We are taking a brief vacation! Greens Oppose Philly’s Stop-and-Frisk
Our next publication will be on August 24th. See you then! By Chris Robinson
“My father said if you are ever stopped by the police, you say, “Yes, Sir – No Sir.” Tell the officer what’s in your wallet. Don’t, don’t make no sudden moves and don’t run. Just get through whatever the situation is,’ Nutter said. ‘Those lessons stuck with me.’” [See, Philadelphia Daily News, June 22, 2011, page 3.] During 2005, Philadelphia’s police made 102,319 pedestrian stops. When Michael Nutter became Mayor of Philadelphia in 2008, he ordered an increase in pedestrian stops under a policy commonly called “Stop-and-Frisk.” By 2009, pedestrian stops by police had in- creased 148 percent to 253,333. Of that total, 72 percent of the victims were African Americans, but only
8 percent of those pedestrian stops resulted in an arrest. I, for one, would like to know what we should call the other 92 percent of those pedestrian stops. Were those 233,066 citizens “harassed by the police?” Were they “intimi- dated by the police?” Or should we say, “Their rights under the U.S. Constitution were violated?” The Green Party has a history of opposition to stop-and-frisk. Un- der the heading “Racial Discrimi- nation,” the Green Party national platform says, “We condemn the practice of racial profiling by law enforcement agencies, which are guilty of stopping motorists, ha- rassing individuals, or using un- warranted violence against sus- pects with no other justification than race or ethnic background.” At a Philadelphia City Council
hearing on December 14, 2010, Green Party leader Hugh Gior- dano, who had run for PA House of Representatives, made it clear that stop-and-frisk targets, ur- ban, minority and young citizens. “This law is a form of Jim Crow law,” said Giordano, referring to discriminatory laws used to main- tain segregation of the races. “It attacks a certain group of people, and the numbers and testimony shows it.” Giordano also criticized Philadelphia’s City Council for al- lowing stop-and-frisk to continue unabated. One result of the increased harass- ment and intimidation ordered by Nutter was a federal lawsuit, Bai- ley v. City of Philadelphia, filed in U.S. District Court in November 2010. This class action suit charged that minorities were targeted by
Center City Philadelphia’s Community Newspaper
the police based upon their race and that stops by police were car- ried out without probable cause or reasonable suspicion. This lawsuit was resolved out of court on June 21, 2011, when Nut- ter announced that he would sign two Executive Orders. At the press conference, Nutter said, “Law en- forcement in an urban environment demands a close working relation- ship between the police, the com- munity and the citizens, the people we work for.” Nutter continued, “The heart of that contract between the citizens and police is trust.” Green Party Membership Secretary Carol McLean says, “This is pre- cisely where Greens differ from the City of Philadelphia and its Police Department. Greens believe that
continued on page 10 August 10th, 2011 WEEKLYPRESS
North Philadelphia’s Poor Clare Monastery W
By Thom Nickels Contributing Writer
hen Pope Benedict XVI closed Rome’s centuries- old Santa Croce monas-
tery in May 2011 for “liturgical and financial irregularities,” and trans- ferred the 20 or so in-house Trap- pist monks to other monasteries, he put an end to a “worship venue” that had become a hot spot for Ro- man high society. Santa Croce’s ab- bot, an ex-Milan fashion designer, had been told to get out of town by the pope some years before for his part in turning Santa Croce into a celebrity ashram. Madonna loved to visit Santa Croce although with the closure Lady Gaga will never get a chance. “Liturgical irregularities” covers a lot of territory. In Santa Croce’s case it was liturgical dancing. That’s when people in chiffon like cos- tumes succumb to attacks of nar-
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Poor Clare Monastery at Corinthian and W. Girard Avenue in North Philadelphia’s Francisville section. Posted by the Preservation Alliance -
fieldnotesphilly.wordpress.com
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Fracking Hurting Health Right Now
By Iris Marie Bloom Environmental Writer
T
his morning, riding my bike down Christian Street, across the South Street
Bridge and into West Philadel- phia after an early morning meet- ing, I inhaled far more dirty ex- haust than I wanted to. A city bus belched directly into my lungs and I held my breath as I passed the cloud. It suddenly occurred to me that for me, as an asthmatic and a bike rider, as a city dweller, it would seem “as if” it’s a GREAT thing for city buses to switch to natural gas. But the only new sources of natural gas are those that can only be accessed by deep drilling into hard shale, called “fracking.” If I didn’t personally know peo- ple being hurt by fracking right now up in Susquehanna County and Bradford County, in Wash- ington and Greene Counties in southwestern PA, and elsewhere in the state and country – I could really imagine the seductive ap- peal. How much more appealing it must seem to those who have not been listening to hydrologists, biochemists and climate scientists make the case for a moratorium on fracking. I’ve been listening to those scientists, and I am com- pletely persuaded that it’s urgent for us to halt fracking in Pennsyl- vania based on the cumulative im- pacts to our ecosystem and based on threats to public health for our own and future generations. But it’s not just scientists I’ve been listening to. It’s real people, ordi- nary people in the Susquehanna River watershed and the Ohio River watershed where high-vol- ume horizontal hydraulic frac- turing is already underway, who have had the greatest impact on me. Carl and Judy Stiles of Sugar Run, in Bradford County, were told by a toxicologist to get out of their home last November after they’d been suffering severe abdominal
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