Pittsburgh police plan to bar dozens of local groups and businesses that owe the city money from being able to hire off-duty officers for moonlighting work, according to an internal memo obtained by TribLive.

A TribLive investigation published Sunday turned up city records showing hundreds of businesses and organizations — from a strip club to a soup kitchen, from restaurants to bars, from Duquesne Light to the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh — enjoyed years of police services and millions of dollars of work without paying a cent.

“This is part of a continuing effort on behalf of the police bureau and public safety department to bring these accounts into a current state,” Emily Bourne, a Pittsburgh police spokeswoman, said Thursday. “This is a means of ensuring these accounts are made current.”

After outgoing Mayor Ed Gainey took office in 2022, the employers’ debt mounted, peaking last year at $3 million spread among about 200 employers, financial records reviewed by TribLive show.

In June 2021, under former mayor Bill Peduto, unpaid invoices for police moonlighting totaled less than $200,000, the records show.

The police bureau will suspend secondary employment services, effective Jan. 1, “for any client with one or more invoices that are 120 days or more past due,” Pittsburgh police Cmdr. Eric Baker said in the memo, which was dated Wednesday.

There are 56 entities in arrears listed in the memo, including major businesses and utilities such as UPMC, Whole Foods, Target, Pennsylvania American Water Co., Pittsburgh Water & Sewer Authority (now Pittsburgh Water) and Sherwin-Williams.

Others include the Bloomfield-Garfield Corp., the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, the Community College of Allegheny County’s North Side campus and the Pittsburgh Passion women’s football team.

Gainey could not be reached for comment Thursday.

“It just makes sense,” Councilman Anthony Coghill, D-Beechview, said of the decision to halt services for anyone who has past-due bills. “They’re not paying their bill. I don’t know why we went so long without somebody collecting.”

Coghill, who chairs council’s public safety committee, said keeping tabs on overdue invoices is “simple bookkeeping.”

Communication breakdown

Dena Stanley, who leads transgender advocacy group TransYouniting, was surprised to see her organization on the list.

Stanley told TribLive she had not received invoices for any debts until just a few months ago. Then, she said, she started receiving a slew of invoices dating back to 2020. Stanley said she met with Jake Pawlak, Gainey’s top adviser and director of the Office of Management and Budget.

“I went to the mayor’s office and they were like, ‘Don’t worry, they’re updating the systems,’ ” Stanley said, adding she did not expect to have to pay for all of the bills she was suddenly receiving.

The city, she said, is “not communicating with anyone properly at all.”

Stanley said she’s angry the police bureau is cutting off access to officers working secondary employment.

“We are the No. 1 hated individuals in America right now because we’re being targeted by the federal government,” Stanley said.

She added the city “is sending a very clear message to me: ‘These folks don’t matter.’ ”

New routine

Baker, the police commander, said in the memo the suspension will remain in effect until all delinquent balances are paid in full.

Those suspensions also “will become a routine administrative practice,” Baker told TribLive on Thursday.

The commander heads the division where city officers work off-duty jobs serving as private security or directing traffic during utility work.

“Once an account is brought current, eligibility … will be restored,” he said.

TribLive was the first to report about internal memos, interviews and public records that revealed a multimillion-dollar moonlighting program hobbled by shoddy recordkeeping, anemic collections efforts and minimal oversight.

After struggling to collect payments on its own, the city in September passed off that responsibility to RollKall, a technology firm that has helped run the secondary employment program since 2022.

“We also do not believe police officers should be put in the position of serving as debt collectors, so this approach keeps them focused on public safety while the vendor manages overdue payments,” Baker told TribLive.

This organizational disarray has festered more than a decade after oversight of the secondary employment program was supposed to be tightened following the arrest and prosecution of Nate Harper, the former Pittsburgh police chief who was ousted and went to federal prison for misusing the city’s moonlighting funds.

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