(Good) Drivers Wanted

That's right, step away from the vehicle.

by Steven Conn

Andy Reid's sons and the group arrested recently for stealing guns in the suburbs and selling them in the city probably don't have a whole in common. Except this: They were all caught as the result of routine traffic stops. Perhaps there is a lesson here for a city where street violence has grown out of control.

Breaking traffic laws constitutes far and away the most common form of law-breaking in Philadelphia. You see it multiple times every day in every neighborhood in the city: cars rolling through the stop sign, speeding through residential neighborhoods, and my particular favorite, honking the horn to announce that the red light is optional.

Philadelphia driving is reckless, stupid and dangerous. Recently, I watched as an elderly woman stepping off a trolley was almost hit by a car passing the stopped trolley on the right. I don't know if there is any way to measure bad driving, but judging from the dropped jaws of my out-of-town guests, Philadelphia is a national leader in automotive chaos.

I don't want to suggest for a moment that there is direct correlation between reckless driving and the epidemic of violence in the city right now. The more we study crime, the more we realize that it results from a complicated set of interacting factors. Economic hardship surely plays a role, but of course most Philadelphians living in poverty live honest, hard-working lives. Guns don't kill people, but if Virginia Tech taught us anything, it reminded us that angry lunatics with easy access to guns do.

In fact, the only thing we can say with some certainty about crime is that it isn't a racial or economic matter so much as a gender question. Men — boys — between the ages of 15 to 30 commit crimes. The rest of us, for the most part, don't. This corresponds roughly to my wholly unscientific and purely observational survey of dangerous city drivers.

Back in the 1990s, "community policing" became a popular new approach to public safety in several big cities. It was driven, in part, by what was known as the "broken window" theory of crime prevention: paying attention to small things like broken windows on abandoned buildings can prevent the total ruin of a neighborhood.

I don't know how the "broken window" theory is viewed nowadays by police and professional criminologists, but coincidentally or causally, crime rates dropped across much of the 1990s including here in Philadelphia.

Nor do I know whether city police are as invested now in those notions of community policing under current and beleaguered Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson as they were under Willie Williams and John Timoney. But my casual street survey suggests city police have no interest in enforcing traffic laws. Indeed, in my neighborhood at least, the police cruisers blow through the stop signs with the best of 'em.

It is hard to argue that city police ought to spend time on moving violations when shootings continue apace. Yet I wonder if enforcing these laws wouldn't have a larger calming effect in city neighborhoods. At the very least, not enforcing them contributes to the sense that the actual streets are lawless. What else do people conclude as they watch cars routinely ignore the law?

Unlike broken windows, traffic laws can be enforced inexpensively and without much additional police work through the expanded use of traffic cameras. A handful have been employed in a few places, and only after people were killed by cars. Michael Nutter, in response to criticism of his stop-and-frisk proposal, said that city residents have a right not to be shot. Quite right, and we have a right not be hit by reckless drivers breaking the law, as well.

When John Street took office, he promised the city "Safe Streets." As he makes his desultory way to the end of his term, that promise seems bitter and far away. When the new administration confronts the complicated problem of crime, it might start by working to make cars obey the law. By making the streets safer, neighborhoods might feel safer, too.

Steven Conn is the author of Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with the Presence of the Past.