Peter McCarthy | Time to fight a racist, segregationist law

This is a direct response to an opinion column by Brian Goldman that appeared in The Daily Pennsylvanian a couple of days ago. I was struck by the author’s irresponsible use of a very racially charged term in this city. Furthermore, I feel that the author is guilty of diffusing the actions of what turned out to be three people to the entire group of ten or so teenagers so that they must all be doomed to the collective identity of a “violent flash mob.”

Giving a little context, I would like to put forward another not-so-reported perspective towards the phenomenon of “flash mobs” and the resulting youth curfew law that has recently been legally intensified. Perhaps ask yourselves whether this intensification could be a response to racial and class tensions that exist in our city and more specifically, to the desire on the part of wealthier and mostly white citygoers and commercial interests to keep black youth who can’t contribute economically out of the commercial space.

To give some background, on Aug. 8, 2011, Mayor Nutter issued Executive Order 9-11 to enforce and make stricter a youth curfew provision that already existed in the Philadelphia Code. As stated in the first line of the order, the temporary intensification of the curfew was a direct response to “large groups of teenagers and young adults” who had “organized themselves in so-called ‘flash mobs’” and had “assaulted, robbed and injured individuals in Center City and other parts of the city.”

A variation of this temporary intensification was eventually passed into the Philadelphia Code in Nov. 2011 through an amendment of the section on “minors” (Chapter 10-300; Bill No. 110633).

Many of my peers and I have been wondering why the city has been so heavy handed towards these groups of youngsters — to the point of even rewriting the Philadelphia Code — when there are other groups of people in this city that engage in illegal and disruptive activities without a comparable response.

What about the congregations of exploratory freshmen getting drunk for the first time and throwing up on Locust Walk? What about the fraternities and sororities? (Need I elaborate?) In fact, ask any of this year’s Penn freshmen who were minors in August of last year (when the curfew started being enforced) about the email they received from Penn’s Vice President of Public Safety assuring them that their status as Penn students effectively exempted them and their parents from many of the curfew’s sanctions.

I am by no means proposing that these other groups should be subject to our curfew law, I am saying quite the opposite: that nobody should. Why? Because the law further segregates our community simultaneously in terms of race and socioeconomic status.

Let us be clear that the curfew is directly targeted towards African American youth in Philadelphia. On Aug. 7 2011, speaking explicitly to African American youth, Mayor Nutter conducted a sermon at his church to publicly address the phenomenon of “flash mobs” telling them that “quite honestly you’ve damaged your own race.”

The following day, he issued Executive Order 9-11 as a direct response to these “so-called flash mobs,” thus implying that the law was to be targeted specifically towards African American youth he had spoken to one day previous.

The empirical record of its subsequent enforcement confirms this. Moreover, as Massaro and Mullaney found in 2011, the original areas of curfew enforcement intended in the executive order are those where the city’s white population and commercial interests are most concentrated.

The critical questions to ask are two: what message does this send to black youth in this city and what freedom does this law give police officers to act on their well known and observed racial profiling tendencies? (Stop and Frisk, I’m looking at you!)

The answer is clear: black youth, no matter what their background, age or intentions now have to think twice about living in or visiting commercial white populated spaces in this city lest they be harassed and interrogated by a police force that thinks the worst of them.

I agree with you, Mr. Goldman. Let’s not be bystanders, lets fight this racist and segregationist law!

Peter McCarthy is a first-year Masters of Social Work student from the School of Social Policy & Practice. His email address is petermcc@sp2.upenn.edu.

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