What if the Gun Nuts are Right? part 2



	Copping a plea: Police Commissioner John Timoney wants a statewide one-gun-a-month law to cut down on illegal handgun resales. The glut of guns on the streets, he says, makes the city’s high homicide rate inevitable. photo: Sandor Welsh

part 1

John Timoney was in the New York Police Department for 27 years. He has worked as a police consultant to big cities on four continents. Yet he says he’s never seen anything like the gun culture among criminals in Philadelphia.

"There is clearly a gun attitude in this town that I’ve never experienced before," says Timoney, who estimates that Philadelphia police recover about the same number of illegal guns each year as New York’s police do — even though New York is five times as big.

In March 1998, when Timoney arrived here as police commissioner, Philadelphia was one of the only major U.S. cities that was not seeing any meaningful declines in murders and shootings. And it didn’t take him long to figure out that the root cause of the problem wasn’t just out on the streets. It was also in Philadelphia’s courtrooms.

The very week Timoney arrived, a drug-related shootout in a crowd outside Penn’s Palestra left one shooter dead, three innocent bystanders injured and a 21-year-old under arrest for murder. A subsequent newspaper story revealed that the alleged killer and his victim had both been recently convicted of possessing illegal weapons. They would have been in jail that fateful day if not for the lenient probationary sentences they’d gotten from the Philadelphia courts. One of their judges was even quoted as saying, "I got him for simply carrying a gun, not using a gun. It was just a gun case."

"Just a gun case!" Timoney fumed at the time, with disgust in his voice. "That’s disgraceful."

But with gun cases in particular, Philadelphia’s justice system has been badly broken for a very long time. Unlike most states, Pennsylvania forces counties to fund their own court systems, so money is tight and judges are under pressure to avoid building up backlogs of cases. When someone stands accused of mere illegal possession of a gun, judges typically hand out probationary sentences in exchange for guilty pleas — just to clear their calendars and avoid time-consuming jury trials.

It is a kind of chronic dysfunctionalism that has plagued big-city courts for decades. The famed Harvard criminologist, James Q. Wilson, pointed out way back in 1973: "For those who believe in the theory of deterrence, it is a grim irony: The more crime increases, the more pressure on court calendars, and the greater the chances that the response to the crime increase will be a sentence decrease."

When it comes to guns, this cycle of escalating caseloads and reduced sentencing has reached a kind of vanishing point in Philadelphia. Any potential deterrent effect has disappeared entirely here. In fact, when a kid gets caught by the cops with an illegal gun in Philadelphia, the worst thing likely to happen to him is that he loses his gun. If America had fought World War II the way Philadelphia fights gun violence, this article might well have been written in German.

So the benefits of taking gun cases out of the local courts, especially Philadelphia’s courts, is not lost on John Timoney. In fact, he worked with federal prosecutors in New York in a similar effort to work around the crowded local courts. It was the NYPD’s remarkable success in reducing gun crimes (in the absence of any new gun laws, murders dropped by half in just a few years) that helped inspire Project Exile in Richmond.

But Timoney says he’s not willing to grant the NRA the other side of their equation — that traditional gun control doesn’t work. During recent budget hearings Timoney assured City Council, despite some vocal skepticism, that Pennsylvania desperately needs legislation that would restrict gun buyers to just a single gun purchase every 30 days. The objective of such "one-gun-a-month" laws is to prevent lawful gun buyers from purchasing a dozen guns at a time, and then reselling them illegally out on the streets.

"Until you control the supply of guns in this city," he says confidently, "you will always have a relatively high murder rate in Philadelphia."

City Council, though, has some reason to be skeptical. The problem with Timoney’s assertion, which is commonly repeated in some form by many law enforcement officials, is that it is hard to find any evidence that it’s true.

For instance, Maryland passed a one-gun-a-month law in 1995. While the number of legally sold guns has declined, the state’s largest city, Baltimore, continues to have a staggering murder rate almost twice as high as Philadelphia’s. Maryland’s law was based on Virginia’s one-gun-a-month statute, which passed in 1993. Subsequent studies showed that while that flow of illegal guns exported from Virginia to other states had been curtailed, urban gun crime was unaffected. In fact, the homicide rate in the state capital of Richmond rocketed to its highest level ever one year after one-gun-a-month passed.

