This is a follow up to several posts recently about a gay bashing in Highland Park, the community I live in. I’ve linked each of the earlier blog posts below, ending with the first post. My last communication on this issue said that a meeting with the Zone 5 Police Commander and Patrick Dowd would follow. Because of some scheduling issues, that meeting didn’t happen as quickly as anyone expected, but finally, today, we had the meeting. I wanted to share some basic info that came out of that exchange, and ask for comments from you, the readers.This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive report covering all things Police/LGBT, but rather a quick summary of what was discussed and concluded. With two reported gay bashings in the past few months- this Highland Park incident, and the June bashing in Bloomfield, this is an extremely important subject for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Treansgenders here in Pittsburgh. Not much happened after the Bloomfield event. It is my hope that, this recent situation can be a starting point for a growing and improving relationship between the LGBT community and the Police, at least as far as Zone 5 is concerned.
Today’s meeting showed how serious the Zone 5 Police unit is in terms of addressing the concerns of the LGBT community. Zone 5 is the largest of the Pittsburgh Police zones and very understaffed. Yet, both the commander, Tim O’Connor and Lieutenant Reyne Kacsuta took considerable time out of their day and away from other responsibilities to make the meeting successful. Also attending the meeting was Councilman Patrick Dowd, who has been working with me extensively on this. I never cease to be amazed at Patrick. I don’t think I could ask for a better councilman. Betty Hill and Ted Hoover from Persad also participated. Both were invaluable in this meeting. Ted is heading up Persad’s Community Safe Zone project, while Betty as executive director has a very unique perspective on things. It is easy to think of Persad, as a place for counceling, but more accurately, Persad is an organization intent on improving the well being of the LGBTQ community.
We went into the meeting with a set of goals for the meeting, and all in all, I think we made great progress on all of the goals. There was only one element of the discussion that I wasn’t really happy with, and I’ll talk about that later. Here were the goals for the meeting.
- To share information about process
- To talk as far as we are permitted without violating privacy what we can learn from the incident in question (at Stanton & Negley on July 16th)
- To strategize about how we could further open lines of communication between the bureau and the LGBT community.
We spoke at length about the idea expressed by some gays and lesbians- that the Police respond slower if the victim is a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, or Trans person,or that LGBR persons would receive less services.  Both the Commander and Lieutenant stated that was uniquivocally not true. “We like to catch bad guys” said the Kacsuta. Response time is impacted by a few things, and I’ve written some about that before. If a person called 911 while a crime is in progress, the 911 dispatcher gives the call a high priority, and based upon the number of other open calls in the area, an officer is dispatched as quickly as possible. If the caller tells 911 that the crime has already happened, then the call is prioritized lower, and officers are dispatched to collect a report. The 911 service is provided by the County, and we didn’t spend much time on the 911 dispatcher’s role or attitude. That is probably better addressed directly with the 911 department. The other issue that greatly affects response time is the issue of officer availability, and in this regard the police force is woefully understaffed.
Under Act 47, the City is frozen at 917 officers, when some believe that 1500 would be a more appropriate number for the size of the city. Zone 5, like the other areas has been understaffed, but as new officer training classes are completed, they are working to increase the numbers. O’Connor expressed that June and July had been particularly difficult months for Zone 5 with 6 homicides, and higher numbers of other crimes than usual. Another factor that affects response time is the number of officers who are able to respond. For example directly before the Highland Park bashing, there had been a situation where shots had been fired. They were called to a house, and occupants of the house opened fire, on the police and the police fired back. In that case, an officer is limited to a desk job until an investigation is completed. Both Dowd and O’Connor spoke to the steps being taken by the City to address the staffing issue, so that zones can adequately respond to all calls.
I’ve heard some express that the Police are overall homophobic, and both O’Connor and Kacsuta responded that that is not the case at all. While not all officers may be the most accepting of LGBT’s, the force is in general a place where differences in sexual orientation are accepted, and everyone treated with fairness and respect. We talked at length about the fact that there is a significant number of gay and lesbian officers and many are very “out” at work. I think many of us can easily assume that uniforms equal closed minds, but that is as unfair and unrealistic as assumptions some far right anti-gays hold about gay and lesbians. This is a topic that I think deserves much more discussion, and I’ll leave that for a future post. In fact this post has already become quite long, so I’ll stop now and post a “part 2” tomorrow.
Original Posting about the Highland Park attack