--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from the FIFA World Cup, of all things. The FIFA World Cup 26 is coming to North America next summer. It is the ultimate celebration of sports and culture. You can get closer to the beautiful game with a hospitality package, closer to the action, the best seats, the best suites, closer to match day and that world-class food and that world-class entertainment, closer to the experience of a lifetime. Book a hospitality package at fifaworldcup.com slash hospitality.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained, I'm Sean Rameswaram. And we're just a few days away from the end of our second year. We can blame just about anything on COVID-19. Supply shortages? That's COVID-19. Being a bad friend? Yep, that's COVID-19. Quit your job? COVID-19. The insane spike in gun violence? COVID-19.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In 2020, the homicide rate rose by almost 30%. That's the biggest spike since the FBI started keeping track about 60 years prior. We didn't see as big a surge in 2021, but the number of murders is still up in the United States from last year. Earlier this year, we tried to figure out what exactly was going on with this spike in American gun violence. Today Explained producers Jillian Weinberger and Miles Bryan linked up with ProPublica's Alec McGillis to look at how this is all playing out in one city in particular, the city of Philadelphia. We ran the reporting in two back-to-back episodes. Today, as we look back on the year, we're bringing you both of those shows in one. Here's Alec.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: So Philadelphia offers one of the starkest examples of this terrible nationwide trend. They had 499 homicides last year, which is just one shy of their all-time record of 500 set back in 1990. And this year is looking like it's going to be even worse, much worse than last year. And unlike many other major cities, Philly actually had a referendum on the issue of public safety in the form of their election for district attorney.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: The city put all of this in front of voters like Nikesha Billa.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: Just want to be very informed.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: I met Nikesha on Pennsylvania's primary day, May 18th. Her coffee table was covered in election mailers and sample ballots.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: We were still sitting here just sifting through. We were just talking about the ballot questions and things.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Nikesha was especially invested in one race, the race for district attorney, because her son was shot and killed in March.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: I'm speaking for a lot of mothers. I'm carrying that we...
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Through Nikesha and her family, we can see how Philly managed this gun violence problem years ago and what's happened since. We're going to go on this two-episode journey with her. And by the end of it, she's going to choose who to vote for. She'll pick a vision of how the city should be responding to this crisis.
--:-- Jillian Weinberger: So you guys really want to hear from the humble beginnings.
--:-- Miles Bryan: The very beginnings.
--:-- Jillian Weinberger: The humble beginnings.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: A couple Today Explained producers and I talked with Nikesha at her dining room table on a sunny day back in May.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: This is going to turn into an interview of not just about just Dominic, but Dominic and his mom. Just when I found out that I was carrying Dominic, it was like the best thing that had ever happened to me.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: This was back in 2000, when Nikesha was in her early 20s. Violent crime was still near an all-time high in Philadelphia. Nikesha's neighborhood had its share of issues, but she was proud of what she had built. After being raised by her grandparents and then living with her sister, she had finally gotten a place of her own, a three-bedroom house in a neighborhood called Kensington. Pretty quickly, though, the situation there became unstable.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: It was very nice outside. We had one of those early, warm, seasonal time periods.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: When Dominic was about six weeks old, Nikesha walked with him to the corner store to get something to eat.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: When I left out of the store that day, a fight had broke out, and it was gunfire all around me. And I just froze and there was nothing I could do but just stand there and hold my baby. And I remember going home back into the house and saying, I can't do this. I can't raise my baby in this neighborhood.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Nikesha decided to leave. She packed up the first place she'd ever called her own and went to a shelter with her son.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: It was a hard decision, but even harder if I would have stayed.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: She lived in the shelter for about a year. Eventually, she moved into subsidized housing, got a job in medical billing. But Nikesha wanted to spend more time with her son. So she looked for work where she could still be with him.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: There was a school bus company that allowed the drivers to bring the children to work with them if they couldn't find child care. And I remember studying hard for my CDL so that I could get the job where I can bring Dominic to work with me.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: And when did you move up here?
--:-- Nikesha Billa: 2004.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: She bought a big, airy house in northeast Philadelphia, a working-class, mostly white neighborhood. That's where we talked to her in May.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: I moved to the northeast because I just wanted to give Dominic a better start. Not just the safer streets, but even a better education.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Nikesha and Dominic liked the new neighborhood. It was safer. And as Dominic grew, Philly as a whole was getting safer too.
--:-- Michael Nutter: What I wanted was a change in behavior by folks who might normally carry a gun.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: The homicide rate fell sharply under one mayor in particular, Michael Nutter. He was in office from 2008 to 2016, only the third black mayor in the city's history.
