Mayor Parker’s Kensington cleanup is an essential part of bringing order back to Philly

When Mayor Cherelle L. Parker announced her plans to bring some order to Philadelphia’s most chaotic neighborhood, the residents of Kensington may have been relieved, but some activists most assuredly were not.

“It feels very reminiscent of the ‘90s and the aughts, this idea that if you lock everybody up, things are going to change,” Kris Henderson, executive director of the Amistad Law Project, told The Inquirer.

The ‘90s! Ask the people of Kensington if their neighborhood was better in the ‘90s and you might get a different perspective. Sure, it was far from perfect, even then. Thirty years ago, Kensington was already a place where you could find many families suffering through poverty, drug-related crime, and unemployment. And across the city in the first half of that decade, Philadelphia saw an epidemic of murders — setting a record in 1990 that would stand until 2021.

But as the decade wore on, that yearly death toll declined, as did other crimes in the city. And a big part of the reason was that — with apologies to Henderson — if you lock up criminals, things do change for the better.

In those days, people used to talk about the Republicans as the “Daddy Party” and the Democrats as the “Mommy Party.” An oversimplification, yes, and it surely runs afoul of modern sensitivities around gender, but there was a point to it. A generation ago, the thumbnail sketch of a Republican was one who believed in order and consequences and wanted you to stand on your own two feet. The Democrat was one who wanted to comfort you and take care of you, even when you should be taking care of yourself.

But even if these traditional parental roles were meant to be opposites, there were things they had in common. After all, parents tend to agree on at least some aspects of child-rearing. And one part of any normal household — or any normal political system — is rules-based order. And most of the opposition to doing anything about crime in Philadelphia comes not from the Daddy Party or the Mommy Party, but from the new “No Parents” progressives who seem to view holding anyone responsible for their actions in any way to be akin to fascism.

Refusal to enforce serious rules has already created a crisis in the city. When District Attorney Larry Krasner drastically decreased the number of illegal gun charges his office would even bother to prosecute, was anyone surprised that more people started carrying illegal guns? And that more murders quickly followed? Criminals know that an unenforced law is no law at all, and will act accordingly.

But No Parents progressivism extends beyond Krasner’s permissiveness on gun crime. Declining to prosecute other crimes is likely to increase their occurrence, and is certain to make those crimes happen in public. Kensington is commonly described as an “open-air drug market,” and that’s a choice dictated by the government’s inaction.

The war on drugs was never going to eliminate all drug abuse — no law enforcement scheme is 100% successful. But enforcing laws sent the message that criminals should do their crimes in secret, not out in the open. Does that matter? A look at the state of affairs in Kensington shows us that it does. Every neighborhood has someone doing drugs in it, and probably always will. But nowhere else in Philadelphia do the drug trade and its victims dominate public life, to the detriment of everyone else trying to live an ordinary, law-abiding life.

In the heady days of 2020, there was a popular fable on social media about the “Nazi bar.” The idea, in essence, was that if a bar owner allowed people wearing Nazi gear to drink there, it would give the impression that this was a safe place for that sort of thing. This would drive off normal patrons, and soon the owner would find himself running a watering hole for white supremacists.

This was intended as an argument for intolerance of all unpopular political opinions, not just actual Nazis. But the literal point is true — normal people won’t hang out in a place full of people wearing swastikas. So, what does it say about so-called progressives who think it’s a travesty for cops to stop people from shooting heroin in the park or smoking weed on the subway?

In the past, when Democrats in Philadelphia argued for more funding for this or that, it was said to be in the cause of making things better for everyone in the city. Public transit to get us to work or school without needing to own a car. Parks for kids to play and for people of all ages to enjoy a pleasant stroll in the fresh air. Even small-government Republicans are hard-pressed to argue against a bit of green space.

But when neither mom nor dad enforces the rules, all that effort — and spending — amounts to nothing.

Is it helping to prolong substance addiction with ‘harm reduction’?

An unsafe and unpleasant subway system won’t get people out of their cars; it will serve only those people who have no other option and will make them miserable in the process. A park where people shoot up and drop their needles on the ground in an opioid daze? Congratulations, you’ve just turned a public park into a needle park. No moms or dads are going to take their kids to a place like that, so it becomes useless to all but the people who ruined it. The neighborhood is made worse off, the tax dollars wasted, and city life made a little drearier.

Most people are happy to lead law-abiding lives and shouldn’t be subject to the whims of a tiny segment of the population that dominates their neighborhood with chaos and crime. One woman who was moved off the streets in the recent sweeps said, “It’s a whole bunch of cops out here, but nobody to help us.”

But is it helping to let people lie in the streets? Is it helping to prolong their addiction with “harm reduction”? And is it helping the rest of the people in the neighborhood to let the streets be taken over by crime?

A return to the spirit of the ‘90s means getting people help when they need it, but also enforcing the basic rules that make cities livable for everyone else.