Philadelphia Mayor John Street, who considers himself a mayor for the neighborhoods, is providing calm but aggressive leadership against crime.
The calmness is shown by his compilation and distribution of a book listing his city's crime strategies and long-term crime statistics; he is not going to allow media and other voices panic him, when in fact the city's crime rate is now lower than it has been under the city's law and order mayor, Frank L. Rizzo, the city's first black mayor, W. Wilson Goode, and the city's most widely acclaimed mayor, Governor Ed Rendell.
Street believes that much of the crime rate is do to fluctuations in the drug trade and social conditions in general, and is beyond the control of any mayoral administration. But he is deeply proud of what his administration has done.
The Street Administration has mapped out all the murders and shootings across the city, and correlated them with the underlining social conditions in the neighborhoods: including unemployment, high school dropouts, drug trade arrests, poverty rates, and child abuse cases. No informed person should be surprised at the correlation between these factors.
The Street Administration has established and maintained funding for preventive programs around the city: curfew centers, after-school activities, parenting skills programs, youth development programs, delinquency and violence prevention programs, day care programs, truancy related services, etc. These programs are located at social service agencies, schools, and city government agencies at numerous locations around the city.
Crime has gone down overall in Philadelphia while Street has been Mayor. Although the number of the city's murder has climbed from a very low start, it is still lower than it has been under any of the mayors who served before him until one goes back to the administration of James H. J. Tate, who served from 1962 through 1971.
Street though knows that the city can do a better job that it is doing with greater authority to regulate guns than it now has, and greater state effort to regulate guns. He is appalled at how easy it is for Philadelphia criminals and their friends to get guns from out of city gun dealers.
He is frustrated that the state at the impetus of the National Rifle Association stripped away the city's power to regulate gun license requirements in 1995, after the city banned sale or possession of assualt weapons. At that time the city had only 700 or so people with licenses to carry guns; now the city has over 30,000 people with such licenses, far more than New York, Washington, and various other cities.
When the state House of Representatives, at the suggestion of Democratic Appropriations Chair Dwight Evans, a likely 2007 Democratic mayoral candidate in a large primary field, established September 26, 2006 as a day for a meeting on crime of the rare-used Committee of the Whole, Street had his administration and his community allies help organize a protest day in the State Capitol.
His forces are paying bus transportation costs for anyone who wants to come. Perhaps more importantly, they are recruiting mayors around the country--including Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City--to address the rally. The NRA-dominated Pennsylvania legislature is going to get its largest exposure yet to the righteous wrath of frustrated urban and suburban residents who want to limit the gun trade, guns that are not childproof, and guns in the hands of the wrong people.
In Pennsylvania, the Committee of the Whole is a screening mechanism used for topics on which there are many ideas, but little consensus. Members get to vote by secret ballot. The process makes it clear what general concepts have the political support to be worth pursuing, and was helpful earlier in the year of focusing attention on senior citizen tax property tax rebates as an achievable goal, and getting it enacted.
The Committee of the Whole meeting on September 26 and the rally on the same date are only two steps in what will likely be a very long journey. Nevertheless, they are noteworthy for the rarity of their occurence and the urgency motivating them. Anyone interested in more information about the rally should check out http://www.september26rally.org/...