--:-- Michael Nutter: To the law-abiding citizens of Philadelphia, I say that we are the great majority. And to the lawbreakers, you are in the small minority. This is our city, and we're taking it back. Every day, everybody...
--:-- Alec MacGillis: He focused specifically on the young guys who are most likely to be involved with gun violence, often young black men in poor neighborhoods.
--:-- Michael Nutter: I wanted them every day to think about, before they came out of the house, I know they're actively stopping people. Maybe I shouldn't carry this gun today, because I don't want to get caught.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Mayor Nutter was relying on a core belief among criminologists: the need for what they call swift, certain, and fair policies. It's the idea that people are much less likely to carry guns or commit other crimes if they know punishment for doing so will be swift, certain, and fair. Fair doesn't mean the prison sentence has to be long to be effective. People just have to know that they're likely to get caught and will face some consequences. That's the idea anyway.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: In practice, Nutter's approach to reducing gun violence relied on a lot of stop and frisk. That led to a court case. In 2011, the city of Philadelphia settled a lawsuit with the ACLU, which alleged that more than half of the police department's stops were unconstitutional. That was more than 100,000 illegal stops in one year.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Now, Nutter's administration implemented a bunch of other programs, too.
--:-- Michael Nutter: I believe that there are some people probably still alive today because of many of the things we did.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: They doubled down on community policing, getting more cops out walking around in neighborhoods that saw a lot of crime. They supported violence interruption programs, which pay for locals in dangerous neighborhoods to try and head off conflicts before they get violent. And the police department also tried a program that focused their resources on the very small group of people who were most likely to be involved with gun crime.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: And something worked. The homicide rate started to fall pretty quickly after Nutter took office. By 2014, when Dominic was in middle school, the city's homicide rate was about half of what it was at its peak, nearly 25 years earlier. But this drop wasn't just in Philly. Crime fell in New York.
--:-- News Anchor: The overall trend in all of our crime categories continues to go down.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: L.A.
--:-- News Anchor: Crime in L.A. declined for the 11th straight year.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: All over the country.
--:-- News Anchor: The crime rate in the U.S. went down in 2009 for the third year in a row.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Criminologists don't all agree on what exactly led to the dramatic drop in crime. It might have been the end of the crack epidemic. Some even point to a decline in kids' exposure to lead. Some also highlight the success of the targeted policing programs, what Mayor Nutter launched in Philly. Nikesha, well, she appreciated the fact that the city was getting safer. But those police stops were often on her mind. Her family was growing. She eventually adopted three more kids and had another baby. She fretted about them, especially in their mostly white neighborhood.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: My family was accepted, but not totally. I think Dominic, he had the worst times and experiences because his skin color were darker.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Nikesha worried about Dominic a lot, but especially when her son got his driver's license. Her husband at the time was actually a homicide detective assigned to the DA's office. And he and Nikesha made Dominic carry copies of his license and registration in the glove box, in their center console, even in his coat pocket.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: You don't just have that anxiety building up on my child as a new driver, making sure he obeys all the driving laws and regulations, but now you have this other monster that you have to worry about being pulled over and running into the wrong officer. All mothers of black and brown children, we share that fear.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: That fear, the very real fear of running into the wrong officer, helped jumpstart a movement in Philly in the race for the city's district attorney back in 2017.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: District attorneys have a lot of power. Once someone's arrested, the DA's office decides which charges to bring against them or whether to charge them at all.
--:-- Prosecutor: For now, we'll charge him with man one. Funny, he smells like murder too to me.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: The DA helps decide who gets let out on bail.
--:-- Prosecutor: Your Honor, the defendant has been convicted of murder once before. He is a repeat offender. He's a soldier in the Masucci family and is considered a flight risk. This office requested he be held without bail.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: They stand opposite the defense attorney in the courtroom.
--:-- Defense Attorney: Did you know it was wrong when you woke up that morning?
--:-- Defense Attorney: Did you know it was wrong when you ate your cereal?
--:-- Prosecutor: He's badgering, Your Honor.
--:-- Judge: Sit down and shut up, Mr. Feynman. Overruled.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: And they negotiate on which cases should be plea bargained and which should go to trial.
--:-- Defense Attorney: Don't worry, we get it. You need a case you can prosecute.
--:-- Prosecutor: I also need a case that won't bounce on a motion to dismiss.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: For years, Philly's DA, like most big city DAs, was a law and order type. But in 2017, a new kind of candidate pulled ahead in Philly's DA race.
--:-- Larry Krasner: We all know the reality. The reality is that if you're a kid on Penn campus walking around with weed in your back pocket, you are going to be protected by the Penn police. That's what they're there for. And if you are a black or brown kid who's three blocks away who is not a Penn student, then you're going to be put up against the wall three or four times by police officers.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: This is Larry Krasner, one of the city's best-known defense attorneys.
