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Pittsburgh Police Outline Homicide Rates, Ways To Reduce Violence

PITTSBURGH (KDKA/AP) - Pittsburgh's new police chief decried the city's homicide rate as a "public health emergency" and promised to work with the community to defuse the culture that has fueled a spate of retaliatory killings that saw 71 people die last year.

That was the most since 2008, when the city had 74 killings.

"Seventy-one may be an individual number, but if you start compounding it by the number of persons and lives that it affected, it far outreaches 71 individual victims," said Pittsburgh Police Commander Rashall Brackney.

The city's 10-year average is 55 homicides annually.

But the statistics cited Thursday by Chief Cameron McLay show that both victims and perpetrators tend to have long criminal records.

The 34 people arrested so far for those 71 killings have been arrested 220 times, or an average of six arrests per perpetrator. The 71 victims have been arrested 478 times, an average of seven per victim.

Thelma Glenn, the sister of Kimberly Waller who was Pittsburgh's last homicide victim in 2014, also spoke at the news conference. She pleaded for information in her sister's murder. The jitney driver was shot and killed on the South Side.

"Somebody knows something about my sister's murder," said Glenn. "There is no way that they did not hear something that was going on, a gunshot, the car crashing into the pole. I'm sure everybody saw the pole that her car hit. Somebody knows something. We're making a public plea for just information."

Chief Mclay says "there's a pattern here of retaliatory violence among groups on the fringe" of criminality.

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