Philadelphia — I was awakened at 8 a.m. Wednesday by a worried call from a good friend, journalist and radical prairie activist Michael Caddell in Kansas. “Dave!” he said urgently, “Is Philly burning?”
I groggily asked him what he meant? Had the closed Sunoco tank farm and refinery in South Philadelphia suddenly exploded into an inferno again?
“It’s all over the news,” he said. “Even Democracy Now!. Fires burning, looting, and 30 police injured!”
The Philadelphia Inquirer (10/28/20) reported “scattered looting…in the area of Castor and Aramingo Avenues in the city’s Port Richmond section, and along City Avenue.”
I flipped open my computer and went to the digital Philadelphia Inquirer. There was no story about the city burning. No banner headline about dozens of Philly cops injured. Just a report (10/28/20) on the “mostly peaceful” protests by “hundreds of people” over the outrageous police shooting death Monday of Walter Wallace, Jr.
Wallace was a 27-year-old Black father having a mental health crisis, whose family had called 911 for an ambulance. Instead of an ambulance, they got two cops who, immediately on arriving in their squad car, pulled out their sidearms. Soon after, they shot Wallace over ten times, killing him, “because,” they said, he didn’t drop a small knife he was holding in his hand. This although he was at least 10 feet from them at the time, and his mother was pleading with the cops to back off and let her calm him down.
It was an event that had happened two days earlier, and I knew there had been protests over it, but not widespread unrest.
The Inquirer article mentioned a protest by hundreds of people from the neighborhood and supporters at the police precinct in West Philadelphia where the shooting had occurred, and also that some thousand people had gathered on the other side of the 1.6 million–person city, in its Port Richmond neighborhood. There they had broken into shops in a strip mall and a Walmart at the intersection of Castor and Aramingo Avenues. But aside from a police car and a few dumpsters set on fire, there was no mass unrest, and no torching of stores or other buildings.
Nothing like the uprising and conflagration last summer in Minneapolis following the police murder of George Floyd, or even like the widespread break-ins in the shopping district in Philly’s Center City and other cities last summer in response to Floyd’s videotaped strangulation.
What was going on? Why Mike’s anxious morning call?
It turns out that protests against the police shooting of yet another young Black man (an all-too-common event in Philadelphia, where there have been 400 fatal and non-fatal shootings by police, mostly of Black men, over the 2008–18 period), while reported fairly calmly and accurately in the local media, were being played up as another major urban explosion in the national media.
Perhaps what got their attention was Gov. Tom Wolf’s decision to send a few hundred Philadelphia National Guard soldiers to, as he put it, “protect the right to peacefully assemble and protest while keeping people safe.”
The National Guard troops were deployed in the city during the protests over Floyd’s murder, and their presence actually had a calming impact by most accounts. That may be because the Guard units are more racially integrated than the Philadelphia police force, and because they are better trained about not resorting to their weapons as readily as Philly cops. Those cops seemed to be at their aggressive best in these latest protests, reportedly tackling and hitting protesters with batons.
USA Today (10/27/20) reported that “police in Philadelphia said 30 officers were injured during violent protests Monday night,” without mentioning that nearly all the injuries were minor.
Much of the national media reported that 30 officers were injured during the Tuesday night police actions at the protest in West Philadelphia. But some neglected to mention, as the Philadelphia Inquirer (10/27/20) reported, that only one officer, a woman hit by a speeding pickup truck that had rounded a corner into a wall of cops, breaking her leg and causing other unspecified injuries, was still in the hospital. The other 29 officers, who had reportedly suffered minor injuries from thrown objects, were simply examined, treated if necessary and discharged.
Even the New York Times (10/28/20) omitted the detail about the lack of severity of the injuries — a serious oversight or reporting failure. (An earlier article mentioned that the police had been “treated for cuts and bruises,” but that information dropped out in later reporting.)
Most of the national reporting was more deliberately inflammatory and even frightening, reminiscent of the coverage of the major unrest in Portland, New York and other cities that followed the Floyd killing.
“Looters in Philadelphia Ransack Stores, Attack Reporter During Second Night of Chaos,” blared Fox News (10/28/20). (A reporter for the Blaze, Elijah Schaffer, claimed he was “jumped” by people he described as “BLM rioters,” said to be “looting a dozen stores.”)
The Boston Globe (10/28/20), under the rather overheated headline “National Guard Responds as Protests Over Walter Wallace, Jr. Killing Engulf Philadelphia,” contradicted Governor Wolf’s explanation for the Guard deployment, reporting instead, with no attribution, that the soldiers were there “to protect property” and to “quell unrest.” The injuries of 30 police officers were again mentioned in the Globe story, but not the minor nature of 29 of them.
Fox News (10/28/20) illustrates how the Philadelphia protests were spun in media catering to Trump voters.
ABC News’ headline (World News Tonight, 10/27/20) was “Turmoil in Philadelphia After Death of Walter Wallace, Jr.”
