Rampage in Philly Shows Social Media's Potential: Youthful
Rage, Instead of Ineffectual, Could be Potent
23 February 2010By Dave Lindorff
City leaders and the downtown business community in
Philadelphia are wringing their hands and calling for
“tough action” against a horde of some 150 high school
kids from eight of the city’s decrepit and failing
high schools who rampaged late Tuesday afternoon
through the Center City district’s shops, from the
Gallery mall at 10th and Market Streets to Macy’s near
City Hall, frightening tourists and suburban shoppers,
and knocking over shopping displays.
By evening, police had reportedly locked up 15 kids
who were charged with violent offenses, such as
beating other kids or bystanders, or destroying
property (Macy’s claimed damages to its flagship store
totalling $700). Some of these kids were held
overnight on lesser charges such as shoplifting or
disturbing the peace.
I’m not going to diminish the seriousness of the
incident. Nobody should be trashing stores or stealing
things, and certainly nobody should be hurting other
people.
At the same time, the official response, which has
been to treat minor crimes like shoplifting or
engaging in showball fights on the sidewalk or in the
interior mall of City Hall like major criminal
activity and to seek heavy penalties against these
kids reeks of the growing police-state metality that
is poisoning our society, locally and nationally.
Some of the kids who were arrested by police were
under 16, and yet six hours after they were locked up,
many, and perhaps all of them, had been prevented by
Philadelphia Police from even contacting their
parents. When a police officer at the 22nd Precinct,
where some of the kids were being held, was asked by a
caller why parents--who were understandably frantic by
11 when they still didn’t know where their sons and
daughters were--hadn’t been allowed to call home, his
response at first was a sneering, “Oh, you think they
should have a right to a phone call?” Later, when
pressed, he said, “They’ll get to call home when we’re
done processing them.”
This was already some six hours after the kids had
been picked up, and he gave no indication when the
“processing” would be completed.
This is not, I suspect, how such things are handled by
police in the suburbs, where parents of arrested
minors, especially white minors, tend to get called
immediately by police. (In fact, when I was 12, I and
two friends the same age, plotted a heist from the
local Five and Ten Cent Store, with each of us trying
to cadge the most expensive item we could. I grabbed a
sable paintbrush, worth about $25. We got caught
because of our boasting afterwards to all and sundry.
A state trooper called my father. I confessed, and had
to return the brush and apologize to the shopowner, a
mortifying experience.)
Now in this case the city is seeking to have at least
some of the kids who were arrested expelled from
school, though the incident has absolutely nothing to
do with their behavior in school. This is just
punitive, law-and-order thinking that will do nothing
to make these kids better behaved. In fact, it will
just ensure that they are angrier and less able to
make their way in society as adults. Do kids in the
suburbs get expelled from school if they get convicted
for shoplifting, or if they get busted for drunk
driving on the weekend? No. Of course not. They get
expelled for violations that happen on school time on
school property. Police are also calling for the
Philadelphia School District to make free student
transit passes invalid after 4 pm, instead of 7 pm--a
truly stupid idea that if implemented would make it
hard for all low-income students in the public schools
to participate in after-school activities like sports
or drama clubs.
What really needs to be addressed, and what instead is
being completely ignored by authorities and the
public, is the question of why we’re seeing this kind
of rampage in the first place.
Having talked with kids who frequent the Center City
commercial area, I know that those with dark skin are
regularly mistreated by store owners and store
personnel in the Gallery, and in stores like Macy’s.
My 16-year-old son reports that when he and friends
have gone shopping or browsing in stores in the
Gallery, for example, he has seen store personnel
falsely charge his black friends with “planning to
steal” items, when they were merely looking at things
in the same way that other kids who were white, or
asian like him, were doing.
In other words, African-American kids feel blatant
prejudice downtown, which does much to explain the
hostility that was apparent in the recent rampage. If
Philadelphia politicians and business leaders want to
make the Center City area more shopper-friendly in a
municipality that is more than 50% non-white, they
might start by getting store owners (and police) to
start treating all people in the area equally,
including the kids who go there.
A logical idea would be to call a mediated meeting of
the kids who pulled this stunt, and any others who
might be interested, with the shop-owners, so that
both sides could discuss their grievances and,
hopefully, also come to see each other as human
beings. But that would be so humane and rational and
unauthoritatian, it's hard to imagine anyone in City
Hall or the Board of Ed for that matter setting such a
thing up. Sad.
Meanwhile, the kids, who have demonstrated in this and
earlier rampage incidents tremendous organizing skill
at using social networking systems like MySpace,
Facebook and cell-phones to pull together on short
notice large groups of kids like the latest one along
Market Street, should give some thought to taking
their impressive facility with the new technologies
and using it more productively. Instead of organizing
riots, they could organize protests that, far from
angering and frightening the majority of
Philadelphians, might earn the support of at least
some of them. Instead of calling kids together for a
mindless, disorganized and indiscriminate rampage
against store-owners, they should organize peaceful
protests against specific, targeted store operators
who are demonstrably racist.
Imagine if these kids used the new media to bring a
thousand teenagers to the Gallery to march on the
sidewalks with signs demanding an end to racism in
these stores. Imagine if they used social media to
organize mass boycotts of stores known to target black
students for harassment. Imagine if they used social
media to organize protests against police bias and
police brutality.
There is enormous potential here, if kids would only
grab hold of it and put it to good use.
They might even be able to teach some lessons to us
adults about how to organize protests over things like
the War in Afghanistan, or the failure of our
congressional representatives to support real health
care reform.
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