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Also this issue: Strange Bedfellows Ready, Willing and Disposable? Fineprint Main Line $ex Battle Eternal Two-Faced Natural Selection The Bell Curve |
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June 26-July 2, 2003
city beat
Screaming Bloody Murder
Lately, Republican mayoral hopeful Sam Katz has been making a lot of noise about violence in Philadelphia. I attended a Katz press conference two weeks ago, where he stood on the corner of 56th and Woodland in my old Southwest neighborhood and called the rising tide of city homicides "an epidemic." By comparing the numbers of killings so far this year with the mid-June 2002 totals, there are 26 more murdered Philadelphians, a 22-percent increase that has Katz running around the city taking subtle jabs at Operation Safe Streets. And, of course, touting himself as the savior of innocent citizens from the gun-toting psychopaths who lie in wait in every dark alley.
"To make Philadelphia a safer place to live it is not enough to simply increase presence in certain neighborhoods; we have to make sure that people who are arrested for gun crimes stay off the streets," Katz told the dozen or so assembled reporters.
For a bit of comic irony, just as Katz was complaining about the lack of police presence in Southwest Philly, five cops rode by on bicycles, three more pulled up in patrol cars and two beat cops walked up. The next time he goes into a neighborhood complaining about the lack of police presence, he should probably have his people call the local precinct first to make sure they don't show up in force and ruin his photo op.
In a subsequent press release issued last week, Katz says that as mayor, he'll support long mandatory sentences for gun crimes, set up a special "gun court" and "direct the police commissioner to increase patrols in statistically proven high-crime areas during the peak hours gun crimes are committed."
Now if that last part sounds a lot like Operation Safe Streets, it should. Katz doesn't deny the similarity, saying, "I don't really care what we call it, as long as we get it done." The devil, as usual, is in the details. And that's where Katz's plan differs.
Where Operation Safe Streets -- like Operation Sunrise before it -- used an overwhelming around-the-clock police presence on street corners to scare the bad guys back into the shadows, Katz proposes to increase police patrols in high-crime areas from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m., when most gun crimes occur. According to "The Katz Plan for Taking Aim at Gun Violence in Philadelphia," the authorities should "focus on stopping individuals from illegally carrying guns in high-risk places, at high-risk times and by high-risk people." This can be accomplished, the plan states, through traffic stops and consent searches in these high-crime neighborhoods.
Here's where it gets sticky.
If Katz thinks for one minute that large numbers of traffic stops combined with wholesale police searches, consensual or otherwise, are going to sit well with the community advocates who live in those "high-risk" neighborhoods, he's got another think coming. You can almost hear the (probably justified) howls of racial-profiling already.
I asked Maureen Garrity, Katz's press secretary, about that near-certain probability. She reacted with horror and surprise.
"Every precaution would be taken to see that people's rights aren't violated," Garrity told me. "There has to be probable cause for any stop or search and Sam is adamant about that. Sam recognizes the potential for abuse in enforcement, but great minds would sit down and work those problems out beforehand. I can assure you that our plan would not profile citizens on the basis of race, age, gender, neighborhood or any other factor, other than their potential danger to the community."
Garrity said Katz's plan would simply put names to the statistics. If a person has a history of illegally carrying a gun, she said, they'd be watched more closely and arrested at the first sign of trouble.
Knowing that the mayor's people would just love to throw some gasoline on this small fire of controversy, I called Mayor Street's re-election campaign and asked Communications Director Mark Nevins about the Katz plan. Just as I suspected, he was ready to riff.
"It's borderline offensive, and raises the specter of racial profiling, even if it is well-intentioned," Nevins groused. "It definitely represents the proverbial slippery slope. Who decides who is Œhigh-risk'? Operation Safe Streets already tracks trouble spots and steps up patrols in those areas."
I won't bore you with the rest of Nevins' speech, a sound bite-laden diatribe blasting Katz for his lack of experience in law enforcement and neighborhood crime fighting, but the point is, he's right. Even if well-intentioned, this one has the potential for some real ugliness down the road. Let's hope that none of the "great minds" that are going to sit down and hash this out include the one that came up with this hand grenade of an idea.
Daryl Gale’s weekly radio show, Dialogues, with co-hosts Rotan Lee and Bill Miller, is burning up the airwaves Fridays 7-10 a.m. on WURD (900 AM) in Philadelphia.
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