Want to know if a city government is failing? There are usually three flashing red indicators. The first is when it’s not able to meet the daily basic needs of its citizenry, like reliably picking up the trash. The second is when murder and mayhem reign and city leaders can no longer make the streets safe for its citizens.
And the third is when, in the face of those two daunting conditions, it seems like city leaders have effectively thrown in the towel. Oh, they still show up for work and go through the motions, but rather than engage in action and experimentation, you get a whole lot of defensiveness and shoulder-shrugging. Resignation, rather than passion.
Welcome to this very moment in Philadelphia, folks. Yesterday, I tuned into the mayor’s once-every-two-weeks press conference on the scourge of gun violence and came away… less than confident that there’s an all-hands-on-deck sense of urgency at play.
MORE ON REDUCING GUN VIOLENCE IN PHILADELPHIA
Let’s review yesterday’s performance. We heard the mayor read a statement in a robotic monotone updating how $22 million will be dispersed to anti-violence community partners in the next month that provide “trauma services, mental well-being support services, and services to help those at-risk maintain and keep a job.”
Then we heard Erica Atwood, the city’s director of Criminal Justice and Public Safety, who, channeling Bobby McFerrin (“Don’t worry, be happy”), said her update would be “elevating assets over deficits.” She went on to introduce us to Dope Show Concerts, which brought rapper Lil Durk to town, and is offering internships in event production to at-risk youth. We met Atwood’s CJPS “Brand Ambassadors” and heard about efforts to mentor and keep engaged young Philadelphians.
I’m not saying that the tactics and programs the mayor and Atwood outlined are unproductive—though it’s hard to tell when goals, timetables and meaningful commitments to public accountability are barely mentioned. But let’s assume for the moment that none of the investments Kenney and Atwood outlined will go to waste. The fact remains: It was now 16 minutes into a press conference during a gun violence crisis, and none of what we’d heard was likely to save a shooting victim’s life tomorrow.
Nor did the subsequent presentation from Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw and her staff stir a lot of confidence. Outlaw noted that homicides are currently up 26 percent over last year, before noting that they were up “40 percent a few months ago.” This, according to Outlaw and her lieutenant, is good news—“a downward trend.”
“Philadelphia is lawless right now,” Thomas said. “There’s this perception that you can do anything you want and get away with it. When a one-year-old is getting shot, something has to happen. Stuff has to be shut down.”
Not exactly a call to arms, so to speak, is it? More like spin. The fact is that murder has been rising in Philadelphia for all six years of Jim Kenney’s mayoralty. When he took office, the city had posted its lowest murder rate in 60 years. It has increased a whopping 78 percent since then, including jumps of 13.7 percent in 2017 and 12 percent in 2018, as well as a 40 percent surge last year.
So excuse me for doubting that a drop from 40 percent more dead Black and brown bodies to 25 percent more dead Black and brown bodies qualifies as progress.
If government isn’t approaching this crisis with the rush of adrenaline our moment calls for, who is? Well, I found at least three examples.
“We will stop you if you make us.”
First, it’s not true that all cities are suffering through an avalanche of killings. We’ve written about how, through smart, collaborative public safety, Newark and Camden have greatly reduced shootings and homicides. And in the city of Chester, once a hotbed for gang activity and crime, homicides are down by 63 percent this year.
We’ve written often about the smart, community-oriented, carrot-and-stick approach that has worked in all of these towns, but the other thing they all have in common is a style of leadership that treats gun violence like the existential threat it is. In Delco, District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer—a reformer who also incarcerates those who need to be off our streets —told the Inquirer, “We told them, We know who you run with. We know your groups. You can’t have group shootouts anymore. We will help you if you ask us, but we will stop you if you make us.”
That’s the type of message no leader in Philadelphia is willing to so directly convey—not the mayor, not the police commissioner, and not the district attorney, who doesn’t even bother to attend these updates but doesn’t hesitate to criticize law enforcement, as though he were a pundit and not part of the team charged with keeping the peace.
Remember Mike Chitwood Sr., the most decorated cop in Philadelphia history and, most recently the police chief in Upper Darby? He was an unlikely reformer, too, but it didn’t stop him from making an example of those who violently violate the social contract. He’d inundate the airwaves with his signature slogan: Not in My Town, Scumbag.
Excuse me for doubting that a drop from 40 percent more dead Black and brown bodies to 25 percent more dead Black and brown bodies qualifies as progress.
At yesterday’s press conference, in stark contrast, Mayor Kenney extended his heartfelt condolences to those caught up in our swirl of violence and commented on how sad it all is. We don’t need our leader to be sad. We need him to be pissed that a small group of anti-social assholes are holding his streets hostage and decimating Black and brown communities.
Isaiah Thomas does seem pissed
City Councilman Isaiah Thomas does seem pissed. Two weeks ago, at a press conference at 51st and Haverford, where a one-year-old was shot, he deviated from the script of his colleagues and suggested that what we need goes beyond funding mentoring and trauma treatment programs. “Philadelphia is lawless right now,” he said. “There’s this perception that you can do anything you want and get away with it. When a one-year-old is getting shot, something has to happen. Stuff has to be shut down.”
