There’s a limit on apologies to MOVE

Goodbye, Dr. Tom Farley, we hardly knew ye.

Philadelphia’s bland, soft-spoken Health Commissioner was fired when Philadelphia’s famously woke Jim Kenney learned that Farley had made a mistake, a terrible mistake, but one that actually hurt no one physically, but did hurt some feelings.

Wait! I want to be accurate for the benefit of the remaining Kenney supporters. Kenney did not “fire” Farley, he asked for his resignation on the 36th anniversary of the MOVE catastrophe in which 11 people died and a city block was destroyed. (MOVE survivors sued the city and police department  and were awarded $1.5 million in a 1996 settlement.)

In reality, a request for a resignation is the same thing as firing, except it is the coward’s way out.

What was Farley’s fireable mistake?

Some remains — bones and bone fragments — of those who died on May 13, 1985, were in the hands of the city medical director, who turned them over to Farley in 2017, who cremated them rather than seek to return them to MOVE members. (The medical examiner also made the mistake of turning some remains over to the Penn Museum for study and research.)

“Instead of fully identifying those remains and returning them to the family, he made a decision to cremate and dispose of them,” Kenney said in a statement.

Farley issued a statement Thursday, apologizing for his decision, saying he was following procedure for handling specimens from autopsies after the investigation had been completed.

“I made this decision on my own,” he wrote, it “was wrong and represented a terrible error in judgment.”

Agreed. He manned up.

Was it a firing offense? Apparently.

We can debate that.

Kenney went further than that.

Kenney said he met with family members and apologized, which is appropriate, but he just had to take it a step too far and also apologized “for how the City has treated them for the last five decades.”

This he said to the survivors of a group that has done more to disturb the peace in Philadelphia than any other group. 

It brought to mind last year’s resolution by 16 of 17 City Council members that was an abject apology to MOVE for what happened 35 years earlier.

The resolution blamed the city for what happened, fair enough, but there is not a single word holding MOVE responsible for its actions that precipitated the disaster.

The only Council member to decline the apology was Brian O’Neill. None of the 17 were in office then, but most were alive then. 

To twist Santayana’s famous quote, if you don’t learn history, you will distort it. 

For starters,  MOVE was founded in 1972 as a back-to-nature, radical, revolutionary Black separatist group. No problem with that.

It had a long history of ignoring orders from the city to cease and desist. It had a long history of bringing noise, filth and fear down upon their Black neighbors who called on the city for help.

An earlier 1978 standoff resulted in the death of one police officer and injuries to 16 officers and firefighters. Nine MOVE members were convicted of killing the officer and received life sentences.

So you can understand police reluctance to walk up to the front door of the house on Osage Avenue that had a bunker in its roof, and filled with MOVErs who were brandishing weapons and making threats.

To understand what happened that day requires an understanding that MOVE often operated as a criminal enterprise, disregarding both law and civil behavior.

I repeat, the main victims of  MOVE were their Black neighbors.

I suppose if I give Council time it will apologize to Mumia Abu-Jamal for his incarceration.

How about serial killer Marty Graham? Did he get roughed by the cops?

The there’s murderer/cannibal Gary Heidnik, who got the death penalty.

Shall Philadelphia apologize to his heirs?

Apologies are fine for actual misdeeds. But when making them, we have to think about gravity, and intent.

Farley’s punishment outweighed his offense — and the mayor has to stop prostrating himself in front of cretins whose own bad behavior provoked an over-the-top response and created a tragedy.