Killadelphia
Sometimes you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
As we all know, Killadelphia’s murder rate is around 107 and climbing: victim number 107 was Terrence Walker, 19, shot in the head at midnight on April 8 at 61 and Market Street.
Last night, the neighbors held a vigil for the slain teenager. Do you even need to guess what happened?
Gunshots were fired at the mourners:
During a West Philadelphia memorial service for the city’s 107th murder victim, a gunman fired at mourners, striking a grieving woman in the back as she sat inside a nearby car, police said.
Lt. John Walker of Southwest Detectives said that at about 8 last night, the gunman fired shots from 61st and Market streets in the direction of more than 50 mourners holding a candlelight vigil for Terrence Walker, 19, who had been fatally shot in the head shortly after midnight on Sunday.
[snip]
The unidentified man fired about five shots and struck the woman once in the back, Walker said. The driver of the Oldsmobile tried to elude the gunfire and ended up colliding head-on with a police cruiser, which had just arrived at the scene.
What do you say about an incident like this? I mean, other than “pack our bags honey, we’re getting the Hell out of Dodge City.”
107 murders in 3 months. Rudderless in City Hall. Cops that don’t come when you call, leaving the neighborhoods at the mercy of thugs and gangs. [Kia Gregory has done fantastic work on the problem, and since neither the Inquirer nor the Daily News keep their articles online for long, I'm linking to her exclusively.]
I keep hearing the politicians offering band-aids. The always-useful less John Perzel, the former Republican Speaker of the Statehouse who (like the equally useless Democrat Fumo) treated Philadelphia like his personal fiefdom says he wants to add more police to the streets: does that offset the Bush Administration’s massive cuts to the Community Oriented Policing Services program, which forced our city to lay off 400 officers, decimating Safe Streets? Michael Nutter, candidate for mayor, wants to implement an unconstitutional “stop-and-frisk” program, as well as curfews for adults: I’m all for crime-stopping, but not at the expense of my rights. Read about everyone else’s band-aids here, most of which call for more funds from the feds (who, as we know are axing funds like a drunk lumberjack) or for cutting other programs to pay for more cops.
The fact is Philadelphia’s crime problem is a symptom of a far deeper, much more difficult problem: the persistent lack of jobs that has plagued the city as manufacturing jobs go belly up (or more precisely, get shipped off to China, India, and other countries where a dollar a day is considered living the high life). You simply cannot raise a family on minimum wage, without health benefits. During the lean and hungry years, I got a new familiarity with poverty, working two restaurant jobs at wages that barely covered me. Three days a week I would go from one job to the next, and I soon discovered that the only way to make the jobs pay would be to sign on for hours that barely left me time to sleep, never mind commute between the two kitchens. I didn’t drive at the time, and just as well: even with the comparatively low cost of gas in early 2004, the cost of filling my tank would have been prohibitive.
As a cook, I made about $12.00 an hour, augmented by the $9.00 an hour I was making in restaurant number two. That’s a heck of a lot better than unskilled workers at McDonalds, the Quik-e mart, and the other low-wage jobs that have replaced manufacturing, and it still wasn’t enough. Is it any wonder then, that the poor increasingly turn to selling drugs, with all the crime and violence that entails? And is it not painfully obvious that even flooding our streets with cops empowered to stop and frisk everyone on sight will only briefly stanch the bleeding, and worse, establish a police state that threatens everyone?
It is no wonder that Philadelphia’s population has fallen behind Phoenix, the city with no “there” there: we pay high taxes for services that don’t exist, the violence is sky-high; the city is filthy; and as a result people who would ordinarily thrive in an urban environment are leaving.
Someone shot a gun at people mourning a gunshot victim last night. It boggles the mind.
4 Responses to “Killadelphia”
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April 11th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
We were at 108 on Monday, and given that we average more than one shooting a day we are probably over 110 now. It isn’t a big difference from 107, or at least it wouldn’t be except for the fact that the number represents human lives lost.
April 11th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
i bet that $12/hr. job now pays $10 tops, and the $9/hour maybe $8 if the sucker’s lucky.
the service industry is a mess. i make less now than i did 20 years ago. and in almost 25 years i had all of 1 job with benefits.
April 11th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
…and they do say that we have and are moving more towards a service industry. I got my masters to avoid it, but I will be paying so much on my student loans for the next 30 years that I don’t know if I’ll have a retirement fund.
April 13th, 2007 at 10:15 am
We will make nice little slaves for our new masters someday. Won’t we?