--:-- Crowd: Larry! Larry! Larry! Larry!
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Krasner, a longtime civil rights attorney, promises big changes to the city's justice system. He was a civil rights lawyer who represented Black Lives Matter activists and occupied protesters in suits against the police. Still, in 2017, he won the DA's race in a landslide.
--:-- News Anchor: Philadelphia political landscape has been substantially upended tonight. Larry Krasner obliterated the field.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: With Krasner's win, Philadelphia became part of what's known as the progressive prosecutor movement, alongside cities like San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles. It's a movement to elect officials like Krasner, lawyers who want to transform the DA role to focus on reducing incarceration and racism in the criminal justice system.
--:-- Larry Krasner: This is a mandate for a movement that is loudly telling government what it wants. And what it wants is criminal justice reform in ways that require transformational change within the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Krasner had the support of many progressives. He also had strong support from rank-and-file black voters, the voters most likely to bear the brunt of police violence and incarceration. Voters like Nikesha.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: Krasner came in with letting us know that our civil rights will no longer be violated, and I think that's why he got the support of the people.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Alec, when does this anti-prosecutor-prosecutor Larry Krasner enter office in Philadelphia?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: His term began in January 2018.
--:-- Larry Krasner: The culture of the DA's office is like a sports culture. They try to maximize convictions and maximize years, and it's a failed approach. It has made things worse instead of making them better.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Krasner believed he was elected to overhaul that culture. He started making changes right away. On a cold January Friday, just his fourth day in office, Krasner fired 30 career prosecutors without warning. It became known as the Snow Day Massacre.
--:-- News Anchor: Jim, it is one of the most shocking and drastic shakeups of the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office that anyone can recall. But it most definitely should not come as any surprise to those who had been following the campaign promises of Larry Krasner.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: With his new team in place, Krasner implemented major reforms. He stopped prosecuting some low-level offenses altogether, like marijuana possession and prostitution. He drastically reduced the number of people on probation and parole. And he made big changes to the city's bail system.
--:-- Larry Krasner: There's absolutely no reason why someone who will show up for court, is not at risk of flight, is no threat to their neighbors and community, should sit in jail for days or weeks or months or years because they can't post a small amount of bail.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: At first, Krasner got rid of bail for a bunch of low-level crimes, like retail theft, DUI, resisting arrest. But in March of 2020, Krasner added more offenses to that no-bail list.
--:-- Larry Krasner: The pandemic hits, the courts have just closed. We are facing a potential crisis in terms of Philly County Jail becoming a super spreader if there are too many people in there. So we make a decision, and I made the decision, that we're going to try to simulate a no-cash bail system.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Krasner's office stopped seeking bail for many offenses, except for cases deemed serious or violent.
--:-- Larry Krasner: In every case, we're either going to say no bail, or we're going to name a very high number.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Krasner says his office almost always seeks high bail for gun cases. But he told us it hasn't always been so successful in prosecuting them. There was a decline in convictions for gun possession cases early in the administration. It was a major decline. Within two years of Krasner taking office, the conviction rate for gun possession had dropped by more than 20%, according to the Inquirer. Krasner mostly blames the police for this. Witnesses didn't show up. Evidence was weak. He thinks that's why so many gun possession defendants ended up not being convicted.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: All of this meant that Krasner's tenure was controversial from the start. But the debate really took off last year, when Philly's homicide rates skyrocketed.
--:-- News Anchor: Jason, with five murders and a dozen shootings over the weekend, gun violence was on everyone's mind again today, including the district attorney.
--:-- News Anchor: Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is defending his record and says he is tackling the ongoing violence in our city.
--:-- Police Officer: You got Krasner, he will not prosecute and he will pre-deal these folks and they back out on the street. You give them bail money and next thing you know he's shooting somebody up.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: A lot of Philadelphia police officers and their supporters blame the homicide spike on Krasner, including Joe Sullivan, retired deputy commissioner, Philadelphia police.
--:-- Joe Sullivan: Dog owner. And dog, proud dog owner.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: I met Joe, his German shepherds, and his Yorkie Poop at his house, not too far from where Nikesha lives in northeast Philadelphia.
--:-- Joe Sullivan: I spent multiple ranks in SWAT as an officer, a lieutenant, captain, and the chief inspector. I was the commanding officer of narcotics.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Joe retired in January of 2020. He had a reputation for being pretty centrist politically.
--:-- Joe Sullivan: I totally understand the need to end mass incarceration and bail reform, probation reform. People should not be put on probation for a minor offense and then technical violations.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Still, the former deputy commissioner thinks Krasner's reforms go too far. What is your gut sense of what's been going on for the last couple of years?
