Editorial for July 26, 2007 edition:


Nothing to fear?

Bette Clark is right. As you read of the carnage and the city’s rocketing homicide rate, it seems all this sadness occurs in North Philly and West Philly, and that it’ll never come to the doorstep of your modest Tacony rowhome.
Her distress is understandable. She buried her 15-year-old son Timothy, shot and killed on July 13 as he returned from a local convenience store. Others will read her story with sorrow but find solace in the belief that they won’t feel such pain, just as she’d read the stories of others and held tight to that same solace.
Another violent death, another addition to a homicide rate nearing 240 lives, and now Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson and District Attorney Lynne Abraham are getting jumpy. They went public this week, basically frustrated and feeling the heat, to scold residents for not coming forward with information that can help police solve all these killings.
Their angst is reasonable. These witnesses are very critical. But it’s also surprising that Johnson and Abraham don’t show more empathy for the climate out there. It’s easy to insist that too many people are "no-snitchers" protecting scum. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe a lot of them are scared like hell.
This isn’t the ’50s, when murder was an aberration and the policeman was your friend. This is the new millennium, when much of Philadelphia has disintegrated into urban decay and despair and lawlessness, and the feeling is that the police are powerless to stop anything.
Life is cheap out there. It is easily taken with the indifferent tug of a trigger. And it can destroy anyone, even mothers like Bette Clark.
In these dangerous times, people aren’t convinced that they can tell all and the police will keep them alive, especially as they live in the midst of this danger.
For Johnson and Abraham, the solution isn’t to lay blame. It’s to tackle the issues that got us to this point. ••

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