Richmond, then, is arguably the best case of how gun law enforcement has succeeded where gun-control laws have failed. A city of just 203,000 people, Richmond is one-seventh the size of Philadelphia. Its ghettos are not nearly so large nor so desperate as Philadelphia’s, but for its size, Richmond is a far more violent place. Particularly in the impoverished, largely African-American sections of Richmond, gun violence was out of control for much of the 1990s. By 1996, with a homicide toll of 140, Richmond’s murder rate was among the 10 highest in urban America — more than twice as high as Philadelphia’s and five times higher than New York City’s.

In early 1997, the Richmond U.S. Attorney’s Office huddled with police and local prosecutors to try and solve some of the city’s gun problems, which included the familiar scenario of crowded courts, overwhelmed judges and jails with revolving doors. What resulted was the first and only concerted effort to federally prosecute every gun law violator in a single U.S. city.

Federal gun laws are tough, particularly on career criminals. Any felon with an illegal gun, for instance, typically gets five years, but a felon with three violent crimes or narcotics in his past gets a minimum of 15 years for carrying a gun. Repeat offenders caught with drugs and guns can get 30 years or more, but even with no prior record, a gun-and-drug offender gets a mandatory five years.

For a felon, even having ammo is a federal crime. In a famous case in Boston, a notorious gang leader was put away for 20 years after police found a single bullet in his pocket.

Although the NRA was initially wary of Project Exile, it eventually got on board behind the effort in a big way, contributing thousands of dollars toward posters, billboards and TV ads that proclaimed a new truth to the city’s criminal community: "A gun will get you five years in federal prison." Publicity was almost as important as the prosecutions themselves, since the point of Project Exile wasn’t to lock people up — it was to deter gun crime through the promise of swift and certain punishment.

Hundreds of felons with guns were indicted during Exile’s first year alone, and by the middle of 1998, Richmond’s overall violent crime had fallen 60 percent. A top NRA official boasted to the Wall Street Journal that Project Exile "says with deadly accuracy that guns are for the law-abiding. That hasn’t been said anywhere else in the country, and it is changing criminal behavior in Richmond."

Realizing it had stumbled onto a public relations gold mine, the NRA went scouting for a bigger city to replicate and show off the program. It found Philadelphia, home of its 1998 national convention and of Mayor Ed Rendell, who was developing a national profile on gun-control issues.

As the local U.S. Attorney Michael Stiles remembers it, Cease Fire happened very fast. "The next thing I know I’m hearing from Sen. Specter, who wants to give funds, and I’m ultimately in a room with Charlton Heston and Rendell, and I’m saying, ‘Hold on, I’m the U.S. Attorney, let me have some impact on how we construct this program.’" U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, an NRA supporter and a former district attorney, arranged a special $1.4 million appropriation for Stiles to hire five extra prosecutors and for the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms to assign 10 extra investigators to its nine-county Eastern Pennsylvania district.

By January 1999, Operation Cease Fire was launched, with the NRA providing some cash assistance for promotion and publicity. Charlton Heston came to town to deliver the check and, while the TV cameras rolled, growled out a challenge to felons with guns to "make… my… day."

Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham, who had run a similar, smaller scaled program in the early ’90s called FAST (Federal Alternatives to State Trials) said she was glad to cooperate, but expressed utter disgust that such a program was necessary.

"This program is an indictment of the local court system, of the failure of our local judges to live up to their sworn constitutional duties," she said. "Our judges don’t treat guns and drugs seriously, so we’ll have federal judges do it. It’s outrageous."

A sample of Cease Fire convictions of dangerous repeat offenders shows just how the program succeeds where the local courts have failed:

Jermaine Parks, 28, was sentenced to five years in November 1999 after police caught him prowling in an alley, packing a loaded .45 caliber revolver. Parks had seven prior gun-related convictions, including three as a juvenile, but had never served more than two years in prison for any of his offenses.
Omar Best, 24, was sentenced to 105 months, almost nine years, in November 1999 after police responded to an anonymous "man with a gun" call at 18th and Cumberland in North Philadelphia. They recovered the firearm from Best after he tried to run away. Best had previous convictions for illegal guns, robbery and indecent assault. He had never been sentenced to more than 23 months.
Antonio Harrison, 27, was given 193 months — 17 years — last September for being a felon in possession of multiple firearms. Harrison was a suspect in a murder when detectives with a search warrant found nine different illegal firearms in his home. Harrison’s previous convictions included four gun-related offenses for which he had never been given more than 23 months.

part 3