Guess what? Philly has a “law and order” mayor

With her appointment of a Philadelphia Police Department deputy commissioner, with on-the-ground experience to tame hellish Kensington, Cherelle Parker has made a move to establish herself as Philadelphia’s  first “law and order” mayor since Frank Rizzo.

That sound you just heard was progressives plotzing. 

Even if you don’t speak Yiddish, you can guess what that means.

Here’s why I am going there.

The first thing Parker did after taking the oath of office was to declare a state of emergency in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection, addressing public safety.

This is something her predecessor, the blubbering and equivocating Jim Kenney refused to do, even as homicides soared on his watch.

With that declaration, Parker was keeping a campaign promise.

During the campaign, she also pledged to use Terry stops, which is the Constitutional use of “stop and frisk.” She also toyed with the idea of calling on the National Guard for help in quelling Kensington. 

Both these ideas were rejected as too harsh by her conservative Republican opponent David Oh.

Yes, on law and order Parker ran to the right of the Republican, and entered a mirror universe of the one occupied by Woke radical D.A. Larry Krasner.

Prediction: This mixture of oil and water will lead to a public explosion between the mayor and D.A., sooner rather than later. Extreme prediction: In the  2025 D.A. primary, former prosecutor Derek Green, the mayoral candidate who bowed out and endorsed Parker, will challenge Krasner with Parker’s backing.

It was largely Parker’s anti-crime stance, along with her traditional Democratic policies, that led me to endorse her in the primary, mostly to stop Helen Gym.

The last mayor to endorse “stop and frisk” was Michael Nutter. He used it, Kenney cut it to the bone, Parker is restoring it.

Nutter and Parker have this in common — they are Black and Black Philadelphians are the group most cruelly affected by crime.

This brings me to a 2020 Gallup report that measured how welcome police presence  is in African-American neighborhoods. 81% of Black Americans said they wanted the same or more police presence in their neighborhood. It’s only white progressives like Kenney who think Black people want less police presence.

In good conscience, I must add Black people want a friendly and courteous police force in their neighborhoods, but, without doubt, they want cops.

Parker plans to give them at least 300 more, which will be a challenge as policing as a profession has become as popular as crack whore.

Recruiting has been a problem since even before the George Floyd death, and the subsequent suicidal Defund the Police movement from the Left. (It has largely been discredited now, with mamy Democrats denying they had anything to do with it. Except I never heard a Republican call for defunding.) 

When he was police commissioner, the highly regarded Charles Ramsay told me trying to hire officers, especially Black officers, was like pulling teeth.

He told me PPD tried recruiting on Black college campuses, where students said, basically, you are offering me a job that pays less than I can make in business, where the people I am protecting hate me, and where I can get killed doing it. 

Not exactly irresistible.

Philly cops start at $61,888, which actually is pretty damn good.

But not good enough. 

The state police start at 65K and most people like them in those adorable Smokey Bear hats. Wealthy suburbs pay even more with less danger — starting salary in Radnor, for example, is $81,842, rising quickly to more than $100,000.

Back to Kensington.

Parker appointed three-decade veteran Pedro Rosario, who now becomes the highest-ranking Hispanic on the force. Much more importantly, he has spent most of his career in the Badlands and basically has been named the new sheriff in Dodge, tasked with cleaning up the notorious open-air drug market that has received national media attention.

Call him the Czar of Kensington.

I am sure Rosario has his own ideas.

Let’s hope they start with three words:

Enforce The Law.

Despite what Larry Krasner thinks, drug sales and use are both illegal. Not to mention potentially lethal.

Here’s my four-point plan:

1- Arrest all drug users and pushers.

2- Jail all pushers, which might mean finding a work-around Krasner. Bring in the feds to prosecute.

3- Offer users an option of jail, which is the hard way to get clean, or voluntary enrollment in a treatment program. That might require funding from the feds, which should not be too hard to get given Joe and Jill Biden’s attachment to Philadelphia. (Get the money before the election. Just in case.) 

4- Like with shampoo, repeat.

Is the plan foolproof? No, nothing is foolproof.

But we know the results of non-enforcement, don’t we?