I caught up with Thomas earlier this week. He’s still a basketball coach at Sankofa Freedom Academy, a college prep charter school, where 78 percent of the student body is below the poverty line. “One of my kids just witnessed somebody getting shot,” Thomas told me. “He’s a big teddy bear of a kid. Does everything right. Now his mom is looking to leave Philly with him. I’m talking to her about seeing if he can stay with me and my wife. We’ve got so many traumatized kids right now and I’m just not seeing the urgency to help them and to save them.”
As proof of the administration’s tendency to embrace a failing status quo, Thomas tells me there’s another, less talked about virus in our midst: Unanswered calls to 911. There was, tellingly, no mention of this during the mayor’s press conference. “It happens all the time, and that’s where that perception of lawlessness starts,” Thomas says. “It’s happened to me. Rings and rings and rings. Anxiety is already high when you’re calling 911. When no one picks up, you feel like you have to take the law into your own hands.”
Last year, during the protests after George Floyd’s murder, Thomas witnessed looting and dialed 911 to no avail. So he ran to a police station and told a sergeant that stores were being burned down two blocks away. “Nothing we can do about that,” he says he was told.
“I’m talking to police and elected leaders in Camden and other cities all the time, looking into what works,” Thomas says. But the best policies in the world are doomed to fail if they’re implemented by a beaten-down, shoulder-shrugging, status quo-embracing culture that seems allergic to adopting a can-do attitude.
Last week, State Rep. Kevin Boyle tweeted—and promptly deleted—an odd attack on Thomas, whose “driving equality” bill proposal was recently praised by USA Today. It would keep police from pulling over motor vehicles for violations like having a broken tailgate, often a pretense for stopping Black drivers. Thomas has some experience in this, having been pulled over roughly 20 times under false or questionable pretenses.
“It’s a rite of passage for a Black man,” Thomas says. “You always have to be conscious of the type of car you drive, the type of neighborhood you’re in, the type of eye contact you make with an officer. Now, I’ve never been arrested or suffered significant harm, though the way they search you is the equivalent of soft rape, all in your private parts. It wasn’t until I was 19 or 20 that I realized this isn’t what everyone goes through. So I’ve got lived experience on top of the data.”
Despite that, Boyle, a one-time political ally, attacked Thomas: “In a city with a murder rate so out of control he’s literally championing efforts to further restrict policing…Total fraud!”
“When I talk about making our schools better, no one says, You’re anti-teacher, or anti-child,” Thomas says. “When an institution doesn’t work to the benefit of everyone, you have to try and make it better. You can’t look at the videos and lawsuits of the last year and say our criminal justice system is perfect.”
Thomas took the high road in response, but the bigger picture still resonates. His driving equality legislation is not anti-police; in fact, he’s worked behind the scenes since first introducing the bill last fall to get support for it from the police as well as the Public Defender’s Office.
“When I talk about making our schools better, no one says, You’re anti-teacher, or anti-child,” Thomas says. “When an institution doesn’t work to the benefit of everyone, you have to try and make it better. You can’t look at the videos and lawsuits of the last year and say our criminal justice system is perfect.”
Thomas, at least, is trying. But it’s a fine line he walks. His driving equality bill, contrary to Boyle’s knee-jerk reaction, is a common-sense reform. But when he talks about consequences for gun violence, he runs the risk of deviating from the social justice warrior script and being wrongly accused of favoring mass incarceration. Yes, we’ve locked up way too many low-level, non-violent offenders. But there are some folks who should face the threat of incarceration, for all of our sakes’.
Looking at gun violence through a business lens
Thomas’ colleague in City Council, Allan Domb, shares Thomas’ sense of urgency, even though it’s unlikely that the Condo King has been pulled over in Rittenhouse Square for not having hubcaps on his souped-up ride. But his point of entry on the issue of gun violence comes right from his background as a successful businessman.
Domb has seen the steady stream of funding devoted to anti-violence programs these many years and has wondered just what we have to show for it. What kind of return on this investment are taxpayers getting? It’s an important question now that the city will be investing a record $155 million. This week, Council President Darrell Clarke and the mayor announced the creation of a “Violence Prevention and Opportunity Monitoring Group,” which will help “build on what’s working through evaluation,” according to the press release.
But, again, there’s no mention of goals, timetables, or efforts at transparency. How about a follow-the-money website? Or weekly public CompStat-like meetings?
“In business, no one would invest $155 million without regularly measuring results,” Domb says. When he read about the success in Chester, Domb got pissed: How’d Chester turn the corner on what we’re still struggling with? So yesterday he spent two hours peppering the legendary criminologist David Kennedy—the father of the focused deterrence policing strategies that have worked in Boston and Chester alike.
“He’s a brilliant guy,” Domb reports. “His recommendation is that we should be investing in our management of our GVI program [the next generation of focused deterrence] so we can evaluate it by the week, so we know what’s working and what isn’t so we can pivot quickly. That requires leadership.”
In their own ways, Stollsteimer, Thomas and Domb are all thinking anew about a solvable city problem and are approaching it with a palpable sense of mission and optimism. Now, if only the mayor, police commissioner and district attorney would take some notes.