Holiday Spirit

It is early afternoon in Center City, a few days after Christmas. Shoppers mill about, looking to redeem missed and unwanted presents.

Inside a tiny, dim boutique on South 17th Street, the owner rings up the only customer in the store, a small, attractive, 30-something woman with long, dark hair, dressed casually in jeans, a cashmere coat and trendy flats. Her daughter stands at her side, wide eyed with soft brown curls. They just got their nails done. It’s mother-daughter day, and mom's buying pajamas.

“Did you see these?” mom asks the owner. She’s holds her hair back, flashing the flawless diamonds adorning her ears.

“Wow,” says the owner.

“I got these for Christmas,” she says, her smile shining wide. “And I got a Birkin,” – a bag that has a waiting list of more than two years and a price tag starting at $7,500.

“Did he get you that?”

“Yep,” she says, nodding her head victoriously.

“Did he do that by himself?”

“Noooo,” she says. “It would be nice to be surprised, but if I didn’t tell him, he wouldn’t have a clue.”

She tucks her receipt in her wallet and takes her bag, decorated in a dark ribbon. As she heads for the door, she promises to return next week.

Minutes later, a block away, a young boy steps in front of a blind woman’s cane. His wide eyes appear hurried and lost. Several paces back his mother is being harassed by a security guard.

“I ain’t got nothin’,” she tells the guard, a thin, gray-haired man old enough to be her father. Her two small daughters stand at her side, looking up, pleading.

“Lift up the back of your shirt,” he orders her, as they walk down the street, in an odd little dance of him accusing her and her denying.

She lifts up her sweatshirt, revealing nothing but rolls of brown skin.

But he's undeterred. Their dance continues around the corner.

And her son, dressed in a fuzzy hat and worn coat, stares ahead, unable to defend her or leave.

(Photo credit: shopamericantours.com)

The Tale of Two Philadelphias

The Urban League of Philadelphia recently released a report titled the State of Black Philadelphia. Every Philadelphian should read this report. It offers shocking and saddening statistics that expose the social and economic chasm between the city's black and white residents, and paints a horrific picture of black life in some of the city's neighborhoods.

Here are some of the low lights:

• The median household income for blacks is $26,728, compared to $42,279 for whites—a difference of more than $15,000.
• The unemployment rate for blacks is 9.9 percent, more than twice that of whites.
• Only 53 percent of blacks own their homes, compared to 64 percent of whites, and their property values are less—a difference of almost $100,000.
• Thirty-two percent of blacks live in poverty, which is twice as many as whites.
• Only 14 percent of black high school students are proficient in reading and only 10 percent are proficient in math—less than half as many as white students.
• Twice as many blacks are uninsured.
• Blacks are five times more likely to be murdered.

The grim disparities go on and on...

But in addition to ringing the alarm, the report points to a laundry list of common sense solutions. Thing is, we've always known the who, what and where. It only thing perpetually missing is our collective will.

Many of the responses I received to my column about the report point to individual responsibility. Some readers dismissed the measures as a black problem. One person even wrote that black people are just plain lazy.

Such attitudes still find a way to amaze me, that somehow people use them to bolster racial stereotypes. In reality, these statistics represent a social phenomenon, fueled by racism, that withstands simply pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. For some of the city's residents every thing surrounding them points to failure: blighted neighborhoods, inferior schools, no jobs, random violence, no access to healthcare or healthy food.

When we look at our education system, a student can take responsibility for his education and go to school everyday, yet he will still come out with an inferior education. Statistics show that blacks graduate from high school with the same level of education as white 8th graders. That black high school student can graduate with honors and still not get accepted into college or find a meaningful job.

Until we see these conditions as a social phenomenon; until we talk openly and honestly about racism, which is at the heart of these statistics, and the damage it has done and continues to do; until we talk about individual responsibility, and empower individuals to be responsible; until we start investing in young, black men, beyond the millions we pour into the criminal justice system; until we see that racial equality is in everyone's self-interest; until our moral responsibility leads to action instead of apathy, because crime can only be contained in so-called bad neighborhoods for so long. And even though blacks are doing worse than whites in this city, whites, particularly white students aren't faring well either. Until we stop seeing this as a black problem or a neighborhood problem, things won't only not the same same, they'll get worse.

