Pittsburgh police are once again able to pull over drivers for minor, secondary infractions, as city police have put a hold on training officers about a city ordinance that banned traffic stops for minor infractions.

Pittsburgh City Council voted in late 2021 to bar police from pulling over drivers for minor infractions such as having a burned-out brake light or headlight or an improperly placed license plate or temporary tag. Council also ordered officers not to initiate traffic stops because of registrations, inspection stickers or emissions stickers that are expired by less than two months.

The measure allowed for a 120-day training period to ensure officers understood the changes.

Now, more than a year later, officials said that training has been halted.

Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey in a statement Friday acknowledged a memo from Acting Police Chief Thomas Stangrecki about “delaying the training around our new city law on secondary stops in order to make sure that the training included information about a new state law.”

The state law in question bans police officers from pulling over drivers because the VisitPA website on a license plate is obstructed, said Beth Pittinger, who heads the Pittsburgh Citizens Police Review Board.

“At this point, we’re far along into the practice in the city of Pittsburgh relating to secondary traffic stops,” Pittinger said. “The officers should’ve all been trained by now. I’m not sure that the license plate issue should be a big issue.”

She said police were told “to resume making traffic stops as usual,” as they did before the ordinance nixing stops for secondary violations went into effect.

Cara Cruz, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Public Safety, said police “removed the training so we can better update it to the current state laws and provide more clarity to our officers.”

“You have a real political conflict right now,” Pittinger said. “You have the acting chief of police directing the police to do something contrary to what the ordinance says. Really, summing it up, it’s kind of confusing.”

She called on Stangrecki and Gainey to provide clarification for officers and the public.

“We have been very clear with our vision for policing and what we believe is the right role for our officers,” Gainey said in a statement. “We want our officers to be focused on those in our city who are the most violent offenders and are responsible for harming our residents. Secondary traffic stops for minor infractions are not and will never be part of that focus.”

Gainey said his administration supported City Council’s legislation and plans “to work diligently to train our officers in this law.”

Gainey did not offer a timeline of when that training may commence, and a public safety spokesperson did not immediately respond to that question.

The mayor said the secondary traffic stops in question “have a long history of introducing bias and do not create the kind of safety or build the type of trusting community police relationships our city deserves.”

City Councilman Ricky Burgess, who sponsored the legislation, provided data from the city’s police bureau that showed officers had conducted 4,650 traffic stops involving Black motorists in 2020, compared to 4,513 involving white motorists and 120 involving Hispanic or Latino motorists. About 23% of the city’s population is Black, just more than 3% are Hispanic or Latino and about 65% are non-Hispanic or non-Latino white, according to census figures.

Burgess and other proponents of the measure argued that eliminating traffic stops for minor violations would reduce disproportionate stops impacting people of color and limit the possibility of police stops escalating to violent encounters.

Councilman Anthony Coghill and other detractors, however, had raised questions about whether the measure would cause confusion when compared to state laws. Coghill and others also voiced concerns about whether reducing traffic stops would limit officers’ chances of finding guns, drugs or other larger issues during routine stops.

“I know that the police side of the story is essentially that the minor traffic stop prohibition interfered with their ability to police in a way that would perhaps stop some criminal activity, the confiscation of illegal guns and that sort of thing,” Pittinger said, though she added there is no data to support or refute that claim.

Copyright ©2025— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)