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With DNC, Philadelphia police take step toward shedding checkered past

PHILADELPHIA—The moment still haunts Jim Taylor Jr., who was at the red hot center of one of the darkest chapters in this city's history.

Richard Higgins grew up in Philadelphia and is a block captain in his neighborhood in West Philadelphia. Higgins said that "the community’s relationship with police is far, far from where it used to be.” (Photo: Jasper Colt, Jasper Colt-USA TODAY)

PHILADELPHIA—The moment still haunts Jim Taylor Jr., who was at the red hot center of one of the darkest chapters in this city’s history.

His West Philadelphia home was one of 60 houses destroyed more than 31 years ago when the city’s police department unloaded a makeshift bomb from a helicopter on the violent, radical group known as MOVE that had holed up in Taylor's working-class, African-American neighborhood.

The infamous bombing by police of MOVE that killed 11 people—including five children—is among the most controversial police actions in American history and perhaps the lowest point in the history of a department that has long been checkered by a pattern of police brutality and endemic racism. MOVE, an anti-technology and pro-animal rights group, had become a nuisance to neighbors and was viewed as a threat to police.

“We’re still not whole,” Taylor, 51, an Army veteran, said as he stood outside his family’s rebuilt home.

His father, Jim Taylor, Sr., said the bomb killed the family dog, destroyed everything in the house but the freezer, and led to years of financial problems that contributed to his marriage breaking up in 1999.

“The MOVE bombing…It destroyed us,” the elder Taylor said.

About eight miles away from Taylor’s home, the Democratic National Convention comes to a close Thursday—an event where the party’s politicians repeatedly touched on the need to repair relations between the country’s law enforcement and black communities.

6221 Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia sits uninhabited after being rebuilt following a firebomb dropped from a police helicopter burned it and most of the block to the ground in 1985. (Photo: Jasper Colt, Jasper Colt-USA TODAY)

The issue is under the national spotlight in the aftermath of a series controversial police-involved killings—including this month’s police shooting deaths of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota that were captured on video—as well as the retaliatory shooting deaths of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge.

The checkered history of Philadelphia’s Police Department with African-Americans hasn’t factored into the narrative of the convention, even as surrogates for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton repeatedly spoke about the need to address issues of endemic bias in policing, while also promising to support officers.

Tensions between police and the city’s African-American community run long and deep. The Justice Department last year found that Philadelphia police officers, who were involved in nearly 400 shootings between 2007 and 2014, mistakenly perceived blacks as a threat at more than twice the rate of whites.

In 2011, the police department entered a consent decree to make a series of changes to its policies after the ACLU sued the agency for disproportionately targeting black residents for investigative street stops—known as “stop and frisk.”

The hard-edged police tactics of Philadelphia’s past, however, were not on display during this week’s convention.

“You have to learn from those things,’’ said Charles Ramsey, who served as Philadelphia’s police commissioner from 2008 until earlier this year. “MOVE was clearly a black mark on the people of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Police Department. But at some point you have got to move on and learn from those experiences. If you don’t, you’ll never see the light in front of you.’’

In a way, the Philadelphia Police Department’s handling of security around this week’s protests of the convention marked perhaps the agency’s most high-profile effort yet as it tries to shed its ugly image of the past.

Row houses in Philadelphia burn after officials dropped a bomb on the MOVE house in this May 1985 file photo. (Photo: Associated Press)

Last time Philadelphia, the nation’s fifth largest city, hosted a convention in 2000, police infiltrated activist groups and arrested more than 400 people for the duration of the convention. The city was hit with dozens of wrongful arrest lawsuits and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay off civil settlements and legal fees.

Ahead of this week’s convention, Philadelphia’s city council passed an ordinance that allowed police officers to deal with most infractions by protesters outside the convention hall with fines. As a result, police have issued about 104 tickets and had only made 11 arrests as of Thursday afternoon. The arrests all involved protesters who attempted to scale the security fence surrounding the convention complex.

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross said from the onset that he intended to manage the convention operation, overseen by the U.S. Secret Service, with a visible emphasis on the de-escalation of potentially volatile encounters with police at all costs. Ross said the strategy is quickly being adopted by other cities across the nation, even for lesser security operations.

From their understated uniforms of shirtsleeves and shorts for the bike patrol to the distribution of water to heat-stressed protesters, Ross said officers are applying lessons learned from other departments around the country, as well as his city’s past.

“If you go in like you are preparing for a fight, that’s what you’ll get,’’ Ross told reporters this week. “We made a pledge to demonstrators that we are not going to do that.’’

Back in the West Philadelphia neighborhood of the MOVE bombing, residents say the scars haven’t entirely healed, but the heavy-handed tactics of the police department have faded.

Richard Higgins, 69, a neighborhood block captain who lives just around the corner from the Osage Avenue block that was ravaged in the bombing, recalled that one of his earliest memories of the dealing with Philadelphia police was getting arrested as a young man for providing alcohol to a minor. He had purchased some liquor for his 20-year-old nephew, who had just returned home from serving in Vietnam.

The charge was dropped, but he was certain he would have never been arrested for a minor infraction had he been white. That incident, Higgins said, shaped his perspective as a young man that police were “not a friend.” It likely didn’t help that he found police to be a nearly invisible presence in his neighborhood.

In recent years, he said, that has changed. Former Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, who retired from the force in January, made community policing a focus. As a result, Higgins says he sees more officers patrolling in his neighborhood who have established good relations with him and his neighbors. And his attitude about the police department has shifted.

“If this were a white neighborhood, I don’t think police would have ever done the MOVE bombing,” Higgins said. “But the community’s relationship with police is far, far from where it used to be.”

Wilson Goode was 16 months into his term as the first African-American mayor of Philadelphia when police leveled the narrow strip of Osage Avenue, a traumatic moment that the city’s former chief executive says remains “part of who I am.’’

“It was a tragic event, a dramatic event, certainly a regrettable event for everyone,’’ Goode said. “For the people who lived there and witnessed the way it was done, they have every right to distrust and mistrust the police. In that instance, the folks in that neighborhood were failed by government and they have a right to doubt.’’

But Goode, 77, who now oversees a program that mentors children of incarcerated parents, called the police action “an aberration’’ that should not have defined the police department then and certainly not now.

“What happened there was not consistent with the kind of policing that was being done then,’’ Goode said. “It was one of those rare events, once in a century kind of events.’’

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