--:-- Joe Sullivan: I don't think you could ignore the election of the new DA and the reform measures that were put in place. In Philadelphia, the city's awash with guns. And the goal of any police department is to make that core group of violent recidivists really afraid to be caught carrying a gun, because they know that there is a reasonable prison sentence in their future. And that is enough to make people say, I'm just going to leave the gun at home. I don't want to get caught with a gun.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Joe Sullivan believes that to reduce gun violence, people need to know there's a good chance they'll be punished if they're caught with an illegal gun. He worries that's not happening under Krasner.
--:-- Joe Sullivan: If your buddy goes to court, they drop the felony charge and let him walk out the door on the misdemeanor charge, what do you think he does when he gets back? He tells everyone. We've heard these discussions on prison tapes, prisoners talking about, hey, don't worry about it.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Krasner just doesn't think that's true.
--:-- Larry Krasner: This notion that a bunch of young men whose brains are not even fully formed are carefully following crime statistics and they're following the paper. And they're never going to rob a bank if somebody gets arrested and convicted for robbing a bank. Well, guess what? They've been arrested and convicted for robbing banks and they still rob banks.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: This is a fundamental disagreement between Sullivan's camp and reformers like Krasner. It mirrors an argument that criminologists often have. Those that agree with Krasner say, hey, these young guys aren't reading the news. Those that agree with Sullivan say, these young men figure out that there won't be consequences for carrying when they see their friends back out on the street. So the Sullivan argument goes, more people carry. And when there are more guns on the street, they're more likely to be used. More people get shot. More people die.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Like Nikesha's son, Dominic, late last March.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: He never said which mall he was going to. He just said, I'm going to just grab me an outfit. And I said, okay. And as always, be safe. You know, I love you.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Dom went to a nearby mall to get new clothes. He left his job at a hospital during the pandemic because he was worried about bringing home COVID. Now that the city was starting to reopen, he was hoping to join the steam fitters union.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: That was a steamers apprenticeship, local 420.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: That afternoon, Nikesha was actually headed to the same mall on her bus route. She now drives for the city.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: And when I pulled in, I saw the ambulance. I saw the police. I even heard the helicopters over top. There were three people that got on the bus. And when I got to the last person that was paying their fare, I had said, what in the world is going on over there at the mall? And he said, ma'am, somebody just got shot up in there. And I was like, my gosh, you got to be kidding me. I didn't allow my mind at that moment to go there, but I instantly was afraid. And I wanted to pick up my phone, but I had passengers on board and we're not allowed to hit my phone, of course, with safety issues.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: The first moment I got to pull over when my bus was clear, I picked up my phone, and I saw nothing but red going straight down the phone from his calls. I dialed the first number, and I'm like, what's wrong? What happened? And they would just say, Keisha, I'm sorry. And I'm like, well, what, who, what, what happened? And they couldn't say. So I hung up on them, dialed the next number, and I got the same thing. Keisha, I'm so sorry. I'm like, you so sorry what? I hung up the next number and I think I got my brother and he just kept saying, Keisha, it's Dom. I'm like, okay, he's Dom, so just tell me he's okay. Tell me he's okay. He said, I can't.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Dominic died on March 29, 2021. He was 21 years old. Nikesha buried him two weeks later. When we met, her house was filled with keepsakes decorated with Dom's likeness. A painting, a face mask, a pillow, a quilt. All to keep his presence close.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: A suspect, also 21, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder a couple weeks after the shooting. His case is making its way through the courts. The motive is still unclear, but he had a record. Police had already arrested him twice for gun possession, in 2018 and 2019. Both times he'd been released on bail, and both cases are not resolved. Nikesha couldn't help but wonder, would a more conventional prosecutor have made a difference? Maybe Larry Krasner was too lax on gun cases. Maybe a different prosecutor would have put the suspect behind bars for gun possession. Maybe that would have prevented Dom's death.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: When Dominic died, Larry Krasner was campaigning for re-election against a prosecutor he fired, Carlos Vega. Vega was a career homicide prosecutor who was supported by the police union. On primary day, Nikesha still wasn't sure which candidate to support.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: I'm speaking for a lot of mothers. I'm speaking for a lot of minorities who have been victimized through the justice system as well. So it's like, for me, it's a multidimensional quest of knowledge before I vote because there's so many different areas that are at stake at this point.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: Nikesha was torn. It couldn't just be Krasner's fault. A lot of the cities that saw gun violence spike in 2020 didn't have progressive prosecutors. The fact is, there were a lot of changes last year. For Dominic, for Philadelphia, and for young people all across the country. Everything got shut down. Schools, libraries, rec centers, and even the courts. The guy who allegedly shot Dom, his prior gun arrests were still awaiting court dates before Dom was killed. Those cases were delayed. The courts decided to cease nearly all operations for COVID-19.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In a moment, how the pandemic made gun violence worse, and what Philadelphia voters decided to do about it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Back in May, I went down to this riverfront park in southwest Philly called Bartram's Garden. It has a little dock with a bunch of rowboats. I was with a few Today Explained producers, Miles Bryan and Jillian Weinberger. We went to meet up with teens who were part of a youth group called Yeah! Philly. Some of them had been caught up in the criminal justice system. A couple were wearing ankle monitors because they had active cases. But that afternoon, everybody was relaxed. It was a good vibe.
