Hundreds of killings drove Philadelphia Black voters to back the public safety candidate
Residents and leaders in Philadelphia are concerned about the implementation of Parker’s public safety agenda.
In the City of Brotherly Love, where there’s a history of police brutally slaying Black men, Black voters helped elect a mayor openly committed to a practice known to put them under greater police scrutiny and exposure.
The history is deep and deadly. And Philadelphians know that.
In 1883, after a police-protected mob attack on abolitionists and police beatings of Black voters, Philadelphia in 1924 studied its policing of Black people. The study determined that Black people accounted for almost 25% of arrests even though they made up just 9% of the population.
Fast-forward to 2024, and the city swears in Cherelle Parker, Philadelphia’s first Black female mayor who prioritized public safety in her platform. It includes evaluating city-owned cameras in public places, increasing the number of police patrolling streets, and supporting a controversial tactic of detaining and searching people based on reasonable suspicion of weapon possession or criminal activity — stop and frisk.
Black voters were aware of the déjà-vu nature of Parker’s platform, city residents said. They know the controversial stop-and-frisk practice led to over-policing, unnecessary arrests, lawsuits, and brutality. But they also know there are hundreds of murders and homicides of people who look like them, who come from their communities and are disproportionately affected. And that’s why Black voters supported her, activists said.
However, even though violent crime has reached unprecedented levels since 2020, residents and leaders in Philadelphia — including ones that support the mayor’s plans — are concerned about the implementation of Parker’s public safety agenda.
“We know that even things with good intentions can sometimes go off the rails. Anytime you talk about stop and frisk, we have to be sure that we’re talking about stops and searches that are justified,” said Mark Tyler, a reverend and community leader in Philadelphia. “While it may seem on a gut level that this is the right thing to do, the way it’s been done in the past doesn’t work.”
Historically, the implementation of stop and frisk did not adhere to its intention, which was for police to temporarily detain someone who was suspected of carrying a weapon or illegal item or reasonably believed to be involved in a crime. Instead, it turned into the police capriciously stopping people, and it disproportionately affected people of color.
“Stop-and-frisk law must be based on more than whimsy but less than probable cause; it must be based on (1) reasonable suspicion, (2) good cause to believe, and (3) articulable suspicion,” according to The Department of Justice.
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Philadelphia is no stranger to stop-and-frisk controversy and litigation. In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal class action lawsuit on behalf of eight Black and Latino men who said the police stopped them because of their race. The department settled the lawsuit in 2011 and agreed to collect stop-and-frisk data.
In 2018, the data revealed that the department still engaged in unconstitutional stop-and-frisk tactics. Eighty percent of the stops and 87% of the frisks were of Black and Latino citizens. However, that demographic comprised 56% of the population. Of the 741 frisks during the seven years, only 10 of them produced a weapon, according to the ACLU report.
“There is no place for unconstitutional stop and frisk,” Parker said previously on the campaign trail. “Terry stops are what I wholeheartedly embrace as a tool that law enforcement needs to make the public safety of our city their No. 1 priority. It is a legal tool.”
Terry stops are defined as “the authority to conduct an investigative detention and frisk of a criminal suspect.”
The name “Terry” comes from a 1968 Supreme Court case that allowed police to stop someone if they had a reasonable suspicion that they’re “armed, engaged in, or about to be engaged in criminal conduct.”
Terry stops are almost identical to the definition of stop and frisk with one major difference — the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Terry stops constitutional.
After recording more shootings and killings in Philadelphia from 2020-2022, homicides declined by 20% in 2023. However, more than 400 people were slain last year, and most of the victims were Black people from poor neighborhoods.
Parker’s focus on public safety helped her win the election. It wasn’t just that she was a Black woman. She wasn’t the only Black candidate. From the beginning, she focused on crime and the safety of Black residents. As a result, her win was driven by Black voters who came from the disenfranchised communities in the city.
Voter turnout was low, with two-thirds of registered voters sitting out the election. Still, 56% of the majority of Black precincts voted for Parker, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I think it’s clear that Black voters rallied around Cherelle Parker,” Tyler said. “With public safety consistently being the No. 1 concern on the minds of voters, even though we can debate what public safety looks like, the consensus is that she stood out the most to people.”
Philadelphia wouldn’t be the first city to bring back the controversial policing tactic in recent years. New York City Mayor Eric Adams brought the practice back in 2021, as did cities in Illinois and Minnesota.
Last year, a court-appointed federal monitor said that members of the NYPD’s Neighborhood Safety Team, an elite unit in the department, made too many unlawful stops and that 97% of the people stopped were either Black or Hispanic.
In Washington D.C., the U.S. Attorney asked the city council to allow the police to use stop-and-frisk tactics to handle surging crime in the city. Black residents in Chicago were nine times more likely to be stopped by the police in 2018 and 2019, according to a report an independent monitor released in 2023. Less than 4% of these stops result in a weapon being found, and police rarely find drugs when they stop someone.
An annual report released by the Milwaukee police department in 2023 showed that Black Milwaukee residents were 4.5 times more likely to be stopped while driving than white ones and were 10 times more likely to be subjected to “field interviews” than white people.
For Philadelphia, the fear from some community leaders is that the stop-and-frisk practice will morph into what it used to be, despite the intentions of Mayor Parker and the police department. “It’s going to target Black men, it’s going to cost the city lawsuits, it’s going to generate a lot of distrust towards the police,” Reuben Jones, the executive director of Frontline Dads, a gun violence prevention group in Philadelphia, told WHYY.
Data from Philadelphia shows that 90% of those stopped and frisked are innocent of any crime. In fact, Philadelphia police only found guns and drugs on about 4% of all stops in 2019. They made almost 77,000 pedestrian stops that year.
Overall, Black residents are 44% of the city’s population but account for 71% of police stops, the Inquirer reported.
Tyler says others are choosing to be cautiously optimistic and hope that the mayor also focuses on uplifting other initiatives to address the violence and despair.
“We tend to only look at this from a policy and police perspective,” Tyler said. “Yes, it’s a problem that police need to be involved in, but it’s also a neighborhood problem that all sectors need to be involved in.”
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