HARRISBURG -- Pittsburgh patrolman and police union President Michael Havens is hoping that the third time is the charm for enacting a state law that would allow Pittsburgh cops to live outside city limits.

Havens has been at the Capitol pushing for a bill sponsored by state Sen. Jane Orie, R-McCandless, and co-sponsored by Sen. Sean Logan, D-Monroeville, that would prohibit any Pennsylvania municipality from requiring its police officers to live in the town where they work.

"We would like to be able to live in any municipality we want, as city teachers can," Havens said in a phone interview yesterday. "It's a matter of personal freedom and choice."

Craig Kwiecinski, a spokesman for Mayor Tom Murphy, disagreed, saying: "All of our municipal employees should be invested members of our community."

Many municipalities, including Pittsburgh, have such a residency requirement for police, and officers frequently resent it.

Telling police where they can live is "outdated," Logan said. "We shouldn't mandate that an officer must live in a place where one day, he or she might be arresting a person and then, the next day, be standing behind them in line at the grocery store."

Orie said many police officers have told her it's "an issue of safety" for the officers and their families.

"They've told me that hard-core criminals say, 'I know where you live and where your kids go to school,' " she said.

She conceded that a criminal could probably still find out where officers live or send their children to school even if they move to the suburbs, but she still thinks eliminating a residency requirement is a positive move.

Police residency is a concern for officers in many Pennsylvania towns, "from Erie to Philadelphia and everywhere in-between," state Fraternal Order of Police President Mark Koch said yesterday, but nowhere is it more of an issue than in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh, for reasons he couldn't explain, is the only Pennsylvania city where a state law was passed years ago prohibiting the police union from even bringing up the residency rule when it negotiates a new contract for city officers. Officers in other towns are at least allowed to discuss eliminating the requirement, he said.

The measure to let police live where they want to live has been defeated in the two previous General Assembly sessions, but Orie thinks its chances of passage are better this time around. She said that, for the first time, the measure has support from Philadelphia senators, such as Christine Tartaglione and Shirley Kitchen, with a Senate vote possible this week or next.

Murphy and Pittsburgh City Council strongly oppose lifting the residency requirement. The last time Orie introduced her bill -- in June 2003 -- council unanimously passed a resolution against it and Murphy wrote to all legislators opposing it.

Murphy said Pittsburgh has consistently been ranked among the safest cities in the nation and a major reason is that "ALL of our public safety personnel are invested stakeholders in our community as residents of the city."

Kwiecinski said Orie has long been "one of the harshest critics of Pittsburgh's finances, yet she continues to propose this type of legislation that would severely hamper the city's position in collective bargaining and that would add to the city's financial burden in future years. This is exactly the type of move that could put the city right back in the financial quagmire."

Havens said it would be easier to attract suburban officers to work in the city if they didn't have to move their families if hired.