Drug and Gun Money: Too Great to Stop Violent Crime?

As I sat down to prepare this post, I was feeling a great deal of frustration about the continuing lack of meaningful local and national leadership with regard to the murders, robberies and drug-induced madness in Philadelphia’s black communities.

I’m frustrated and moving very fast because, once again, I’m supposed to be in two different places at the same time, this morning. It’s not my office manager’s fault; some things simply can’t be changed.

In this case, I heard a couple of days ago, that the mother of Leonard Small, one of my closest childhood friends, has died and the funeral is at 9:00 this morning, at St. Paul Church, at 10th & Wallace Street. That’s two blocks south of the Richard Allen Housing Projects, where we grew up, and directly across the street from the new complex of $350,000 townhouses I discussed in last week’s blog post.

At the very same time, Philadelphia NAACP President Jerry Mondesire has invited a small group of black men to a 9:00 am breakfast to offer support to his son, Joey, who’s headed off to college. It’s a good idea. With all that we’re faced with, black men need to think more and more creatively about ways to preserve their children’s futures. Raising a child is a shared responsibility – especially amid the peculiar and outrageous chaos that impacts black boys in Philly and across the country, today.

I heard of Leonard’s mom’s passing from another childhood friend, Billy Smith (we used to call him, “Puppet;” he hated it), who happened to be in the audience Wednesday night as I spoke for Minister Rodney Muhammad, at a meeting called to discuss ways in which the local black community might, somehow, begin to curtail the growing rate of murder and violent crime in Philadelphia.

After my presentation, a woman from Germantown approached me, in tears, and said that her own son had been murdered 10 years ago, and that the horrible conditions I described in my remarks had not changed at all since his death. Even in her continuing grief about her son, however, she volunteered to help, in any way she could, to save other young people from the madness.

That’s how strong many of our black parents are, Bill Cosby, despite the circumstances in which they and their children have been put.

On Tuesday, the day before Rodney Muhammad’s event, all of the newspapers and websites were filled with the latest FBI statistics that indicated that, in the year 2006, Philadelphia had the highest per capita murder rate among cities with 1 million or more persons.



The FBI further reported that Philly’s violent crime rate also grew at a nation-leading pace – up 5.9 percent vs. 1.3 percent for the nation, as a whole - and while property crime actually decreased by 2.9 percent nationwide in 2006, our city’s property crime rate jumped by 3.6 percent.

Perhaps most revealing for those who are serious about reversing those trends, the same report indicated that the cities with the greatest violent crime rates are generally those with the greatest number of impoverished people. Sounds like a good description of Philadelphia − a city with a 24.5 percent poverty rate, and where only about 50 percent of adult black males have jobs.

Among 34 cities with a population of 500,000 or more, Philadelphia (at 27.8 per 100,000) had the fourth - highest murder rate, behind Detroit (47 per 100,000), Baltimore (43 per 100,000), and Washington D.C., (29 per 100,000). New York City, (which still gets curiously strong favorable national publicity as the “safest U.S. big city”) actually experienced a 10.6 percent increase in murders in 2006. The mean average black population in those cities stands at 67.6 percent and each of them have a poverty rate that exceeds the national average.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, criminologists have said the surge in the national violent crime rate is attributable to… “unemployment, a resurgence of gang activity, increased traffic in illegal guns, reductions in programs for youth development, children growing up in poverty and single-parent households.”

Curiously, the one thing that the criminologists are careful not to include in their analyses is the impact of drugs and the “business of illegal drugs” in our communities across the country. According to the Federal Office of Drug Control Policy, Americans spend as much as $70 billion a year on cocaine and $23 billion a year on heroin. In addition, in late December of last year, Reuters, the international newswire service, reported that America’s number one cash crop is marijuana, at $35 billion a year. Just the combination of the annual cocaine, heroin and marijuana sales in this country, equates to $128 billion and, in 2006, Tom Riley, a Drug Control Policy spokesperson, estimated overall U.S. illegal drug use at $200 billion annually.

If our nation's illegal drug industry were to be incorporated, given a corporate logo, listed on an exchange and ranked by Fortune Magazine in its annual list of America’s 500 largest businesses, it would be the country's fifth largest publicly traded company , smaller only than Wal-Mart($351 billion), ExxonMobil($347 billion), General Motors($207 billion) and Chevron($200.5 billion).

That’s more annual revenue from illegal drugs than all of the corporate revenues last year at Ford Motor Company, or Verizon, or Home Depot, or Merrill Lynch, or Goldman Sachs, or Procter and Gamble. More than the annual revenues at Dell Computers, Target, Wachovia Corporation or Pepsi Cola. As hard as it may be to believe, the business of drugs is even bigger than Halliburton, which earned just $22.6 billion last year, according to Fortune.

We know where the money from the publicly traded companies goes. But who gets to keep the non-taxable $200 billion from the non-stock exchange - listed drug traffickers, the people who grow it, process it, ship it and do wholesale distribution? And with that much money on the table, is it any wonder that there is no real effort to keep drugs out of our communities? If we really want to stop drug use and violent crime, why has there never been a focus on the “top end” of the drug industry, by major media outlets? I don’t know, doesn’t it seem as though the elimination of the national, illicit drug trade in this country would reduce the desperation and chaos in our cities?

And while we’re on that subject, why, again, don’t mainstream media talk at all about who really made the money that was realized from the 86 million firearms that were manufactured in the United States from 1977 to 1996. And, why don’t they focus on the 43 percent increase in imported handguns into the United States over the first two months of 2007?

You tell me, do you really believe the NRA’s absolute objection to the control of gun sales is based on the protection of “Constitutional Rights” or on the revenues from the 86 million firearms?

If our state’s elected officials are seriously interested in stopping violent crime in Philadelphia, how much longer can they be satisfied with telling us that the NRA simply won’t stand for effective gun control, and that there is nothing they can do about it?

How do the drugs and expensive, imported nine millimeter weapons find their way from places like Afghanistan and Austria, and into North Philadelphia? Do they arrive here on the same boat? And whose job is it to check the packages when they arrive? All of that sounds like a great story for the mainstream media, but instead, they have conditioned us to focus on “irresponsible parents” and “insufficient numbers of police officers.”

If I heard it once, I heard it 100 times during the recent mayoral primary: “If we could just have 1000 more cops….”

It all seems to be a well-orchestrated charade…provide for discriminatory hiring practices, an extraordinarily high poverty rate, 10.5-to-1 rate of black incarceration to white incarceration in Pennsylvania, increasing off-shoring of jobs and down-sizing of corporate staffs, poor quality primary and secondary education, colleges and universities priced beyond the grasp of people who want to move up from poverty…and, on top of all of that, a steady flow of imported drugs and guns – Uzi’s, Glocks, Berettas, etc. – into our communities.

I want to be sure to quickly point out that I am in no way trying to justify or rationalize malicious criminal activity. If we continue to condone the elimination of reasonable economic access to an entire race and class of people, however, and allow the concurrent infusion of a broad array of illegal, economic alternatives into their communities, we shouldn't pretend to be surprised that crime results, even among people who were previously "good."

It’s time to stop playing games around the national symptoms of violent crime and to focus, finally, on its real causes.

The local economic disparities can be addressed by successful collaboration among regional business, political and community leaders. The larger issues of illegal drug control and the appropriate regulation of the handgun industry are state and national responsibilities.

Where are Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain on these issues?

Why isn’t anyone asking?

In the meantime, I’m headed out, now, to attend Leonard Small’s mom’s funeral and to help to ensure that Jerry’s son won’t fall victim to the carefully orchestrated madness.


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