You want a reason to cry? You want some reason for despair? The black cloud of violence has settled over the streets of Philadelphia and it shows no sign of leaving. You want figures? I’ll give you figures from The Daily News: 125 homicides as of May 5, in our city this year. There were 126 this time last year. We’re nothing if not consistent.
For a while, some of us could ignore the obvious. We thought maybe the killings only happened in other people’s neighborhoods. We saw those scenes on the 11 o’clock news so often we became numb – mothers weeping, neighbors wailing, friends with a dazed look. For some of us it seemed as far away as the murders in Darfur, Sudan. But now you realize there are no good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods, no safe haven from the violence. Homicide in Philadelphia has made us all brothers and sisters. Now we can all mourn together.
Each of us has had our own personal wakeup call. Mine came a couple of weeks ago when my daughter and my 9-year-old granddaughter Eliza got caught in the holdup of a doughnut shop near me. Nobody was hurt, but it was too close. The possibilities are too horrible for me to contemplate. Hell, that’s when it really hit home: the mean streets of the city are all around us, even around the corner.
Just to the north, New York City has been able to reduce its crime rate to what it was 45 years ago. Here, the crime rate percolates to frightening levels. Philadelphia can learn a lesson from New York because it wasn’t that long ago when the Big Apple was a frightening place. David Dinkins was the mayor – a nice man, but an ineffectual leader. The city seemed lost for solutions. Citizens had resigned that their streets had been taken over by drug warlords and hooligans. I know there are lots of complicated reasons why crime goes up, but a big part of it is when the mayor and law-abiding citizens just give up. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani took over the mess and turned it around, with the help of effective, dedicated law enforcement. You could call it the "Miracle of New York." I admit I am one of those who love New York and I feel as indebted to Giuliani for what he did to make its streets safer as for what he did on 9/11. Giuliani’s methods were questioned; he wasn’t above reproach. He wasn’t perfect, but New York is a better place because of him. This is not a political brief for Giuliani to run for the presidency – there are already things he says and folks he supports that make him unrecognizable to me – but what happened there should show us it is possible to take back our streets.
We don’t have to look far back to find a better time in Philadelphia. Once, like New York, we had a similar turnaround. They had Giuliani and we had Ed Rendell as mayor and John Timoney as police commissioner. With determination combined with street savvy, as was the case in New York, Rendell and Timoney did a marvelous job in a lot of ways, the least of which was making the streets safer. Philadelphia became that "shining city on the hill" for the other urban areas across America.
Timoney became a campaign issue as John Street and Sam Katz battled to succeed Rendell. Katz promised to keep Timoney, Street was hesitant. After it was apparent to the Street campaign the election could turn on support for the popular police commissioner (much as it did when Frank Rizzo became an issue in the Tate-Specter race years ago), Street, almost reluctantly, agreed he, too, would keep Timoney.
Eventually, Timoney seemed to become disheartened and "retired." At the time, we were led to believe he was tired of law enforcement, but after a short stint in the private sector, he is back as police commissioner of Miami. Meanwhile, Philadelphia has returned to the same dispirited, violent place it was before Rendell and Timoney.
The mayor’s distractions have been many. A city steeped in corruption has also become a place where the culture of violence thrives. He is torn between budget cuts and securing the streets and his police commissioner seems like a nice guy, but appears totally clueless. There are many ways you can die violently in Philadelphia – no matter your age, no matter how innocent. You can be cleaning a schoolyard, sitting on your front step or just playing hopscotch. Mix some rage in with those tears. There should be no bigger issue than crime in the next mayoral election.
With apologies to Bruce Springsteen:
The night has fallen and the streets are dark,
the yellow crime tape marks the spot near the little park.
Families and friends are gathered to comfort the woman who cried,
Mike Strug interviews all of them about the latest kid who died.
Oh receive me, brother, let’s do something about this,
Or will we leave each other alone like this
On the streets of Philadelphia?
