Cameron Rowland
Life and Property, 2026

Continuous recording of Pittsburgh Police radio communications,
Continuous recording of Greater Pittsburgh Municipal Police radio communications,
Continuous recording of Allegheny County Police radio communications

The Pittsburgh Bureau of Police does not retain publicly accessible recordings of their two-way radio communications. These communications can be accessed live using a UHF radio scanner. Due to the amount of simultaneous radio communication throughout the city, multiple scanners are necessary to receive all transmissions. Public access to recordings of these transmissions allows these internal communications to be reviewed collectively. When Life and Property is exhibited, recordings are produced continuously. Each day the prior twenty-four hours of recordings are made publicly accessible on the exhibitor’s website. The recordings for each day of the exhibition are publicly hosted in perpetuity.

The Pittsburgh constabulary was created in the 1780s to police enslaved and free black people in Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, founded in 1857, expanded this function and worked to recapture slaves who had escaped to Pittsburgh from Southern plantations. After 1865, the police continued to violently enforce the conditions of labor, acting as a strikebreaking force for corporate employers. In 1909, the Pittsburgh Police executed the Round-Up, during which they descended on the Hill and, using the Pennsylvania vagrancy code, arrested hundreds of black people who could not provide proof of employment. The function of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police is described as the “protection of life and property in the City of Pittsburgh.” The Pittsburgh police have used disproportionate racial violence to pursue this goal for 169 years.

In 2024 black people made up 22% of the Pittsburgh population and 61% of arrests by the Pittsburgh Police.¹
In 2024 black people made up 13% of Allegheny County’s population, and 64% of the population in the Allegheny County Jail.²

Over the past century numerous local groups, including the Citizen’s Committee Against Police Brutality, the Big Daddies of Beltzhoover, the Civilian Alert Patrols, and the Coalition to Stop Killer Cops, have organized against the systemic operations of police violence in Pittsburgh.

Looking out, documenting, and inverting surveillance have always been practiced by black targets of policing. Internal documentation of the police that is produced by the police is only available at the discretion of the police. External documentation of the police is essential to understanding what the police actually do.

The radio communications of police in Pittsburgh make evident that the vast majority of police dispatches are in response to 911 calls reporting perceived disorder. The dispatches show how frequently callers report people to the police for “arguing,” “shoplifting,” “refusing to leave,” “double parking,” “disorderly conduct,” “drunkenness,” “drug use,” and “indecent exposure.”

In its publication Apartheid Policing in Pittsburgh, the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Law Center writes that

police presence is unnecessary to deal with most of what is labeled “criminal activity,” as the vast majority of crimes committed are nonviolent. . . . Nationally, 80% of state criminal dockets are for misdemeanors—low-level offenses. In 2019, approximately 62% of all crimes reported in Pittsburgh were “Part II Offenses” such as forgery, fraud, embezzlement, vandalism, prostitution, drug offenses, public drunkenness, and disorderly conduct. About 32% were property crimes and only about 6% were violent crimes.³

Calling the police to “protect life and property” disregards the violent imperatives of the police. The purpose of calling the police is to subject the accused to scrutiny, dispossession, incarceration, deportation, and death by enforcement.

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