Year One of the Kensington crackdown tackled chaos head-on — and pushed it down the street

In their struggle against Kensington’s chaos, Filgia Encarnacion and her neighbors often feel alone.

For two years they have been contending with a hookah lounge that opened up next door, drawing all-night parties and raucous fights. Her teenage son routinely sees drug deals from his bedroom window, along with people injecting, and men picking up sex workers. Smoke from a nearby homeless encampment wafts through their rowhouse walls.

When Mayor Cherelle L. Parker took office in January and vowed to clean up Kensington for good, Encarnacion thought real relief was headed her way.

“Anybody would be hopeful,” she said, after seeing the mayor’s pledge on the evening news.

A year into the city’s crackdown, Encarnacion has instead watched more problems come to her doorstep.

The five-phase plan that Parker outlined in April includes a critical third step where police intend to reclaim blocks from drug activity and “hold” them for neighbors to reclaim. Encarnacion said she’s been ready — but the city hasn’t delivered.

“I don’t know what the plan is,” she said with an exasperated laugh. “I know what the TV says, I know from my [community] meetings, but they’re not quite telling us. It’s like they’re putting out the fire. But not necessarily coming out with a solution.”

Since January, the Parker administration has put 75 new police officers on the street, quashed homeless encampments, and increased narcotics arrests as it tries to respond to Kensington as if an open-air drug market had opened in Rittenhouse Square.

But the crackdown hasn’t been as swift or forceful as many residents had hoped.

An Inquirer analysis of police department data found that Kensington saw a steep reduction in gun violence, in keeping with a historic decline citywide. But the quality-of-life crimes and nuisance issues that plague the neighborhood have not improved, and have instead followed the familiar pattern of policing in Kensington: Old problems just move to new places.

» READ MORE: Ahead of the Kensington crackdown, aggressive policing has intensified

Deputy Commissioner Pedro Rosario, who oversees the law enforcement plan, said police are limited in what they can do until a trio of new initiatives arrives: an under-construction addiction treatment facility, a revamped drug court, and the new home for the city’s police-assisted diversion program.

“[The police] are as frustrated as the neighbors,” Rosario said. “The rest of this [system] hasn’t caught up. We’re not pointing the fingers at anyone. It’s a complicated issue that requires a complicated solution.”

The northern half of Kensington, the section north of Lehigh Avenue that harbors most of the drug trade, is on pace to see fewer shootings in 2024 than in any other year in a decade, the paper’s analysis found. During the pandemic, this area ranked second-worst for shootings and homicides citywide, as drug-fueled vendettas choked Kensington Avenue. This year, the area has dropped to fourth place.

More intensive policing has not alleviated the neighborhood’s suffering. A no-tolerance policy on homeless encampments has left many people sleeping tentless on sidewalks, porches, and vacant lots. Others have fled from the new red zone near Kensington Avenue, leading to more reports of encampments in lower Kensington, Fairhill, and Center City, according to complaints filed with Philadelphia’s 311 system.

The displacement has been most disruptive in upper Kensington, where residents and business leaders continue to see a revolving door of problems.

Neighborhood leaders have criticized Parker for communicating poorly about her plan. Harm-reduction advocates have protested what they view as inhumane policies targeting people in addiction, which include more arrests for simple possession, cuts to syringe exchange funding, and planned restrictions on mobile addiction service providers operating too close to homes.

Yet some longtime residents blame police for not making enough arrests, while also pointing to the lack of social service outreach and a shortage of solutions around housing, treatment, and economic opportunities.

“It’s about the same as it was,” said Jose Rios, 46, a lifelong Kensington resident who is unemployed and has several childhood friends who live on the street. “Jobs are real hard to find around the neighborhood. We need more opportunities for people who are lost.”

The city is still building its $100 million addiction treatment facility in Northeast Philadelphia, while also moving to open a “wellness court” for people facing drug charges and the Police Assisted Diversion facility on Lehigh Avenue. Details about how the facilities will work together remain unclear, and legal challenges are expected.

The success of Year Two of Parker’s plan likely hinges on whether those programs will provide meaningful relief. Meanwhile, the political pressure rises.

In January, well before Parker unveiled her Kensington plan, police officers were already arresting more people for narcotics, cracking down on outdoor sleeping, and, in the eyes of people living on the street, generally making life more uncomfortable.

It was a stark shift in tone from recent years, when the neighbors’ suffering and laissez-faire policing became an international spectacle.

City officials and police commanders long viewed Kensington’s woes as something to contain. Shutting down the open-air drug market, the thinking went, would simply move problems to other neighborhoods — a likelihood that officials cautioned about early this year.

That displacement, so far, has been manageable, civic leaders said.

Homeless encampment complaints filed with the city’s 311 system reveal that, since January, some people experiencing homelessness flocked to new areas under the state-managed I-95. State officials helped clear 26 encampments and installed new fences in at least three locations under the interstate this year, a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation spokesperson said.

Ken Paul, head of the Port Richmond On Patrol and Civic Association, said one encampment under the highway ballooned to about 20 tents and 50 people. He and his neighbors began seeing more needles and foot traffic throughout their rowhouse-dotted blocks.

