang activity has settled down since then -- there are about half the number of gangs now, police say -- it persists in many areas.
Currently, gang-related incidents are tracked through police reports. This information is then funneled into an intelligence analysis computer program, called Analyst Notebook, which generates organizational charts connecting individual gang members to give officers a better sense of who is involved in what gang, and which gangs are feuding.
Through this information, the bureau has been able to put together what it believes is a fairly complete picture of Pittsburgh's 40 or so gangs and each one's turf. In East Liberty, for example, the unit has identified nine gangs, with names like East Hills Bloods and Hilltop Boyz.
Before the task force was implemented at the beginning of this year, not all scraps of intelligence made it into incidence reports.
For example, if police responded to shots fired but no one was hit, it might not generate an incident report. In those cases, valuable information such as a description of the shooters or their cars might be lost. Now, officers fill out "lead sheets" which include this information.
"It's a 911 call that doesn't result in actual paperwork but yet it's very important info about what's going on in the community," Sgt. Wallace said. "So we can gather those bits and pieces of information and put together a (report)."
The information can now, for example, be synthesized into intelligence briefings and circulated throughout the city so that officers in all zones can be on the lookout for cars and shooting suspects.
"It makes the officers more aware of what's going on citywide as opposed to just their own little neighborhood or zone that they patrol," she said.
In the next six months, Sgt. Wallace said the bureau will incorporate the Allegheny County Police Department and the Allegheny County District Attorney's Office into the new intelligence-gathering effort.
First Published February 19, 2008 12:00 am
