An All Too Familiar Philly (Murder) Scene
The news from bloody Philadelphia just gets more and more horrifying.
I note that the city’s TV newscasts are cast in the “If It Bleeds It Leads” mold, but the mayhem one day this week was so bad that it soaked up 18 minutes of the 30-minute evening newscast on one station, barely leaving any time for really important stuff like the weather and sports.
The mayhem included incidents in which police Officer Charles Cassidy was shot in the head outside a previously robbed Dunkin’ Donuts by a perp who then stole his service revolver, another incident in which four people were wounded, including another officer, by an ex-con who drowned trying to escape his dragnet, and a lock-down at one of the city’s largest high schools.
Officer Cassidy, a 25-year veteran, has died. He was the fourth Philadelphia police officer shot this year, the third this week, and the second in just 12 hours in a city that is chronically poor, undereducated and violent — and shows no sign of coming to come to grips with its demons.
Mayor John Street led the Greek chorus that chimed in on cue after these latest war-zone convulsions in calling for stronger gun laws in a state where local jurisdictions are at the mercy of an adamantly pro-gun majority in the Legislature.
“Unless we can get control over the proliferation of illegal guns, then the people who are most at risk are, of course, the members of the Police Department,” Street said with practiced angst.
Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson belabored the obvious in saying that his officers are being “basically assassinated” by armed and violent criminals.
“The availability of weapons in our city . . . the availability of guns are really completely out of hand here in the city of Philadelphia,” he said. “Legislators have to realize that we have a gun problem.”
That “problem” has resulted in 325 murders in the first 10 months of the year, the highest big-city homicide rate per capita in the U.S., although the pace recently has slowed slightly from the 2006 rate, which resulted in 406 murders.
Meanwhile, New York City, with five times Philadelphia’s population and once America’s murder mecca, has had “only” 220 murders. Chicago and Los Angeles also lag far behind.
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