Website: Crime in Philadelphia

Posted by on November 24, 2006

[posted from PhillyNeighborhoods listserv]

What Can We Do About Crime? What Can We Do to Reduce the Number of People Who Commit Crime?

Count this as an early notice: a major focus of these lists over the next year will be crime–and what we can do about it.

“We” here means not only you and I and the groups we support. It means the City as a whole.

Zack Stalberg has a short video on the “Next Mayor” web site predicting that crime will be the major issue in the coming months. If you have quicktime, you can see it for yourself. http://www.thenextmayor.com/MoreZack.htm

We’ve been giving a lot of thought to this problem over the past several months–and now that the election is over I intend to share them.

A basic point we need to address: How do we reduce the number of people who commit crime over the next months and years? That’s not what we’re asking. We’re asking how to stop crime at specific locations. We’re asking how to stop the spread of guns and gun violence. Those are important questions. But as long as there are as many as 90,000 people temporarily in our prisons, on probation, or on parole–and most of the crime is being committed by these people–we will never make significant long-term impact on crime and the budgets associated with the Police, Prisons, and criminal justice system.

So..that’s what I’ll be asking lots of questions about….

And save January 15th, Martin Luther King’s Day of Service. We’re hosting an agenda-building Town Meeting focused on “Making Philadelphia Safe” between 9:00-11:00 AM at King High as part of the King Day program.

We’ll also be expanding our web page on crime. That has begun.

Check out the PhillyNeighborhoods.org crime page at: http://www.phillyneighborhoods.org/Crime-Phila/crime-phila.html

It’s updated, lots more links–and more to follow.

So while there are lots of problems on our blocks, in our neighborhoods, and in the city, we can’t do much about most of them until we make the City safe.

That’s a major part of what we’re going to discuss in the coming year.

Ed Schwartz
Institute for the Study of Civic Values
1218 Chestnut St., Rm. 702
Philadelphia, Pa. 19107
215-238-1434
edcivic@libertynet.org