The significance of the widespread overhyping of this Philadelphia story in the national media is, of course, that Pennsylvania, with its 20 electors, is widely viewed as the key state that will determine who wins the November 3 presidential election. President Donald Trump was quick to condemn the protests in Philadelphia, with the White House (Forbes, 10/28/20) calling the protests “the most recent consequence of the liberal Democrats’ war against the police.”
The Trump administration also said it “stands proudly with law enforcement, and will send federal resources to end the riots if asked.”
It’s likely that Wolf’s quick decision to dispatch some National Guard troops to Philadelphia had more to do with preventing Trump from doing what he did in Portland—sending in armed federal officers against the wishes of local authorities and provoking more violence—than with assisting in riot control, which appears not to have been necessary to any great degree.
Late Wednesday, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney declared a city-wide curfew beginning at 9 p.m., and as of midnight, things appeared calm in the city.
There is widespread anger at the police for this latest police killing, and calls for an end to police using weapons to deal with mentally ill persons, but Philadelphia is not ablaze or in chaos.
I’m going to bed.
Featured image: Boston Globe depiction (10/28/20) of protests against a police killing in Philadelphia (photo: Matt Slocum/AP).
What happened to check your sources, major media?
Freedom of the Press has become free DUMB of the press. : (
The echo-chamber ubiquity (where ALL media basically cuts & pastes the loudest, cage-rattlin’, click-bait) is certainly nothing new? We’d actually seen some bad little kids, here in NYC… amidst scores-of-thousands of utterly peaceful, orderly and heartening protestors (all ages, races and perspectives… simply tired of being murdered in a corrupt, third-world police state, by federal, state and local cartoon stereotypical kleptocrats responsable for 35K excess deaths (feeding “essential workers” and their vulnerable loved ones to a fucking VIRUS) so they can flip our homes, take our W4 jobs, liquidate our puny equity… indenture us with surprise “out-of-network ER, ICU, PhARMA & code-up chronic COVID diagnostics to force us back into 1099/ gig sharecropper feudalism. Having stomped-down our candidates, openly colluded with neoConfederate Republicans to pack the judiciary and steal our useless votes with such obscene, blatant, sneering dead-eyed SMUG disdain that they’re just obviously itching to set Trump’s nazi hordes loose on their Black, Latino, left and immigrant constituents, to cow the survivors?
Yes, the Murdochification of the US media, which I feel is the main cause of the divisions in US (and UK) society. All self-serving, of course, because it keeps us at each other’s throats while the billionaires rob us blind. Herman and Chomsky were dead on in “Manufacturing Consent.”
BTW, the “riots” in NYC were also largely peaceful demonstrations. The violence was mostly from the NYPD or right-wing agitators appearing after everyone else had left. As for the “looting,” at least some of it was highly organized theft. I saw the demonstrations myself, and have several friends who are store owners and have in-store video cameras of the so called looting.
Update:
The attorney for the family of Walter Wallace says that the police body-cam footage release to the family for viewing among other things shows that the first of 14 shots (seven bullets fired by each officer) “incapacitated” him, meaning that the other 13 bullets emptied into his fallen body by those officers when he was down and only carrying a knife, not a gun, were unnecessary, and almost certainly assured his death. This is what we’re dealing with not just in Philadelphia but across the US: Police empty their weapons into shooting victims when they use them. They are firing — always — with intent to kill. And here, the man they killed was having a mental crisis and his mother was telling the police to back off so she could calm him down. Instead they were yelling at him, frightening him, disorienting him and ultimately killing him.
If it was mostly “peaceful protest” why was a curfew put in place? The guard was called in immediately for these “Peaceful Protest” while it took nearly a week of riots from Floyd to call in the guard? 30 cops are injured during the “peaceful protest” and you believe that is acceptable because of the severity of the injuries. Why are there any injuries if the protest are peaceful? Finally, when is the Inquirer the voice of reason? They just ran an article blaming Trump for the violence in the “peaceful protest.” We the citizens and the tax papers disagree completely on your bias assessment. This city is no longer safe.
The report of 30 cops injured was put out by the PD, and as I reported, 29 of them went to the hospital to be checked out and were sent home for “scratches and bruises.” Even the serious injury, a cop hit and run over by a pickup truck, resulting in a broken leg, wasn’t a case of an attack by protesters, but a driver turning a corner to fast while trying to avoid the protest march, who turned directly into a line of advancing cops and couldn’t stop. As for your other questions, there was some evidence of provocateurs at the protest, mentioned in the Inquirer which interviewed a high school teacher observing the protest. He said there were white people weaing black clothes and black ski-masks who were throwing bricks and spray painting incendiary things. That’s what we also saw happening in Minneapolis after Floyd’s murder. But it didn’t spark rioting here in Philly. I also explained that it appears the mayor and governor decided to bring in the Guard early to pre-empt Trump from turning PHilly into another Portland with his federal thugs from DHS. It appears to have worked. Philly’s black residents like the Guard a lot better than they like the city’s PD, and for good reason. If nothing else, the Philly Natl. Guard is more integrated than the Philadelphia PD.
Philadelphia doesn’t have its own National Guard. I dunno how integrated the PA Army National Guard is, but I know it has a lot of lilywhite central PA farmboys in it.