I voted for Michael Nutter today. A few weeks ago this seemed like a protest vote — the kind favored generally by the well-educated Age of Reform Part One types who typically also believe that pluralism works, a thousand flowers bloom, etc.
I went into the voting booth today believing that America’s mayoralties might be better left to antiquity and left feeling the same way. Mayors and city councils have become so quaint in recent years, unable to muster the support they need to provide for the cities they ostensibly govern and unwilling to meaningfully contest the big picture problems their constituents demand they address. Whether it’s in battles with the federal government, as in the case with New Orleans, or battles with the state, as is our plight as Philadelphians, mayors and city councils wield less power than ever in an increasingly suburbanized nation.
What we’re left with are either/or propositions that mayors can’t handle either; while Ed Rendell forces the casinos down our throats, the mayor will be left with a law and order problem that he doesn’t know how to fix and the casinos question will fade from view. Moreover, if you watched so much as two episodes of The Wire last season, it’s pretty clear that quality-of-life policing puts everyone at risk, civilians and police alike, broken windows thesis be damned. Stop and frisk policing may pad overtime and create the illusion that something’s being done, but it militarizes communities by treating everyone as a suspect. It’s a civil rights and a civil liberties issue.
[Don’t say people in these communities are asking for more police. Of course they are. They ask for police because it seems like it’s the easiest solution. But it’s the type of policing they get that counts. Put in a different context, stop and frisk is like calling for a troop surge. This is the sort of hamfisted approach Frank Rizzo took that Rudy Giuliani later Disneyfied. We need to do much better than this. We need to be smarter than this. We can do much better than this.]