Violent incidents in Downtown Pittsburgh prompt police to bolster presence

On a Thursday afternoon last month, a summer intern from Pittsburgh’s suburbs was walking on Downtown’s Smithfield Street when she was savagely attacked.

Her assailant punched her twice in the head, dragged her into the street by her hair and broke her nose by punching and kicking her in the face, police said.

Police made an arrest that day. And before long, the victim quit her internship.

“Not only did this happen in broad daylight, no one interceded,” Courtney Gumpf and Jennifer Schlieper, co-owners of Flying Scooter Productions, where the intern worked, said in a statement. “As most people who worked Downtown know: Downtown is not safe.”

Pittsburgh police rolled out plans this week to counter that narrative.

The force announced Tuesday what it calls a High-Visibility Police Patrol Downtown following three alarming incidents of “stranger-on-stranger” crime and what they called “a recent uptick in crime and disorderly activity” in the central business district.

The new patrol, which police say has already started, is made up of the normal Downtown contingent of 20 officers plus up to 10 additional officers pulled from the K-9, bicycle and violence prevention units.

Most of the unit will patrol Downtown on foot or bike. The extra officers will be spread among daylight and overnight shifts seven days a week.

Each night from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., one marked vehicle with either one or two officers will patrol the central business district with its red and blue lights flashing at all times, said Cmdr. Tim Novosel, who runs the Zone 2 station, which covers Downtown.

The bureau must order the marked car with special lights, which is causing the delay.

“We can’t predict the future but we’re going to become more visible,” Novosel told reporters Tuesday.

“If anything happens Downtown, it’s front-page news … little incidents become big overnight and we know that,” Novosel added. “More visibility will help — it can’t hurt.”

Staffing was already up at the police bureau’s Wood Street substation, Novosel said. Last summer, 10 full-time officers patrolled Downtown. This summer, that number has doubled.

It’s unclear if crime is up or down in Downtown Pittsburgh since last year. Pittsburgh police said Tuesday they couldn’t provide data comparing crime and arrests this year to last year’s statistics.

At least 337 crimes were reported as of Monday within one mile of Gateway Center, the high-rise building complex sitting at the head of the Golden Triangle, according to the privately run website CrimeMapping.com.

About one in every three of those incidents involved a theft of personal property, the website said. More than 50 of the incidents involved drugs.

Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey feels addressing safety — “especially as it relates to Downtown” — is his biggest priority, spokeswoman Olga George told TribLive on Tuesday.

George cited the opening of the police substation on Wood Street and the increased number of officers there as accomplishments of the Gainey administration.

The mayor’s tenure has coincided with a drop in homicides in the city, she said. The administration also has increased funding to violence intervention teams Downtown.

“We have more work ahead of us but we believe that through our increased investments, new recruit classes, and public-private partnerships, that we will be successful in our efforts to keep Downtown a safe and welcome space for all of us,” George said.

Pittsburgh police Chief Larry Scirotto, who has said that there aren’t many “stranger-on-stranger” crimes Downtown, echoed Gainey’s sentiments about safety this week.

In a prepared statement, the chief said that his officers are “committed to ensuring the central business district – and all Pittsburgh neighborhoods – remain safe and welcoming for all.”

The assault of the intern isn’t the only stranger attack that made headlines in Downtown Pittsburgh this summer.

Around noon on June 26, a mentally ill individual attacked a 73-year-old man, breaking the orbital bone in his face, in the middle of Fourth Avenue.

Jameel Huff, 24, of the city’s Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar neighborhood, told police he chased the victim and accused him of being a pedophile after “he heard it in his mind,” a criminal complaint said. The attack was caught on video.

Two days after police say Huff attacked the older man, a city employee was robbed at gunpoint near the Allegheny County Jail on Second Avenue, police spokeswoman Cara Cruz said.

Last week, police responded to a shooting incident Downtown. A man fired at least two shots toward a group of people standing outside a Liberty Avenue store around 7:45 p.m. on July 1. Video showed the man, who appeared to be in his late teens or early 20s, carrying a semi-automatic handgun. No injuries were reported.

That sort of crime concerned those running Fragasso Financial Advisors, a Pittsburgh-based investment management firm.

Fragasso vacated its Downtown offices at the corner of Smithfield Street and Sixth Avenue after its lease expired at the end of April, said Marsha Posset, the company’s marketing director.

“I think crime was the biggest deterrent — and the lack of a plan to address it,” Posset told TribLive.

Before the covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, about 30 employees worked regularly from that location, which Fragasso had used for some 13 years, Posset said. Today, the company is headquartered in Sewickley.

Leadership at the nonprofit group Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, which bills its members as “staunch advocates” for Downtown, called public safety the “primary concern” they hear from residents and business owners. They lauded plans to step up patrols Downtown.

John Valentine, executive director of the Downtown Neighbors Alliance, a nonprofit formed to enhance Downtown, said things have improved in the Golden Triangle.

“If you look at where we were two years ago and where we are today, it’s much better,” said Valentine, whose group’s network includes more than 100 businesses.

Valentine said he has lived Downtown for 12 years and works at the alliance’s office in Oxford Centre on Grant Street.

“We would love it to be zero crime but that’s not realistic,” Valentine told TribLive on Tuesday. “There is no way in the world the police can be everywhere. But, I will say this: it’s safer now than it was when we came out of the pandemic.”

The co-owners of Flying Scooter remain concerned.

The video production company opened its office on Downtown’s Fifth Avenue about seven years ago, Schlieper said.

“We have seen the steady, unmanaged and unprecedented increase in crime, prostitution, drug dealing and homelessness while our city officials do nothing,” the company wrote on social media.