Today, Explained - The spike in gun violence (Part II)

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

A Philadelphia election tested progressive ideas on how to reduce shootings in America. ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis explains. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Previously on Today Explained. Philadelphia offers one of the starkest examples of this terrible nationwide trend. They had 499 homicides last year. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is defending his record

and says he is tackling the ongoing violence in our city. Krasner came in with letting us know that our civil rights will no longer be violated. And I think that's why he got the support of the people. Culture of the DA's office is like a sports culture. They try to maximize convictions and maximize years. We will plea deal these folks and they back out on the street. I'm speaking for a lot of mothers. I'm speaking for a lot of minorities who have been victimized through the justice system

as well. So it's like for me, it's a multidimensional quest of knowledge before I vote. Today on the show, Philly makes a choice. ProPublica's Alec McGillis gets us to Election Day, but first, he's going fishing. Back in May, I went down to this riverfront park in southwest Philly called Bartram's Garden. It has a little dock with a bunch of rowboats. I was with a few Today Explained producers, Miles Bryan and Jillian Weinberger. We went to meet up with teens

who were part of a youth group called Yeah Philly. Some of them had been caught up in the criminal justice system. A couple were wearing ankle monitors because they had active cases. But that afternoon, everybody was relaxed. It was a good vibe. You ever catch anything? No, yeah. Yo, I think I caught like two fish, though. Have you caught anything? Nah. I caught a couple condoms. Oh, shit, I got a turtle.

We were there to ask these young people what they thought was driving Philly's spike in gun violence. Tiffany Rudolph blamed it all on one thing. Tiffany Rudolph, Philly's The pandemic. There's no other way around it. We're not in school anymore. There's kids, especially me, I've depended on going to school to keep myself out of trouble. There's a lot of kids that I know. I was worried for some safety of other kids because people come to school for an escape. I do blame the pandemic as far as to why the gun violence went up. Tiffany's theory that the surge in violence was directly tied to the pandemic, it's a lot like what Philly D.A. Larry Krasner told us.

He was the prosecutor who made a lot of reforms and was taking heat for them from people who said those reforms were driving the spike in shootings. Not so, he told us. You have no organized sports for a year, essentially. You have high school classrooms that are closed. You have summer camps closed, summer job programs closed. You have all the programming that goes with houses of faith shut down. You have this dripping away of essentially everything we have taken for granted

as being preventative and protective of young people. And when all that happened, guess what? Young people were killing a lot of young people. Krasner believes the pandemic and the way it upended all of our lives is the reason for the increase in gun violence. We wanted to see how this dynamic had played out for young people in Philadelphia. So we decided to spend some more time with Tiffany to see how the pandemic affected her day-to-day life. This is my apartment. This is my living room. What are we listening to?

I don't know, YouTube. Her apartment's neat, but pretty sparse. There's a poster up on the wall for a drinking game, and another with a line of scripture. What's the quote up there? I can do all things through Christ, which strengthens me. It was here when I got here, but I didn't take it down because, like, I like it. Tiffany took us back to early 2020. I was a straight-A student. I had a 4.0 GPA. I was on the National Honor Society.

I was number two or three in my class. That would be a feat for any kid, but Tiffany's circumstances made it remarkable. In 2018, I was taken by DHS to be put in foster care. And not taken, taken. I saw myself in foster care. My household, I was living with my stepmother, and my dad was incarcerated. And it just wasn't going well. I was forced to grow up at an early age. Tiffany grew up in West Philadelphia, in a neighborhood that struggled with poverty and shootings for a long time.

For Tiffany and a lot of kids like her, school wasn't just a place to learn. It was a place of stability and safety in an often chaotic world. Tiffany also played soccer, joined youth groups, interned with her school's administrative office, took classes at a local university, worked a job, anything she could to stay occupied. But then the COVID lockdown began. Last evening, I announced that we had lost the first of what will become many Pennsylvanians to the novel coronavirus. And happening right now, all restaurants and bars in Philadelphia are being ordered to shut down.

We have breaking news from the Philadelphia School District. Officials have just announced that schools will be closed indefinitely. No doubt officials will be talking about this. All of Tiffany's activities were canceled, and school shrunk down to a box on her screen. It got draining. I went from being energized to lazy.

Like, you go from waking up early in the morning, by the second bus to get to school, you're up, you're energized, you're ready to go. Like, you're ready for the day. It's like your home. It's like, oh, well, technically I don't have to get out of bed. So I'm just going to stay in bed. That's not healthy at all. She limped to graduation and managed to enroll at Temple University for the fall.

