Members of Pittsburgh City Council angrily pushed back on statements former acting police chief Christopher Ragland made yesterday in withdrawing his bid to lead the bureau, with one councilor suggesting Ragland was afraid to speak to council under oath.
“Good riddance, I say,” snapped Councilor Anthony Coghill, who said the withdrawal — which Ragland said came as a result of feeling his appointment had become a “political football” — proved he wasn’t cut out to be chief.
“Welcome to City Hall. When you're the police chief, you are dealing with politicians,” Coghill said. “And if you are going to bail out because a little bit of pressure was put on you, or you didn't like the process that we put in, [then] he was not the right person.”
Mayor Ed Gainey nominated Ragland to lead the bureau full-time after appointing him as acting chief last year. But the morning’s half-hour council discussion itself offered an illustration of the rough-and-tumble of city politics, with aggrieved council members putting criticisms of Ragland front and center.
Councilor Theresa Kail-Smith said she had heard from numerous members of the police bureau who were disgruntled with Ragland’s leadership style.
“I have never heard this many complaints about one chief,” she said. “At the same time, a lot of people were saying, ‘This is who we need right now.’ So council was hearing a lot of conflicting reports.”
Ragland was to replace former Chief Larry Scirotto, who stepped down amid controversy last fall over his interest in refereeing college basketball on the side.
Ragland had been set to soon start a series of six public community meetings — one for each police zone — and to speak before council in a public job interview. But he told reporters yesterday that he felt the process was being drawn out to allow for “endless delays and pressures for dealmaking” that he worried would pressure him to blur the “bright lines” of his ethical standards.
He declined to say how he’d been pressured or by who, except to say it was neither Gainey nor anyone in his administration. But he didn’t deny that the pressure came from council.
Councilor Bob Charland said the meetings were important. “I was very concerned with how the chief was going to interact with the public,” he said. “I thought that was very important, and if our doing that somehow made the chief walk away, then maybe he wasn't the right person for the job.”
In a press conference early Wednesday afternoon, Gainey also didn’t get into specifics. But he said he was inclined to believe Ragland, and argued it would be “inappropriate” for anyone on council to make demands.
“The chief told me that he felt he was asked some things that was inappropriate and that his integrity would be questioned and he wasn't going to do it,” he said. “And he was very clear with council members that at the end of the day, what they wanted him to do or who they wanted him to promote, he was not going to do."
Coghill made an insinuation of his own Wednesday, asserting that Ragland withdrew because he “didn’t want to come to this table under oath.” Coghill himself sponsored legislation to require nominees to be sworn in for their public job interviews with council — a legacy of the bad feelings left behind by Scirotto’s decision to referee college basketball games after telling council he wouldn’t pursue that interest.
“I believe that’s one of the reasons why [Ragland] chose to move on,” Coghill said. “And I’m not going to get into details.”
Coghill acknowledged that he had conversations with Ragland in which he said that in order to support the nominee he would have to “make sure who he was having around him, meaning the assistant chiefs, meaning the commanders. I want to know who his hierarchy was going to be.” But he denied pressing Ragland and said he did not have “nefarious” conversations with any police commanders.
“There was no quid pro quo here,” he said. If being asked about his leadership team “is what scared him away … it just tells me he doesn't have the backbone for this job.”
Still, Gainey said Coghill's account "confirms exactly what the chief said. ... They can try to shift the blame all they choose, to want to shift the blame. But the blame is squarely on them.”
Councilor Barb Warwick argued that council had been impeding the confirmation process by expanding the number of community meetings. She said Ragland had been attending community meetings in her district and had been happy to commit to a town hall by Black community leaders, but that the expanded schedule would extend the process past the May 20 primary. (Kail-Smith disagreed, arguing the community meetings would have taken only until the end of March.)
“Chris Ragland decided he had had enough of politicians using his life and his 31-year career at the bureau as what he described as a ‘political football,'” Warwick said.
“While I recognize the desire for politicians to score political points, we should not be doing it at the expense of our most dedicated employees and public servants.”
Coghill, Charland and Kail-Smith have voiced support for Gainey’s rival in the upcoming primary, County Controller Corey O’Connor. And yesterday, O’Connor released a statement about the news that invoked his campaign’s central theme — that the city “deserves better” — by arguing “This chaos and instability compromises the safety of both Pittsburgh’s residents and our police officers. We deserve better.”
Wednesday’s charged discussion took place when a bill to extend Ragland’s tenure as acting chief — a measure that would have allowed time for him to engage in community meetings with the public — came to the floor. Kail Smith tabled the bill but said she planned to bring it back next week, to serve as a template for reviewing the next candidate for police chief.
“What we would like to have is a format that we agreed upon with the community, regardless of who was chief and regardless of whoever would be mayor, as a process that the community could have their opportunity to meet with any nominees,” she said after the meeting.
She said the process of choosing a chief was inherently political because it was made by elected officials. Still, she said, “I think that we owe it to our officers to act like adults and to show our leadership skills, our working together.”
Gainey sounded a similar note with reporters. “We have to work with the council members that I believe have good faith in creating a system or structure in which they believe that we're going to get the best candidate for the job," he said. “My hope is that what happened to the chief is a statement that we need to change."
Chris Potter contributed.
