The sad Philadelphia story: the City of Brotherly Love shows America how not to deal with a crime wave

PHILADELPHIA is famous for two things: cheesesteaks and murder.

It's also well known for being--in Lincoln Steffens's classic phrase--"corrupt and contented." Philadelphia has one of the most backward and incompetent city governments in America, but its problems go beyond public administration. Philadelphia suffers from a combination of failed civic institutions, a deeply embedded racial paranoia that undermines law enforcement, and a local culture that has come to shrug at the urban chaos this produces. Philadelphia stands as a warning to other big American cities: This is how you drown under a crime wave.

In 2006, the one-or-two-a-day-and-a-dozen-on-weekends murder spree that earned "Killadelphia" its rap as an urban abattoir came to what everybody hopes was its guns-blazing peak, leaving 406 people dead. Another 392 were murdered in 2007. By way of comparison, Phoenix, which recently overtook Philadelphia as the nation's fifth-largest city, had 238 murders in 2006. San Antonio, a city nearly Philadelphia's size and sharing many of its economic challenges, had 119 murders. It's clearly not all about poverty: Miami, America's poorest major city, saw 79 homicides in all of 2006. In March 2006, more Americans died violently on the streets of Philadelphia than died fighting in Iraq--and March wasn't the city's worst month of that year.

That Iraq comparison isn't made casually. In an August 2007 Washington Post article titled "The War in West Philadelphia," surgeon John P. Pryor described his experience this way: "In the swirl of screams and moving figures, my mind drifted to my recent experience in Iraq as an Army surgeon. There we dealt regularly with 'mascals,' or mass-casualty situations. In Iraq, ironically, I found myself drawing on my experience as a civilian trauma surgeon each time mascals would overrun the combat hospital. As nine or ten patients from a firefight rolled in, I sometimes caught myself saying 'just like another Friday night in West Philadelphia.'"

For the tourist, it must be hard to believe that all this mayhem is happening in the city where schoolchildren go to see the Liberty Bell and Carpenters' Hall. Center City, as Philadelphia's core is called, is vibrant, diverse, affluent, and full of cafes and theaters. Ten-year property-tax abatements encouraged a boom of condo conversions, and new skyscrapers transformed the city's skyline. Ed Rendell, now governor, made attracting new business and investment to Center City the cornerstone of his mayoralty, and he still enjoys the reputation of a minor divinity in the city. But there was a hollowness to Rendell's achievement: Those skyscrapers became home to floors and floors of vacant or underutilized real estate. Awage tax of over 4 percent continued to drive the middle class out of the city and into the suburbs. Small and independent entrepreneurs, when they're not being milked by union thugs, are suffocated under an expensive and complex tax regime. Rendell left Philadelphia with some of the worst public schools in the country, so incompetently run that the state had to take them over in 2001. And Rendell's final kick in the shins was leaving this mess in the hands of America's least competent mayor, John Street, who succeeded him in 2000.

A FAILED CITY GOVERNMENT

The worst of Philadelphia's murder rampage roughly corresponds with the Street years, and it is not difficult to see why. Street's administration was a crime spree in its own right. Though the mayor was never charged with a crime, his inner circle kept prosecutors busy: The city treasurer was sentenced to 10 years in prison on a 27-count federal corruption indictment and took a couple of bankers down with him, and the mayor's consigliere died before facing trial on similar charges. A prominent Muslim leader close to Street was convicted of using his political influence to win financial favors, while the mayor's brother, a hot-dog vendor with no relevant experience to speak of (and fronting a company with no employees), was offered a no-bid, million-dollar contract to provide services at the city's airport.

Politics constantly hobbles the ability of the city's capable police department to address crime. One illustrative episode involves the shooting of a 16-year-old student outside of Strawberry Mansion High School in West Philadelphia. The head of the school district went to the mayor pleading for more police patrols during the immediate after-school hours, which are the most dangerous time of day for students. But the proposal was scotched by Sandra Dungee Glenn, an African-American school-board member and former chief of staff to Rep. Chaka Fattah. Glenn argued that deploying extra police in the area would send the wrong message to students and make them feel "that we need to be armed against them." Mayor Street chimed in that he wouldn't trust "a cop with a Glock" in the schools. So black leaders, along with Philadelphia's black mayor and its black police chief, directed its heavily black police force to leave black students vulnerable to black criminals, for reasons of racial politics. Sandra Dungee Glenn was subsequently named chair of the School Reform Commission. That's Philly.