The fatal shooting of a canvasser underscored the stakes of the mayor’s race: ‘This is life in Philadelphia’

Philadelphia’s gun violence crisis and safety concerns have dominated the debate over who will become the city’s next mayor, and yet it still came as a grim shock when a political canvasser was fatally shot Monday while passing out campaign literature.

And just hours later, city officials announced that — in a separate incident — two inmates had escaped from a Philadelphia jail, including one man, described by police as being “very dangerous,” who is facing charges in connection with four homicides. The men had yet to be apprehended as of Tuesday afternoon.

The high-profile incidents that happened on the same day just a week before election day underscored the dire public-safety situation that the next mayor will inherit: three years of a persistent gun-violence crisis, a pervasive sense of fear among residents, and an understaffed prison system where employees say leadership has failed to address “chaos” in the jails.

Nearly 9 in 10 Philadelphians think that crime is the number-one issue for the next mayor to tackle, according to the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and research firm SSRS, which conducted a survey of residents earlier this year. Almost half of the respondents said that gun violence has had a major negative impact on their quality of life, and two-thirds said they have heard gunshots in their neighborhood in the last year.

“This is life in Philadelphia,” said Councilmember Kendra Brooks, a member of the Working Families Party, which is politically aligned with the progressive group that the canvassers were working for. “We all have to continue to work beyond election season to address the root causes.”

Most of the major mayoral candidates on Monday expressed condolences following the shooting, which involved two canvassers for the political organization One PA. The shooter and the victim — who police said knew each other and had an existing dispute — encountered one another while passing out campaign literature Monday afternoon in East Germantown ahead of the May 16 primary.

» READ MORE: A worker for a progressive political group fatally shot another canvasser in East Germantown, police say

Police said the two men began arguing, and a 22-year-old man shot a 46-year-old man. Officials said both men were armed — the older man’s gun was not registered to him. The 22-year-old was in legal possession of his gun, investigators said, and he told police that he was acting in self-defense when he fired a single shot at the victim.

OnePA endorsed City Councilmember Helen Gym for mayor in March and was canvassing on her behalf, as well as for a slate of City Council candidates: Seth Anderson-Oberman, Rue Landau, Amanda McIllmurray, Isaiah Thomas, and Erika Almirón.

The group is one of a handful of progressive organizations that are knocking on doors and distributing literature ahead of the election, and they are working as independent-expenditure groups. Under city campaign-finance laws, they aren’t allowed to coordinate with the campaigns that they are supporting. The organizations have said they work to specifically bring residents of underinvested neighborhoods into the political process.

Sage Cruz, co-executive director of One PA, said in a statement Tuesday that the group suspended its canvassing operations “as we process this loss.” Cruz said the group’s policy is that guns are “never” allowed when volunteers or staff are handing out campaign materials in neighborhoods.

Gym tweeted that she “was devastated to hear about the tragic death of a canvasser.”

“My thoughts are with the family of the victim, the One PA community, and everyone impacted by this irrevocable loss,” she wrote. ”Though the canvasser was not part of our campaign, this loss is deeply felt by all of us.”

Grocer Jeff Brown said in a statement that the killing serves as “a reminder that there are names, faces, and families behind every senseless death in our city.” And Cherelle Parker, a former City Councilmember, tweeted that the “stunning violence and gut wrenching loss of life touches each and every one of us along the campaign trail.”

”Someone who was loved will not be coming home tonight, and all I can hope is that we will remember him by working to stop this senseless violence,” she wrote.

Allan Domb, who has taken a more tough-on-crime tone than some of his opponents, on Monday shared news of the prison break, saying Philadelphians “deserve answers” about why it took nearly 24 hours after the escape for the public to be notified.

And on Tuesday, he said he was saddened to hear the news about the death of a political canvasser and said “we must get illegal guns off our streets.”

Each of the top five contenders for the Democratic nomination has a public-safety plan, but the proposals they choose to emphasize vary. Gym, for example, laid out a crime plan that includes a large expansion of city and social services, including a guaranteed jobs program for people under age 30 who live in communities most affected by gun violence.

Others are more focused on law enforcement. Parker has called for hiring hundreds of new police officers — even as the department has struggled to fill existing vacancies — and she’s expressed support for police using stop-and-frisk as a means of fighting the proliferation of illegal guns.

Bishop Dwayne D. Royster, who leads POWER Interfaith, a coalition of faith leaders who have worked alongside One PA in the past, said the killing of a canvasser is a “deep tragedy that is really hard for us to fathom” amid what he described as a “pervasive sense of hopelessness” in the city.

But he said he is hopeful that the next mayor will deliver a sense of a calm. He said though he doesn’t agree with every candidate’s positions, each of the top contenders is “trying to have the conversation.”

“Even in our darkest hours,” he said, “I have a lot of hope in Philadelphia.”