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.