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Inside Today's Bulletin
Philadelphia's Zombies
By: Michael P. Tremoglie, The Bulletin
11/16/2007
"It's worse than horrible because a zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring."
You mean like Democrats?" (from the 1940 Bob Hope movie "The Ghost Breakers")
While watching Mayor John Street make yet another vapid, fatuous pronouncement that more gun laws are the solution to the mayhem in Philadelphia, one would have to believe that he is exactly the type of Democrat Bob Hope was talking about more than 60 years ago.
Hizzoner, once again, pointed the finger at guns as the culprit after yet another shooting of police officers. They were plainclothes narcotics officers serving an arrest warrant at a house, in Philadelphia's Frankford section, from which illegal drugs were being sold. The juvenile shooter was described as making a living dealing drugs.
These were the fourth and fifth Philadelphia police officers shot in the past several weeks - one fatally. Two retired Philadelphia police officers were shot and killed in Northeast Philadelphia while working as armored car guards.
After every incident, Mayor Street blamed gun laws as the reason for the slaughter. Yet the one thing besides using a gun the shooters all had in common - the one thing that Mayor Street, his myrmidon Commissioner Johnson and the media claques all repeatedly ignore - is that all the shooters had prior criminal records.
Mustafa Ali was the killer of the two retired officers. He was convicted in 1993 of robbing a bank at gunpoint. He was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III to only seven years in federal prison followed by five years' supervised release, despite the fact he was eligible for at least 111?2 years according to sentencing guidelines.
However, Mustafa's attorney, Patricia McInerney, now a Common Pleas Court judge, plea bargained the case with the government so that he did not get the sentence for which he was eligible. Indeed, ultimately Mustafa did not even serve the entire seven years of the more lenient plea-bargained sentence.
Antonio Coulter, the shooter of Officer Richard DeCoatesworth, had a prior arrest record for illegal drugs and assault. He was arraigned Nov. 1 and scheduled for another arraignment for additional charges Nov. 26. Perhaps this time the judge might keep him in jail - presuming he is convicted.
Jerome Whitaker, the shooter of Officer Mariano Santiago, had a prior arrest for murder. He pleaded guilty to the 1994 shooting of a 6-year-old. Mr. Whitaker's defense was that he fired at an unoccupied vehicle as payback for an earlier clash. The little girl was killed by a stray round.
Mr. Whitaker served all of 11 years in state prison before being paroled in July 2006. He was arrested about a year later for violating parole yet was subsequently released a few months later - only a few weeks before shooting Officer Santiago.
John Lewis, who shot and killed Officer Charles Cassidy, had a prior arrest record for illegal drugs. He had no past arrests for violent felonies, yet he was filmed by a security camera robbing a store at gunpoint weeks before - the same store he was robbing when he killed Officer Cassidy. (The moral of this story is that just because shooting suspects have never been arrested for a violent crime does not mean they never committed one.) Incidentally, the person who helped Mr. Lewis flee police also has a prior criminal record.
Yet, somehow Mayor Street is oblivious to this very pertinent fact: Criminals, sometimes even those with a prior murder conviction, are routinely let out of jail and walk the streets of Philadelphia with impunity.
One reason may be that it is easier for Mayor Street to blame the chimera of guns and evil greedy gun manufacturers rather than confront the real problems of a defective criminal justice system that consists of feckless judges, capricious parole boards and unanswerable probation departments. These people are part of the mayor's political cronies. He cannot point the finger at them.
It is more convenient that he assign blame for violent criminality to a business. This is more appealing to the mayor's left-wing base. It is very easy for Mayor Street to deflect the blame from himself and his colleagues for the violent crime wave engulfing Philadelphia by playing to his liberal constituency.
Former Police Commissioner John Timoney testified before the U.S. Senate in 1999 that "the average national sentence for violation of federal gun laws is 77 months. This stands in stark contrast to the three- to six-month sentence now received in Philadelphia's state courts."
That was eight years ago. When will the courts and corrections systems, instead of manufacturers, be held responsible?
Michael P. Tremoglie is an advisor to the presidential campaign of Representative Duncan Hunter, who is seeking the nomination of the Republican Party. He was formerly director of managed care at Temple University Health Sciences Center.