--:-- Teen 1: You ever catch anything?
--:-- Teen 2: No, yeah, yo, I think I caught like two fish, though.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Have you caught anything?
--:-- Teen 3: Nah, I caught a couple condoms.
--:-- Teen 4: Oh, shit, I got a turtle.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We were there to ask these young people what they thought was driving Philly's spike in gun violence. Tiffany Rudolph blamed it all on one thing.
--:-- Tiffany Rudolph: The pandemic, there's no other way around it. Like, we're not in school anymore. There's kids, especially me, like, I've depended on going to school to keep myself out of trouble. There's a lot of kids that I know, like, I was worried for some safety of other kids because it's like people come to school for an escape. I do blame the pandemic as far as to why the gun violence went up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tiffany's theory that the surge in violence was directly tied to the pandemic, it's a lot like what Philly DA Larry Krasner told us. He was the prosecutor who made a lot of reforms and was taking heat for them from people who said those reforms were driving the spike in shootings. Not so, he told us.
--:-- Larry Krasner: You have no organized sports for a year, essentially. You have high school classrooms that are closed. You have summer camps closed, summer job programs closed. You have all the programming that goes with Houses of Faith shut down. You have this stripping away of essentially everything we have taken for granted as being preventative and protective of young people. And when all that happened, guess what? Young people were killing a lot of young people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Krasner believes the pandemic and the way it upended all of our lives is the reason for the increase in gun violence. We wanted to see how this dynamic had played out for young people in Philadelphia. So we decided to spend some more time with Tiffany to see how the pandemic affected her day-to-day life.
--:-- Tiffany Rudolph: This is my apartment. This is my living room.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What are we listening to?
--:-- Tiffany Rudolph: I don't know. You two.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Her apartment's neat, but pretty sparse. There's a poster up on the wall for a drinking game and another with a line of scripture.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's the quote up there?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's the quote up there?
--:-- Tiffany Rudolph: "I can do all things through Christ, which strengthens me." It was here when I got here, but I didn't take it down because I like it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tiffany took us back to early 2020.
--:-- Tiffany Rudolph: I was a straight-A student. I had a 4.0 GPA. I was on the National Honor Society. I was number two or three in my class.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That would be a feat for any kid. But Tiffany's circumstances made it remarkable.
--:-- Tiffany Rudolph: In 2018, I was taken by DHS to be put in foster care. And not taken, taken. I signed myself in foster care. My household, I was living with my stepmother, and my dad was incarcerated. And it just wasn't going well. I was forced to grow up at an early age.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tiffany grew up in West Philadelphia, in a neighborhood that struggled with poverty and shootings for a long time. For Tiffany and a lot of kids like her, school wasn't just a place to learn. It was a place of stability and safety in an often chaotic world. Tiffany also played soccer, joined youth groups, interned with her school's administrative office, took classes at a local university, worked a job — anything she could to stay occupied. But then the COVID lockdown began.
--:-- News Anchor: Last evening, I announced that we had lost the first of what will become many Pennsylvanians to the novel coronavirus.
--:-- News Anchor: And happening right now, all restaurants and bars in Philadelphia are being ordered to shut down.
--:-- News Anchor: We have breaking news from the Philadelphia school district. Officials have just announced that schools will be closed indefinitely.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All of Tiffany's activities were canceled and school shrunk down to a box on her screen.
--:-- Tiffany Rudolph: It got draining. I went from being energized to lazy. You go from waking up early in the morning, catching the second bus to get to school, you're up, you're energized, you're ready to go. You're ready for the day. Then you're home. It's like, oh, well, technically I don't have to get out of bed, so I'm just going to stay in bed. That's not healthy at all.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She limped to graduation and managed to enroll at Temple University for the fall. But when college classes started online, she had a hard time.
