Another victim of a ‘small crime’ in a big city
Last week, I was mugged. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds, because I didn’t suffer any physical injuries beyond a slight bruise to the hip where the muggers (there were two working in tandem) shoved me into the self-service kiosk at CVS. It was one of those classic “push and grab” affairs, where one person distracts you by pretending to accidentally bump into you and the other takes your wallet.
I didn’t make a police report, because I knew it wouldn’t do any good in a city like Philadelphia where we had more than 500 homicides last year, many of them unsolved. I also live near the spot where Officer Daniel Faulkner was murdered by Mumia Abu Jamal 40 years ago, and Jamal is still alive even though he should have been executed before I graduated from law school in 1987.
The Philadelphia justice system has more to worry about than Christine Flower’s stolen credit cards.
And as I said, I didn’t suffer any physical injuries, unlike so many Philadelphians who lost their lives because of policies championed by Democratic District Attorney Larry Krasner. I’ve written many times about my problems with “Let ‘Em Loose Larry” and his vision of social justice, which conflicts with a victim’s sense of criminal justice.
Krasner and his supporters seem to believe that it is a violation of an offender’s civil rights to force him to pay bail, serve appropriate sentences for violent crimes, and be accountable for the consequences of their drug use, their possession of illegal firearms, their use of someone else’s identity documents, etc., and so forth.
The saddest cases are the ones where the DA has completely ignored the pleas of victims and their family members, as he did with the family of Sean Schellenger, who was knifed to death by a man who, today, is living his best life. Krasner reduced the charges against the killer, Michael White, from first-degree murder to third-degree murder and then again on the eve of trial to voluntary manslaughter. A jury acquitted White of even that charge. At the time of the killing, White was sympathetically described in the media as a promising young man who wanted to write poetry. Indeed.
Sean is dead. So are at least 500 Philadelphians who succumbed on Krasner’s watch, so you can’t blame me for thinking that my mugging is not exactly “top of mind” at 3 South Penn Square, the District’s Attorney’s Office. And that, my friends, is the problem.
Murder is horrific. Rape is evil. Shootings and mayhem make a city unlivable. But so do the smaller crimes that create a sense of unease, of fear, of apprehension. When people feel that they cannot safely walk into a CVS in a relatively placid part of the city (we are not talking about the badlands of Kensington or the Killing Fields of North Philly) that is the small pebble that creates the larger ripple that creates the tsunami of an exodus.
Rudy Giuliani knew this over 30 years ago. While the former mayor of New York is now the laughingstock of the liberal elites and their friends in the mainstream media, those of us who were alive and visiting the Big Apple in the 1990s understood just how much Giuliani’s “broken windows” theory made sense. It was a recognition that small crimes, like the broken window of a car smashed to grab a radio or other items, created an environment that made people feel as if they lived in an armed camp.
When you prosecuted the smaller crimes and didn’t just give the offenders a pass because “the jails were too full,” you gave residents a sense that they mattered. You helped them feel as if their lives were more important than the lives of the people preying upon them. In the process, you encouraged other people to relocate to the city, repopulating it with productive human beings who didn’t make a living as parasites on the sweat of others.
Philadelphia is at a point where there are a lot of broken windows. I am speaking both literally, and figuratively. When I take my evening walks, which I do even though my family and friends tell me I’m crazy, I see the refuse of drug users littering the sidewalks, excrement and castoffs of half-eaten meals, and lots of broken windows. This is in an area not far from the tony confines of Rittenhouse Square. This is the current state of the city of Mayor Jim Kenney, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw and the aforementioned Larry Krasner. The lack of concern is manifest.
And the physical manifestations keep people from moving into a city that I love that derives from 60 years of good memories. Currently, there is little reason for me to love this city. But as Pascale wrote, the heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of. To me, Philadelphia is the surprise at the end of the Market Frankford El, the magical place I visited as a child with my grandparents. It is the place where I spent Saturdays in the 1960s, with my father and younger brothers. It is the place where I first started practicing law, and where I experienced a Superbowl (finally,) and where I became an adult, and then-gulp-a woman teetering on the edge of a cliff named Elderly. It has been the bedrock of my existence for many years. And it hurts to see what someone like Larry Krasner, who cares very little for people like me, who pays her taxes and doesn’t rob others of their hardearned property, has done to the city.
That’s why I didn’t report the fact that I was a crime victim. There are too many broken windows in this city, too many shrugged shoulders, and too many people in authority who care for the rights of the offenders over the rights of those who simply want to live in peace and prosperity.
In the end, it’s not just the windows that are broken.