Related Stories:
A Black-and-White Issue.
by Kia Gregory. Philadelphia Weekly. 12/12/07

Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane.
With Patricia Coulter of the Urban League of Philadelphia, Kia Gregory who writes for the Philadelphia Weekly, and Phoebe Haddon, professor of law at Temple. 12/18/07

(Photo credit: Jeff Fusco)

Soul Force

On Tuesday, and every Tuesday, the Father Paul Washington committee wants every Philadelphian to call the Pennsylvania state legislators holding up gun reform.

The committee is lead by his two sons, and self-described best friends, Kemah and Michael, and is part of their father’s mission to save lives

Their motivation is simple: too many guns on the street, too many lives being taken.

“If there’s no crack on the streets, you can’t have crack addicts,” says Kemah, 56. “It’s the same thing with guns. If there’s no guns in the street, you can’t have the level of violence we see in the neighborhoods.”

The brothers, the oldest of five, grew up at 18th and Diamond, four blocks away from their father’s church, the historic Church of the Advocate, which was an island of hope for the struggling North Philadelphia neighborhood.

During his 25 years at the Advocate, Father Paul was a leader in the black community and the black power movemet. He ran a soup kitchen. The Church had sports teams and a myriad of activities for the neighborhood kids. In 1968, the church hosted the National Black Power Conference, and the Black Panther Party convention in 1970.

Until he passed away in five years ago, the church remained a haven.

“This comfort zone really gave folks an opportunity to grow positively,” Michael says, “but five blocks away there with a lot of problems, gangs and violence. They respected the church perimeter. Guys drinking wine on the corner would hide their bottle when Miss So-and-so walked by, but now, the whole community fabric has eroded.”

Michael, 48, says it started unraveling with the lost of jobs.

“In North Philadelphia you had factories like Stenton and Zenith and Westinghouse that made families stable,” he remembers. “Now they’re all gone. “

The committee’s campaign to blog Harrisburg's switchboards has been going on for about a month. They are pushing for two bills, House Bill 22, which would limit handgun purchases to one within any 30-day period, and House Bill 29, which requires gun owners to report lost and stolen guns and the state police to maintain a registry of all firearms lost or stolen in Pennsylvania.

Both bills have been stalling in the judiciary committee for ions. Last week, about a dozen members of the legislative black caucus walked off the house floor in protest over the lack of progress. The church plans to meet with the heads of the caucus next Wednesday.

Recently Diamond Street, from 16th through 19th, was renamed after Father Paul Washington Ave,” who often said, “Soul force does not depend on numbers.”

“A lot pf people think you need masses of numbers behind you to make change,” says Kemah. “Dad always said, ‘If you are doing something for God, He is the only one who needs to be behind you. He arms you with everything you need’.”

The surrounding community has seen its share of shootings and murder and robberies, and the brothers say only the community can heal itself.

“It’s just a community now without a lot of respect of self and life,” says Kemah, recalling his father’s day when men tipped their hats and opened doors for women. “My father loved life. He loved children and just to see them as they are now with no morals and no respect, I think he would really be hurt. It’s something he would cry about, and I know he would speak against it, and I know there would be some activity at the church around this.”

(Photo Credit: Mike Persico)

One Man Army

The tattoo on John's neck reads “One Man Army.”

And when he was at Strawberry Mansion high school he was, one of the best players in the city, so good that he was named all-star and MVP, which earned him a free ride to college. But basketball came easy to John. So did rapping, which he now does under the name Wall Street. But the streets were his true love, and where he lost his leg over drug money.

“I can’t forget that I got shot,” says John, 19, standing tall and lanky, with a slight beard. He speaks in a thoughtful, self-assured tone that can only be described as charismatic. “I can’t forget that I lost a leg. I have regrets, but I don’t get mad. I’m really supposed to be gone for real for real.”

John tells how he was in the drug game “kinda heavy” before he got shot last November. “I had birds in the street," he says of the bricks of cocaine he flipped for fast money. "I had it all before I got shot."

