Philadelphia Shootings
Yesterday was a bad day in North Philadelphia
IT WAS A MOTHER’S worst nightmare.
Mirta Rodriguez looked out the window of her second-floor North Philadelphia apartment a little after noon Saturday and saw her 16-year-old son, Mark Anthony Rivera, sprawled on the sidewalk, riddled with bullets.
He had dared to diss another youth, cops and witnesses said – a youth with a gun.
Meanwhile, in Feltonville, family and friends of Teven Rutledge, who was shot to death on his 15th birthday Sunday by a man who had been hit by a snowball at D and Rockland streets, were trying to understand how such a terrible thing could have happened.
Police yesterday were looking for suspects in both cases.
The senselessness of the snowball killing enraged Mayor Nutter. He called it the “dumbest-ass event of the year.”
“And unfortunately we’ve seen these events in the past,” he said. He said he and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey were going to “continue going after illegal guns and be tough on crime.
“We will be relentless.”
His vow comes too late for Teven Rutledge, the victim of the snowball slaying, who was removed from life support and pronounced dead yesterday in Temple University Hospital, and for Mark Rivera, who reportedly died because he had refused to buy marijuana from another boy.
If the Mayor is so outraged, if the Mayor wants to talk about “dumb-assest events”, perhaps he’d like to revisit his crime emergency plan, which has already drawn criticism for the areas it doesn’t target.
Conversely, six districts that reported some of the worst violent-crime rates last year did not make the commissioner’s list: the Sixth District, which includes eastern Center City and North Philadelphia; the 16th District, including Mantua and Powelton in West Philadelphia; the 23d District in North Philadelphia; the 24th and 26th Districts, encompassing Kensington, Fishtown and Port Richmond; and the 17th.
Frankly, the 25th District, which includes Feltonville, should be on that list as well.
As the Inquirer’s 2007 homicide map demonstrates, Feltonville and the surrounding area is by any account far more dangerous than neighborhoods like Chestnut Hill (the 14th District) and University City (18th District). Yet these two neighborhoods have been targeted for increased police presence, while the 25th District and other high crime areas languish. Here’s a map I shaded in with red to illustrate where the police has increased presence.
Compare this map to the interactive map linked in the previous paragraph. Why does UPenn, which already augments the police department in University City with its private police force and the safety ambassadors, need a crime emergency? Maybe the high crime rate at the western edge of the 18th justifies that presence, and maybe that’s where it’s concentrated. But you cannot make that claim for Chestnut Hill. Districts like the 22ndm, the 25th, the 39th that are the ones crying out for help.
If we are to have a crime emergency and allow the police expanded powers to stop and frisk citizens, assuming guilt before innocence, the Mayor should put the cops where they’re needed.
December 9th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
[...] Time to fire up the ol’ time machine and take a look at the mayor’s “crime emergency”. You’ll recall that there was quite a bit of criticism about placing more cops in neighborhoods like Chestnut Hill and University City, both afflicted with “problems” like wealth and a private police force provided by UPenn, as opposed to “actual high crime”: Conversely, six districts that reported some of the worst violent-crime rates last year did not make the commissioner’s list: the Sixth District, which includes eastern Center City and North Philadelphia; the 16th District, including Mantua and Powelton in West Philadelphia; the 23d District in North Philadelphia; the 24th and 26th Districts, encompassing Kensington, Fishtown and Port Richmond; and the 17th. [...]