City to Take New Tack To Curb Gun Violence

Mayor-elect Michael Nutter, angered by the brazen shooting of a police officer and a persistently high number of killings that threatens to top 400 for a second consecutive year, has vowed to declare a crime emergency as soon as he enters office Jan. 7. Nutter also plans to bring the police force to full strength for the first time in years, saturate high-crime communities with officers, limit or prohibit street gatherings and establish curfews in those neighborhoods.

The mayor also wants to change municipal employment practices to give former prisoners a better shot at being hired by the city, and he wants to give a three-year tax credit to businesses that hire ex-offenders.

"Last year, 406 people were killed, 70 percent of them black men," Nutter said in an interview. "If it were anything else, an explosion or a health outbreak, the federal government would have our city on lockdown trying to find out what's going on with agencies we haven't even heard of.

"But it's one homicide here, one there -- people doing bad things to each other," said Nutter, a former city council member. "It's ripping the heart out of the city. It's damaging the morale of the city. It's damaging all of us."

Nutter said the killing of police officer Charles "Chuck" Cassidy in a Dunkin' Donuts in north Philadelphia in late October angered residents and highlighted the need for tough reforms.

"The shooting -- I call it the assassination -- of police officer Chuck Cassidy has transcended the issue of race, and put the problem out there so that everyone in Philadelphia could understand it," Nutter said. "We need to stop the violence and instill respect for human life. In many cases, those guys don't value their own lives."

Parts of Nutter's proposal have been used in other cities to reduce crime. The District of Columbia has employed curfews in the past. Aggressive "stop and frisk" tactics have been put into place in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis and Minneapolis. Philadelphia itself has resorted to limiting the movement of people in some high-crime areas, though the policy has been used only on a temporary basis.

"It's hard to tell how big Nutter plans to make this," said Stephanos Bibas, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan. "Philadelphia is just getting around to the strategies that New York was using 15 years ago and Boston was trying to use 20 years ago. I think this could be very big. I think it's a lot bigger than anything Philadelphia has done before."

The mayor's plans, which will be implemented by former D.C. police chief Charles H. Ramsey, whom Nutter appointed to head the Philadelphia force, are among the city's efforts to cut into the stubbornly high homicide rate among African American men in their late teens and early 20s.

While the rate among black men age 18 to 24 has dropped dramatically from the highs of the early 1990s during the height of the urban crack war, the group's homicide rate is still about nine times higher than the rate among white men of the same age, and is far higher than the rate for any other group of black people.

In Philadelphia, homicides rose to 406 last year, an 8 percent increase from the year before, and more than 2,000 people were shot. Police are overwhelmed with cases, said Lt. Mel Williams. Eighty detectives are working on 372 cases, solved and unsolved, from this year alone. There are hundreds of such cases from previous years.