His life is now severed into moments of before and after.

“I can talk stuff in my music ‘cause I lived that,” he says. “I walked around with my glock off safety ‘cause out here you ain’t got time to click. I walked around with five gees in my pocket. That ain’t about nothing,” he says waving his hand dismissively. “All that glitz and glamour, ain’t nothing, ‘cause what can make you happy can also make you cry.”

***
When John got out of jail, the drug money he had stashed away was gone.

“After I found out who it was," he says of the thief, "I suited up and sat and waited,” as the guy finished up a dice game, “and I got my money back how I could get it back.”

Later that night, while John was sitting in the passenger side of a car in the city’s Huntingdon Park section, he sees the guy running out of an alley. He grabs for his gun in the backseat, but it’s gone. He imagines that the other passenger back there who got out of the car earlier took it in a set-up, as he sees another guy run toward the car wearing a dark hoodie.

“And that’s when it went down,” he says.

The two men opened fire. John runs out of the car, and soon his legs start to burn. He is shot five times in his left leg and two in his right.

Lying on the ground, he laughs at the two people standing over him, saying, “You might as well finish now." "Nah," says one of the passerby. “You bleeding, Wall Street.”

Someone calls 911, and John, laying on the ground sweaty and tired, folds his hands over his chest and prays to God.

“If that was gonna be my last breath, I said something to God,” he says.

****
John laid in the hospital for about a month. He suffered severe vascular damage. When he woke up one day, his right leg was gone.

“I was just looking, and I just laid back down,” he says. “I wasn’t really mad. I was mad, but I wasn’t. I was like 'Dang, they took my jawn', and I was like, 'Oh well'.”

Three days later he cried. He says it was the only time.

When we met in May, John had been walking again for about a month. His new leg leaves him a crude limp that requires a cane or crutches. It also brings him constant pain. The scar tissue from his stump digs into his prosthetic leg for which he pops muscle relaxers daily. His doctor wants to amputate further, but John refuses.

“I’m just gonna have to walk with those crutches for the rest of my life,” he says flatly.

***
John started selling drugs when he was about 14. His customers loved him so much, he remembers, that some even called him their son.

His mother was an addict. His father was a dealer. “What does that mean?” he says. “My family is a good family. I was raised in the church. It doesn’t mean nothing.”

Life is about choices.

“I love the streets,” he says. “I ain’t gonna lie, I am the streets. I speak for the people in the streets. I don’t miss killing my community. But you get a lot of love, and sometimes you get a lot of hate. It’s funny that way.”

When talking about today’s rising gun violence, John blames a perverted mentality.

“There’s no respect, there’s no loyalty,” he says. “People will sell their soul. People will turn on their mother for $2. I don’t know. It’s so crazy.”

For John getting shot was a turning point. The bullet matured him.

“It wasn’t my downfall it was my upbringing,” he says of the shooting. “I don’t feel invincible, but I’m here. What they planned to do failed. I’m still walking, baby. It just makes me look at things differently and talk to people differently. People talk to me about the grind all day, and I say ‘Look man, it ain’t worth it'.”

The moments after he was shot are filled with daily physical therapy, and music. John, a sharp lyricist, boasts of an upcoming tour with heavyweight rapper 50 Cent. He also volunteers at prevention and intervention programs throughout the city, telling young people his story.

But the past keeps him leery.

“I don’t wanna get caught slippin',” he says one afternoon, standing on a North Philadelphia corner. “I’d rather be in the cut.” One of his shooters is in jail, John says, but he doesn’t know why. “I just know he’s not having a good time in there,” he says. “It’s like I’m in there, but I’m not. I got people who love me in every jail. I’m not glorifying that. It’s the truth.”

The other shooter is still on the street. “I always think about it.” he says about getting shot again. “If I get shot one more time, and I survive, it’s gonna be a problem. People ain’t gonna keep shooting me.”

John also has an upcoming court date, which he shrugs off. “I ain’t looking at nothing but freedom,” he says.

But like that night last November, he miscalculated, learning once again that you can’t outrun the past.

