On the heels of a Pittsburgh City Council meeting where dozens of residents called for drastic reductions to the $111 million in spending proposed for police in the 2021 budget, the local arm of a Harrisburg-based think tank released a report Wednesday that recommends the city rework its spending priorities.

A budget is a “moral document” that reflects the values of a region, Nthando Thandiwe, an analyst with the Pittsburgh Budget and Policy Center, said during a call with reporters.

The center released an analysis of Pittsburgh’s 2021 budget that shows the city spends more on police than cities of similar size across the country and lacks the crime rate to justify the spending.

Diana Polson, a senior analyst with the Keystone Policy Center, the Harrisburg think tank, called the May 25 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis a “national reckoning” that has spurred people to protest and cities across the country to rethink how police departments operate.

“Mayor Bill Peduto has proposed no decrease in the number of uniformed police officers in Pittsburgh. This misses a huge opportunity to reduce police staffing through high rates of retirement,” the report, authored by Thandiwe and Polson states.

About 200 officers are eligible to retire this year and if they were encouraged to do so the city could make cuts through attrition, according to the report.

The report acknowledged Peduto’s creation of a task force on police reform earlier this year, and the series of reforms that have been adopted by city council.

But more can be done, according to the report.

“Mayor Peduto does not support defunding the police but rather reimagining policing,” Tim McNulty, Peduto’s spokesman, said. “That is why this budget funds the Office of Community Health and Safety, and puts more resources into the Group Violence Intervention program.”

Cutting police spending means laying off police officers, and McNulty said the mayor has “done all he can to avoid layoffs.”

Doing so would “add to economic hardship for hundreds of people in our region, cut off their health insurance and increase food insecurity,” McNulty said.

The report also calls for the city to reduce its pension contributions in 2021, another idea that was questioned by McNulty.

“The proposal from the research center to cut city pension payments is anti-worker and would violate the promises made to working families performing public services for the city,” McNulty said. “It would also negatively impact taxpayers as it would hurt the city’s credit rating.”

Peduto has repeatedly talked about the need for federal relief because of the pandemic and warned in his budget address that without relief, the city will need to make drastic cuts in July of more than 600 employees.

There is nothing in the city’s contract with the police union that guarantees a level of staffing, Robert Swartzwelder, president of Fraternal Order of Police Fort Pitt Lodge 1, said.

“What is mandatory is a shift staffing level,” Swartzwelder said.

Any changes would have to be negotiated with the union and it has not been approached by the city, Swartzwelder said.

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