Pubdate: Sun, 25 Feb 2007
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA)
Copyright: 2007 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc
Contact:  http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/340
Author: Mark Bowden

The Point

IN OUR WAR ZONE, AN IMPOSSIBLE JOB

Before we went for a drive around his turf, Philadelphia Police 
Inspector Carl Holmes handed me a flak jacket. He noted my surprise.

"We'll be in a marked car," he explained. "Sometimes it draws fire."

The war zone in question was East Division, from the Delaware River 
west to Broad Street, bounded on the north by Roosevelt Boulevard and 
stretching south to Northern Liberties. It is home to about 300,000 
people, most of them Hispanic or African American. The flak jacket 
was just procedure, more a matter of liability than real danger, but 
East Division is the setting for much of the gun violence afflicting 
the city, and Holmes, a gigantic man who once played offensive tackle 
for Temple University and in the pros (Redskins and Jets), is 
responsible for policing it.

It is an impossible job, and Holmes, a well-read man with a law 
degree, knows that the best he and his men can do is address the 
symptoms of what he calls "an underground culture of despair and disorder."

You don't have to look far for reasons. In almost every neighborhood, 
the rotting shells of ghost factories cast dark shadows over 
rooftops. Gone is the industry that once spurred construction of 
these houses, that gave order, purpose and hope to life. Holmes 
estimates unemployment is about 65 percent in his division now. 
Sixty-five percent. Here and there, polite civilization has a 
toehold, but down every street iron bars have turned front porches 
into cages, and as Holmes' cruiser makes its way over Butler Street, 
street drug dealers scatter two blocks ahead, and then reassemble two 
blocks behind.

This is, of course, nothing new. Unemployment, drugs, the breakdown 
of families and communities... we have been hearing about the root 
causes for decades. But this is not a problem that just percolates 
unchanged. It is getting worse, and it is evolving in new and frightening ways.

Last week, I wrote about the late Dante Jackson Freeman, a teenager 
who owns the distinction of having been shot on five separate 
occasions in neighborhoods on the other side of Broad Street. He was 
a victim of the newest permutation in a long history of street 
violence: shootings for nothing, or for nothing terribly significant. 
People have long been murdered in lovers' quarrels, gang disputes, 
contested drug turf, and robberies, to name a few of the obvious 
reasons. Holmes' force handles an average of six shootings a week, 
and three to four homicides a month. In January, they found one on 
the sidewalk outside a school at F and Cornwall Streets. They let the 
children out on the opposite side of the block so they wouldn't have 
to step over a dead body on their way home.

"It doesn't do me any good to talk to young people caught up in this 
street culture," Holmes said. "There is such a deeply ingrained 
distrust of police, or of any authority."

Holmes could tell them that the vast majority of neighborhood drug 
dealers die in the neighborhood where they start. They don't get 
rich. They don't escape.

"If I tell them that education and hard work are a better way, all 
they have to do is look around them at the people in their lives, and 
they just see me as a fool or a liar."

David Simon, one of the creators of the Dickensian HBO series The 
Wire, which depicts this urban subclass in Baltimore and is one of 
the finest works of social realism ever put on film, sees it as part 
of a general devaluation of human life, which he blames on 
capitalism. The children at the bottom are, in this view, effectively 
born discarded. They just don't count. Little wonder they return our 
scorn, and learn to maneuver and survive in the violent, criminal 
world they inhabit. There is a Lord of the Flies element to it, says 
Paul Fink, professor of psychiatry at the Temple University School of 
Medicine, and head of the Youth Homicide Committee, which studies the 
deaths and dead-end stories of victims like Dante.

Children like this grow up valueless and ignorant, but they don't 
lack energy, intelligence and ambition - and they are armed.

The candidates for mayor this year are all proposing ways of dealing 
with this problem, ranging from comprehensive to silly: the proposal 
to install thousands of video cameras. Some of the real causes, like 
economic stagnation and unemployment, are simply beyond the city's 
power to reverse, and some of the solutions are politically 
impossible, like the drug war, which fills our prisons to 
overcrowding with addicts at the same time it fuels an underground 
criminal economy. One of the great themes of The Wire, in Simon's 
words, "is how the legal pursuit of an unenforceable prohibition has 
created great absurdity." But politicians commit career suicide to 
even talk about such things.

So we are left, or, rather, Carl Holmes is left, to police the 
symptoms and scrape the dead off the sidewalks. Fortunately, his 
division is big enough to include some bright spots. He stopped to 
talk to a young woman walking her dog in the newly gentrified 
Northern Liberties, where young professionals are buying new 
rowhouses and renovating old ones.

"Are you having any problems in this neighborhood I should know 
about?" he asked.

The woman said her only problem was people parking in front of her garage door.

Holmes dutifully noted the complaint, and said he'd see to it that 
the parking rules were policed more aggressively. If only all his 
problems were that easy to solve.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman