Philadelphia's ghetto neighborhoods do not discriminate because of the color of your skin. Kensington is one of the few places in America where poor people of all colors live next door to each other. If you come from Kensington, regardless of your skin color, you are "Kenzo." Kids, no matter what their race, complain that the drugs, failing schools, violence, decay, and breakdown of law and order have made it tough to believe in a better future.
Young people say if the Mayor wants to improve things he needs to "clean up the streets." How can there be hope when there is trash everywhere and the buildings are crumbling around you? Vacant houses attract rats. Local businesses are gone, families who can leave the neighborhoods sell their houses and move away to better sections of the city or the suburbs.
The neighborhoods of Pennsylvania's first congressional district - where Kensington is located - rank among the top 10 poorest and the top 2 hungriest congressional districts in the nation.
On any given day, the youth populating Philadelphia's corners assume their positions on porches and stoops like this one. Squads and crews reign over their territory, defend their associates, and hang out with friends. Corner boys may have jobs, even good ones, and not be involved in serious criminal activity. However, with more than one in three kids dropping out of high school, many young people out on corners have just given up on trying to find work in this recession.
Police in major U.S. cities stop and question more than a million people each year - a sharply higher number than just a few years ago. In Philly's toughest neighborhoods, anyone young, out on a corner, male or female, white or non white, faces a very good chance of getting stopped and frisked. The police keep records of the race and age of individuals, along with reasons for every ped stop.
The good news is crime is down in the city. But with 200,000 ped stops per year (a number that doubled since 2007), such aggressive tactics come at a cost. Innocent people find themselves lining up against walls and the police come to be seen as the enemy, not a force protecting citizens.
Rec centers like this one in Fishtown remain some of the only positive outlets for children in Philadelphia. Known simply as the "rec", this neighborhood institution remembers role model Freddy Adams, a 16 year old whose life was tragically ended in a random act of violence in 1993.
Under Mayor Nutter, the murder rate has fallen by 20 percent. Yet, Philadelphia ranks as one of the most dangerous cities in the nation. Back in 2006, Philadelphia (population 1.4 million), the sixth largest city in the nation, actually had more murders than Chicago (population 2.8 million), the nation's third largest city.
We started seeing the stop snitching T-shirts around 2002 in Baltimore and in Philadelphia. The earliest versions of the shirt featured a stop sign with "snitching" tagged underneath. This shirt warns "speak no evil." There are fewer T-shirts now since everyone "just knows" to "mind your business" and not speak to the police. They believe the police only come to harass you, not to help you.
"You just maid your bigest misteak." A block in Kensington.
People who speak to the police face punishments ranging from retribution in the form of vandalism against their homes, receiving threats of violence, and even death. Anyone can be a snitch, even the grandmother calling the cops because someone is selling drugs in front of her house.
In Philadelphia's most dangerous neighborhoods, where there are memorials to the dead everywhere, it seems like there has been a murder on nearly every block.
Toy guns for sale in Kensington. Attempts to regulate the real thing have failed. Pennsylvania scores a D on gun control nationally. The state's rural, more conservative legislators in Harrisburg remain strongly aligned with gun-rights proponents.
Upon his inauguration, Mayor Nutter tried to create five new gun laws that would apply only to Philadelphia County. The laws included provisions requiring lost or stolen guns to be reported to police in 24 hours, prohibiting individuals under protection-from-abuse orders from possessing guns, allowing removal of firearms from persons posing a risk of imminent personal injury to themselves, banning certain assault weapons, and a one gun a month law. The new laws became unenforceable when the courts declared them unconstitutional. Some called Nutter's actions on gun control illegal and threatened he might be arrested.
In Philadelphia, "bullets don't have no names." Contrary to what outsiders think, it is not just young black men who are dealing with gunshots. Black, white, Latino neighborhoods-- they're all deadly places. Anyone is a potential victim. In Philadelphia's toughest neighborhoods, being arrested and going to jail is more common than finding work, getting married, or heading off to college.
Penn sociologists Sam Preston and Emily Buzzell report that the likelihood of black, male Philadelphians being murdered exceeds the chances of US troops dying on the battlefields of Iraq.
[Reference: Buzzell, Emily and Samuel Preston. 2007. "Mortality of American Troops in the Iraq War." Population and Development Review, 33, 3, 555 - 556.]
Designs from a tattoo artist studio on Kensington and Allegheny Avenues.
Are there gangs in Philly? We have corner boys, crews and squads. Police describe some of these groups as gangs. While squads and crews claim corners and neighborhoods, they do not have the elaborate rituals, colors, clothing and tagging associated with gangs like the Crips and Bloods or the Latin Kings.
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