[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

Philadelphia’s mayor Cherelle Parker is on a mission. That mission was the eradication of the drug/homeless encampments near Kensington and Allegheny Avenues. Like most city residents, the new mayor wanted the area “cleaned up” after years of city neglect by Democrat administrations distracted by COVID lockdowns, George Floyd riots and various unhealthy obsessions on Donald Trump after his election to the presidency in 2016.

While the homeless/drug epidemic climbed to epidemic proportions during DJT’s presidency, then Mayor Jim Kenney danced an Irish jig in his office in June 2018 when a federal judge ruled in favor of the city’s sanctuary city policy. The city was more concerned about protecting illegal immigrants than dealing with the massive numbers of drug addicted homeless coming to Philadelphia from every part of the country.

Known primarily as the best city in the country to buy cheap drugs—thanks primarily to the laissez-faire attitude of police and City Hall when it came to shooting up in public and sleeping on sidewalks—Philadelphia became the ‘Do What Thou Wilt’ city of drug intoxication.

This was also a time when shoplifting became a non-crime in most of the nation’s blue cities, such as San Francisco and Portland. A time when security guards in many businesses were told to look the other way as thieves stocked up on goods and boldly sashayed past them because the guards had been told they weren’t allowed to arrest or put a hand on the culprits unless the stolen goods added up to a certain amount of money.

In my own neighborhood, which borders drug-infested Kensington, I witnessed shoplifters piling goods into canvass bags at a nearby WAWA and the local dollar store. Cans of Red Bull were a favorite item as were whole boxes of candy bars. Security guards, like birdwatchers sans binoculars, stood like mute zombies as the drugged out shoplifters had a field day.

And it was all legal. It was all acceptable. WAWA security guards had to follow strict instructions to never put their hands on a shoplifter and avoid unnecessary confrontations. They could request that the shoplifter return the stolen goods but chasing them out of the store was forbidden. Only the Philadelphia police had the power to chase a shoplifter, which is why WAWA then began employing part-time officers to work in tandem with security guards, so the former could make chase as the latter observed the show.

Still, police were not prosecuting shoplifters who stole items under a certain dollar amount. It was as if shoplifting had suddenly become legal.  Anarchy reigned. As a result, stores hired more security guards (for intimidation purposes only) so that shopping for incidental items like dental floss meant that you had to walk through flanks of guards who treated paying customers like potential criminals. Pedestrian items like toothpaste were locked behind glass containers.

Adding insult to injury, an Orwellian oversized surveillance security machine– a robot with flashing lights– was installed outside WAWA that spewed out recorded messages every two minutes: “For security purposes, this store is under surveillance.”

Mayor Parker’s orchestrated May 8, 2024 clean sweep of the Kensington and Allegheny encampment was supposed to be a ‘velvet glove’ sweep in which homeless addicts were encouraged to enter rehab and arrange to live in a city shelter. The homeless were told that there would be no police action. Yet on the morning of May 8, police arrived before the city’s Encampment Resolution Team, the people charged with persuading the homeless to seek treatment.

Despite the good intentions of the plan, police began disbanding tents while sanitation workers hosed down the sidewalks. This was not what was promised by the city yet this action really does symbolize what happens when a Democrat city tries to play fast catch up after years of looking the other way.

Only a handful of addicts opted for treatment during the May 8 sweep, while the vast majority—hundreds, in fact– scattered into small alleyways or made their way into other areas of Kensington where they could resume shooting up. The mayor’s Resolution Encampment point man, Chief Public Safety Director Adam Geer, said that the sweep was the “First step in an ongoing effort to move drug users out of the neighborhood and into treatment.” Words of this sort sound wonderful on paper, but forcing people into treatment traditionally has had a low success rate. Even if the hundreds of people who scattered into alleyways on May 8 had said yes to treatment, it’s very doubtful whether there’d be enough city shelters and rehabs to handle them all.

Mayor Parker wants desperately to be known as the one mayor who finally cleaned up Kensington. This would certainly be a diadem in her resume but her bullheadedness in pursuing this narcissistic dream is clearly creating a coming disaster. Instead of “cleaning up,” the mayor is “spreading out,” as in scattering the homeless tribes throughout the city and into neighborhoods where their presence was little felt before.

Already one can see these wandering tribes scouting for new places to inhabit. Many are filtering into Port Richmond and the Harrowgate neighborhoods; some are pitching tens in the small stretch of woodland not far from historic Penn Treaty Park. Others are trying new neighborhoods on for size.

But, you know, they have to go somewhere to live. After all, they’ve gotten used to the city’s over indulgence in allowing them to “own” K & A for years and years. The city’s responsibility in creating this disaster is certainly criminal, although now it wants to be seen as law biding and moral in telling the tent dwellers that they are no longer welcome in the place that it unofficially designated as “your special little safe hole in hell.”

Fast-paced radical change is bound to produce disastrous results. But Philadelphia Dems are clueless, especially when one considers how quickly they will resort to fascist tendencies when they have a burning agenda and/or want to cover up past sins. Order the homeless druggies out now, they say—as if one were bombing a MOVE compound as the city did in 1985—without thinking about the consequences of that action.

Yes, Phillies sports fans: the scattered tribes of the Drug Nation are making their way to a neighborhood near you.

Clearly, the preponderance of mini homeless encampments seems to be the wave of the future, something that every city neighborhood can expect soon because of Mayor Parker’s desire to become famous.

The May 8 Kensington sweep seems to have initiated another change in the city: an overnight crackdown on shoplifting. Suddenly, and without warning– and after years of being able to steal anything from the shelves– shoplifters are being perused with no thought of the “I can’t breathe” rhetoric that perversely infiltrated public policy just a short time ago.

In a recent incident at the WAWA near me, it was reported that a white homeless youth was physically attacked by a black security guard for calling him the N-word. Physically attacked, as in beaten up. Police now pursue shoplifting—even if it’s one can of Red Bull—with the ferocity of chasing a million dollar bank robber.

At Kensington and Allegheny, police presence has been constant since May 8. Before May 8, police looked the other way when addicts publicly helped one another shoot drugs into each other’s necks; today one can be arrested for carrying a drug pipe or other benign drug paraphernalia that used to be sold in head shops.

The bipolar disconnect is weird and confusing. The fast catch up game the city is playing is also bound to lay the groundwork for new kinds of crime.

The question is: How do you make up for having trashed an organic respect for the law many years ago without going overboard and creating another “sick” Philadelphia scenario?