[lbo-talk] Crime in Philly

[Jim Straub]

Certainly, but don't you think most north philladephia residents have
a more nuanced or conflicte view than that?  The reality is that the
violence is getting to extreme levels in the hood, but its staying
among people who know each other and their neighbors now, so the
professionals and hipsters moving back to the city via near west
philly, northern liberties etc don't really deal with it much.  If I
personally had a button I could push to make every handgun in urban
america dissapear I'd push it, and Nutter got a ton of the traditional
black vote fatah lost because he said he'd have the police do that
stop and frisk and fatah said he wouldn't.

Something I find myself dwelling on lately is how we as leftists have
an approach to police and crime issues taken pretty verbatim from the
struggles of the 60s/70s, but material social reality of those issues
is a lot different today.  We are kind of half out of step with the
times when urban black community is regularly protesting inadequate
police response to black homicide victim cases (as opposed to if
heaven forbid a penn student gets caught in a crossfire or whatever)
as protesting police brutality.


>
> My one word response is 'ugh.'
>