Killadelphia: City of Brotherly Mayhem

AN ALL TOO FAMILIAR PHILLY (MURDER) SCENE

The news from bloody Philadelphia just gets more and more horrifying.

I note that the city's TV newscasts are cast in the "If It Bleeds It Leads" mold, but the mayhem one day this week was so bad that it soaked up 18 minutes of the 30-minute evening newscast on one station, barely leaving any time for really important stuff like the weather and sports.

The mayhem included incidents in which police Officer Charles Cassidy was shot in the head outside a previously robbed Dunkin' Donuts by a perp who then stole his service revolver, another incident in which four people were wounded, including another officer, by an ex-con who drowned trying to escape his dragnet, and a lockdown at one of the city's largest high schools.

Officer Cassidy, a 25-year veteran, has died. He was the fourth Philadelphia police officer shot this year, the third this week, and the second in just 12 hours in a city that is chronically poor, undereducated and violent -- and shows no sign of coming to come to grips with its demons.

Mayor John Street led the Greek chorus that chimed in on cue after these latest war-zone convulsions in calling for stronger gun laws in a state where local jurisdictions are at the mercy of an adamantly pro-gun majority in the Legislature.

"Unless we can get control over the proliferation of illegal guns, then the people who are most at risk are, of course, the members of the Police Department," Street said with practiced angst.

Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson belabored the obvious in saying that his officers are being "basically assassinated" by armed and violent criminals.

"The availability of weapons in our city . . . the availability of guns are really completely out of hand here in the city of Philadelphia," he said. "Legislators have to realize that we have a gun problem."

That "problem" has resulted in 325 murders in the first 10 months of the year, the highest big-city homicide rate per capita in the U.S., although the pace recently has slowed slightly from the 2006 rate, which resulted in 406 murders.

Meanwhile, New York City, with five times Philadelphia's population and once America's murder mecca, has had "only" 220 murders. Chicago and Los Angeles also lag far behind.

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I have been reading the essays of Ishmael Reed lately, and a recurring subject in his writings in the late 1960s into the 1970s was the coming race war between blacks and whites. That notion was very much a part of the black radical lexicon of that era and of course remains deeply embedded in the rantings and writings of white supremacists.

Reed, one of the best African American writers of our time, sat to the left of many of his peers back in the day but neither endorsed or rejected the notion of a race war. I suspect that he is not at all surprised that the race war in America today is blacks killing blacks.

In fact, there have been an astounding 100,000 murders in the U.S. since the 9/11 attacks, most of them in inner cities and most black-on-black shootings, stabbings and other forms of self genocide.

This epidemic is only bound to get worse.

As Bob Herbert of The New York Times notes, criminals locked up over the past 10 or 15 years are now leaving prison by the hundreds of thousands each year. With few jobs or other resources available to them, a return to crime by a large portion of that population seems inevitable.

Who's to blame?

First and foremost, these shiftless souls themselves, with the federal government and society as a whole a not close second.

And in Philadelphia so-called civic leaders whose frailties have made it even more difficult to push back, including a weak mayor (Street) who has spent much of his administration fighting off corruption allegations, and a weak police commissioner (Johnson) who has been in over his head from Day One.

Street deserves an extra helping of scorn.

I admired him as a rabble rousing Afro-coiffed community activist in the early 1980s who was determined to shake things up. But he has become a poster child for the time-honored concept of being part of the solution and then becoming part of the problem. He has been a terrible disappointment as mayor.

The feds played a big role in the substantial reduction of big-city crime in the 1990s, but much of that support has since vanished because of the diversion of your tax dollars toward fighting terrorism and the war in Iraq, of course, as well as the belief of Bush administration ideologues that crime is a local problem and their resistance to any form of gun control that might help stanch the flow of guns into those inner-city killing zones.

According to one study, Philadelphia has lost a staggering $287 million a year in federal funding since President Bush took office for law enforcement, education, job training and housing -- the social programs that can chip away at the root causes of crime.

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This is the kind of post that a know-it-all white blogger looks back on and says: "Boy, I shoulda known this one was gonna get me in trouble."

Perhaps it will because as much as Washington and white America is to blame for the chronic neglect of the underclass -- which is predominately peopled by blacks and other racial minorities and increasingly by immigrants, many of them illegals -- the buck has to stop somewhere and that somewhere is in the inner city itself.

This brings me back yet again to Philadelphia, a city that I know well and love dearly.

Since 2001, there have been 10,000 shooting victims in the City of Brotherly Mayhem. Some 80 percent of the victims were African American males, while most of the perps were African American males under the age of 25.

Hey, I now live in a college town neighborhood where the most serious crime is overturned trash cans, but that does not keep me from have an abject feeling of hopelessness when it comes to Philadelphia and its future.

Police Commissioner Johnson, speaking to a CBS Evening News reporter, has no illusions about the epidemic -- along with having no solutions -- and has doggedly resisted more innovative tactics despite saying that:

"Traditional policing is not working. That's just my opinion. Traditional policing is only locking up people better. That's not the only answer."

In trying to fight that hopelessness, I have come to believe that the biggest part of the answer is not jobs creation, better policing or effective gun control, but breaking the cycle of violence and failure by weaning up-and-coming young black men from the notion that being a man is not how many people you off or women you knock up, but succeeding where your peers -- the brothers who are dead or in jail -- have not.

Whether that means finding God, a teacher or other mentor who genuinely cares about a young man's future I know not. But help has to be on their doorstep or maybe just a block or two way, and not at some social services center downtown or ivy-covered university urban affairs department.

Photograph by Jim MacMillan/Philadelphia Daily News