One year later, he’s locked up on State Road, for a drug case he caught prior to his shooting, contemplating his choices for the next two to four years.

(photo credit: Jeff Fusco)

Man Shot While Holding Baby

On Wednesday morning, around 5:30, gun shots rang out on the streets of Southwest Philadelphia. In the aftermath lay the unimaginable: a 26-year-old man holding his 10-month-old son.

Witnesses say it started with an argument between a man and a woman. Then two men approached. Then gun shots cracked through the air.

The two men fled on foot, apparently after they opened fire on their intended target as he stood in the rear driveway of a home near 56th and Litchfield Street, holding his baby boy.

Police are looking for the suspects, two black men, thought to be 18-20 years old, wearing black hoodies, one with “RL” across the front.

Young, black male, wearing a hoodie is a description that fits a large part of Philadelphia, and now, over recent shootings involving similar-looking suspects, it's one that reads as armed and dangerous.

Their victim lies in critical condition at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania with multiple gun shot wounds to the chest. The baby was not injured.

“The fact that he was shot while holding his son is unbelievable,” says police spokesman Lt. Frank Devore. “It’s outrageous that they would do something like that with a baby right there.”

It’s more than outrageous. It's unconscionable; something that cannot be reasoned with; something that cannot be legislated or regulated; something beyond an education or a job; something that, as the baby cried out while his father fell to the ground, is devoid of all hope.

Perhaps the father thought his baby would shield him, that the shooters, in a moment of conscience, would hold their fire. But the baby is a symbol of our lost humanity, and the nightmare that anyone can get shot in Philadelphia.

And with that the intractable questions arise: Why was the man out so early, and with his baby? What erupted in his life that two men wanted him dead, and the expense of an innocent child? And what becomes of them all now, as well as the rest of us?

(Photo credit: Jeff Fusco)

Philly's Next Top Cop: Charles Ramsey

Dear New Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey:

First, thank you for taking the job.

I can’t imagine a more mountainous, seemingly futile task than quelling the city’s mounting gun violence, which has mutated into something wanton and aimless. In our darkest hours, we’ve mourned a third grader shot and killed outside his elementary school one morning; a mother of four shot and killed while shielding her babies from a gun battle that brought five guns and 40 shots outside her door; 11 people murdered over one weekend; 14 year old Tykeem Law shot and killed by a road-rager while riding his bike; and recently a veteran police officer shot and killed as he entered a Dunkin Donuts, interrupting a robbery in progress. He was one of three cops shot in four days.

Our most recent headline involved three people killed outside two nightclubs, one in ritzy Olde City this past Sunday, a sure omen that violence is spreading outside of the city’s bad neighborhood, black-on-black comfort zone. Now, in Philadelphia, anyone can get shot anyplace, anytime.

But we already knew this. In 2005, we suffered an astounding 380 murders. In 2006, 406 murders. And now in 2007 we’re on target to exceed last year’s nightmare with an average of one person murdered and five people shot every single day.

So, police commissioner to be Ramsey, you have your work cut out for you. You have the intractable social problems of deep, concentrated poverty and inferior education that provide the backdrop for the city’s violence; you have a lack of meaningful job opportunities for the city’s ex-offenders; you have the free flow of illegal guns and a hardened state legislature that flat-out refuses to hear anything in the way of gun reform; you have a stop snitchin’ mentality that keeps communities locked in fear and thugs roaming the streets; you have criminals emboldened by our apathy; and you have a citizenry that feels helpless and hopeless, that no longer believes in its political leadership.

Mayor-elect Michael Nutter believes in your leadership, so much that he bucked departmental ranks to find you, which is understandable. He needs someone who’s turned around a bullet-riddled city before. You’ve been the chief of police in DC for eight years. Before that you were Deputy Superintendent of the Chicago P.D., where reportedly you were instrumental in designing and implementing a nationally-recognized model of community policing, something we desperately need here in Philadelphia. You are also known for declaring crime emergencies, giving yourself greater authority to change cops schedules to increase manpower, at the expense of departmental morale. Philadelphia has crime emergency. Criminals have declared war on us. And here’s hoping you’ll be the take-no-prisoners crime fighter we so desperately need.

