A rare circumstance where television might really help you.

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.]