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11. Philadelphia, Here I Come
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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11 Philadelphia,HereIcome Once you cross the George Washington Bridge, you’re out camping. —L I EU T E NA N T F R A N K MCGE E, C OM M A N DI NG OF F ICER, N Y PD SHO OT I NG R A NGE I n the late fall off 1997, Mayor Ed Rendell of Philadelphia hired Bill Bratton to do a quick study of the Philadelphia Police Department and to make some recommendations to improve its crime-fighting efforts. As part of his review Bill asked me to read some documents, including a management study of that department that had been conducted prior to Rendell taking over as mayor in 1991. The management study had been conducted by a group of consultants, which included at least one member of the Harvard faculty. Before we went to see Mayor Rendell, Bratton asked me if I would be interested in the police commissioner’s job in Philadelphia. I told Bill that it would depend on Mayor Rendell’s response to our review. While I did not know Rendell, I knew enough about him to know that I would like working for him. On a Saturday morning in December, Bill and I gave a presentation to Rendell and his inner circle regarding our findings. We had some recommendations for change that we mentioned to the mayor. “But what about the management study I asked you to review?” Rendell inquired. “Well, Mr. Mayor,” I said, “I read the entire report and it’s 208 p h I l aD el p h I a a very nice report, but nowhere in the hundred and fifty-seven pages does it mention crime and what to do about it.” At the end of our presentation Bratton hinted to the mayor that I might be interested in the police commissioner’s job in Philadelphia if it ever opened. After some discussions with the mayor, I was hired as the police commissioner to serve under Rendell during the last two years of his second, and final, term. Mayor Rendell had won national acclaim for his stewardship of Philadelphia . He had taken over a moribund city whose best days looked to be behind it. Rendell single-handedly revitalized the city, putting it once again in the top tier of American cities where it rightfully belonged . He had boundless energy and a temper to fit. But he was a genuinely funny guy and the world’s biggest practical joker. Vice President Al Gore dubbed him “America’s mayor” long before that moniker was bestowed on Rudy Giuliani after 9/11. The New York Times Magazine chronicled Rendell’s success in a long piece that featured a picture of Rendell kneeling down in a bathroom stall at City Hall personally cleaning the toilet bowl. The picture said it all: there was no job too hard or too low for Ed Rendell to tackle. And tackle problems he did, and he generally succeeded, with one exception: crime, especially homicides . Unlike some politicians, Rendell recognized he had a crime problem, admitted it, and went about the task of fixing it. He had tried numerous initiatives with little or no success. I was his final initiative during his last two years in office. While some cities, especially New York, had success in their fight against crime in the mid-1990s, other cities, most notably Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Chicago, did not fare so well. This was a fact often overlooked by the naysayers who decried the crime decline in New York City, arguing that crime was declining nationwide, so why the fuss about New York? In fact, the notion that the police had anything to do with the crime decline was ludicrous, they argued, since the police could do little to affect the root causes of crime: poverty, homelessness, education, racism, and on and on and on. When I took over the Philadelphia Police Department in March 1998, it was going to be like a great lab experiment to see if the policies [52.55.214.236] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:32 GMT) phIlaDelphIa, heRe I COme 209 and strategies developed in the NYPD were transferable to another city. Philadelphia had a stubbornly high homicide count due to the easy availability of guns. The city was helpless to control the availability of guns. Any effort to pass reasonable gun control legislation by the city, including who could be issued a pistol permit to carry, was regularly overruled...