But when college classes started online, she had a hard time. Academically, I failed Temple to the point where I have no credits for my first semester. I dropped out of school my second semester before it was over. Teenagers across the country struggle to stay engaged with their schoolwork during the pandemic. Many have been dealing with increased anxiety and depression. Some pediatricians have reported more suicide attempts. Philadelphia's high schools stayed almost entirely closed through this last school year. The rec centers shut down. The libraries shut down. Even now, many of the city's swimming pools are still shuttered.

The school shutdowns were initiated to save lives. But for some of the boys Tiffany grew up with, the shutdowns themselves put them at risk. A lot of people, they went to school to escape from their home. You never know what people go through behind closed doors. They could have went to school just to eat because they don't have food at home. They could have went to school to get the loving from their teachers because they couldn't get that at home. Now, I know some of the boys, like, they used to go talk to the counselor. No matter how they act or whatever, they will go to the counselor. And it's like, for them, I know it hit them hard because it's like, you don't have a counselor nowhere.

And it's like, okay, they have free time now. You have 24-7 out of the day. You're not in school. You don't have to do anything technically. So it's like, oh, I'm going to go out and do this. I'm going to go out and do that. And it's because they don't have the structure of going to school anymore. And it wasn't just school that was out.

It was after-school programs too. Like, yeah, Philly, the one that took the kids fishing. Whether it's you've got to do your homework, you want to hang out, you want to play video games, you can all come here. Kendra Vandewater is the co-founder. Before we went out on the dock together, she walked us through the group's new permanent location in the heart of West Philly. Beanbag chairs, TV, bookshelves, all of that. Kentra created this place for kids to decompress, process, and talk out disputes. A place to head off conflict before it has the chance to become violent.

Before there's even a reason for cops to get involved. We mediate a lot of stuff. We have kids who come here and say this is the only place they feel like they don't have to bring a gun. They're with us at events, they're saying that's the only time they feel like they don't have to bring a gun. They're with us at events. They're saying that's the only time they feel like they don't have to look over their shoulder. So we're trying to create a culture where we have to find you other ways, you know, to resolve things and to feel safe without carrying a gun. Up until March of 2020, the group was operating out of Philly's public rec centers,

hosting dozens of young people every week for meals and after-school activities. When the pandemic hit, those rec centers closed. Yeah, Philly tried to continue online, but it wasn't the same. Most of our kids and young people, they want to be seen in person. They don't do well logging on and doing all that. So that was a loss. And we weren't able to reconnect with them on a deeper level until we were able to get our own space. With school online, rec centers locked, and even basketball hoops taken down,

Kendra wasn't surprised when the shooting rate started to go up in Philly in the spring of 2020. As that happened, more people started carrying guns. We know that because police were finding more guns when they were making stops. Research shows that generally more guns leads to more shootings. We asked Kendra about Joe Sullivan's explanation for this. He's the former deputy police commissioner you heard from in the last episode. I don't think you could ignore the election of the new DA and the reform measures that were put in place.

Sullivan thought that because the conviction rate for gun possession has fallen under Krasner, the DA has created a sort of culture of impunity, where more young people were carrying guns because they figured they had a pretty good chance of getting away with it. Kendra doesn't buy it. I don't think they think that far. I think that it's really about them protecting themselves. And we talk about that too.

A lot of them don't understand how the system works, even the ones that are in there. They don't understand, you know, what the numbers are or what the process is, even for their own cases. Kendra blames the pandemic and what came a few months later in late May of 2020. We did so much processing with our young people around that, you know, they're watching Instagram videos of George Floyd being killed how many times. They're in the midst of all of the protests and uprisings that are happening in their neighborhoods. In Philly and a number of other cities, some people looted stores and set police cars on fire.

Thick black smoke billowing in the air. That's because at least four police cars have been burning after protesters— Some of the worst looting happened in Tiffany's old neighborhood. The police SWAT vehicle started dispersing the tear gas in the residential areas before it even made it to the intersection at 52nd and Arch. Allies of the police, people like Joe Sullivan, they blame local officials for not doing enough to support cops through the protests. Oh, it destroyed morale.

It really did. It destroyed morale. Krasner's office actually charged two officers for their behavior during that period. One for pepper spraying an activist in the face, the other for hitting a protester in the head with his baton. Officers are saying, man, if they're getting locked up that easily, I don't really want to get involved in this. I've got a mortgage to pay and tuition to pay.

