This site has previously noted the open-air drug market in the Kensington section of Philadelphia; with published photos of junkies shooting up right on the street in front of SEPTA’s Allegheny Avenue train station, it’s pretty difficult not to notice. The government of Mexico has actually used photos of Kensington in ads to discourage drug use in Mexico! And Philly’s George Soros-sponsored, police-hating, and softer-than-Charmin-on-crime District Attorney Larry Krasner has actually filed suit to stop efforts to fight crime in Kensington and on SEPTA.

But, rather than far-left Helen Gym Flaherty, whom hard-leftists Will Bunch, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, The American Prospect, have supported, and only slightly-less-leftist Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff, whom The Philadelphia Inquirer endorsed, the actual voters in the City of Brotherly Love voted for the tougher-on-crime Cherelle Parker Mullins^[1]None of the female candidates for Mayor in Philadelphia had shown enough respect to their husbands to have taken their husbands’ names, though they certainly appreciated their husbands’ … Continue reading. And thus the Inky is having to take note of Mrs Mullins efforts to do one of the promises on which she campaigned: clean up Kensington!

How Kensington Avenue’s open-air drug market went international — and the city’s fight to take back the neighborhood

Kensington’s plight now serves as a cautionary tale for foreign governments, a punching bag for Republican presidential candidates, and a source of macabre clickbait on the internet.

by Max Marin | Monday, March 25, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

Kiara Lynn Garcia was just doing what young people in Kensington are told to do: get out.

After graduating from college in 2019, she took her international relations degree and flew farther than most of her childhood friends could dream — 8,000 miles, to Shenzhen, China, where she began her career teaching English as a second language.

But in her first year abroad, as the pandemic raged, a viral video reached Garcia’s friend circle in China and catapulted her back home.

The clip showed a man driving under the familiar blue shadow of the El train, filming droves of people nodding out in the streets, some openly injecting drugs, others itching at gruesome wounds or asleep in front of shuttered stores. “This is not a horror movie,” the videographer narrated in Mandarin. “This is real life.”

In a way, it’s laughable. Reporter Max Marin continues to document all of the videos on YouTube and elsewhere about how terrible Kensington has become, how it’s an international spectacle, but never mentioned that Miss Garcia opted to live under a Communist dictatorship than in her blighted neighborhood.

Amusingly enough, the article’s subtitle, and a paragraph in the article, frets about the conditions in Kensington being “a punching bag for Republican presidential candidates,” because the newspaper wouldn’t want to be in any way supportive of evil Republicans!

Kensington’s problems did not develop overnight, but have been growing and festering for a long time . . . and Philly’s last Republican Mayor left office when Harry Truman was President of the United States! Michael Nutter was Mayor, and Charles Ramsey Police Commissioner, from 2008 through 2015, and four days into 2016, and they were at least reasonably tough on crime, but Jim Kenney was Mayor for the subsequent eight years, and while Mr Kenney was very vigorous in getting a sugary drink tax pushed through — those Seven/Eleven Big Gulps were just a terrible, terrible problem! — and loved issuing authoritarian degrees concerning COVID-19, firing what city employees he could who refused to take the vaccines, he did little else, and problems soared. For his last year in office, he was only little less than AWOL. Why shouldn’t Republican candidates blame Kensington’s problems on Democrats, because Democrats have had a complete lock on the city’s problems for 72 years now.

The challenge is enormous. More than one-third of the city’s homeless people live in Kensington. The zip code 19134 saw 1,270 fatal overdoses between 2015 and 2022, more than double any other neighborhood. Kensington endured a historic surge of drug-fueled gun violence during that same period, with more than 1,400 shootings, including 300 within a five-minute walk of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues. Residents lodged more quality-of-life complaints with the city’s 311 system than any other part of the city over the last three years — contending with abandoned cars, crumbling buildings, and human feces in the streets.

Kensington and Allegheny Avenues are the hub of Kensington, and the SEPTA elevated train station is located there.

More than a third of the 2,500 narcotics and drug-law violations recorded by police in 2023 occurred in Kensington. The concentration of drug crime in the neighborhood is extreme, calculating to 376 violations per square mile, compared with just 16 violations per square mile in the rest of the city.

There’s a nice graphic that goes with that last paragraph, but let’s tell the truth here: the Philadelphia Police haven’t really been pursuing “narcotics and drug-law violations” in that neighborhood, and the arrests that they’ve made there barely scratch the surface of the problems. A junkie shooting up in the street, or passed out on the sidewalk is a narcotics and drug-law violation,” all by himself, but the cops don’t arrest for that. The Philly Police could scoop up hundreds of narcotics violations every night, passed out on sidewalks, asleep in doorways, or crashing in the SEPTA train station, but don’t because they know that the District Attorney and his minions wouldn’t prosecute them anyway.

Many stakeholders fear that a crackdown without a long-term plan will simply end in displacement, causing a catastrophic surge in overdose deaths and increased burden on surrounding neighborhoods. As developers sweep up land in upper Kensington’s drug market, some longtime residents, 45% of whom live in poverty, say they are wary that a dramatic wave of gentrification is next, bringing high rents and property taxes that will force them out, too.

The city has not been trying to crack down on crime there for decades; perhaps, for all of their ‘fears,’ it’s time to try to see if that works. After all, nothing else has.

Yes, a lot of the residents are poor, but fearing greater wealth helps to keep them poor. As we noted last week, keeping a neighborhood poor keeps away grocery supermarkets, meaning that the poor are having to pay higher prices for lower quality food at corner bodegas. Deliberately keeping a neighborhood poor only makes the residents even poorer.

The Inquirer article is a very long one, the type of thing only possible in the digital age of newspapers, the type of thing that I have said is the way newspapers — albeit possibly only in digital form — can survive and thrive in the age of the internet, and it’s well worth a read. Mr Marin spends many paragraphs telling readers how the neighborhood went from a reasonably prosperous, working-class neighborhood to a synonym for poverty, death, disease and druggies, and while the loss of industry helped start Kensington’s downward slide, it was drug abuse, decades of drug abuse — Mr Marin dated that from the K&A Gang bringing in methamphetamines in the 1970s — which turned it into what it is today.

Drugs destroyed Kensington, and only fighting drugs, fighting them with everything the city can muster, can reverse and revitalize the neighborhood. Philly can try all of the other drug treatment programs it wants, but, in the end, vigorous and harsh law enforcement, targeting users as well as dealers, has to be a major part of it. Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right. “Nice guy” policies have led to disaster in the city.