Laurels & lances: Reach out, reveal, redd up

Laurels: To showing true colors. Pittsburgh police vehicles are sporting rainbow-skylined decals in June to celebrate Pride Month, a focus on the LGBT+ community.

This is one of several decals the department will be using over the year to “focus on inclusiveness, community police work and building bridges,” according to Chief Scott Schubert.

This is important because everyone — regardless of color or religion or ethnicity or sexual orientation or gender identity — needs to feel safe going to the police for help or dealing with police during everyday interactions. Bring on the decals for everybody.

Lance: To hiding problems. The federal government has a list of nursing homes that have a “persistent record of poor care,” but they haven’t seen fit to tell people about it.

People could find out about those in the Special Focus Facility program, like Greensburg’s Twin Lakes Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center and The Grove at North Huntingdon. They couldn’t learn about the ones that should be part of the program but can’t be because it’s limited to just 88 homes at a time. Those sitting in the waiting room enjoyed anonymity. Until Monday. That’s when 400 homes nationwide were outed at the behest of Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senators, Bob Casey, D-Scranton, and Pat Toomey, R-Lehigh Valley.

They include two more Westmoreland locations — The Grove at Latrobe and William Penn Care Center in Penn Township — and Corner View Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood.

The bipartisan demand from the senators was the right thing to do. Decisions about where to trust with long-term care are hard and require the best information. How many people have made those decisions without knowing the federal government thought these homes needed more oversight?

Laurels: To getting things done. It is easy to say we want clean water. It’s harder to make an effort to do something about it. On Sunday, people did, showing up for an Allegheny CleanWays event.

About a dozen people, including families with kids, came out to pull trash out of the Allegheny River in Tarentum.

Maybe the biggest thing people picked up was an awareness of how much more work needs to be done.