If you want to know why homicides in Philadelphia are both proceeding along record numbers and being solved at very low rates, The Philadelphia Inquirer has decided to tell you. Trouble is, I don’t think that they meant to convey the message that they did.
Black and Latino residents in University City feel the weight of police presence
The neighborhood is home to several overlapping police patrols, which doesn’t make everyone who lives there feel safe.
by Nate File | Monday, October 17, 2022
If you were to start your workday in University City by arriving at 30th Street Station, then walking along Market Street for a few blocks before turning towards UPenn, you would have been subjected to at least seven separate and overlapping police patrols.
Of course, if you debark at the 30th Street SEPTA Station, you’re going to be greeted by a large amount of used drug injection needles just laying around on the tracks, so you just might get the impression that the 30th Street Station isn’t the nicest place in the city.
The jurisdictions you would have passed through are: SEPTA and Amtrak Police, UPenn and Drexel Police, unarmed University City District public safety, and the 16th and 18th precincts of the Philadelphia Police Department. University City is blanketed with police officers, and Black and Latino residents feel it every day.
The police’s larger presence here is not entirely condemned or welcomed by residents; feelings can be mixed. But what is clear is that the police’s presence often feels overwhelming to the neighborhood’s most marginalized people.
There were 499 murders in the City of Brotherly Love in 2020, and a record-shattering 562 in 2021. This year is seeing a slight dip in the homicide rate, a whopping 1.86% fewer than on the same date last year, but still on track for 543 murders for the year.
As we have previously noted, that neighborhood is hardly the worst in Philly, but yes, murders have been committed there, recently.
After a couple of paragraphs noting the University of Pennsylvania’s investments in the neighborhood, and its campus police department, we come to this:
It also invested in its police force; UPenn currently has the largest privately funded police force in the state with over 120 officers. Drexel’s police force is much smaller, with about a third as many officers, but it has only been in operation since 2010.
Tamika Diggs, a Black woman who has lived in University City her entire life and works in the area too, has noticed that investment.
“There has been a change in the 30 something years that I’ve been in University City. Initially, there was just a regular police department. You didn’t really see a large police presence. However, as more gentrification happened… more Black and brown families were pushed out of the area, you (saw a surge) of more police,” she said.
“You certainly feel a sense of surveillance,” said Christopher Rogers, a Black PhD student at UPenn. Rogers feels a tangible difference in how much he is watched and perceived by law enforcement in University City as compared to elsewhere in Philadelphia.
He described the burden of the police’s presence more as an everyday “weight”, as opposed to having excessive confrontations with them.
So, Mr Rogers hasn’t has any interactions with the police that he saw as necessary to mention to the Inquirer’s reporter, but he just feels that they’re around. That the police forces are there to try to protect law-abiding citizens from criminals doesn’t seem to be important to him.
There are several more paragraphs in a similar vein, but the concluding three are the important ones:
But investigations and promises can’t undo firmly entrenched problems, and they so far haven’t changed the way Black and Latino residents of University City feel about the police.
“I think there’s an assumption that everyone else that’s not a student is … (dangerous) for the students that are at Penn or Drexel,” said Olivia.
Diggs has made sure to teach her teenage sons to be careful of how they present in public for that very reason. “I always tell them—my youngest is 6-foot-3—’You are not looked at as a teenager by (University City District), Drexel, any police officers … you’re looked at as a grown man. And so when you walk outside, you have to act accordingly.’”
Well, yes, people ought to act like adults! That’s what Olivia — who declined to provide her last name to the Inquirer reporter — is supposed to be teaching her kids.
Here we have several stories, from black and Hispanic residents in one of Philadelphia’s nicer communities, telling us just how much they dislike and distrust the police. But think about that: before very liberal and #woke Jim Kenney became mayor, the previous two mayors, John Street and Michael Nutter, were black. From 2010 into mid 2017, the District Attorney was black. For all of Mayor Nutter’s eight years in office, the Police Commissioner, Charles Ramsey, was black, his successor, Richard Ross, Jr, was black, and the current Commissioner, Danielle Outlaw, is black. The District Attorney, Larry Krasner, is a progressive, police-hating defense attorney, so Philadelphia’s black population know that he’s not going to pursue cases in which there is really any question about guilt.
There’s really nothing more the city of Philadelphia could reasonably do to engender trust betweenj law enforcement and the black community. Yet reporter Nate File was only able to document black or Hispanic residents in a rebuilding, gentrifying area, minority residents who would be generally better off than their minority brethren in the combat zones, who were still very leery of the police.
This, to me, reveals why Philadelphia is the most internally segregated city of over a million people in the United States, because Philadelphians are segregated mentally, segregated in their mindsets to the point that they’d prefer to live in a less safe area than support the police who are trying to make things safer.
Until the black, Hispanic, white, and Asian populations in the City of Brotherly Love can come closer together culturally, the city will remain segregated, and remain violent. That will take a long, long time to change.