Foregoing a national search, Mayor-elect Corey O’Connor is expected to nominate former Police Commander Jason Lando as Pittsburgh’s next chief.

The Pittsburgh Bureau of Police is at historically low staffing numbers, with officers fighting burnout from mandated overtime and patrolling in police cruisers past their useful age. For these reasons, O’Connor said he needs a full-time chief as soon as possible.

“Doing a national search for chief of police, we don’t want that. Nobody wants to waste taxpayer money on something like that and I believe I was elected to make these determinations and we’re going to be ready to make that,” O’Connor said. 

O’Connor is set to name Lando to fill that role. Lando currently serves as the chief of Frederick, Maryland. But before that, he had risen through the ranks in Pittsburgh, getting high marks leading Zone 5 in Homewood and East Liberty for fostering better police-community relations through walking patrols and outreach activities, saying police needed to adopt a guardian mentality rather than that of warriors.

“It’s really trying to train officers to adopt more of this guardian mentality, right? Where it’s not us vs. them, it’s us with the community trying to fight crime and make neighborhoods safer,” Lando said in a previous interview with KDKA-TV.

A Pittsburgh native, Lando attended the Tree of Life Synagogue growing up and directed operations there on Oct. 27, 2018, when a gunman took the lives of 11 innocent worshippers in the worst antisemitic attack in U.S. history. Four police officers were seriously wounded in confronting and subduing the gunman.

Lando had been a finalist to succeed Scott Schubert as chief, but Mayor Ed Gainey selected Larry Scirotto instead. Scirotto left the job last year after only 18 months. Pittsburgh has since had two acting chiefs: Christopher Ragland and Marty Devine.

Sources say the official announcement naming Lando as the next chief is expected to happen on Thursday. He will need to be approved by city council, but he had the support of several council members when his name was floated two years ago.

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