I asked, on August 18, 2020, What Are Mayor Jim Kenney and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw Doing About Open Air Drug Markets in Philly? I had noted The Philadelphia Inquirer’s story about the open air drug market in the Kensington neighborhood, complete with a photo of a man shooting up outside the Market Street SEPTA station. I noted that, despite the Inquirer making it very public, the Philadelphia Police did nothing.
I kept checking the news, for weeks, and never found a story about the Philadelphia Police making a sweep of the area, to clean up the drug dealers and users.
The Inquirer even identified one of the drug users, and published her picture!
“The blocks [where drug dealing takes place] never closed,” said Christine Russo, 38, who’s been using heroin for seven years. She waited Friday near Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, at the heart of the city’s opioid market, while a friend prepared to inject a dose of heroin. “Business reigns. The sun shines.”
Just now much more help did the cops need?
Well, here it is, nine months later, and the Inquirer is on the same beat:
Even as pandemic lockdowns ease, Kensington’s heroin economy thrives, along with the endless gun violence it fuels. And the neighborhood’s pain is plainer than ever.
By Mike Newell | Friday, May 21, 2021
As he looks out over the chaos at the corner of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues — the sprawling homeless encampments, the people injecting heroin and nodding off in the street, the dealers, the trash, the suffering — this is what Flac sees: Money.
“All I see is money, money, money. Ain’t nothing but money down here,” he said, waving at the intersection. “This is one of the few places in America where you can wake up Monday flat broke and on Tuesday you can have $10,000 in your pocket.”
Flac, who manages heroin-dealing operations on a number of corners in Kensington, and who asked to be identified by his nickname because his business is illegal, is a cog in the vast machinery that is Kensington’s drug trade — the largest open-air drug market on the East Coast, if not in the nation.
He is launching a new venture at K & A: a heroin-dealing operation across from the Allegheny El Station, the latest addition to his portfolio of corners around the neighborhood, where some blocks reap as much as $60,000 a day in heroin sales.
Flac says he is only following the riches. Since the temporary closure of the Somerset El stop two months ago, the growing crowds of people who use drugs and live on the street have been moving up Kensington Avenue. There are more customers at Allegheny now, more money to be made, and Flac and his supplier want to plant their flag.
“Every day is a party out here,” he said. “Every day is a good day.”
It’s a major story in the Inquirer, one which took a lot of legwork. There are photos of drug dealers, and Mike Newell, the reporter whose bio says, “I’m an enterprise reporter. I find stories about cops and crime, people and politics, and everyday life that tell a bit about a changing city,” was able to find, talk to, and identify the dealers, dealers who are apparently so unafraid of the cops that they were willing to talk to a reporter.
Of course, Mr Newell would claim some sort of journalist’s privilege and never identify or testify against the dealers if they were arrested.
Flac is upper management. According to his crew, he’s running the operation for a drug supplier with access to heroin sold on the best corners in the neighborhood. Flac, who says he’s out on bail for a gun charge, will oversee the squad of shift managers, dealers, runners and lookouts. Eventually, the aim is to match sales on some of the other “gold standard” blocks — many millions a year.
In other words, the cops could lock up “Flac” in a heartbeat; he’s already out on bail. Mr Newell already has the information needed for the police to get him off the streets, but you know that he won’t give that to the cops. Mr Newell already identified him, in the story, as having a Lincoln Town Car.
The Inquirer story tells readers just how useless it would be to raid the area and arrest all of the drug dealers:
“You can try locking people up — that ain’t going to stop nothing,…tomorrow there is going to be another group taking our place. It’s like trying to cover the sky with a finger,” said “Bebo,” who manages heroin-dealing operations on a Kensington corner.
Well, maybe so, but is that any reason not to try?
The Inquirer, which routinely prints stories bemoaning “gun violence,” its euphemistic term that allows the paper not to mention that there are bad people picking up guns and shooting other, usually also bad, people, tells us about the violence there:
With more customers comes more competition. More than ever, violence follows the markets.
In a 1.9-mile stretch covering the narrow streets along Kensington Avenue, near McPherson — an area smaller than Old City — police have identified 80 corners with open-air drug markets.
In 2020, in that same grid, the heart of the drug markets, 40 people were killed and 178 were shot and wounded.
The escalating bloodshed is overwhelmingly driven by disputes among drug rivals fighting for the profits to be made, said Capt. Pedro Rosario, the commanding officer of the 24th police district in Kensington.
“There’s a lot of great people that live on these blocks,” said Rosario, walking down the narrow blocks by McPherson. Even with the captain there in his uniform, the sales didn’t stop. “And right now, they’re basically prisoners in their own homes.” . . .
Rosario, the police captain, says that with such an overwhelming amount of drugs on the corners — and with gun violence in the district nearly tripling since 2017, when the opioid crisis exploded — it often feels like the best his patrol officers can do is displace dealers from one corner to the next, providing neighbors temporary relief.
A transit hub like K & A, with its ceaseless streams of customers pouring off the El, becomes a battleground. In 2020, two people were shot and killed at the intersection, and two more were wounded. This year, two people have been shot and killed on the blocks near K & A and five others have been wounded. All of the cases are drug-related, Rosario said. And in recent weeks, after a spike in shootings, nearly a dozen more patrol officers have been redeployed to the intersection.
To do what? Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw could set up a huge sweep, and arrest every drug dealer there. The Philadelphia Police Department is the fourth largest in the nation, with 6,300 officers. The manpower is there to sweep through Kensington and arrest all of the bad guys. If more manpower is needed, the Pennsylvania State Police could provide it. And when the drug dealers arrested are replaced the next day, sweep up the next crew as well, then the next, and then the next.
The Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) is the nation’s fourth largest police department, with more than 6,300 sworn officers and 800 civilian employees. Our mission is to make Philadelphia one of the safest cities in the country.
The police department partners with communities across the city to:
- Fight crime, the fear of crime, and terrorism.
- Enforce laws while safeguarding people’s constitutional rights.
- Provide quality service to all Philadelphia residents and visitors.
- Recruit, train, and develop an exceptional team of employees.
There sure isn’t much evidence that the Police Department’s “What we do” statement is true, not if the Inquirer can send reporters down there and get drug dealers to talk to them with seeming impunity. Of course, with softer-than-soft on crime District Attorney Larry Krasner having just won his primary election, it’s understandable that the police might not bother; his office wouldn’t prosecute them anyway.
As of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, May 20th, the Philadelphia Police reported that there had been 199 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love, up from 144 on the same date last year, and as the article made clear, most of the homicides in the city are related to drugs and gangs. I get it: the Democrats who have controlled the city for longer than Elizabeth II has been Queen of England are all social justicy, but at some point, doesn’t someone have to realize that their policies have not worked?
