Philadelphia Weekly

Fatal flaw: The commish's pessimism about curing the city's violence epidemic isn't doing much to curb the crime rate.

>> Click here to listen to Kia Gregory discuss Philly's crime epidemic on WHYY's Radio Times

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Baltimore's police commissioner recently resigned amid rising homicides and dreary department morale.

Sound familiar?

According to the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore has experienced 178 homicides this year, up from 149 the same time last year. And the city is on pace to top 300 murders for the first time in seven years.

After Mayor Sheila Dixon's challengers in the city's hotly contested primary election demanded change in the police department's leadership, police commissioner Leonard Hamm quit--or in other words, was fired.

With Philadelphia experiencing its own violence epidemic at a rate of more than one murder a day, with five shot and killed just this past Sunday, police commissioner Sylvester Johnson, who'll retire at the end of the mayor's term this year, finds his own crime-fighting legacy in jeopardy.

It's hard to say whether Johnson is a hopeless leader or the victim of Mayor John Street's tightfisted management. Regardless, Johnson's retirement/resignation/firing should've happened yesterday.

"If you were to hold the police commissioner to the standards of performance held to other jobs," says Patrick Carr, a Rutgers sociology professor who studies violence in Philadelphia, "then yes, he should've resigned."

Some of those standards are based on numbers: 2005, 377 murders; 2006, 406 murders; 2007, 233 so far, on pace to be the highest body count in a decade.

But as Carr points out, in many ways Johnson's hands are tied. He's managed by the mayor, his budget is controlled by City Council, and his efforts to keep criminals off the street ultimately fall to the district attorney.

Still, it's tragic that the politics of fighting crime has wrought nothing but Band-Aid initiatives, catchy slogans and incessant finger-pointing.

At community meetings I've heard Johnson tell residents--angry, sad and fearful--that "we can't arrest our way out of the problem" and that "police can only do what police can do."

I've heard him say that more cops aren't the answer, then go on to promise a bullet-riddled community the more cops they were begging for.

I've heard him describe the nature of murder: rooted in petty arguments, happening indoors, victim-specific, and therefore beyond his control.

And when it comes to the stop-snitching mentality that keeps witnesses silent, Johnson once told me, with anger and frustration weighing heavily in his voice, that reluctant witnesses have a moral obligation to come forward.

But they don't come forward. And Johnson knows the fear and frustration behind it. He just refuses to accept it, and thereby effectively address it.

Ironically, the more people who get shot, the less likely witnesses are to come forward. Instead of pleading to people's morality, Johnson needs to say how he'll protect them if they come forward.

If anything, Johnson should resign for his disconnect between morality and reality. He should also resign because of his abiding pessimism.