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A Philadelphia story

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

Last Wednesday, July 12, in a scene eerily reminiscent on the Los Angeles police beating of Rodney King in 1991, a television crew in a helicopter filmed Philadelphia cops pulling a black suspect from a stolen police cruiser and beating him with fists and feet for almost half a minute.

The incident might have sparked widespread protests or, worse, violence, but it didn’t. Much of the credit for that must go to John Timoney, the city’s police commissioner, who immediately appealed for calm and promised a full investigation. Timoney neither condemned the officers nor blamed the suspect. Rather, he simply urged that no one rush to judgment, that they wait for all the facts to emerge. Nothing inflammatory, nothing reckless, just the kind of common-sense approach to solving conflict that is too often absent in what passes for civil society today. It’s no wonder Timoney, a Dublin native who earned his stripes on the mean streets of New York, is considered by many to be the most effective big-city police chief in the U.S.

Following Timoney’s lead, similar appeals for calm came from the city’s political leaders, black and white. Many of the city’s newspapers, including its main black paper, echoed those sentiments. To be sure, with the Republican national convention slated for the city later this month, all had reason to want the City of Brotherly Love to live up to its billing. But the public’s resistance to sensationalizing the event, its aversion to turning it into another Rodney King and thus inflaming racial tensions, seemed rooted in a genuine desire to avoid conflict as well as an understanding that justice can only be served when all the facts are known.

Some details have already emerged, and though, if true, they may yet fall short of justifying the action of some of the estimated two dozen officers who converged on the stolen cruiser, they do suggest that this might have been something other than a clear-cut case of overaggressive police treatment of an already subdued suspect.

The suspect is Thomas Jones, a career street criminal who, according to the Philadelphia Daily News, preyed on "the young, the old, and the weak." On July 1, he allegedly carjacked a Chevrolet Cavalier from a 68-year-old women, slamming her arm in the car door in the process. On July 12, the police spotted Jones in that car and ordered him to stop. He sped away, nearly running down a police officer and plowing into a crowd of funeral mourners. He allegedly exchanged gunfire with police and one cop, police say, was hit. Though shot himself, Jones then managed to commandeer the cruiser, driving it a mile through residential neighborhoods before he was cornered.

The helicopter footage shows the officers converging on the cruiser. Jones, inside, is not seen until a policeman, after several attempts, finally pulls him from the car. Ten officers, four of them black, are then shown kicking or throwing punches before Jones is dragged, handcuffed, to a police van.

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The footage does not show how many punches were landed, but during the sequence several offers tumble backward, as if thrown off balance. What is not clear is how much resistance Jones put up.

Only a full and independent investigation can answer those questions. Video footage will no doubt play a part, but only a part. It may turn out that the police acted criminally, or it may be that their actions, all or in part, were justified.

Timoney acknowledged that the video "out of context looks really bad," but noted that it represents 28 seconds of a 21-minute episode. He vowed that officers found to have committed abuses would be prosecuted.

The fact that four of the officers on the video were black probably helped defuse the racial hand grenade. And, as the Philadelphia Enquirer noted, "black citizens, while leery of harassment and brutality, are also sick of being prey to the violent and larcenous." Both facts no doubt helped keep Philadelphia calm in the aftermath of this unfortunate episode. And yet without the direct, rational response from Commissioner Timoney, things could have been very different indeed.

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