During all of this, tons of cops are retiring early or just quitting altogether. At the same time, city officials decided to close the police academy, the pipeline for new recruits, due to the pandemic. The rate of police stops in Philly had already fallen off when COVID first hit. Officers were told to avoid low-level arrests altogether to try and slow the spread of the virus. After the protests, the number of police stops fell even further. Officers were stretched thin, dealing with protests and looting and enforcing a curfew. But some of that decline might have also just been the police choosing to make fewer stops.

Maybe they don't get out of their cars and walk through the neighborhoods. Maybe they don't chase every lead. Maybe they take their time responding to a call. I'm sure that some officers have pulled back. Police stops fell in cities across the country. And gun violence spiked in almost all of them. Criminologists generally agree that having more cops walking around, just seeing and

being seen, helps deter crime. But activists like Kendra say blaming the police pullback for the surge in violence misses a bigger point. That big city departments have done a bad job at solving gun crimes for years. In Philadelphia, police make arrests in fewer than 50% of homicide cases. The rate for non-fatal shootings is even lower than that. Just about one in four result in an arrest. Kendra says people living in areas

with a lot of violent crime understand that, viscerally. So if a person is taken from you and you don't believe in that system to solve that murder, they'll say, we'll just handle it ourselves because they're not going to solve it anyway. After all the high-profile deaths at police hands in recent years, Tiffany's been wary of working with the police too. Like my era of teens, like we've been like cautious around cops, but like it got worse. It kept happening. It kept happening. And nothing was being done about it.

So I was like, okay, at this point, we're like, we're fed up. Tiffany says she's had a dozen family members and friends get shot, most of them since the pandemic began. She told Miles that Philly police finally arrested a suspect in the murder of one of her friends this spring, a few years after it happened. I actually cried. That's the first time I actually heard someone like my friend or any of my friend's killings being solved.

Was it weird to like have that feeling of not happy, but just sort of like appreciative of the cops? It was, I don't know. My feelings will not change towards the cops. I don't care. I'm not about to thank you for doing your job. Yeah, no. You did your job. It took you long enough is what I will say. It took you long enough.

This distrust, it can help fuel a cycle of retaliation that can be nearly impossible to stop. Someone sees a friend or family member get shot. They don't see the police as an option, so they don't return a cop's call during the investigation or agree to testify. Instead, they take matters into their own hands. They get revenge. That crew retaliates in return.

A lot of this now plays out on social media, ramping up the tension. On and on it goes. Criminologists say these two things, the police stepping back and the community's growing distrust of the cops, they're like two sides of the same coin. But they both played a role in fueling the gun violence spike. And this brings us back to Larry Krasner. Hold that thought. We got to do a break. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. We're back with Alec McGillis from ProPublica. But Alec, before I hand it off to you, I just want to recap here. We've got a lot of gun violence in Philadelphia, a pandemic that's making it worse. There's a reformer DA who wants to take a different approach. He's also being blamed

for the increase in gun violence, and he's up for reelection against a more conventional prosecutor. Do I have all that right? Yeah. The city had to decide whether to stick with Larry Krasner and his promise to transform

the criminal justice system. I mean, this is a showdown between the past and the future. This is a showdown between criminal justice reform and the kind of criminal justice that is in an old, brutal, and racist policing. Or whether to vote for his challenger, Carlos Vega. Mr. Krasner, you have blood on your hands. He's a former homicide prosecutor. Larry Krasner had actually fired him, along with a few dozen other career prosecutors,

when he took office in 2018. On May 18th, primary day, turnout started slow. Go, go, go, Vega! Both of the candidates had busy schedules today, trying to make sure their supporters cast their ballots for an election that is being watched beyond Philadelphia. We need a change. We need safety and reform. We can do both. We deserve both. You cannot blame the prosecutors or the police for the fact that the pandemic shut down so many

things. So I'm going to move out of the city if Krasner wins again. I want to stay in Philadelphia. I love Philadelphia, but I can't live under Larry Krasner another four years. We're taking illegal guns in record numbers, but there's no consequence. We're asking the DA's office, like, what are you doing? Go vote for Vega! Go vote for Carlos Vega for district attorney of Philadelphia. In the end, not that many people did go vote for Vega. Larry Krasner has just declared victory.

Here are the latest results. Krasner leading challenger, Carlos Vega, with 64% of the vote. Krasner won the Democratic primary, which in Philadelphia is the only race that really matters. He won big with the middle class progressives that helped propel him to office the first time. We in this movement for criminal just reform just want a big one. And just like in his first election, Krasner also won handily with voters in the city's black neighborhoods.

With the residents most affected by gun violence and by the excesses of the criminal justice system, the Krasner coalition held. And Nikesha stuck with him too, even as she grieved the loss of her son. I have to still stand on civil rights and not just my own personal plight. We're tired of our families being dismantled by the justice system. I have to say I'm really impressed with your ability to think about the broader system in light of what happened. How do you think you were able to do that? I don't know.

