If bullets fly in Kensington, is it really news?
700 block of East Madison Street. Photo via Google Maps, August 2019. Click to enlarge.
Kensington and Independence Mall-area shootings leave two dead, three wounded
The Kensington shootings occurred in an area long burdened by gun violence.
by Anthony R Wood | Saturday, August 26, 2023 | 11:07 PM EDT
A 39-year-old man was shot to death and two others were critically wounded late Saturday afternoon in a triple shooting in Kensington, police said.Several hours later, police said, a double shooting occurred in the Independence Mall area, leaving one man dead and another wounded.
The first shooting occurred just before 5 p.m. in the 700 block of East Madison Street, not far from the intersection of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, in an area that has been more burdened by gun violence than any other in the city.
The 700 block of East Madison is a racially-integrated, semi-dilapidated rowhouse street, with several homes in which the owners have literally put themselves in jail, adding security bars to keep people off of their front porches. Extremely narrow, cars are shown parked entirely on the sidewalk on the left-hand side of the street, as the one-way traffic flows, and partially on the sidewalk on the right-hand side.
A check of the real estate site Zillow shows that 711 East Madison is for sale, for a list price of $59,900, a 750 ft² home built in 1920, and being sold “as is.” No photos of the inside are available. Zillow’s map shows virtually every home in the neighborhood that is listed for sale is listed for under six digits.
Police said the man fatally wounded was shot five times. He was pronounced dead at Temple University Hospital.
Two more men were wounded, both critically, and the newspaper’s story said that the area “was littered with shell casings,” but no arrests had been made, nor were any weapons recovered from the scene.
Earlier this month, a 4-year-old girl and a 24-year-old man standing in the front doorway of their Kensington home were shot and wounded.
A 2021 analysis by The Inquirer documented that nearly 300 people had been shot within a five-minute walk of the K&A since Jan. 1, 2015.
That was a rate per square mile 11 times greater than that of the city as a whole.
There was another murder reported, at Independence Mall. Philly Homicide Reports said that it was the “2nd known Homicide in the past 50 years outside of Independence Hall; on Monday June 14th 1976, a street vendor Eugene Andre was killed by another vendor at 6th and Chestnut during a fight over the price of bicentennial trinkets.”
That’s sure different from Kensington.
Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas weighed in, with an article about sociologist and policymaker Nikhil Goyal, and his book Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty. I knew that Miss Ubiñas was barking up the wrong tree when she informed us that Mr Goyal was until recently a “senior policy adviser on education and children for Sen. Bernie Sanders for two years”.
Miss Ubiñas documented an interview she had with Mr Goyal, and it was notable for one glaring omission. He spoke about things like the Child Tax Credit expansion of 2021 not reaching millions of people, because they don’t file taxes in the first place, and that government welfare data on people should be shared interagency, so that the government could identify people on SNAP — what used to be known as food stamps — and see if there are other government programs for which they’d be eligible. To me, that sounded like getting the government to provide benefits for which people didn’t even apply.
I haven’t read Mr Goyal’s book, and know nothing about it beyond what Miss Ubiñas included in her column, but the glaring omission in her column was neither a question asked, nor an answer generated, which even mentioned the open-air, completely-unbothered-by-the-police drug market on Kensington Avenue, and the homeless junkies camping out and shooting up on the open sidewalks.
The simplest first step would be a massive police sweep, with the Philadelphia Police Department, the Pennsylvania State Police, and Federal Marshalls, rounding up ever dealer and every addict on the streets. Lock up the dealers for as long as the law allows, and charge and convict the addicts, keeping them in jail at least until they detox, and forcing them into rehab once they do. If they refuse rehab, throw them back in jail on a probation violation.
Then the next week, do it all over again, and keep doing it until the area has been cleaned up! Kensington’s problems, the problems of all of the poor neighborhoods in Philly, will never be solved as long as the drug addiction issue is not addressed.
Decades and decades of liberal policies and government in the City of Brotherly Love — the last Republican mayor left office while George VI was still King of England — have led to Philly being our nation’s poorest big city, and none of the Democrats dare to say, “Boo!” to the problems of drug use and crime in Philly’s poor neighborhoods, because they’re afraid of being called raaaaacists, but I have to ask: what is more racist than allowing an entire generation of poor people to live in fetid and festering sewers of neighborhoods, because the government officials are too chicken[insert slang term for feces here] to do anything about it?
The man with five bullet holes in his now-dead body” The two others shot with him in the same attack? The odds are extremely high that it was a gang hit — or, in Inquirerspeak, “street group” dispute — and those gangs exist primarily due to drugs. Attacking the drug problem won’t destroy every “street group” in the city, but it will disrupt most of them.
Miss Ubiñas referred to Kensington as one of “the poorest neighborhoods in the nation’s poorest big city,” and the description is accurate. But, in a newspaper which continually decries ‘disinvestment’ in poor neighborhoods, can’t the Inky’s editors and she understand that nobody with any sense at all is going to invest in Kensington as long as it’s a violent and drug-ridden dump?