Seeking new Philly mayor with real, results-driven commitment to accountability

We finally hear from Jim Kenney, our often MIA mayor, and what does Hizzoner have to say?

Oh, just that he’s already looking ahead to people performing a postmortem on his administration.

“As my term begins to come to a close, much will be said about our city’s path forward,” began his recent and curiously timed op-ed.

In other words, he’s already got one foot on the gangplank of his retirement cruise.

For the record, he’s still got a little more than a year left on his latest term, so that’s peak senioritis even for a guy who’s long suffered from a chronic case of is-it-over-yet.

But then, we know he’s been checked out for a while.

How long?

Oh, well, funny you should ask. Let’s use the gun violence prevention audits as a measure. Why, back in 2017, I was told that the mayor’s then-newly formed Office of Violence Prevention was hard at work on a comprehensive evaluation on the effectiveness of these programs.

Any day now, I was told.

And told again in 2018.

And 2019.

And even in 2020, during the height of the pandemic.

Same story again in 2021.

And it continued that way until October, when the city quietly posted a report that concluded one of Philly’s key anti-violence programs is, in short, a hot mess.

The Community Crisis Intervention Program, an initiative designed to pair neighborhood mentors with people at risk of shooting someone or getting shot, has no program director and a demoralized staff that has conducted few hospital interventions and street mediations.

Not great news, but then at least it was some news — considering that the administration is now saying that a full audit is coming in 2023.

Sure, Jan …

Add it up, and it’s a bunch of wasted time. And wasted lives.

And we know that there will be more of the same, maybe until Kenney — to his great, everlasting relief — is put out of his misery and succeeded by one of the eight people and counting who have now entered the field for the 2023 mayor’s race. One candidate, former City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart, has said much of the city’s anti-violence programming will take at least five years to show results.

Five. Years.

Imagine, if you will, what we could have learned, and where we could have been in Philly’s fight against violence, if, say, the city made good on its promise to evaluate its programs way back when.

From January 2016, when Kenney was sworn in as the city’s 99th mayor, to Dec. 1, there have been 9,755 shootings, 2,527 of them fatal.

The gun violence epidemic in our city is not all on Kenney, of course — no matter how many former city officials looking to score some points (and maybe a new job) insist it is. The problem isn’t only his administration, or even on one desperately flawed gun violence program.

Kenney and Co. are quick to note that the mayor’s administration has dedicated more money to fighting gun violence — $340 million in the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years — than any administration in the city’s history.

But that’s not the flex Kenney thinks it is — because that includes $5.3 million in city funds last year to the Community Crisis Intervention Program alone, an investment where the city is getting nowhere near what it’s paying for, and countless other programs that have been blindly funded while the mayhem continues.

(Speaking of how we love to lean into inefficiencies, City Council just approved a permanent 10 p.m. curfew for teens despite experts saying the approach is useless.)

Meanwhile, aspiring mayors keep lining up: Joining the race in the last several weeks have been grocery store magnate Jeff Brown, retired Judge James DeLeon, and two recently resigned City Council members in Allan Domb and Helen Gym.

Back in September, my colleague Daniel Pearson interviewed the early entrants to the race — Derek Green, Maria Quiñones Sánchez, Cherelle L. Parker — plus Domb, about their plans to improve public safety in the city. Accountability, a political buzzword that’s come to mean very little, came up a lot.

Said Domb: “I don’t want to wake up a year from now and say we just wasted $50 million or $100 million of the city’s money in an area that we can’t afford to waste money, because we’re dealing with people’s lives and families that are getting crushed by this public safety issue.”

Well, wake up, Allan. And wake up, Philly, because until we have leaders who make a real, results-driven commitment to accountability, we will continue to be little more than a city of wasted money and wasted lives.