Category: Life in the Big City

It’s a landslide for Jim Kenney

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

jimkenneyvictory

I’m way past the time when I allow myself to fall in love with candidates. But I admit to feeling a wee bit hopeful about what Jim Kenney can do for my beloved Philadelphia. Via the New York Times:

Jim Kenney, a former Philadelphia city councilman who has cast himself as a progressive in the mold of Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, handily defeated five other candidates to win the Democratic nomination for mayor Tuesday, which makes him the overwhelming favorite to be mayor when national Democrats gather in the city in 2016 to pick their nominee for president.

An hour after the polls closed, The Associated Press said Mr. Kenney was the winner.

He addressed his supporters shortly after 10 p.m., after his leading opponents had conceded. “We are not done,” he said. “There’s another election in November.”

In this heavily Democratic city, the winner of the primary is almost certain to prevail in the November general election to replace Mayor Michael A. Nutter, who cannot seek re-election after two terms. Mr. Kenney, 57, was already sounding like a victor before people went to the polls.

“Together with an open mind and an open heart, we can do really great things in this city,” Mr. Kenney told his supporters Friday at a rally at a downtown apartment building that markets itself as an “urban L.B.G.T.-friendly senior apartment community.” He was endorsed by Mr. de Blasio on Monday.
Continue reading “It’s a landslide for Jim Kenney” →

Law and disorder in Philadelphia

~ susie

https://youtu.be/tei_Jv80ibQ

This is a BBC documentary about Philadelphia’s high rate of violent crime. So mixed emotions: I don’t trust cops, as I’ve said before. But I don’t hate them — at least, not all of them, and not all the time. But look how they react to the suggestion that they might be hassling good guys: “Good guys went back into their house when we told them to.” Very black and white.

If you’ve never lived in a big city, you should watch this.

Always snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Philadelphia cops. WTF?

21-year-old Samir Hill is a point guard at Allegany College of Maryland. Recently Hill was playing a friendly game of basketball with some friends Philadelphia when two police officers happened to pass by. The officers engaged in friendly trash talk which lead to a an impromptu game of one-on-one with Hill.

Hill absolutely shook and burned both officers, making them look old, fat, and slow — which they were. But it was all in fun and the officers left the court smiling and joking with the youngsters.

Hill’s friend posted the video on YouTube and it went viral very quickly. This would seem like a great public relations video, maybe invite Hill down to the station for a few public relations photos for some billboards. And viola, you have a public relations win for the Philadelphia P.D. But Philly P.D. decided to take a slightly different approach.

Instead of embracing a public relations gold mine, they instead turned it into a public relations disaster. Not long after the video went viral Hill was “detained” by Philadelphia police for about two hours while they searched his car. They did this while Hill was handcuffed and brought to the police station. They claimed they were looking for his “friend.” No charges were filed and he was released.

Anthony Williams and the hood

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Tony Williams

Will Bunch on the sudden political conversation of charter-school champion Anthony Williams in the Philadelphia mayor’s race:

But the really awkward thing is Williams’ rank hypocrisy here. Since he’s eager to revisit the 1990s, it’s worth noting that that was an era in which Williams couldn’t throw citizens from “our communities” behind bars quickly enough. Then a state rep from West Philly, Williams worked with three Republican lawmakers as part of a tough-on-crime posse called “the Gang of Five” that lobbied then-Mayor Ed Rendell (successfully) to bring in New York’s John Timoney as police commissioner and to institute so-called “broken windows policing” that would cite and even jail low-level, non-violent offenders.

Of course, “broken windows” policing became the “gateway drug” to the mass incarceration crisis in America, which has ripped urban communities apart, and eventually to policies like stop-and-frisk that 2015 Williams now wants to end. At the height of the Gang of Five crusade, Williams even championed what was described in the Inquirer as their “most intriguing idea: a plan to set up tent cities for incarcerating low-level offenders during warm-weather months. At present, a lack of city jail space makes it tough to keep prostitutes, for instance, off the streets…”

Yes, Anthony Williams wanted to keep non-violent criminals, like sex workers, in sweltering tent cities during the summer (an idea borrowed from Phoenix’s barbaric sheriff Joe Arpaio, by the way) because there weren’t enough jail cells for all the folks he wanted to lock up. But I guess that’s a lot harder to fit on a cardboard sign than #BlackLivesMatter. Especially at the height of 2015’s Black Spring.
Continue reading “Anthony Williams and the hood” →

Criminal charges in Baltimore

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmMoH7Vy_CM

Marilyn Mosby is throwing the book at the Baltimore police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray with charges that include second-degree murder, manslaughter by vehicle by means of gross negligence, misconduct, and assault in the 2nd degree.

Not only that, she says there was no probable cause to arrest Freddie Gray in the first place:

BALTIMORE — The state attorney of Baltimore, in a unexpected announcement, said Friday that she had probable cause to file homicide charges against the police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, who was died after sustaining a spinal cord injury while in police custody.

In a news conference Friday, Ms. Mosby said that the death of Mr. Gray had been ruled a homicide.

David Simon: If you want to fix Baltimore, ‘end the drug war’

~ susie

baltimore ghetto

When the only job people can get is selling drugs, why arrest people for selling drugs? Turns out Martin O’Malley was not quite the progressive I thought:

No, The Wire does not explain what’s happening in Baltimore this week, as my colleague Alyssa Rosenberg wrote yesterday. Still, the show’s creator and former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon knows a lot more about the city than most of us. And in a wide-ranging and riveting interviewwith The Marshall Project today, he offers an unequivocal assessment of how to turn things around in that city today.

“So do you see how this ends or how it begins to turn around?” Bill Keller asks him.

“We end the drug war,” Simon says. “I know I sound like a broken record, but we end the [expletive] drug war. The drug war gives everybody permission to do anything. It gives cops permission to stop anybody, to go in anyone’s pockets, to manufacture any lie when they get to district court… Medicalize the problem, decriminalize [it] — I don’t need drugs to be declared legal, but if a Baltimore State’s Attorney told all his assistant state’s attorneys today, from this moment on, we are not signing overtime slips for court pay for possession, for simple loitering in a drug-free zone… then all at once, the standards for what constitutes a worthy arrest in Baltimore would significantly improve.”

Simon traces the arrest and death of Freddie Gray to a police culture that’s long since abandoned any pretense of probable cause when it comes to stopping and arresting young black men in the city. “The drug war — which Baltimore waged as aggressively as any American city — was transforming in terms of police/community relations, in terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the police department,” he says. “Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war.”

In the growing concern over drug use in the 1980s and 1990s, political leaders — in Baltimore and in cities all over the country —  began throwing people in jail on flimsy suspicions, Simon argues. “Too many officers who came up in a culture that taught them not the hard job of policing, but simply how to roam the city, jack everyone up, and call for the wagon.”

Simon reservers his harshest words for Martin O’Malley, the former Baltimore mayor who touted reductions in the crime rate under his tenure on his way to the governor’s mansion in Annapolis — and, perhaps, in his burgeoning candidacy for the White House.

“The stake through the heart of police procedure in Baltimore was Martin O’Malley,” Simon says. “He destroyed police work in some real respects. Whatever was left of it when he took over the police department, if there were two bricks together that were the suggestion of an edifice that you could have called meaningful police work, he found a way to pull them apart.”

Dear sweet Jesus, our media is incompetent

~ susie