Philly kids ransacking Wawa was ‘a scene from the apocalypse’

Philly, we’ve got to get our kids in check.

What happened inside that Wawa in the Northeast Saturday night was like a scene from the apocalypse. If you watched the videos that have been circulating, then you saw how the store at 7001 Roosevelt Blvd. was swarmed by young people running around, intent on destruction. They started streaming in shortly after 8 p.m. and began throwing and grabbing things. Outside, kids jumped up and down on parked cars.

In the midst of all that craziness, a young woman climbed onto a store counter and began twerking. At first, I was too distracted by merchandise being thrown and all of the other chaos inside the convenience store to notice. But then I saw her standing up high near the front of the store by the cash registers, shaking her backside and waving her arms above her head as if she were performing at a strip club, oblivious to the ruckus going on around her.

At one point, someone waiting at a counter (who seemed like a customer) asked, “Are y’all going to make sandwiches, or are y’all just going to keep recording?” If it weren’t sad, it would have been funny.

According to the Philadelphia Police Department, roughly 100 juveniles were inside the store on Saturday. Some were standing around watching and video recording. Others ransacked displays and stole merchandise. Police dispersed the crowd but — incredibly — made no arrests.

“Why didn’t they arrest anybody?” Bilal Qayyum, an anti-violence activist, asked when we spoke Tuesday. “If you are in the store and literally stealing, you’ve got to be held accountable.”

Afterward, Wawa had a huge mess to clean up.

So does this city. Post-pandemic, it feels as if the quality of life in Philly has gotten worse.

Last year, the city’s homicide rate hit the highest total in at least half a century. Carjackings have skyrocketed as well; if 2022 continues at its current pace, the number could be 500% higher than it was in 2019. Shoplifting is on the rise, too. Meanwhile, prosecutions for retail theft have dropped as the District Attorney’s Office has made a conscious effort not to prosecute lower-level criminal cases to free up resources.

I can appreciate District Attorney Larry Krasner’s decision to focus on bigger crimes than pilfering from stores, but the kind of lawlessness that took place at Wawa can’t go unaddressed.

“It’s disturbing. Someone could have gotten hurt,” Chad Dion Lassiter, executive director of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, told me Monday.

“Homes, communities, and schools should be asking young people, ‘Were you part of that?’” he added. “See, that’s a different form of correction, protection, and affection.”

Critics are big on placing blame on parents, particularly absentee fathers. But that’s only part of the problem.

This is a societal issue.

The kind of criminality we saw unleashed Saturday inside that Wawa wasn’t a one-off, an example of one group of kids who decided to do a bad thing. This kind of lawlessness is all around us.

Cut another motorist off in traffic? They may pull out a gun. Park your car on a certain street? You might return to find your catalytic converter is missing. Chase behind the thieves, and you could wind up getting shot, like a block captain in East Germantown was last month. Drive a vehicle that someone else wants? You may wind up carjacked at gunpoint early one morning, like the mom and daughter from Northeast Philly were in their own driveway last week.

» READ MORE: Safety concerns in Center City lead to more unarmed bike patrols and security guards around office buildings

This isn’t just a problem in our region. You can see it all over, even in Washington, D.C.

Consider the videos showing right-wing protesters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, who broke into the halls of Congress, destroyed government property, and stole whatever they could all because former President Donald Trump lost the presidential election. I worry that we may see more of that kind of thing in the coming days, as the House committee investigating the attack was supposed to hold its next public hearing on Wednesday (it got postponed because of the hurricane).

The fact that so many feel that they can do what they want with no regard for the safety and well-being of others is a societal problem. Krasner is right about our not being able to adjudicate our way out of what’s happening. We also need a massive cultural shift in our national psyche. We need to move away from thinking only about what we want, and instead focus more on what works for society at large, including those around us.

We need to create this cultural shift in our homes as well as in our schools and other social organizations. We also need it in our political parties as we march toward the all-important midterm elections. Without it, we’ll keep seeing repeats of what we saw in that Wawa on Saturday night.