Police release more details about raid on Pittsburgh homeless encampment

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Police in Pittsburgh raided a homeless encampment on Wednesday, but officers said their targets were people preying on people experiencing homelessness.  

KDKA-TV was there on Wednesday night when two dozen Pittsburgh Bureau of Police officers descended on a homeless encampment on Grant Street, arresting suspected drug dealers.

Acting on search warrants and the findings of a months-long investigation, narcotics and violence prevention officers converged on the Downtown encampment, handcuffing and detaining several people as they searched the tents. According to incident reports, they seized large quantities of suspected crack cocaine. 

“After police activity and investigation, they realized there were people coming into this encampment, as we’ve seen on others, that are preying on the vulnerable population, using them as camouflage or cover to engage in illegal activity, including drug dealing,” Pittsburgh Public Safety Director Lee Schmidt said.

Officers arrested five individuals, including two who they say did not live there but stored and sold drugs from two of the tents.

Deidra Lomax of Washington County is charged with possession with intent to distribute 50 individual bags of crack cocaine. The criminal complaint says Davidt Brown of Turtle Creek had 39 pieces of crack as well as powder cocaine he had been selling to the people experiencing homelessness there.

Lomax was released on her own recognizance, but Brown remains in the Allegheny County Jail unable to make his $1 bail. 

“We never want to go after people in our vulnerable population,” Schmidt said. “We want the people who are the perpetrators and the predatory actions stopped.”

According to the criminal complaints, police began their investigation by responding to complaints from business owners who had observed open-air drug transactions, violence, public urination and defecation at the site.  

Schmidt said the site is not being decommissioned but is under study by a city and county committee that evaluates the encampments and whether they should be taken down. 

About half of the encampment was taken down during the raid. And while many of the residents left, others returned on Thursday while the city and county evaluated whether to take down the rest of it.