Albert Einstein supposedly said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Perhaps relying on a misunderstanding of Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the progressive left can hold that if they just keep doing the same thing — albeit spending more of Other People’s Money while doing so — their oh-so-noble policies will work where they haven’t worked before. The progressive left are complaining that more conservative urban policies won’t work, but they are being implemented because liberal and progressive policies didn’t work!

Mayor Parker’s Kensington plan is part of a broader shift on crime and drug policy in blue cities

Experts and activists see Parker’s approach as part of the larger trend. But there’s intense disagreement over whether her strategy can be effective.

by Anna Orso | Earth Day, April 22, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

It wasn’t that long ago that the mayor of Philadelphia wanted to open a supervised drug consumption site and City Council was passing legislation to make it harder for police to arrest people for nonviolent crimes.

But along with a new class of leaders, the political tenor in the deeply Democratic city has decidedly shifted.

It’s kind of a shame that the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer limited reporter Anna Orso’s article to subscribers only, but not to worry, I subscribe so that you don’t have to! If “the political tenor in the deeply Democratic city has decidedly shifted,” perhaps it is because the city government tried progressive policies so diligently under previous mayor Jim Kenney, and the results were disastrous.

Cherelle Parker Mullins won the 2023 Democratic mayoral primary by running as a more moderate politician, to the right of more liberal former Controller Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff and the far, far, far left Helen Gym Flaherty. Mrs Mullins won big in the areas of Philly in which the crime rate was worst, while her more liberal challengers did better in the wealthier, less dangerous areas. The areas in which the liberal policies failed the worst were the areas in which the further left candidates did worse.

City Council last year passed legislation effectively banning supervised drug consumption sites — where clinicians oversee people using drugs and revive them if they overdose — in most of the city.

New Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, who ran for office while embracing stop-and-frisk and opposing drug consumption sites, won election handily. Since taking office in January, she’s solidified her rejection of some progressive approaches to drug policy, announcing that the city will no longer fund services that provide people with tools for safer drug use.

And earlier this month, Parker unveiled her administration’s much anticipated strategy to end the sprawling open-air drug market in the city’s Kensington neighborhood, where hundreds of people — many of them in addiction — are homeless. Her plan includes arresting people for such low-level offenses as drug possession and prostitution, crimes the city hasn’t targeted in years.

Philadelphia is far from alone in being a blue jurisdiction taking a more law-enforcement-heavy approach to public safety and drug policy, compared with just a few years ago in the aftermath of the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, which ushered in a wave of progressive policymaking and criminal justice reform.

Perhaps Miss Orso didn’t recognize the implications of what she wrote, but to conservatives it’s perfectly clear: basing widespread social change policies on the unfortunate death-while-resisting-arrest of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled previously convicted felon George Floyd might not have been the best idea in the world.

I cannot simply quote everything in the article; that would be plagiarism. But Miss Orso continues to note how liberal cities like New York, Washington, and San Francisco have reversed course on the continued permissivist policies which have seen crime increase and even more people sink into the dark world of addiction. Oregon recently ‘recriminalized,’ if that’s really a word, possession of several drugs.

Experts and activists see Parker’s approach as part of the larger trend. But there’s intense disagreement over whether her strategy can be effective in achieving her goal of ending the drug market while still treating people in addiction with compassion.

Kris Henderson, executive director of the Amistad Law Project, a law firm that has advocated for public safety approaches outside law enforcement, said Parker’s strategy represents a return to “war on drugs” policymaking that emphasizes policing over public health.

Ahhh, the Amistad Law Project. Let’s tell the truth here: Amistad’s primary activism is ‘decarceration,’ to keep people out of prison, and free those already locked up. You can see just how honest Amistad is in their statement about the third-degree murder conviction of former police officer Edsaul Mendoza:

A small measure of justice was served today when former Philadelphia police officer, Edsaul Mendoza, pleaded guilty to third-degree murder for killing Thomas “TJ” Siderio, an unarmed 12-year-old boy in South Philly in 2022.

TJ was riding bikes with two friends around 7:30 PM in March 2022, when four plain clothes cops in an unmarked car approached them. The boys then jumped off their bikes and ran in different directions. Mendoza chased after TJ, where video footage shows Mendoza clearly saw that TJ had thrown a gun away and was unarmed. TJ dropped to the ground and was lying facedown when Mendoza approached him and shot him in the back, killing him.

An alleged but unconfirmed photo of Thomas Siderio Jr.

There’s more at the original, but Amistad deliberately omits the fact that the young Mr Siderio, himself the son of two criminals:

fired a shot at the (police) car, shattering the rear passenger side window and piercing through a passenger’s headrest. Shards of glass injured (Officer Alexander) Camacho, who screamed that he had been shot.

Officer Mendoza pursued Mr Siderio, who was carrying a stolen laser-sight equipped 9mm Taurus semiautomatic handgun, which the 12-yeqar-old juvenile delinquent tossed into the bushes “40 feet away,” or 13 yards, from where he fell, the distance a healthy 12-year-old boy could cover in a dead run in less than two seconds.

Thomas Siderio should be alive. He should be in school, playing with friends, getting the opportunity to make mistakes and then learning from those mistakes.

Young Mr Siderio had an opportunity to make a mistake, and the mistake he made was to shoot at the police, but whoever wrote the piece for Amistad omitted that rather pertinent fact. Mr Siderio learned his lesson the hard way, and we can all hope that the kids who knew him will have learned from his mistake.

Junkies in the streets in Kensington.

The last several paragraphs of Miss Orso’s article are about the views of advocates of “harm reduction.” But “harm reduction” is not really that, but harm transference, transference away from the criminals and the addicts who stay out of jail, and onto the residents of the neighborhoods like Kensington which they have turned into vast stretches of junkies shooting up and camping out on the sidewalks.

You can’t fight drug abuse by coddling drug addicts, and drug addicts, and the dealers who supply them, have turned the Kensington section into such a disaster zone so bad that the Mexican government uses it as an example to its own people of why they should not use drugs. We do not know if the new Mayor will actually be able to rescue Kensington from what it has become, but we do know that halfway measures will not fix the area.

You know, I get it: the progressive advocates really don’t like government power — or at least not government power over the left, though many would use it against conservatives! — and the last thing that they want to see is law enforcement arresting and jailing the junkies. But being ‘nice’, taking away consequences for bad action, has led to what Kensington has become today. What the progressives have advocated has already been tried, and it has utterly failed.