PHILADELPHIA — It’s been four weeks since former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter admonished the city’s district attorney Larry Krasner in an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer for his dismissal of the city’s crime wave, calling his offhand remarks “some of the worst, most ignorant and most insulting comments [he had] ever heard spoken by an elected official.”
Krasner told reporters a couple of days earlier that Philadelphia didn’t “have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence” when discussing a city that at the time had seen a record 521 homicides by Dec. 1.
For perspective, the number of homicides just seven years ago, 250, was less than half of that.
Nutter said Krasner’s remarks took a certain audacity of ignorance and white privilege and wondered “what kind of white wokeness Krasner was living in to have so little regard for human lives lost, many of them Black and brown.”
Four weeks later, after five minutes of national coverage, nothing much has changed. By the time 2021 ended, the Philadelphia Police Department announced there had been 38 more homicides, bumping the number of lives lost violently up to 559. This is the most recorded homicides ever in one year since the city started tracking them 60 years ago.
On the last night of the year, six gunmen fired more than 65 rounds on a busy Philadelphia street filled with people enjoying restaurants and bars. Patrons ran frantically for cover. When the gunshots ended, one woman was found shot multiple times, and several young men suffered non-life-threatening gunshot wounds.
Four days into the new year, the city has not seen any relief. Just hours into 2022, two people were killed, and at least 12 others were injured by gunfire.
Nutter laid down the law on Krasner largely because the district attorney has behaved more like a white elite liberal activist who talks about de-escalating the war on crime while seemingly holding low regard for his own police force — motives he says are meant to protect minority communities.
Yet it is his soft-on-crime attitude and activism that are hurting his own minority communities the most.
Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police President John McNesby said in an interview with the Washington Examiner that most of the violent crime committed in the city directly affects minorities.
“It is a shame because the people in this community want help. They want to support the police. They want the police there to protect them. In fact, they want more police. It is their loved ones who are being killed, and their pleas are going on deaf ears.”
According to the Philadelphia Office of the Controller, more than 84% of the victims of gun violence in 2021 were black.
McNesby said that unlike the city police’s relationship with Krasner, they worked hand in hand with Nutter when he was mayor. “He did a great job, and he kept crime in check.”
The violent crime wave doesn’t just affect the poor and middle-class black neighborhoods — areas that rarely receive the proper attention in the news. People who live in the well-to-do neighborhoods of Center City are now dealing with a string of armed robberies — 25 to be exact, just in the first two weeks of December.
Two weeks ago, U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon was carjacked at gunpoint right after finishing a meeting at FDR Park.
This all comes a bit more than one year after the country was overflowing with calls from elected officials to defund the police. Other cities, such as New York and Chicago, are also suffering the consequences of electing people like Krasner who gingerly jumped on that bandwagon.
Eventually, even-minded people understood there would be consequences for that activism.
One of the most fundamental things people expect from their lawmakers at all levels is that they provide safety and security for the populace. Recent polling shows that President Joe Biden isn’t just suffering an erosion but a full-fledged collapse of voters’ faith in protecting people or having good policies on crime.
A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll showed only a little more than a third of people (36%) approve of Biden’s handling of crime and only 32% approve of Biden’s handling of gun violence. That figure shrinks among independent voters with only one-fourth approving of his handling of gun violence.
G. Terry Madonna, a political science professor at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, says as in all things political, sentiments toward presidents and their parties always run downhill to whoever is running for office in the state.
In short, if Biden is having a problem with voters on crime, then any fellow Democrat running for Congress, governor, or the state legislature is also having doubted on those issues.
“There isn’t any doubt about it — it will be an issue. It won’t be the leading reason, but voters are going to press Democrats on where they stand here in 2022 on crime and the police, and they will expect answers,” said Madonna.
Madonna, a legendary figure in Pennsylvania political science, said currently, COVID, inflation, the border crisis, and the supply chain problems are Biden’s biggest problems. “However, people want to know they can feel safe in their localities. They also want to know their state is safe. This is just another undercurrent that the Democrats don’t need.”
The other problem Democrats face on this issue is not that Philadelphia Democrats will vote Republican in the statewide elected offices next November but that they might stay home if they are fed up with how their party has handled violent crime.
Fewer votes in Philly and her collar counties means the votes coming out of the other 60 or so more conservative-leaning counties in the state (outside of Allegheny) could outperform the Philly area’s larger populations and usher in a Republican sweep.
It has happened before.