--:-- Tiffany Rudolph: Academically, I fell to the point where I have no credits for my first semester. I dropped out of school my second semester before it was over.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Teenagers across the country struggled to stay engaged with their schoolwork during the pandemic. Many have been dealing with increased anxiety and depression. Some pediatricians have reported more suicide attempts. Philadelphia's high schools stayed almost entirely closed through this last school year. The rec centers shut down. The libraries shut down. Even now, many of the city's swimming pools are still shuttered. The school shutdowns were initiated to save lives. But for some of the boys Tiffany grew up with, the shutdowns themselves put them at risk.
--:-- Tiffany Rudolph: A lot of people, they went to school to escape from their home. You never know what people go through behind closed doors. They could have went to school just to eat because they don't have food at home. They could have went to school to get the loving from their teachers because they couldn't get that at home. Now, I know some of the boys, they used to go talk to the counselor. No matter how they act or whatever, they will go to the counselor. And for them, I know it hit them hard because you don't have a counselor no more. And it's like, okay, they have free time now. You have 24-7 out of the day. You're not in school. You don't have to do anything technically. So it's like, oh, I'm going to go out and do this. So I'm going to go out and do that. And it's because they don't have the structure of going to school anymore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it wasn't just school that was out. It was after-school programs, too.
--:-- Kendra Vannawater: Like Yeah, Philly, the one that took the kids fishing. Whether it's you've got to do your homework, you want to hang out, you want to play video games, you can all come here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Kendra Vannawater is the co-founder. Before we went out on the dock together, she walked us through the group's new permanent location in the heart of West Philly. Beanbag chairs, TV, bookshelves, all of that. Kendra created this place for kids to decompress, process, and talk out disputes. A place to head off conflict before it has the chance to become violent. Before there's even a reason for cops to get involved.
--:-- Kendra Vannawater: We mediate a lot of stuff. We have kids who come here and say this is the only place they feel like they don't have to bring a gun. They're with us at events. They're saying that's the only time they feel like they don't have to look over their shoulder. So we're trying to create a culture where we have to find you other ways to resolve things and to feel safe without carrying a gun.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Up until March of 2020, the group was operating out of Philly's public rec centers, hosting dozens of young people every week for meals and after-school activities. When the pandemic hit, those rec centers closed. Yeah, Philly tried to continue online, but it wasn't the same.
--:-- Kendra Vannawater: Most of our kids and young people, they want to be seen in person. They don't do well logging on and doing all that. So that was a loss. And we weren't able to reconnect with them on a deeper level until we were able to get our own space.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: With school online, rec centers locked, and even basketball hoops taken down, Kendra wasn't surprised when the shooting rate started to go up in Philly in the spring of 2020. As that happened, more people started carrying guns. We know that because police were finding more guns when they were making stops. Research shows that generally more guns leads to more shootings. We asked Kendra about Joe Sullivan's explanation for this. He's the former deputy police commissioner you heard from in the last episode.
--:-- Kendra Vannawater: I don't think you could ignore the election of the new DA and the reform measures that were put in place.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sullivan thought that because the conviction rate for gun possession has fallen under Krasner, the DA has created a sort of culture of impunity, where more young people were carrying guns because they figured they had a pretty good chance of getting away with it. Kendra doesn't buy it.
--:-- Kendra Vannawater: I don't think they think that far. I think that it's really about them protecting themselves. And we talk about that, too. A lot of them don't understand how the system works, even the ones that are in there. They don't understand what the numbers are or what the process is, even for their own cases.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Kendra blames the pandemic and what came a few months later, in late May of 2020.
--:-- Crowd: George Floyd! George Floyd!
--:-- Kendra Vannawater: We did so much processing with our young people around that. They're watching Instagram videos of George Floyd being killed how many times. They're in the midst of all of the protests and uprisings that are happening in their neighborhoods.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In Philly and a number of other cities, some people looted stores and set police cars on fire.
--:-- News Anchor: Thick black smoke billowing in the air. That's because at least four police cars have been burning after protesters.
--:-- News Anchor: Some of the worst looting happened in Tiffany's old neighborhood. The police SWAT vehicle started dispersing the tear gas in the residential areas before it even made it to the intersection at 52nd and Arch.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Allies of the police, people like Joe Sullivan, they blame local officials for not doing enough to support cops through the protests.
--:-- Joe Sullivan: Oh, it destroyed morale. It really did. It destroyed morale.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Krasner's office actually charged two officers for their behavior during that period. One for pepper spraying an activist in the face, the other for hitting a protester in the head with his baton.
