On her 100th day, Mayor Parker unveils aggressive public safety goals and Kensington strategy

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker stepped off the El and into the largest open-air drug market on the East Coast.

She had come to Kensington on Thursday, a regional epicenter of the opioid epidemic, to mark her 100th day in office and send a message: “Change is on the way.”

On the five-block walk from the Market-Frankford Line station at Allegheny Avenue to her event at Russell Conwell Middle School, Parker saw plenty of reasons why change was needed. She passed a line of tents and people lying on the street. Some were openly injecting drugs. One man held a bag of syringes.

A woman filmed with her cellphone and said, “Mayor Parker, we love you!” and another held a baby out of a takeout window. One man yelled, “We need help! We need housing!”

Parker said she heard him loud and clear.

“It reinforced a need for that holistic approach,” she said. “No matter how intractable or how insurmountable, everything we just witnessed, instead of making us weary, it just strengthens our resolve.”

In Kensington on Thursday, Parker, the city’s 100th mayor and the first woman to take on the job, released her administration’s much-anticipated plan to tackle public safety in the city, with aggressive goals such as reducing homicides to historic lows and ending the Kensington drug market.

The 53-page plan focuses largely on the Police Department and says the Parker administration will aim to reduce the number of homicides in the city by 20%, cut down on stolen cars and retail theft by 50%, and add 129 new “community police officers” to the force.

The plan details how her administration will hire more police officers amid a shortage of recruits. It also lays out ways to reduce violent crime, quell quality-of-life offenses such as illegal ATV use and retail theft, and to permanently shut down open-air drug markets such as the one in Kensington.

And at the event at Conwell, in the same auditorium where she swore in Police Commissioner Kevin J. Bethel on her first day in office, Parker had many of the top officials in her administration provide updates on their policy areas:

The focus of the day was, intentionally, on Kensington. Chief of Staff Tiffany W. Thurman and other administration officials joined Parker on her walk from the El and said seeing people express support for the mayor’s approach was “energizing.”

”It is a hope revival that we’re seeing,” she said. “It’s organic. It’s not something that we’re drumming up. This is just the first 100 days, and there is a lot left to be done.”

The strategy for Kensington includes a significant law enforcement component, including for officers to arrest anyone seen using illegal narcotics, a major departure for the neighborhood, where open drug use has been rampant for years.

According to Parker’s plan, the administration’s Kensington strategy will include ending narcotics sales and open drug use, targeting corners with high levels of gun violence, removing “the presence of drug users,” and ending the neighborhood’s reputation as “the narcotics destination of Philadelphia.”

The plan says drug users will be offered “diversionary services,” meaning they can be connected to recovery services in order to avoid criminal charges.

» READ MORE: How Kensington, growing pains, and unexpected crises defined Mayor Parker’s first 100 days

The administration intends to employ a five-part process that begins with warning people living on the streets that “this will be the final opportunity to take advantage of shelter and treatment services prior to enforcement efforts.”

The remaining steps include a multi-day initiative during which police will arrest people for drugs, sex work, and quality-of-life crimes; “securing the neighborhood,” including with barricades on sidewalks to discourage camping; “community transition,” meaning the city will seek funding to ensure stability; and “sustainability,” when the Police Department will decrease the presence of officers to avoid the perception of overpolicing.

Parker’s administration has for months said she would provide more specific details about her approach to crime by her 100th day in office, a deadline she set in an executive order she signed shortly after being inaugurated.

Managing Director Adam K. Thiel said the administration is working with hospitals and recovery services to increase the number of drug treatment options in the city, acknowledging, “We don’t have enough beds” for hundreds of people who are in addiction and living in Kensington.

He said Parker’s administration is attempting to build capacity ahead of the major effort to clear the neighborhood, but he ultimately sees expanding capacity for treatment in the city as a five-year effort.

”We need to build the rest of the continuum for long-term care, treatment and housing. Talk about a major endeavor,” he said. “This is an all-hands-on-deck effort.”

During her remarks, Parker said that in the lead-up to her 100th day, she has often been asked how she is feeling.

”If I’m being very truthful and direct with you, the emotion that I have felt the most when I’ve been in that historic office sitting in that chair,” Parker said, ”I feel extremely vulnerable.”

The mayor said people discouraged her from sharing that because, as the first woman in that role, she might be seen as weak.

Parker said she chose to do so anyway to communicate that she needs help from others to accomplish her goals. It’s a common refrain she’s employed since the campaign trail.

”The fact of the matter is that none of it becomes a reality just because the mayor says so,” she said. “It’s about assembling a talented group.”

Staff writer Ellie Rushing contributed to this article.