City council holds public interview with acting Pittsburgh Police Chief Larry Scirotto
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- Larry Scirotto is currently the acting Pittsburgh police chief and needs Pittsburgh City Council's approval to become permanent.
If approved by city council, Scirotto will face major challenges as chief, like rising violence and fewer police. The department could fall to less than 700 officers in the next year and a half from its budgeted number of 900, but Scirotto says he has a strategy to address that.
"The community is the police and the police is the community," he said.
If, or when, he is approved by city council, Scirotto will inherit a city wracked by youth gun violence and a bureau with a shrinking number of police to deal with it. In addition to new class recruits scheduled to come on this summer, he wants to put on another in November -- but must find the recruits to do it.
"If we don't have a strategy, we're going to be left in the wind without candidates and we'll continue to hemorrhage candidates to suburban police departments and that's not acceptable," Scirotto said.
To that end, he will begin a recruitment drive offering candidates higher pay and meaningful work. In the meantime, better deployment of the officers he has -- eliminating or cutting down on calls for parking violations and burglary alarms -- and refocusing efforts on more urgent tasks.
"My objective, my commitment is we start defining what response looks like in police department with the resources and the numbers that we have today focusing on violent crime reduction, police-community partnerships, quality of life," Scirotto added.
He wants to create a violent crime unit to get guns off the street and foster better community-police relations. He's a big proponent of community policing -- not designating a few officers to walking a beat, but encouraging all officers to get out of their cars and develop relationships, saying police should be guardians, not warriors.
"When should a police department ever be at war with its community? Never. We're not warriors. We're not in a foreign country. We are guardians of our communities, and in that challenge is to care for our communities."
City council is expected to approve Scirotto and he says he'll hit the ground running, but the city has been nearly a year without a permanent chief and Scirotto will have a lot of catching up to do.