Video of South Side fight sparks investigation of Pittsburgh police officers

An incident involving several Pittsburgh Police officers on the city’s South Side is under investigation, according to a public safety spokesperson.

A video circulating on Facebook appears to show a fight Aug. 8 outside of the Cambod-Ican Kitchen at the corner of East Carson and South 17^th streets.

The footage shows a large crowd outside the restaurant and at least two people on the sidewalk engaged in a fight. Several Pittsburgh Police officers enter the frame, and one pulls a person off of another man who is on the ground. The man stumbles backward and falls to the ground.

The video then seems to show two officers striking the man on the ground.

The circumstances surrounding the fight were not clear, nor was it known if anyone was arrested in the incident.

The video can be viewed here. It contains violence and graphic language.

Cara Cruz, a Public Safety spokeswoman, said officers were responding to a fight between patrons inside the restaurant. She said the Office of Municipal Investigations

The latest South Side incident comes amid an effort by city officials and police to stem the violence in that neighborhood, which is popular for its nightlife scene.

The South Side, for most of 2020 and the first months of 2021, remained a shell of itself as the covid-19 pandemic wrought a slew of restrictions, many focused on the hospitality industry. All capacity restrictions expired in late May, the Pennsylvania’s mask mandate expired June 27.

Police began stepping up patrols in early July as officials cited a “dangerous and untenable” situation involving crowded sidewalks, unruly pedestrians and sometimes violent tendencies. Shootings on consecutive weekends last month led officials to expedite a plan to restrict traffic on the most raucous section of the East Carson Street corridor.

The pandemic makes comparing crime so far in 2021 to the same time in 2020 difficult, but the city’s Uniform Crime Report for the first half of the year includes a heat map that shows the most popular stretch of East Carson Street as a hotspot in terms of reported crime.

In a different, interactive violence dashboard, data shows that theft and vandalism remained the top reported offenses in the South Side Flats through May 31, with larceny theft making up 22% of 339 reported crime and vandalism at 16%.

Instances of violent crime – not including homicide – have ebbed and flowed in the Flats over the years: 118 in 2016, 81 in 2017, 70 in 2018, 99 in 2019 and 58 in 2020. It should be noted that those numbers include only crime reported to law enforcement.