Focused deterrence policing was being used in Philly a decade ago. Why did we wait so long before trying it again?

One of the first questions I asked the two nice police officers who picked me up from the dark Graduate Hospital-area corner where I’d been robbed at gunpoint on an early Sunday evening in November 2013 was, “So, how do you like the focused deterrence strategy in this district?”

Focused deterrence, which is also known locally as Group Violence Intervention, is all of a sudden in the news as if no one had ever heard of it before. The program, first pioneered decades ago by John Jay College professor David Kennedy, was featured in a recent Inquirer story headlined, “A city-led effort to reach potential shooters has produced encouraging results, Philly officials say.”

Way back in 2012, former Inquirer columnist and now Washington Post writer, Karen Heller, wrote about Philadelphia’s first try at implementing Kennedy’s theories in South Philadelphia, including the 17th Police District located in Point Breeze, about seven blocks from where I was mugged two years later. Charles Ramsey, Philly’s police commissioner at the time, was a 2010 inductee into the “Evidence-Based Policing Hall of Fame.”

Focused deterrence is an example of evidence-based policing. It involves officers identifying a small number of chronic offenders, confronting them, and responding swiftly if anyone in the group continues to commit crimes. Ramsey’s boss, former Mayor Michael Nutter, backed Ramsey up. In his second inaugural address in 2012, Nutter bemoaned the 324 murders in 2011. That number would merit bragging rights today.

» READ MORE: Want to cut Philadelphia crime? Work with the criminals | Karen Heller

But back to 2013 on my dark corner of Graduate Hospital: I was leaning into the rear seat of my Prius and was giving myself big props for having found a parking spot when a voice behind me said, “Give me your purse. I have a gun.”

Thinking it was one of my jokester neighbors, I straightened up with my right hand on one of my bags and turned around smiling. Alas, I did not recognize the young man whose face was in deep shadow from his hoodie and whose right hand was pointing something long, round, and flinty toward my stomach. Astute observer of human nature that I am, I decided not to ask him to actually show me the long, round, and flinty object that was mostly in shadow.

He repeated his request for my purse, which put me into a momentary quandary. The bag in my hand held my art supplies and a nearly finished drawing for a Sunday cartoon strip called “Penn’s Place” that I was drawing at the time for the Sunday Inquirer. The finished art was due the next day.

My purse was still out of sight on the floor of the car. If I gave him the cartoon bag in my hand, it would have totally thrown off my tight schedule. Which would take less time to recover from: Replacing my specially ordered pens and tediously redrawing the strip? Or handing over my real purse and having to replace IDs, a credit card, and my Pen and Pencil Club membership card?

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When I handed my assailant the art bag, he looked at it rather suspiciously, perhaps because it said “Trader Joe’s” rather than “Hermes” on the outside. After a second or two, though, he grabbed it and took off down the dark sidewalk. I wanted to yell after him, “Use what’s inside!”

Instead, I got my real purse, moved onto the road under a streetlight, and shakily called 911. And then I waited. And waited. A young couple eyed me suspiciously as they crossed the street. I told them what happened and asked them to wait with me. They warily kept their distance but thankfully stayed. I later found out that they thought I might have been a grifter waiting for my muscle to appear and rob them.

Eventually, a police car showed up with two extremely nice officers who thought it was a good idea to drive around in the dark looking for the kid long after he’d sprinted away. Finally, we drove to the 17th District police station.

While one of the police officers filled out the report, I chatted with his partner, whom I quizzed about his views on focused deterrence. Although he said it didn’t prevent all crime in the neighborhood (as I could confirm), he thought it was terrific. I remember him saying he had a young son whose safety he always worried about. He said wistfully, “I wish we had focused deterrence in my neighborhood.”

» READ MORE: A city-led effort to reach potential shooters has produced encouraging results, Philly officials say

That was not to be.

There were 280 murders the last year of Michael Nutter’s mayoralty. Focused deterrence was never expanded citywide or into the neighborhood of the police officer I spent time with after being mugged.

Given we now have more than 500 murders a year, and suddenly focused deterrence, renamed (naturally) as Group Violence Intervention, is in the news again, you have to wonder why the succeeding administration abandoned focused deterrence in the first place. “Unfocused dithering” describes their approach.

If you want to hear what focused deterrence is all about, a 2014 TEDx talk titled “Be the Change” crisply describes the principles.

During the pandemic two years ago, when restaurants and stores were closed, I was lined up on the sidewalk for coffee through a café window. I asked the two police officers next to me how things were going. When I found out they were from the 17th District, I asked them what they thought of the focused deterrence tactics that had once worked so well in the area. They looked at each other, shrugged, and one said, “Never heard of it.”

Signe Wilkinson, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, spent 35 years as an editorial cartoonist at The Inquirer and the Daily News.