Councilmember Jamie Gauthier — Statement Regarding Philadelphia Inquirer Article

First and foremost, I want to commend the Philadelphia Inquirer reporting team that contributed to this article — including Aubrey Whelan, Oona Goodin-Smith, Jason Laughlin, Mike Newall, and Jeremy Roebuck — for their excellent work and dedication to shedding light on this dark day in our city’s history. As we have been reminded consistently over the last several months, both through the COVID-19 pandemic and the civil unrest that has unfolded in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the press plays an indispensable role in holding truth to power and holding our government leadership accountable.

For as long as I live, I will always remember the events that unfolded on 52nd Street that day. I have never witnessed an interaction between police and civilians that felt so chaotic, and so fully out of control. A great deal of attention from the media and the public has been paid to a separate protest on I-676, and the egregious tear gassing of demonstrators involved in that incident — and I am glad that today, residents of West Philadelphia, many of whom were traumatized by the day’s events, are finally receiving the consideration they deserve.

As this Inquirer article so clearly demonstrates, from so many different perspectives, the PPD response that day constituted an attack. It was an attack on our Black community, that has been discriminated against by police for generations. It was an attack on families, of small children and seniors alike, who choked on tear gas inside their own homes. It was an attack on every person that was indiscriminately hit with pepper spray or rubber bullets, while they were walking towards home or driving in their cars. And it was an attack on whatever trust our community had managed to build with police in the decades since the MOVE Bombing — another grievous instance of police brutality carried out against our own people, in our own neighborhood.

It should go without saying, but: this does not constitute ‘protecting and serving.’ There is no excuse for what happened that day. PPD was woefully unprepared for the scale of the protests on 52nd Street, which meant that they were essentially left to improvise. But improvising with military-grade weapons, in a residential Black community, is a recipe for disaster. To this day, the Mayor and PPD refuse to even acknowledge the possibility that the police response on 52nd Street was racially motivated. But it’s difficult to imagine a response even remotely similar being carried out in Rittenhouse Square, or Society Hill, or Fishtown.

I am deeply disappointed in the Kenney Administration for their response to this incident, and their failure to accept responsibility for what this was: an outright assault on a Black community, in the midst of a national reckoning on racial justice. Our police are charged with protecting and serving Philadelphians — and that is what they need to do. Not just in white neighborhoods, not just for a social media photo-op, but every day, on the streets, in our communities of color. We need to have a wholesale reckoning with the havoc that police have wrought in our communities of color — and until we do that, history will repeat over and over again.