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timesuck t1_jacvlbs wrote

Reply to comment by K8771 in Pittsburgh City Councilor Anthony Coghill set to run for Allegheny County Treasurer by drmartykrauss

You’re in luck because you won’t have to wait (at least due to the topography). The hills might be an issue if we only had 20 cops for the whole city, but boy, do we have a lot more than that!

We have so many cops for a city our size. To give some context, we have about 30 police officers per 10,000 residents. Other cities around our size: Indianapolis has 18, El Paso 14, Nashville 20. We spend $1 out of every $5 in the city budget juston the police.

We have plenty of police officers and they’re spread out throughout the city, which would still be the case even if we hired fewer of them, gave them less fancy military gear, and held them accountable.

So, yes, it was a very dumb thing to say.

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K8771 t1_jacx23x wrote

You may think it’s irrelevant given the stats, but your comment dumbed down the idea of topography to “we have hills”. If you don’t agree that we need more cops then fair enough, but the idea that Pittsburgh is a very geographically divided city is not ridiculous

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timesuck t1_jad2efs wrote

No, Coghill dumbed down topography to “we have hills”. And no one is arguing that the idea the city is hilly alone is ridiculous, but it was a ridiculous thing to say in the context of that conversation. Especially because the only thing council was seriously considering at the time was diverting a measly $5 million out of the police budget and zero officer cuts.

I think it’s pretty easy to understand that even if we cut our police force by half, you still wouldn’t have to have a car from Shadyside respond to calls in the South Hills. So, for Coghill to use the topography of the city during the debate around police funding where we were never in danger of having so few officers the hills would become an issue was a strawman.

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