Update: 12/09/14 11:40am
Pittsburgh City Council confirmed McLay's appointment at its regular meeting Tuesday morning. McLay will be sworn at by Mayor Bill Peduto at 4:00 this afternoon.
Original Post:
Nearly three months after Cameron McLay became acting chief of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, City Council on Monday held his confirmation hearing.
The two-hour meeting focused less on McLay’s qualifications for the job and more on his ideas about how to improve the bureau and address the concerns of individual members of City Council.
Those concerns included the trust gap between police and communities of color, drunk driving in nightlife districts such as Carson Street, the effectiveness of the Pittsburgh Initiative to Reduce Crime, de-escalation techniques, implicit bias among officers, use of force and using data to do predictive policing.
McLay said that trust gap is his biggest challenge, and that he’ll address it by facilitating conversations between his chiefs, commanders, rank-and-file officers and stakeholders in the community.
“In my perfect world, those conversations will be happening naturally, they’ll be happening organically, and we’ll be willing to talk about some of the uncomfortable things like race and policing and how those two (things) intersect,” McLay said.
Councilman Daniel Lavelle said he’d like to implement “Safety Sundays” by bringing officers into churches to encourage the public to share information about what’s going on in their communities.
McLay was receptive to the idea and said interactions between police and communities of color need to be normalized in order to reduce the “snitch effect.”
The acting chief said his second biggest challenge is a lack of morale at the bureau.
“What I’ve heard loud and clear is that there are perceptions of inequity, unfair practices, cronyism … in how things are distributed,” McLay said.
He said until that issue is addressed, the trust gap cannot be closed.
“When people feel valued and respected, all kinds of amazing things start to happen,” McLay said. “If they feel marginalized and disrespected, all kinds of bad things start to happen.”
McLay said changes in policies governing promotions within the bureau are part of a larger paradigm shift toward community-oriented policing. He said police need to start to see themselves as social workers.
“We are peace officers and public servants who sometimes have to enforce laws, as opposed to law enforcement officers who surveil their communities and look for opportunities to catch people doing stuff wrong,” McLay said.
Another concern brought up by several City Council members is the lack of diversity on the police force. McLay said the bureau needs to step up recruitment and outreach in communities of color, and that over time young people of color will begin to see themselves as future police officers.
“I’m hearing that loud and clear from our communities of color, ‘All we see is white males, we don’t see ourselves in you,’” McLay said. “That’s killing me both from the standpoint of the police-community relationship and then again from the recruitment relationship.”
McLay also talked about beefing up training for officers. He said the basic training they go through is good, but that they don’t receive enough training, and that the bureau’s training facility is in horrible condition.
“What I’m hearing loud and clear from the officers in the zones is, ‘Chief, we’re hungry, we want training, we want to do better. We’ve been trained in the basics, now we want to learn about some of these other things,’” McLay said.
One the training initiatives proposed by McLay is in implicit bias, which can lead to racial profiling. He also wants to see officers trained in de-escalation and community-oriented policing techniques.
Additionally, McLay wants police stations in each of the city’s six zones to be more welcoming to the public. He said creating public meeting spaces within each station would help normalize regular interaction between police and the community.
McLay also wants to increase the use of technology within the bureau, by outfitting all officers with body cameras and increasing the bureau’s capacity for data analysis.
“As a chief, I should know what happened in the last 24 hours at a glance. I should be able to look (and see) where is the disorder as its mapped in the city, what’s happening,” McLay said. “I should know what happened in the last week, what are those emergent trends and what are those persistent trends and where are they located.”
Correction: An earlier version of this report erroneously stated that a preliminary vote would be held on Tuesday and a final vote would be held next week. In fact, no preliminary vote is necessary for such appointments and a date for a final vote has not yet been set.