--:-- Joe Sullivan: Officers are saying, man, if they're getting locked up that easily, I don't really want to get involved in this. I've got a mortgage to pay and tuition to pay.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: During all of this, tons of cops are retiring early or just quitting altogether. At the same time, city officials decided to close the police academy, the pipeline for new recruits, due to the pandemic. The rate of police stops in Philly had already fallen off when COVID first hit. Officers were told to avoid low-level arrests altogether to try and slow the spread of the virus. After the protests, the number of police stops fell even further. Officers were stretched thin, dealing with protests and looting and enforcing a curfew. But some of that decline might have also just been the police choosing to make fewer stops. Maybe they don't get out of their cars and walk through the neighborhoods. Maybe they don't chase every lead. Maybe they take their time responding to a call.
--:-- Joe Sullivan: I'm sure that some officers have pulled back.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Police stops fell in cities across the country. And gun violence spiked in almost all of them. Criminologists generally agree that having more cops walking around just seeing and being seen helps deter crime. But activists like Kendra say blaming the police pullback for the surge in violence misses a bigger point — that big city departments have done a bad job at solving gun crimes for years. In Philadelphia, police make arrests in fewer than 50% of homicide cases. The rate for non-fatal shootings is even lower than that. Just about one in four result in an arrest. Kendra says people living in areas with a lot of violent crime understand that, viscerally.
--:-- Kendra Vannawater: So if a person is taken from you and you don't believe in that system to solve that murder, they'll say, we'll just handle it ourselves because they're not going to solve it anyway.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: After all the high-profile deaths at police hands in recent years, Tiffany's been wary of working with the police too.
--:-- Tiffany Rudolph: My era of teens, we've been cautious around cops. But it got worse. It kept happening. It kept happening. And nothing was being done about it. So I was like, okay, at this point, we're fed up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tiffany says she's had a dozen family members and friends get shot. Most of them since the pandemic began. She told Miles that Philly police finally arrested a suspect in the murder of one of her friends this spring, a few years after it happened.
--:-- Tiffany Rudolph: I actually cried. That's the first time I actually heard someone like my friend or any of my friends' killings being solved.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Was it weird to have that feeling of not happy but just sort of appreciative of the cops?
--:-- Tiffany Rudolph: I don't know. My feelings will not change towards the cops. I don't care. I'm not about to thank you for doing your job. You did your job. It took you long enough is what I will say. It took you long enough.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This distrust can help fuel a cycle of retaliation that can be nearly impossible to stop. Someone sees a friend or family member get shot. They don't see the police as an option, so they don't return a cop's call during the investigation or agree to testify. Instead, they take matters into their own hands. They get revenge. That crew retaliates in return. A lot of this now plays out on social media, ramping up the tension. On and on it goes. Criminologists say these two things — the police stepping back and the community's growing distrust of the cops — they're like two sides of the same coin. But they both played a role in fueling the gun violence spike. And this brings us back to Larry Krasner.
--:-- Larry Krasner: I mean, this is a showdown between the past and the future. This is a showdown between criminal justice reform and the kind of criminal justice that is in an old, brutal, and racist policing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The city had to decide whether to stick with Larry Krasner and his promise to transform the criminal justice system, or whether to vote for his challenger, Carlos Vega.
--:-- News Anchor: Mr. Krasner, you have blood on your hands.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's a former homicide prosecutor. Larry Krasner had actually fired him, along with a few dozen other career prosecutors, when he took office in 2018. On May 18th, primary day, turnout started slow.
--:-- News Anchor: Both of the candidates had busy schedules today, trying to make sure their supporters cast their ballots for an election that is being watched beyond Philadelphia.
--:-- Voter 1: We need a change. We need safety and reform. We can do both. We deserve both.
--:-- Voter 2: You cannot blame the prosecutors or the police for the fact that the pandemic shut down so many things.
--:-- Voter 3: So I'm going to move out of the city if Krasner wins again. I want to stay in Philadelphia. I love Philadelphia, but I can't live under Larry Krasner another four years.
--:-- Voter 4: We're taking illegal guns in record numbers, but there's no consequence. We're asking the DA's office, like, what are you doing? Go vote for Vega! Go vote for Carlos Vega for District Attorney of Philadelphia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the end, not that many people did go vote for Vega.
--:-- News Anchor: Larry Krasner has just declared victory. Here are the latest results. Krasner leading challenger Carlos Vega with 64% of the vote.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Krasner won the Democratic primary, which in Philadelphia is the only race that really matters. He won big with the middle-class progressives that helped propel him to office the first time.
--:-- Larry Krasner: We in this movement for criminal justice reform just won a big one.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And just like in his first election, Krasner also won handily with voters in the city's black neighborhoods, with the residents most affected by gun violence and by the excesses of the criminal justice system. The Krasner Coalition held, and Nikesha stuck with him too, even as she grieved the loss of her son.
--:-- Nikesha Billa: I have to still stand on civil rights and not just my own personal plight. We're tired of our families being dismantled by the justice system.