He watched as social workers reached out to people, but few would accept services until officials shut down the encampment. The grip of Kensington’s drug supply — an increasingly toxic cocktail of fentanyl and the animal tranquilizer xylazine — appeared as strong as ever.

“It’s a sad game,” he said. “If anybody could ever figure it out, they could run for president.”

Civic leaders continue to support Parker’s initiative on behalf of Kensington residents. And yet, shifting some of the burden to other neighborhoods has not eased the troubles in Kensington.

The closure of a sprawling homeless encampment near Kensington and Allegheny Avenues in May mostly pushed drug users deeper into the surrounding residential streets, with an eruption of activity along the Somerset Street corridor to the south. The city launched a volley of surprise quality-of-life sweeps, towing abandoned vehicles and sealing vacant houses. They also increased foot patrols on overwhelmed blocks.

Some crimes continued to rise. Even as shootings plummeted, car thefts rose 19% and residential burglaries increased 72% from the first half of the year to the last.

“I don’t hear a lot of the gun stuff no more,” said Sheryl Martinez, 55, who lives with her daughter in upper Kensington. “But it’s like every other day you hear ‘oh, my car was broken into’ or ‘my [catalytic] converter was taken.’”

As the year wore on, neighborhood civic meetings became a reckoning between lofty promises and limited results.

The administration promised to enforce drug laws, Shannon Farrell-Pakstis, head of the Harrowgate Civic Association, noted at a December meeting. Yet she sees officers routinely walk past people injecting in plain sight of children without making an arrest.

“What is the next step of this? And how long do we have to live like this?” Farrell-Pakstis asked city officials. “Where is the end?”

Kensington has become the center of narcotics enforcement in recent years, a trend that has continued under Parker. More than two-thirds of all drug-related arrests citywide so far this year were in the two police districts that span the neighborhood.

But the volume of arrests for drug dealing and possession remains less than half of what it was before the pandemic. Officers have arrested nearly 2,800 people on drug-related charges in the 24th and 25th Police Districts since January. That’s a 24% increase over last year, but pales in comparison to the 2019 tally of almost 7,000 drug arrests.

Rosario acknowledged there are limits to what the department can handle.

The bottleneck occurs well before people reach the city’s critically understaffed jails. Narcotics arrests now frequently require a trip to the hospital, which can tie up arresting officers for the duration of their patrol shifts. Once the 24th District reaches a certain number of arrests each day, Rosario said, Capt. Christopher Bullick can’t pull any more officers from street duty.

“We’ll bust the system,” Rosario said.

At least two people who were arrested on drug charges died while in custody in recent months, including a man on Dec. 12 who was found with drug paraphernalia in a detention cell at Police Headquarters, the Kensington Voice reported.

Few residents expect the city to arrest its way out of the problem, an approach that has failed in the past. But social services are lacking, residents said, as outreach teams don’t have enough staffers to reach every corner of the neighborhood.

Adam Geer, the city’s chief public safety director, said outreach staffing needs to be addressed. The city will be able to offer more details about the new drug-related programs and facilities by January, he said.

“We are here, and we’re not going anywhere,” he assured frustrated residents at the December meeting.

In June, the owners of Cantina La Martina blasted the city over the explosion of drug activity in front of their acclaimed Mexican restaurant on Kensington Avenue.

Widely regarded as a community anchor since its opening in 2022, the restaurant began losing business as the homeless population ballooned around its brightly painted eatery. There seemed to be no plan to fix that, owners Mariangeli Alicea Saez and her husband, Dionicio Jiménez, said at the time.

Last week, Saez said the couple at one point considered leaving the neighborhood when their lease was up in two years — if nothing changed. But in recent months, the city’s communication and response times have improved, they said.

“We are keeping them accountable, and they’re there every day,” she said. “We don’t see ourselves going anywhere unless we have to … as long as the administration is working with us.”

In the winter months, fires started by people living outdoors pose a grave threat to businesses and residents. Saez applauded the city’s revamped solution: a collaboration of police, social workers, and firefighters on a mini truck that responds to small blazes and tries to bring people indoors to receive services.

Rosario said Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel has ordered him to capitalize on the cold, when the homeless population decreases, to try to secure blocks.

» READ MORE: How Kensington Avenue’s open-air drug market went international — and the city’s fight to take back the neighborhood

Bill McKinney, director of the New Kensington Community Development Corp., said he remains skeptical that the plan will materialize.

“There’s nothing that indicates for me this is anything other than what we’ve seen in the past,” he said. “So I assume folks will just keep moving around.”

Failing to deliver visible results next year could prove a political liability for Parker, should public support give way to frustration, he added.

And in some respects, the world is watching.

Over the summer, Rosario said, a convoy of Israeli public officials visited Philadelphia and requested a trip to Kensington — a testament to the area’s growing international disrepute.

Kensington’s top police commander recalled how, during the tour, an Israeli military official in the group confided that she would choose life in an active war zone over living there.

“I don’t want to insult you, but I’d rather live in my neighborhood, where I might get hit with a rocket or a terrorist bomb, than have to live here in this community,” she said, according to Rosario.

The deputy commissioner recalled laughing. Then wincing.

“Anytime anyone talks s— about Kensington, I take it personal,” he said, “because it’s my job to change that.”