Pittsburgh police eye $52K in grant money for cold case project

City and Public Safety leaders want to use a chunk of grant money to focus on some of Pittsburgh’s unsolved cold cases, officials said Wednesday.

Legislation introduced this week to city council would set aside $52,000 from the Department of Justice’s Byrne Justice Assistance Grant to go toward the cost of investigating cases in which leads have dried up and suspects remain at large.

The money could go toward such expenses as hiring retired homicide detectives as consultants and the cost of resubmitting evidence for testing and examination. The grant will also allow the bureau to invest in equipment and supplies that would “allow detectives and consultants to sort through and continue investigating cold homicide cases,” Molly Onufer, spokeswoman for the mayor’s office, said in a statement.

Detectives will start with cases that date back at least five years, said Public Safety spokeswoman Cara Cruz. If they get through those files, they will move on to another five years back.

City council still must approve the legislation.

From 1980 through 2019, more than 269,000 homicides went unsolved across the country, with 70,000 of those unsolved cases coming in the past decade, according to the Murder Accountability Project, which uses the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report data. Nationwide, that translates into a clearance rate of just over 62% since 1980.

Looking at cumulative data going back to 1980, the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police has more solved cases than unsolved – 1,068 solved homicides compared to 899 unsolved. The ratio of solved to unsolved homicide cases started becoming more unequal in the mid- to late-2000s, the data shows, and police cleared 289 of 822 cases between 2005 and 2019, according to the data, which the Murder Accountability Project pulls from the FBI.