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EVAN M. LOPEZ
borhood and hold cookouts for kids. The dealers that now attract gunfire to his block are broke. “The sad part about it is that they not making no money,” he says. “You stand on the corner, you fighting, and you killing each other. … We can hear them asking each other, ‘Let me get a half of that sandwich.’ What kind of drug dealers are you? You need to change your occupation. … They’re working for sneakers and to smoke blunts.” In neighborhoods like this, guns are easy to find and quickly drawn. Lee says guns on the streets are higher caliber now than ever before. “When I first started it was the .38 specials and then it was the 9-millimeter. Now I’m seeing a lot of .40s and a lot of .45s,” Lee says. “But those guns that are being used in crimes are not necessarily new weapons. Some are older — the average is 11 years old. A lot of guns are passed around from person to person for years.” The former drug dealer from Strawberry Mansion found his first gun at age 13 in an alley. “It’s kind of cliche,” he concedes, but “that’s when my whole life turned around.” Not, he notes, for the better. Now, if someone wants a gun, “All you got to do is ask.” It’s like asking, “‘Do you know where the Walmart at? Do you know where the restaurant at?’ It’s as simple as that.” • HOW DID WE GET HERE? That gun, and how it came to be stashed in that alley, could be traced back to a previous crime, a previous gang, a previous generation that ruled the corner. But a review of the historical record shows it really goes back further, to the early 20th century, when the first of two Great Migrations swept millions of impoverished black people out of the Jim Crow South and into Northern cities in search of jobs and less repressive environs. In Philadelphia, working-class whites violently opposed the arrival of blacks in their neighborhoods, while middle-
class whites fled to segregated suburbs. And so, the hyper-segregated metropolis was born.The black ghetto sat in its isolated center. There, job opportunities were few and the murder rate was high. The murder rate fell during World War II, as black Philadelphians found work opportunities. By the early 1950s, African-Americans had a homicide rate 12 times the white rate, but that gap was narrowing. But by the late ’50s, black youth gangs in West Philadelphia were preoccupying city leaders; the murder of a University of Pennsylvania international student in 1958 by a group of black youths made international headlines. Crime and race became bitter flashpoints in the city. Gangs had multiple generations: Midgets, juniors, seniors, old heads. “They had their own institutions, as they saw it. They had their own leadership hierarchies: leader, the runner, the assistant, the war chief, consul,” says Harold Haskins, a gangoutreach worker during the 1960s who documented the 12th and Oxford gang in the classic documentary The Jungle. Youth gang members had little interaction with drugs aside from alcohol, he says. They had guns, but not as many as today, so street fighting was still a popular way to settle disputes. 3-S resident Wayne
Jacobs was from Camac and Diamond streets, “known as a fighting corner.” They “resolved most things with our fists,” he says. The deindustrialization of Philadelphia and the growing economic inequality that followed pummeled the black ghetto. Between 1967 and ’77, the city lost 40 percent of its manufacturing jobs. Even the timing of murders changed as a result. From the 1950s on, murders in Philly spiked on weekends. But as more young men went unemployed in the early 1970s, a greater share of killings took place on weekdays. As jobs evaporated, an informal economy emerged in poor black neighborhoods: selling liquor by the glass at the kitchen table on Sundays, selling prepared meals to neighbors, hosting card games — and selling drugs. Illegal entrepreneurs, vulnerable to robbery, increasingly purchased guns; nationwide, handgun sales quadrupled between 1962 and ’68. The murder rate began to climb in Philly. Things came to a head in 1969, when 45 youths were murdered in gang violence (up from just one in 1962) as .38s and rifles replaced homemade zip guns on the streets of the city. A polarized Philadelphia elected Police Chief Frank Rizzo, who had a reputation for brutality against the black community, as mayor in 1971. Things got much worse in the 1980s, with the development of crack cocaine and multi-shot pistols to replace the old-fashioned revolver as protection in a tumultuous drug marketplace. Murder was never so easy. Nationally, the murder rate has fallen since 1991 — but failed to drop to anything approaching historic lows. And it has stayed persistently high in Philadelphia. “I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by six” became the credo of permanent urban warfare. • CAN PHILLY STOP THE KILLING? Changes in the murder rate over the past century are generally attributed to social and economic forces. Police efforts — including increasing the size of Philly’s force to an unsustainable 8,500 in 1979 — have had little lasting effect in areas like North Central Philly. That neighborhood’s 22nd Police District leads Philadelphia in homicides. Now, the 22nd has become Philly’s laboratory for testing crime-prevention and crime-fighting methods. The District Attorney chose the area to roll out a new targeted prosecution program. Criminology professors are focusing experiments there with help from the police district. Everyone from Family Court judges to top brass at the city departments of Health, Commerce and Licenses & Inspections is zeroing in on the 22nd under a federal violence-reduction grant. And a new anti-violence program is deploying some of the very men who used to run the corners to turn the neighborhood around. Perhaps as a result, crime in the 22nd has declined this year: Through the end of August, murders in the disCONTINUED ON PG. 16