Will the killing of Tyre Nichols change Philly’s mayoral debate over cops, crime?

The crowded, long-distance race to elect a new Philadelphia mayor in 2023 had barely left the starting line when there were early hints that some of the pack was drifting into the right lane — or, arguably, the center-right — on the issues that seem to matter most to voters in America’s founding city: crime and policing.

The first hints came last month at a forum on gun violence attended by nine of the 10 Democrats running to replace departing Mayor Jim Kenney. There, the City Hall wannabes largely stayed in the center lane — promising policies to reduce crime, but not by hiring more cops — although one leading candidate, former City Council member Cherelle Parker, caused a stir by suggesting an openness to a return of stop-and-frisk policing.

Another closely watched hopeful — the grocery executive Jeff Brown, who’s made a splash by spending on early ads — also told the audience at St. Joseph’s University that “we have enough money in the police budget.” But just days later, in Northeast Philadelphia, Brown said more cops and police spending was his “No. 1 priority” while lashing out at District Attorney Larry Krasner — an avatar of progressive criminal-justice reform — and criticizing the city’s most noteworthy reform measure of the 2020s, a curb on police traffic stops.

Then came a giant object in the center of the road to a new mayor: the police beating in Memphis — after a traffic stop — that killed a young unarmed Black man, Tyre Nichols, followed by release of videos that created national outrage. Suddenly, talk of radical reforms in policing — which rose after the 2020 cop murder of George Floyd, only to fall with a national spike in homicides and a massive political mood swing — was back.

Will the outcry over Tyre Nichols become a game changer in the Philly mayor’s race?

Some social-justice advocates certainly hope so. “So far, none of the mayoral candidates are conspicuously saying the right thing about police reform and at least two of them” — Brown and former council member Allan Domb, running an aggressive anti-crime plan — “are saying the wrong thing,” Michael Coard, acivil rights attorney and activist, told me. Coard said he supports a massive shift of police dollars toward mental health, drug rehabilitation, community intervention, schools, and job training.

“We need to do something different,” agreed Kris Henderson, the executive director of Amistad Movement Power, a social movement that opposes mass incarceration and is a sister organization to the Amistad Law Project. Henderson called the popular notion that there is a correlation between how much a city spends on police and its ability to reduce crime “a false narrative.”

Like other advocates, Henderson sees the city’s moves on police reform in the nearly three years as a mixed bag. On the positive side, the law that candidate Jeff Brown has criticized — the driving equity measure from Council member Isaiah Thomas that bars cops from stopping motorists solely for low-level offenses like a broken taillight — has won national praise for the potential to reduce police interactions with citizens that could go bad.

Likewise, Henderson said they are hopeful about efforts to increase mobile crisis units that can respond to mental-health emergencies with trained professionals rather than the armed cops who are often called out in such cases — including the October 2020 incident in which Philadelphia officers shot and killed Walter Wallace Jr. Still, the city’s early efforts lag far behind the expansive push for better mental-health responses in some cities, most notably Denver.

But arguably the biggest issue around police reform is how much money big cities like Philadelphia spend on cops — and whether those dollars are well spent. The recent history here is typical of many U.S. municipalities. When thousands were marching in the spring of 2020 to protest Floyd’s murder under the suffocating knee of Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin, Philadelphia City Council voted to effectively freeze police spending — but the move was short-lived.

» READ MORE: ‘They’re trying to George Floyd me’: Killings by U.S. cops rise | Will Bunch Newsletter

After a 2021 in which Philadelphia logged its all-time record for homicides at 562, the city signed off last June on a significant increase in spending — largely driven by personnel expenses — that raised the overall police budget to nearly $800 million. That marks a nearly $150 million increase since Kenney became mayor in 2016 for what is the city’s biggest budget line, by far. Aided by COVID-relief dollars, City Hall also bumped up spending on neighborhood anti-violence initiatives and the public defender’s office. But critics say Philadelphia won’t truly be safer until the kind of neighborhood services advocated by Coard are prioritized over flooding the zone with more cops.

“No one — or very few people — are saying we need to disband the police,” Henderson said. “What people are saying here is that we have finite resources and we’re pouring so much money into the thing that doesn’t seem to be working, so how can we shift resources into other things?”

How this plays out over the next three-plus months isn’t just a local story, but a national one — in a year in which the Philly mayor’s race will be a closely watched bellwether. Over the last two years, calls for radical police reform have faded amid a pandemic-linked spike (now falling in many localities) in murders, which have led Democrats from Joe Biden’s White House to many City Halls to call for more police funding, not less. That trend is epitomized by New York City’s ex-cop mayor, Eric Adams, whom critics accuse of prioritizing policing over schools or libraries, which are facing millions of dollars in budget cuts.

Will the uproar over the brutal death of Nichols — who was laid to rest Wednesday, after five Memphis cops were charged with his murder — and a spate of other high-profile police killings in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and elsewhere bring the debate back to where it was in June 2020? Few expect that Republicans in Congress will agree to the stalled federal cop-reform act. That shifts the focus to this year’s local elections in places like Philadelphia and Chicago.

This week, I reached out to the two candidates who exemplify the two divergent lanes in the Philadelphia election: Jeff Brown and ex-councilmember Helen Gym, a longtime critic of police brutality who has emerged as the race’s most prominent progressive after winning endorsements from the Working Families Party and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers.

Brown’s campaign provided a statement that said: “The tragic murder of Tyre Nichols at the hands of law enforcement officials is yet another example of why we need drastic reform of our criminal justice system.” The statement also mentioned that the driving-equity law he’d called “bad legislation” at a forum just this week would “diminish” the racist history of police traffic stops. Pressed for a clarification, a campaign spokesman said Brown has qualms about a provision regarding unregistered vehicles but “it is not his desire or intent to work to repeal the bill.”

On related issues, the statement said Brown supports more diverse police hiring, an emphasis on community policing, greater use of technology like “gunshot cameras,” and the formation of “a Community Crisis Corps consisting of mental and emotional health professionals, clergy, retired police officers, and social workers.”

“The brutal murder of Tyre Nichols — like far too many before him — proves that police reform is a necessary part of public safety,” Gym told me in a written response. “We must have both.” She reiterated her support for the driving-equity law, agreed with the call for more mental-health-oriented crisis responses, and called for better treatment of violence victims. “Too often, they are treated by police officers only in terms of their value to prosecution rather than by a city government providing them with the housing, mental health, family, and employment supports they need to deal with the trauma of violence,” she said.

She also expanded on her comments at the St. Joseph’s forum, adding that her goal isn’t to cut police funding but to expand other public services. “Black and Brown communities have borne the brunt of decades of divestment with policing too often replacing quality education, jobs, and housing as the major institutional spending that people see,” Gym said, calling for measures such as “environmental improvements like cleaner, brighter streets, towing of abandoned cars, and greening and repurposing of vacant lots.”

Even after Nichols’ murder, though, it’s unlikely you’ll hear a politician who’ll echo an activist like Coard, who described his ultimate goal as “defanging” the police. Somewhere, a visionary urban leader will emerge who can build on outrages like the Nichols case to turn around the battleship of over-policing that set sail decades ago. That city could still be Philadelphia, but the clock for radical reform is ticking rapidly.

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