City Councilmember Quetcy Lozada wants police to crack down on crime in Kensington. It’s about time.

I recently spoke by telephone with City Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, after reading her comments about the need for more law enforcement in the bloodstained streets of Kensington, a neighborhood that’s notorious as the home of the East Coast’s largest open-air drug market.

As Lozada told me about the stark conditions in the community she represents, I remembered the exact moment when I realized the area had descended into lawlessness.

It was May 28, 2019, and I was touring the area near Kensington and Allegheny Avenues with Shannon Farrell-Paktis, president of the Harrowgate Civic Association. We were walking on a street that, according to the neighborhood grapevine, a nonprofit had identified as the potential location for a safe injection site.

I recall thinking it would have been a strange place for such a facility, given that the street ran directly behind a day-care center. Yet between the human waste and used hypodermic needles that littered the ground, dozens of people were already stretched out on the pavement, shooting drugs as Farrell-Paktis told me about the chaos in her neighborhood.

As we talked, a group of police officers rode by on a bicycle patrol, seemingly oblivious to the crowd of people injecting drugs behind the childcare facility, ignoring the chaos that was playing out before their eyes.

In the four years since, that scene has been endlessly repeated in a neighborhood besieged by drug users chasing heroin, fentanyl, and xylazine, and dealers who kill for the chance to sell to them. Both groups seemingly get what they want, and Philadelphians who live there are the ones who pay the price.

That’s wrong, and it must be addressed.

Lozada, who took office last November as the 7th District Council member, is now saying what Kensington residents have been expressing for years: Police must do their jobs. They must stop looking the other way. They must enforce the law.

When Lozada and I spoke, I asked her if she believed the current approach had failed.

“Yes,” she said emphatically, “and that is because [law enforcement’s] current approach is basically to stand down … We started using this term, ‘We can’t arrest our way out of it,’ and that has translated to, ‘We won’t do anything about it.’”

I think she’s right, but it’s complicated. Kensington just saw a police officer shoot and kill Eddie Irizarry when the motorist was in his car with the windows rolled up, prompting a charge of first-degree murder, so calling for more enforcement is controversial. But standing against police abuses is not the same as standing against police protection. We all want equal treatment. In fact, we demand it.

Standing against police abuses is not the same as standing against police protection.

Sadly, whether public officials are responsive to such demands is often determined by the race of those who are making them. And in Kensington, that response is also driven by class.

I firmly believe that the “velvet glove” approach to the drug users in Kensington is driven by the fact that so many of them are white. And while we can debate whether the approach known as harm reduction — which includes safe injection sites — has helped drug users, there is no doubt that it has harmed Kensington residents, who are left to deal with the neighborhood’s appalling conditions. Many of them are white, too. But they don’t have money, so in the ideological fight over addiction, those residents have become collateral damage.

As Lozada told me, “The voices for harm reduction have taken priority over the voices of those who live there.”

Again, she’s right, and the fact that the opinions of faraway academics have more weight than neighborhood residents is bizarre.

Those who live in Kensington occupy a community held hostage by the drug trade, with users and dealers camped out on streets that are strewn with broken and bloody needles. The smell of rotting flesh from drug users’ open wounds wafts through the air. People stumble along like zombies, and when they are still, they often double over in a stupor.

The police are there, sometimes patrolling on bicycles, but — just as they did when I watched them roll past a group of people injecting drugs four years ago — they often do nothing more than observe.

“I think that in order to help us change what is happening in Kensington right now, we need more than just [police] presence,” Lozada told me. “We need actual enforcement. We need them to do the work that needs to be done. If you’re breaking the law, we need to enforce the law.”

Yes, there should also be outreach and resources for those who want help, said Lozada, but people need hope, and hope comes from action.

“We’re going to have to take drastic measures before we see residents become partners,” she said, adding that trust will only come when people believe the city is actually listening.