(Photo credit: David Swanson / Philadelphia Inquirer staff photographer)

"Insane" Lawlessness

Three cops shot in four days was the city's latest shameful headline tragedy.

The third officer, officer Charles Cassidy, was shot in the head when he walked into a Dunkin' Donuts in West Oak Lane during an attempted robbery. Cassidy died the next day, making Philadelphia once again a city in mourning.

Two weeks later, two more Philadelphia police officers have been shot in the line of duty.

Yesterday, when plain clothes narcotics officers were serving an arrest warrant on an alledged drug dealer in Frankford, someone fired on them through the window, wounding the officers.

Mayor-elect Michael Nutter called the city's recent cop attacks "insane," and vowed that such lawlessness would not be tolerated. But Nutter doesn't take office until January. In the meantime, current-Mayor John Street and the police commissioner Sylvester Johnson once again called for gun reform that will never happen.

Truth is, when cops become easy targets, the city has no hope.

We have only ourselves to blame. Such brazen lawlessness is the result of our apathy. We've emboldened our criminals, starting with the six witnesses who stopped snitchin' against third grader Faheem Thomas Childs' killers; to our political weakness to pass meaningful gun reform; to our waning outrage over Cassidy's death; to the next senseless shooting.

The next day police arrested Donyea Phillips with attempted murder in the city's latest cop shooting. Phillips is only 16, and his weapon used was a stolen gun.

(Photo credit: Mike Persico)

Wanted: Police Commissioner

On Wednesday, after winning the November election in a 4-to-1 landslide, mayor elect Michael Nutter sent reporters a email that the following morning he’d make a major announcement. Police commissioner ... Police Commissioner ... Police Commissioner, I prayed. He didn’t. Standing outside of City Hall that chilly morning, Nutter named a finance director. But he couldn’t escape the question, which reporters repeatedly hammered. Much of the anxiety for an answer is the frightful uncertainty the city faces as it careens toward 400 homicides this year, mixed with helplessness of current police chief Sylvester Johnson’s shoulder-shrug, defeatist attitude in stopping it. Nutter vows that on his first day of office he will declare a state of emergency, and hopefully on that day whoever he declares police commissioner will address the city, particularly those trapped in bullet-riddled neighborhoods, vowing to do everything in his power to quell gun violence. Then, he'll focus on deployment, bringing fearful residents the beat cops they long for. And he'll present and maintain the strong leadership and hope the post has long been lacking.

(Photo credit: Jeff Fusco)

Cop Killer

There is no doubt that John Lewis is a monster.

On Halloween morning, Lewis shot police officer Charles Cassidy in the head as he walked into the West Oak Lane Dunkin Donuts Lewis was robbing.

Cassidy, a 25 year police veteran and married father of three, died the next morning.

He was the third Philadelphia police officer shot in four days.

Days later Lewis was captured days later at a Miami homeless shelter where he confessed and apologized saying he didn’t mean for any of this to happen, adding to the senselessness of his crime.

But it is now that perhaps for the first time in his life 21-year-old Lewis offers hope. He gives a city in mourning another opportunity, after many tragic moments squandered, to sustain our collective outrage over the city’s gun violence.

Every day in Philadelphia, on average, someone is murdered and five people are shot. Lewis showed us that we cannot contain the city’s mounting bloodshed in black on-black, God-forsaken neighborhoods. Lewis showed us our hypocrisy, that now violence had become something unimaginable, something unacceptable. And he showed us the swarming ills that make violence a breeding ground.

News stories on Lewis’ life highlight a series of failures, and many of those affected by the city’s gun violence resemble John Lewis. He dropped out of Olney High School. He was unemployed. The week before Lewis walked into that Dunkin Donuts his grandmother took him to retailer Forman Mills for a job application. He had a series of drug arrests. He was a single father to newborn baby girl. He had a frustration of a life deemed not worth living. He had easy access to a gun. These are not excuses, but a reality that Lewis brutally shows us we’ve dismissed for too long.