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)