Word: philadelphias
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Even outspoken local civil rights activists have been reluctant to raise an uproar. Philadelphia's NAACP head J. Whyatt Mondesire, not a man known to be shy about criticizing the city police, publicly dismissed the Rev. Al Sharpton when he called the case "worse than Rodney King" and came to town to visit one of the beaten suspects. "We let him know we didn't particularly like outsiders coming in and making comments about a situation he wasn't aware of," Mondesire told TIME. "But he practices his own brand of headline grabbing. So let him do his own thing...
...part, Sharpton said he had not come to Philadelphia to provoke controversy. "Reaction to what? I didn't call for any reaction. If I had called a march or called a gathering I can see [why people would say nothing came of it]." He came to do mainly one thing: "I met with the mother." As for Mondesire's comments, Sharpton told TIME, "I guess he's into organizational competition...
What makes this incident in Philadelphia different? Mondesire said it is a combination of weariness and hope in the minority community - weariness because they have seen Philadelphia police go unpunished in other high-profile cases dating back to the 1960s, but hope because the new mayor and his new police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, a veteran of turnaround projects at troubled departments, seem to be responding aggressively to the beating. "They jumped on it right away, they didn't hesitate," Mondesire says. "They immediately stepped into the investigation, they immediately took them off street duty, which is different" from the official...
...injured or killed. Nutter, who is black, was elected mayor last year in part on his promise to reduce the killings in a city weary of constant gunplay. "The rise in homicides makes it really clear that [the police] are operating under a level of stress," says longtime Philadelphia Daily News columnist Elmer Smith. "That doesn't necessarily cause the community to give them a pass, but certainly causes them to be less inclined to leap to the conclusion that they are an occupying army, that these people don't care about us. It's that dangerous out there...
...three men involved in the May 5 beating were suspects in a North Philadelphia shooting, in which someone shot into a crowded city street. Lawyers for the men have denied that their clients were involved in any gunfire and say police are covering up the real reason for the beating - that they may have mistaken one of the passengers for a man wanted in the shooting of a fellow officer. That shooting, just two days earlier, took the life of Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski. The officer had just stopped a car with three men suspected in a mid-day bank robbery...