Investigating shootings in Northwest Philly: ‘Two guys who shouldn’t have brought guns to a fistfight’ | Mike Newall

At the cramped headquarters of the Philadelphia police’s Northwest Division on a recent afternoon, a pair of criminal intelligence officers were receiving their biweekly assignment: digging up information on two weeks’ worth of shootings.

Here in the Northwest, one of the most violent divisions in the city, that meant 13 separate shooting victims, and an additional 10 cases where no one was hit.

Officers John Burnett and Corey Smalls went through the grim tally:

There was the mother whose son told her one morning he’d heard gunshots in the night outside their house on Stenton Avenue. They found the garage shot up. A possible act of witness intimidation.

There was the 4-year-old who suffered a graze wound in the behind at a gas station on North Broad. He had gotten out of the car to help his mother’s boyfriend pump gas. At Albert Einstein Medical Center, the boy looked at cartoons while detectives gently asked him questions.

There was the man shot twice in two weeks. In the first instance, bullets flew through a passing car, just as a woman inside had bent down to pick up her purse. Had she been upright, she likely would have been shot in the head.

All the details went into a Word file, the year-to-date list of all the serious crimes in the division that stretches from Lehigh Avenue to North Philadelphia to Chestnut Hill — shootings, armed robberies, burglaries, and the like. By this day in late May, the document ran 1,610 pages.

Burnett and Smalls are a plainclothes team whose job is to hang around crime scenes, hospitals, and street corners — and get witnesses and victims to talk to them.

“A lot of people want to talk, but anonymously,” Smalls said. “They don’t want to be held to paper. They just want to get it out there. They don’t want the repercussions of the street.”

In Northwest Division, the repercussions of the street are often deadly. Citywide, at this moment, Northwest has the highest shooting victims of any division in the city. In all, 147 people have been shot here this year, more than anywhere else in the city. Mirroring citywide trends, the numbers are growing: Shootings in Northwest spiked 12 percent from this time last year.

Northwest is tied for the second-highest murder rate in the city; 34 people have been killed this year. It is also second in the city for gun arrests.

“When you have people living in this community for 40 or 50 years who feel like they can’t walk out of their house to go to the store because of the gun violence — that’s a problem,” said Reginald Hall, a neighborhood youth advocate from Germantown and the Northwest community liaison for the city’s Town Watch Integrated Services.

That’s why I’ll be spending the summer reporting from the division — covering the violence, the reality of the people harmed by it, the neighbors living with it, the police officers chasing shootings. A city criminal justice system trying to balance needed reforms with policing a tide of violence — and as a scandal over offensive social-media posts by dozens of police officers has strained relationships with the community even further.

Much of that balancing act falls to the lean, quiet Inspector Deshawn Beaufort, who grew up in the division and raised his family there. His phone still rings every time an acquaintance or old neighbor has a less-than-ideal interaction with an officer. An added layer of quality control.

“For me, it’s about making sure it’s done the right way — that people that know it could be done the right way,” he said. “When you’re talking to your people, you convey to them to treat people like they would want their family treated. It’s that simple, to be honest.”

And on top of all these challenges, the violence spirals. Just last weekend came a spasm of shootings all over Philadelphia, a brutal wake-up call in a city that can often overlook the epidemic of gun violence on its streets.

Northwest was not spared.

Now the division had new assignments — like the case of a 30-year-old man shot at 30th and Clearfield while talking to a friend. The armed robbers who approached them dispensed with the typical pleasantries and simply shot the victim in the shoulder. “You already know what this is!” the gunman yelled.

Then there was the man shot in the thigh at a playground who asked the detectives if they knew whether he was the shooting’s target or just unlucky.

On Monday, after a deadly weekend, the phone kept ringing in the Special Investigations Unit of Northwest detectives, a stuffy, windowless room with bulging aluminum file cabinets.

In the interview room, a suspect in a shooting on 72nd Avenue cradled his head in his arms on the table. He had spent a good portion of his day running. Outside, detectives Joe Cremen and Tim Hartman, an exacting duo who communicate almost nonverbally, considered the finer points of what constitutes a self-defense case, and admitted their suspect had a pretty good one.

His buddy had gotten into an argument with a neighbor. The buddy punched the neighbor. The neighbor shot the buddy in the gut. The guy in the interview room shot the neighbor in the butt.

Both were carrying illegally.

Any way you parse it, Hartman observed, “two guys who shouldn’t have brought guns to a fistfight.”

The detective asked the suspect in the room his story. Eventually, they and the District Attorney’s Office would agree on self-defense. They charged the man with what’s all too common a crime: having an illegal gun on the streets of Philadelphia. And they went back to their piles of cases.