--:-- Miles Bryan: I have to say I'm really impressed with their ability to think about a broader system in light of what happened. How do you think you were able to do that?
--:-- Nikesha Billa: I don't know. I'm a mom. I'm a mom. And my nurturing and love doesn't just end with just my children.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the end, Nikesha and many others in Philly didn't see the DA's race as a choice between reforming the criminal justice system or stemming the rise in gun violence. They bought into the pitch that Krasner and other progressive candidates across the country are making: that draconian prison sentences and overly aggressive policing are both unethical and unhelpful in reducing violent crime. And that getting at the root cause of the violence requires investment in longer-term strategies — opening more rec centers, improving schools, and creating good jobs. But so far this year, Philly's been kind of an outlier.
--:-- News Anchor: The Associated Press projects Eric Adams as the winner of the Democratic primary in the race for New York City mayor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: New York City went to the polls to pick its Democratic nominee for mayor last month. Eric Adams is a former cop who campaigned on stopping gun crime.
--:-- Eric Adams: For 22 years, I wore a bulletproof vest and stood on the street corners and protected children and families in the city of New York.
--:-- News Anchor: You yourself have said you're the new face of the Democratic Party. Explain that.
--:-- Eric Adams: Because we have abandoned our cities. And you're seeing the Democratic Party, basically they've thrown up their hands and we're continuing to see the same problems in our inner cities. We need to turn it around.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's not just New York. In Los Angeles County, residents are gathering signatures to try and recall the progressive DA there. And in Atlanta, the mayor abruptly decided not to seek re-election last spring. She'd have been taking heat for presiding over a sharp spike in gun crime as well. So it seems like we're in this difficult moment. On the one hand, from what you've been telling us, the roots of the surge in violence over the last 18 months is not as simple as one program that got canceled or one policy that got changed. It's the pandemic and the protests and the police and probably other things on top of that. And in Philly, at least, people are not convinced that they should react to all that by ditching criminal justice reform. But structural change takes a long time, and this problem is affecting people's lives right now. Are there solutions that could help in the short term?
--:-- Alec MacGillis: It's hard. These cycles of retaliation are really tough to break. But a lot of people are now trying to figure this out. There's been a growing recognition that something changed for the worse over the last year, beyond the root cause problems that have existed for a long time. People see that stopping the bleeding requires acknowledging that and rebuilding the social connections that ruptured during the last 18 months. You can see this new focus in Philadelphia, where leaders are pouring money into anti-violence programs, over $100 million. And Philly's doubling down on that program we heard about in the previous episode, the one that targets government resources to those most likely to shoot or be shot. This kind of spending is gaining steam on the national level, too.
--:-- News Anchor: Cities experienced an increase in gun violence. We're able to use the American Rescue Plan dollars to hire police officers needed for community policing and to pay their overtime.
--:-- Alec MacGillis: We know this stuff can work because it's worked before. It's just going to take a lot of money and time and effort. It's the sort of effort Tiffany Rudolph knows all too well.
--:-- Tiffany Rudolph: I don't know, I just want to get my life together.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tiffany's doing much better than she was last winter. But when we last met up, she told Miles she was exhausted.
--:-- Tiffany Rudolph: Okay, I'm going to tell you why I was up until 6 o'clock in the morning. I was on the phone talking someone out of shooting someone. And that's not the first time I did that. I actually do this.
--:-- Miles Bryan: What was the situation?
--:-- Tiffany Rudolph: I guess the guy killed someone we know. And my friend found out, and he was looking for retaliation. I understood him 100%. However, I don't have time for you either getting shot back at and dying or getting a case, and now you have to go to jail.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Do you think he heard you?
--:-- Tiffany Rudolph: He better have heard me. His mom was there, too. He gave his mom the gun. So that's what made me feel okay with hanging up the phone. I just didn't feel comfortable hanging up the phone until I knew he understood me. But he passed the gun to his mother. I felt comfortable enough to get off the phone with him to know that he's not going to go out here and do anything crazy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tiffany will take her wins where she can get them. She stopped a shooting. It was a small victory. But she can't keep staying up all night. She can only do her part. We made these two episodes on The Great Regression in collaboration with Alec MacGillis and ProPublica. You can find Alec's written piece at ProPublica.org. Just look for his byline. Alec had production and reporting help from Today Explained's Jillian Weinberger and Miles Bryan. Editing from Matthew Collette and Nick Varshevar. Fact-checking by Laura Bullard. Engineering from Efim Shapiro and Hannes Brown. Special thanks to Thomas Abt, Katerina Roman, Liz Kelly Nelson, and Lauren Katz. We have music from Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassenfeld. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
