Matt Slocum/AP Photo
A vandalized statue of the late Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, who also served as the city’s police commissioner, behind mounted State Police officers outside the Municipal Services Building in Philadelphia, May 30, 2020
Unlike Richmond, Virginia, there are no Confederate statues on the streets of Philadelphia. But hundreds of miles away from the former capital of the Confederacy, the statue of former mayor and police chief Frank Rizzo was as close as a Northern city gets to a monument to the Lost Cause. And like some of the Southern towns that finally turned a page, early in the morning of June 3, workers packed up Rizzo and stashed him out of sight.
The statue of the man who once told Philadelphia to “vote white” had long been a magnet for protests, especially after lynchings of black men. In the past several years, the calls for it to be removed reached a crescendo. Yet Mayor Jim Kenney (who is from South Philadelphia, Rizzo’s old power base) always hesitated, including this week when he originally said that it would be taken down in a month. (Someone perhaps had the good sense to convince Kenney that if the city didn’t take it down, well, many bad things can happen in a month.) A Rizzo mural in South Philadelphia’s Italian Market will also come down.
The statue was as much a monument to the hypocrisy of Philadelphia’s white power brokers as it was to the man who personified racism and police brutality. Welded into place in 1998 across from City Hall, eight years after Rizzo’s death, the display was supported by the city’s Democratic leaders. Ed Rendell, the mayor at the time, who went on to become governor of Pennsylvania, hosted a fundraiser along with the city’s top law enforcement official, District Attorney Lynne Abraham, and other local notables to raise money for the statue. Kenney, a city councilor at the time, now claims it was “kind of foisted on the city 20 years ago,” a claim a former Philadelphia politician hotly disputed, calling him “a liar and a hypocrite,” among other things.
Wikimedia Commons
Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, 1972
A living legend for Italian Americans, who celebrated one of their own making it to the top of the police force in 1968 for three years and then springboarding into City Hall in 1972 for eight years, Rizzo was affable, supporting individuals, black and white, who needed a hand. He helped secure funding for the city’s first African American museum. Contrary to popular misconceptions, law-and-order stances like Rizzo’s played well with some African Americans, who by the late 1960s were desperate for relief from the criminals who preyed on them.
But Rizzo was the type of racist who could pull off the good, the bad, and the ugly. An ardent practitioner of the dark arts of police brutality, he was fond of luxuriating in violent imagery. “If I were you, I’d grab one of those big baseball bats and lay right into the sides of their heads,” he once said. His tough-on-crime ardor caught the attention of Richard Nixon, who doted on Rizzo so much that he tried to get him to run for mayor as a Republican (which he did finally in the 1980s, after serving two terms as a Democrat).
AP Photo
Police officers arrest a student demonstrator during a Philadelphia Board of Education protest, November 1967.
Many cops took those words to heart, raiding gay coffeehouses in the 1950s and busting the heads of high school students campaigning for a black history curriculum in the public schools in the 1960s (the police commissioner himself was on the scene), and HIV/AIDS demonstrators in the 1990s. Rizzo was vilified in the West Philadelphia neighborhood where I grew up, an area subject to heavy police surveillance. My father railed against him and his baseball-bat threats constantly, and we kids learned to recognize “1818” and “1820,” the two bright-red squad cars that patrolled our neighborhood.
By 1979, the Department of Justice had swooped in to file a lawsuit against the city for the police brutality that germinated from the seeds Rizzo sowed. Philadelphia has kept DOJ busy for decades. After a 2011 consent decree was put in place, police stop-and-frisk searches had to be predicated on “reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct” and not “race or ethnicity.” By 2015, the department concluded that the use of deadly force by both black and white officers was still rampant. Another 2018 report found that, in the first six months of that year, police unlawfully stopped and frisked 1,000 people each month.
The statue was as much a monument to the hypocrisy of Philadelphia’s white power brokers as it was to the man who personified racism and police brutality.
After nearly four years in office, Kenney proposed raising the fiscal 2021 police department budget by more than $20 million, while cutting funding for the civilian oversight commission by nearly 20 percent and anti-violence programs by the same amount, because apparently why investigate abuses and stop violence, instead of just busting heads?
Leadership has been erratic. Last year, Police Commissioner Richard Ross suddenly resigned in disgrace over sexual misconduct and allegations of discrimination. The nationwide search for a new police chief produced Danielle Outlaw, who led Portland, Oregon’s 900-member force. This move was a recipe for culture shock if there ever was one. After Outlaw learned that her black nail polish ran afoul of department regulations, her first official action as commissioner of the 6,500-strong force was an order to eliminate the department’s prohibition on clear-only nail polish, a story worthy of The Onion. Even before the protests, police excesses kept up during the coronavirus crisis as ten officers hauled a man off a SEPTA bus for not wearing a mask.
For many Philadelphians, the police response during the first weekend of George Floyd protests was more of the same. Despite other major American cities erupting in rage, the force appeared unprepared for the scale of weekend demonstrations which ultimately led to defacing Rizzo’s statue with red and white paint (which the city quickly cleaned up). Looters later trashed Center City shops and commercial strips elsewhere in the city.
When a group of peaceful protestors shut down Interstate 676, a highway spur through downtown Philadelphia, police sprayed them with tear gas (which had not been used in recent history) and corralled them as they tried to flee up a steep embankment. Outlaw later issued a directive that any use of force must be reported on police radios, which begs the question of whether officers can or will comply when faced with split-second decision-making. Meanwhile on Friday, a cell phone video emerged of a police commander beating protestors earlier this week.
In the Fishtown neighborhood, a historically white working-class enclave now undergoing rapid gentrification, a group of baseball-wielding white men marched through the streets “on patrol.” Some police officers even posed for pictures with the men. The optics of their weapons of choice were not lost on a city still plagued by the virus of Frank Rizzo.
