Over the past several days, Wilmington lived through another rash of shootings resulting in a new shootings record: 147, surpassing the 2010 record of 142. On Monday, I returned home from seeing The Godfather on the big screen at Penn Cinema to multiple flashing red lights at 6th and Madison Sts — 2 women had been shot sitting on their porch earlier that evening. Earlier on Monday, the WPD reported arresting a man carrying an illegal gun not far from this spot — on the 500 block of W 5th — and credited the community with reporting this guy. On Friday, a man was shot in the 600 blk of W 6th St. Other shootings up on Lea Blvd AND at the Riverfront made this a heartbreaker of a Thanksgiving weekend for Wilmington.
Let’s remember the campaign promise, shall we?
Only a safe city can be a great city. I will hire a new police chief who will be held directly accountable to me for results. I will work to enhance the morale and professionalism of the WPD. We will proactively combat crime in violent, high-crime areas where crime is rampant. We cannot sit back and wait for crime to happen and merely be reactive to threats. On day one, the city will have a more visible police presence in the neighborhoods and also at rush hour to enhance traffic flow. We will work with preachers and families to make sure juveniles and first offenders have an opportunity to get on the right track. But I will not coddle violent criminals and repeat offenders. I am tired of families feeling trapped in their homes and feeling unsafe to walk their neighborhoods.
This is from Candidate Williams’ NJ Questionaire (Thanks to Anonymous Tipster for sending this link). So how are we doing on this? I very much like Chief Dunning, but seriously, there is little going on at the WPD that hasn’t been going on before. They ramped up some of the newer units that had been in place and now they want to eliminate the special units to just respond to calls. And responding to calls isn’t particularly proactive. From where I sit — there has been little proactive about combating crime in West Center City — or anyplace else for that matter, except for Downtown. Some of my neighbors report seeing a few more police cars during the day, but if that is so, there’s been little result from that. I’m on Pennsylvania Ave and Washington St during rush hour and don’t see police working with traffic flow. And no one I’ve spoken to has seen much effort to work with preachers and families to better steer juveniles.
Not much of a surprise, really. Nor is the current effort by Mayor Williams, Chief Dunning and various Councilpeople to try to blame residents for not speaking out. It *should* be normal to speak out about people who are destroying your peace. Wilmington’s problem is that all too often you can speak up and whoever gets arrested is back on the street looking for who told within a few hours or days. There are neighborhoods that are genuinely being terrorized by some folks and blame those who are being terrorized isn’t a solution or smart. It just plays to the suburbanites who think that people living in tough neighborhoods brought that on themselves.
Quick story — when I moved into my house, there was a house catercorner to mine across the alley that had a burned fence. The man I bought the place from told me it was the former house of a WPD officer. Once who was a big presence in West Center City — pushing back on dealers and other miscreants — until the miscreants decided to burn his fence. The officer promptly moved his family away from there. Because even this guy couldn’t withstand the terroristic elements. That’s just one story, but communities that are being terrorized need some help in developing trust that speaking up won’t be a risk they live with on their own. Which currently it is in some places — if you report, and the person is back on the street shortly thereafter to continue terrorizing people, the problem person continues to be a problem until someone calls again.
Berating people for not speaking means that you aren’t being especially proactive. It means that all you can do is respond to calls and you need people to call you in order to deal with bad guys. It means that the WPD isn’t doing itself the favor of working on better trust relationships with these communities. Which it badly needs to do and which Community Policing was meant to try to address. Community Policing is now officially defunct. Replaced by hectoring residents for not calling the WPD. The Atlantic Cities wrote about this and the lack of trust some neighborhoods have in the police last week:
An unwillingness to deploy community policing strategies could help explain why Wilmington is having a record-breaking year for firearm assaults (143 year-to-date, beating 2010’s record of 142), and why an individual who opened fire on six cops and a fellow resident is still walking around free.
Replacing hectoring with forming partnerships with communities so that they feel that law enforcement has their backs in trying to take back their communities is really the goal here. Many in the WPD are taking much of the reporting about the increase in crime personally — even though this isn’t about the failure of individual officers (who are often great people), but the failure of management to wrap their arms around the problem. And in the meantime, Mayor Williams is talking about replacing command staff. I doubt this will make much difference since these staff are pretty much following whatever exists of the Williams policing plan in the first place. Chief Dunning notes that there are multiple systemic problems that contribute to Wilmington’s violence problems. She is quite right about that. The WPD can’t deal with most of those systemic problems and you certainly won’t cure any of those with Stop and Frisk. Most certainly you won’t gain back much community trust with Stop and Frisk or whatever aggressiveness is currently on offer. This problem needs a broadbased and highly focused *set* of solutions, and the WPD is but one piece of it. Other communities — like Philly — are getting this. Wonder when Wilmington will?