Pittsburgh police plan to bar dozens of local groups and businesses that owe the city money from being able to hire an off-duty cop for a moonlight detail, 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,” Pittsburgh Police spokeswoman Emily Bourne said Thursday morning. “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 Commander Eric Baker said in the memo, which was dated Wednesday.
The memo lists 56 businesses.
The suspension will remain in effect until all delinquent balances are paid in full, Baker said in the memo.
Those suspensions also “will become a routine administrative practice,” Baker told TribLive on Thursday.
The commander heads the division where city cops 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.
Gainey could not be reached for comment Thursday morning.
“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.”
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.
This is a developing story.