The solution to Philly’s gun violence is ‘1% Rambo and 99% Mr. Rogers’ says one of Pa.’s first Black state troopers

Benjamin Brooks, 83, has spent the last six decades of his professional life — first with the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) and now with his own consulting firm — modeling how to de-escalate conflict before it spirals into rage and violence.

His first rule is that you must know the difference between reacting and responding to a problem.

“We say there are two perspectives. You react when you don’t know what to do. And every time you react — it goes wrong,” Brooks said.

Take the gun violence that is roiling Philadelphia and resulted in 516 deaths last year. Brooks said we first need to stop reacting.

“It isn’t being properly addressed. Gun violence is not a police problem, it’s a community problem,” Brooks said adding, “Police can only do reports after the crime has occurred.

“But everybody who fires a gun and kills someone belongs to someone. People in the community, we know all the actors. We know who they are.”

Making certain he is responding is also Brooks’ personal motto. “If you allow everything to impact you, your life will be miserable.”

“You react when you don’t know what to do. And every time you react — it goes wrong.”

The PSP was born in 1905, making it the nation’s first statewide uniformed police organization, but it would take another five decades before the agency hired its first Black troopers. Brooks recently sat in the office basement of his Collegeville home and recalled how he and his best childhood friend from his North Carolina hometown, Richard McDowell Jr., became those troopers.

Friends since elementary school, McDowell and Brooks graduated high school in May 1957 and decided Elizabeth City had too little to offer. After a brief military stint, they left home, moved in with their respective aunts in Philadelphia, and after a string of factory jobs proved dissatisfying, hatched another career plan.

“We started looking for a job and when we were riding around, we saw a sign for the Pennsylvania State Police,” Brooks recalled. “We said let’s go in to see what excuse they give for not hiring us.”

To the duo’s surprise, there were no excuses.

They were allowed to take the examination and were accepted into the Pennsylvania State Police Academy in Hershey, graduated in 1961, and became the first African Americans to become state troopers.

Despite the growing civil rights movement without, and rumors of rampant discrimination within the state police, Brooks called it a good job. “There were little slights here and there — nothing dramatic,” Brooks said.

Born in 1939, Brooks said microaggressions were part of Black life and had to be managed well because the wrong reaction could be deadly.

“There was Klan activity and atrocities were committed, especially at night,” Brooks said of his childhood in relatively peaceful Elizabeth City. He recounted stories of white men driving the highways with hooked sticks to grab Black men walking at night.

“That’s why you would walk in a ditch, so you wouldn’t be dragged down the road,” he said.

PSP had its own growing reputation for blatant racial discrimination, but Brooks said his professional life proceeded without much overt racial animosity.

He did recall being called to the scene of a riot in Folcroft, when a Black couple — Horace and Sarah Baker — tried to move into the Delmar Village neighborhood a few days after the March on Washington in August 1963. An angry mob that had swelled to 1,500 reacted to the first Black people in the neighborhood by hurling rocks and destroying the house — breaking windows, bashing in doors, and setting a fire.

With the local police force overwhelmed, Gov. William Scranton sent state troopers to help quell the disturbance. “I was the only Black trooper in the contingent,” Brooks recalled. “People were shouting 2-4-6-8 we don’t want to integrate.”

The following year, Brooks married and had his own housing issues when landlords refused to rent to him upon discovering he was Black. Brooks responded by purchasing a lot and building his own house.

Only a trickle of Black cadets came to the academy after Brooks.

One of them was William H. Bolden III. “[Bolden] was a former Philadelphia police officer and he did his 18 months probation but was dismissed at the end of his probation for having ‘bad debts.’ He had an outstanding loan for $15,000 which he had whittled down to $10,000 during his probationary period,” said Brooks. It was such an egregious charge that Bolden decided to sue.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Bolden becoming the lead plaintiff in a class action suit against the PSP, which found racial discrimination was rife within the agency.

At the time there were only 62 minority staff members out of 4,173 employees, or 1.5%. Moreover, of the 62 on the force at the time the suit was brought, 60 were relegated to the lowest rank, that of trooper, including McDowell and Brooks.

The PSP entered a consent decree to give people of color more opportunity to be accepted into the state police. By June 1974, they were hiring one cadet of color for every white cadet.

And Brooks’ career began to surge forward.

He was promoted to corporal in 1976, sergeant in 1978, and lieutenant in 1980, when he was transferred to Philadelphia.

During his two years in the city, he graduated from the FBI National Academy. In 1982, he was the first African American to be promoted to the rank of captain.

In 1987, he was promoted to major and transferred to State Police headquarters in Harrisburg, where he became the first enlisted member to command the Affirmative Action/Contract Compliance bureau.

Brooks retired in 1992 and for 30 years he has been running his own consulting firm with an expertise in training on how to respond effectively and empathetically to conflict, especially in diverse environments.

He said reducing the city’s homicide rate will require understanding that youths kill one another because of low self-esteem. He has even created an acronym, LSMFT — Low Self-esteem Means Friction and Trouble.

“Boys killing boys need to discover who they are and what they have to offer,” Brooks said.

And his own vast policing experiences have taught him that responding to Philadelphia’s gun violence will require all stakeholders to come to the table — community, politicians, courts, and the district attorney, as well as the police.

“It’s not about arrests. Arrest was only 1% of what I did. It’s about how to come together as a community. It’s 1% Rambo and 99% Mr. Rogers.”