I'm a mom. I'm a mom. And my nurturing and love doesn't just end with just my children. In the end, Nikisha and many others in Philly didn't see the DA's race as a choice between reforming the criminal justice system or stemming the rise in gun violence. They bought into the pitch that Krasner

and other progressive candidates across the country are making. That draconian prison sentences and overly aggressive policing are both unethical and unhelpful in reducing violent crime. And that getting at the root cause of the violence requires investment in longer-term strategies, opening more rec centers, improving schools, and creating good jobs. But so far this year, Philly's been kind of an outlier. The Associated Press projects Eric Adams as the winner of the Democratic primary in the race for New York City mayor.

New York City went to the polls to pick its Democratic nominee for mayor last month. Eric Adams is a former cop who campaigned on stopping gun crime. For 22 years, I wore a bulletproof vest and stood on the street corners and protected children and families in the city of New York. Adams beat out a bunch of progressive candidates, Larry Krasner types. You yourself have said you're the new face of the Democratic Party. Explain that. Because we have abandoned our cities. And you're seeing the Democratic Party, basically, they've thrown up their hands

and we're continuing to see the same problems in our inner cities. We need to turn it around. And it's not just New York. In Los Angeles County, residents are gathering signatures to try and recall the progressive DA there. And in Atlanta, the mayor abruptly decided not to seek re-election last spring. She had been taking heat for presiding over a sharp spike in gun crime as well. Hmm.

So it seems like we're in this difficult moment. On the one hand, from what you've been telling us, the roots of the surge in violence over the last 18 months is not as simple as like one program that got canceled or one policy that got changed. It's the pandemic and the protests and the police and probably other things on top of that. And in Philly, at least, people are not convinced that they should react to all that by ditching criminal justice reform. But structural change takes a long time. And this problem is affecting people's lives right now.

Are there solutions that could help in the short term? It's hard. These cycles of retaliation are really tough to break. But a lot of people are now trying to figure this out. There's been a growing recognition that something changed for the worst over the last year, beyond the root cause problems that have existed for a long time. People see that stopping the bleeding requires acknowledging that and rebuilding the social connections that ruptured during the last 18 months.

You can see this new focus in Philadelphia, where leaders are pouring money into anti-violence programs, over $100 million, and Philly's doubling down on that program we heard about in the previous episode, the one that targets government resources to those most likely to shoot or be shot. This kind of spending is gaining steam

on the national level, too. Cities experienced an increase in gun violence. We're able to use the American Rescue Plan dollars to hire police officers needed for community policing and to pay their overtime. We know this stuff can work because it's worked before. It's just going to take a lot of money and time and effort. It's the sort of effort Tiffany Rudolph knows all too well. I don't know, like, I just want to get my life back. Tiffany's doing much better than she was last winter, but when we last met up, she

told Miles she was exhausted. Okay, I'm gonna tell you why I was up till 6 o'clock in the morning. I was on the phone talking someone out of shooting someone. Like, I, like, and that's not the first time I did that. Like, I actually do this. What was the situation? I guess the guy killed someone we know. And my friend found out, and he was looking for retaliation. I understood him 100%.

However, I don't have time for you either getting shot back at and dying or getting a case and now you have to go to jail. Do you think he heard you? He better heard me. His mom was there too. He gave his mom the gun. So that's what made me feel okay with hanging up the phone. I just didn't feel comfortable hanging up the phone until I know he understood me.

But he passed the gun to his mother. I felt comfortable enough to get off the phone with him to know that he's not going to go out here and do anything crazy. Tiffany will take her wins where she can get them. She stopped a shooting. It was a small victory. But she can't keep staying up all night. She can only do her part. We made these two episodes on the Great Regression in collaboration with Alec McGillis and ProPublica.

You can find Alec's written piece at ProPublica.org. Just look for his byline. Alec had production and reporting help. From Today Explains, Jillian Weinberger and Miles Bryan. Editing from Matthew Collette and Nick Varshaver. Fact-checking by Laura Bullard. Engineering from Afim Shapiro and Hannes Brown. Special thanks to Thomas Abt, Katarina Roman, Liz Kelly Nelson, and Lauren Katz.

The rest of the Today Explained team includes Will Reed, Halima Shah, Victoria Chamberlain, Emily Sen, and Amina Alsadi, who's our supervising producer. We had extra help this week from Paul Mounsey and Christian Ayala. We have music from Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassenfeld. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.