Former Pittsburgh Police officer Tony Moreno returned to the political arena Friday afternoon, announcing his second bid for mayor of Pittsburgh with a message focused on public safety and disdain for current leadership.
"We need to make sure that we have the police department that we pay for, that we get the services that we need," Moreno, who is running as a Republican, told reporters outside a city pool in Brighton Heights. "We're going to go into the police department and use innovative recruiting techniques to bring people back to the city of Pittsburgh [to] be police officers."
Moreno ran as both a Democrat and a Republican in 2021, and he lost to current Mayor Ed Gainey both times. His message this time, a blend of back-to-basics governance mixed with sharp criticism of Democrats, echoed that earlier bid.
"[The things] I've talked about four years ago have all come true," Moreno said, flanked by roughly a dozen supporters holding homemade signs. (One urged citizens to "Vote for Pedro" in an apparent nod to the 2004 film "Napoleon Dynamite"). "It's no longer innuendo. What we're seeing right now is a breakdown in our police department and government in total."
Gainey is running for a second term on the Democratic ticket, where he faces a spirited challenge from Allegheny County Controller Corey O'Connor. While reported rates of serious crime such as homicide have declined in Pittsburgh and elsewhere since their COVID-era peak, concern about public safety and the dwindling ranks in the Bureau of Police were already part of the political debate.
But Moreno contended that neither Democrat was likely to solve the problem.
"You're going to have Ed Gainey representing the progressive socialists, and you're going to have Corey O'Connor just representing the progressives," he said. "They're the same person — they run on the same policies."
Moreno’s interest in running was first reported by WESA last week, and at least two other contenders are said to be weighing a challenge: South Side business owner Richard Cupka and Lawrenencveille retailer Thomas West. But his name is the only one of those three that voters will have seen on a city ballot before, and his bid is just the latest appearance in the spotlight by the former narcotics officer.
Voters have seen Moreno's name on both party’s ballots. Moreno has changed his party registration repeatedly, having long been registered as a Democrat before switching to Republican in 2018, only to re-register as a Democrat prior to his 2021 mayoral bid. In that effort, he didn’t run as just a Democrat but sought the endorsement of party leaders.
Moreno campaigned that year on the strength of his work as a police officer and U.S. Army veteran, stressing promises to “prioritize public works and public safety” while denouncing politics as usual and pledging to establish job-training initiatives and better access to housing.
He offered similar messages Friday. While cities across the country have struggled with lagging police recruitment, and while Pittsburgh faces lean years ahead financial, Moreno said the solution was to increase pay, pensions and other benefits to officers.
"We're going to boost their pay, we're going to add to their cost of living in their pensions and make that viable," he said.
Such messages resonated with more conservative Democrats four years ago, but Moreno was bedeviled by his unusual political background and by previous social media posts supporting Donald Trump — as well as the kind of fundraising and name-recognition challenges that often afflict first-time candidates. Still, even as he finished a distant third in the spring primary, he garnered enough write-in votes on the GOP ballot to become the Republican nominee for mayor.
Gainey bested him in the November general election by a margin of nearly three to one, rolling up big margins north of the rivers and in the wedge between them, while Moreno won more conservative areas in the city’s south and west. Just over a year after seeking the Democratic nomination, Moreno briefly sought to lead the Republican Committee of Allegheny County.
But on Friday, Moreno said he was back because "Ed Gainey did not bring the change. ... He went along with [former Mayor] Bill Peduto's policies — none of them have changed, he just put them on steroids."
Moreno said he "learned a lot" from his 2021 run.
"I ended up appealing to the Republican base in the city ... and I was able to learn everything there is to know about what happens here politically," he said.
"The Republican party is the only place I have to be," he added. "If I ran as an independent, there is no platform for that."
No Republican has served as mayor of Pittsburgh since the Great Depression, and a slew of GOP candidates in recent years have never threatened to change that. But Gainey already faces a serious challenge on the Democratic ticket, and while the city remains a Democratic bastion, it's not clear that previous support of Donald Trump would be the same sort of liability that it was four years ago, given Trump's return to the White House.
Moreno is also the only candidate in the field so far to have appeared in a reality TV show, playing a prominent role in a segment of “Cops” filed in 2005: In the episode, Moreno arrests an apparent low-level drug dealer. Moreno dislodges drugs from the suspect’s mouth as the man professes his innocence — and when the suspect expresses concern about how his mother will react, Moreno shrugs, “Yeah, she ain’t gonna be happy.”
“I’ve really grown to love the city, and that’s why I do what I do here,” Moreno tells the camera.
Chris Potter contributed to this story.
