The one thing everyone agrees on is that the situation, as it stands, is a mess. The question is, who made it?

Guards say they are paid $8 or $13 per hour with no benefits or paid sick days, job security is almost non-existent and they have to buy some of their own equipment. But chiefly, sitting in the conference room, they complain about training and safety: This is, after all, a job outside high-rise project towers.

In the late 1990s, Jerome (not his real name) became one of Philly's biggest illegal firearms traffickers. The system, he says, was ill equipped to stop him, and gun-shop owners were all too willing to sell him whatever guns he wanted.

Should you find yourself still thirsty after the following brief review, you'd do well to blame the Internet.

Jack Wagner is broke. No, not broke. "Broke" implies that there was something once not broken, that at one point the treasure chest spilled finance onto the ground and that now, after millions spent on television ad blitzes and full-page Inquirer ads, the chest is empty. Jack Wagner just doesn't have any money. Never did, really.

Ramsey's admitted unfamiliarity with the most basic reports spelling out the department's ailing regulatory mechanism is telling.

Jauhien Sasnou was arrested for disorderly conduct after he took pictures of South Street cops clashing with concertgoers.

Where many developers once saw an opportunity to cram as many high-paying tenants into a building as possible, others are beginning to see potential anchors of communities — just what those industrial buildings were in the first place. The Philadelphia Center for Architecture's upcoming exhibit, "Retooling Industrial Sites," reveals this new creed borne out.

He was an asshole who'd had way too much to drink and was looking for a fight, and in a different scenario with different characters and different magnitudes, Michael Foley may have deserved a fraction of what ended up coming to him. But it would have been only a fraction, and it wouldn't have been doled out by a cop.

The CQS is but one of four city "row offices" run by elected officials who provide services easily performed by other agencies. The city considered shuttering them last year to save money amid its budgetary meltdown. It didn't. We spoke with Zack Stalberg about it.