Replaying a shooting

A news story about an extraordinary effort by state troopers to understand the circumstances of a racially charged police shooting.






ON TURNPIKE, OFFICIALS TRY TO REPLAY SHOOTING
A 13-MILE STRETCH WAS CLOSED FOR HOURS. INVESTIGATORS WENT OVER VERSIONS OF EVENTS IN WHICH TROOPERS WOUNDED THREE MEN.
BYLINE: Howard Goodman, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
SECTION: SOUTH JERSEY; Pg. B01


In silver shadows on the strangely stilled roadway, the minivan backed toward the squad car. A man jumped away, fell to the pavement with a gun drawn, scrambled to his feet, stumbled again, darted out of the way.

His partner readied to fire at the van as it nudged the police car, pushing it backward to a grassy strip left of the shoulder while curving slowly backward across three lanes toward the concrete median barrier.

Forensics expert Henry Lee ordered it done again. And again.

Policing gets smarter

Philadelphia had one of the nation's most brutal and backward police forces in America in the 1970s. In the late '90s the city decided, finally, to change. Here's one of many stories I wrote on how the new police commissioner went about it.





COMPSTAT: NEW WEAPON FOR POLICE
The intense weekly meetings zero in on Phila. crime statistics - and how to thwart criminals
Howard Goodman, Inquirer staff writer
LOCAL: Pg. A01

So there's this cop up in the 14th District, see, and he goes to investigate the theft of a cell phone.

What's he do? He calls the number.

And - can you believe this? - the knucklehead answers.

The cop pretends he's the owner. Tells the thief: "Hey, this phone really likes me. Will you take $50 for it?"

Sure enough, the guy agrees, they meet. Bingo! An arrest.

Captain Joseph Marker told that story yesterday, and the assembled brass roared.

"But here's why I wanted to tell you this," Marker said. "In the 14th now, we have standing orders. Every time we investigate a stolen cell phone, we dial the number."

Celebrating ingenuity, sharing information. That's the essence of a new ritual in Philadelphia policing - the weekly meeting called Compstat.

Compstat is the organizational centerpiece of the Police Department's new crime-fighting initiatives, the chief apparatus for turning the long-slumbering department into a unified, focused force.

Conducted in the half-light of one meeting room or another, with more than 50 police officials from all over the city seated at a U-shaped table with computer-generated crime maps splashed on a screen, Compstat is where district captains and the heads of special units are confronted with up-to-date statistics about crime in their areas, and questioned about them in exquisite detail.

With Police Commissioner John F. Timoney and top aides leading the grilling, it's where captains must defend the steps they have taken to fight crime.

For the commanders on the hot seat, it's a chance to show they are getting ahead of the criminals in their districts.

But if they don't know their facts, if they haven't aggressively and creatively attacked the problems on their streets, Compstat can be an occasion of intense embarrassment.

Yesterday, for the first time since the sessions began in March, Timoney opened a Compstat session to reporters.

Alaska in an RV

A travel piece. The whole family went on the road, and it made for a funny trip.





ALASKA BY RV: A PRACTICAL WAY TO TRAVEL A CHALLENGING STATE
IT'S A LESS COSTLY, LESS DAREDEVIL MODE - WITH PLENTY OF HOOKUPS.
BYLINE: Howard Goodman, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
SECTION: FEATURES TRAVEL; Pg. T01


ON THE ROAD IN ALASKA - Wind lashed my face, cold rain cutting icy rivulets on cheeks chapped raw, as my weary team lunged onward and our sled - plied with foodstuffs, camp gear, precious serums - forged toward the white-blurred, unknown beyond . . .

Well, no, that's not actually how I traversed Alaska.

Picture, instead, a cushioned vinyl seat, a steering wheel, a bed with sheets and pillowcases, a cupboard full of Lays Baked Potato Chips, an Aqua-Marine IV toilet - all of it moving at nine miles to the gallon.

Ellen, my wife, is in the passenger seat, checking our progress against The Milepost, a 754-page guide to just about every roadside attraction in the Great White North. My stepdaughter,
Rachel, is on the couch, writing in her journal. My stepson, Mike, is curled up in the rear bed with a book on the wilderness and Soundgarden on his headphones. Rachel's boyfriend, Tal, and my son, Ben, are playing cribbage at the dining table.

We're doing Alaska family-style, in a rented recreational vehicle - a 1993 Ford Jamboree Rallye - carrying most of the comforts (and a lot of the chores) of home with us as we go from mountaintop to salmon stream to shoreline. In the biggest state in the union - Texas times two, plus change - the six of us are spending two weeks in a 27-foot-long, 18-foot-high, 7 3/4-foot-wide RV.

We have hearkened to the call of the mild.

New top cop starts work

John Timoney stormed into Philadelphia determined to bring the police department to modern standards. He worked fast... from the very beginning.





'FULL SPEED AHEAD,' TIMONEY SAYS ON FIRST DAY
BYLINE: Howard Goodman and Thomas J. Gibbons Jr., INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS
SECTION: CITY & REGION; Pg. B01

In a foul-smelling courtroom in a shabby police station in the blighted heart of one of Philadelphia's most drug-infested and violent neighborhoods, John F. Timoney yesterday began bonding with the police department that is suddenly his.

On his first day on the job, the new commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department began at 7 a.m., addressing morning roll call at the 24th and 25th Districts of Fairhill, Kensington and North Philadelphia.

"Have a safe tour," Timoney told groups of officers unused to seeing so important a personage at their daily ritual.

"This won't be my last visit," he added. "Maybe some night at 1 o'clock in the morning, I'll pop in and drive in a radio car with you."

The 49-year-old former deputy commissioner of the New York Police Department is so new in town that his Rittenhouse Square apartment doesn't have a telephone yet. He is working out of temporary quarters at the Municipal Services Building because his office at the Police Administration Building is getting a coat of paint.

His swearing-in will not take place until today at City Hall.

But he was off and running.

"Full speed ahead," Timoney said jauntily at 8 a.m.

The fly on Rendell's wall

It was one measure of Ed Rendell's self-confidence - or ego- that he let the hard-eyed reporter Buzz Bissinger watch his every move as he tried to lead the city out of a crushing fiscal crisis. Bissinger emerged with a great book about America's cities. Too bad for his sales that the city was Philadelphia.




SILENT WITNESS TO THE CITY'S STRUGGLES
BYLINE: Howard Goodman, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
SECTION: FEATURES ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. F01

For four years he was commonly mistaken for one of the mayor's aides.

Which is just as Buzz Bissinger wanted it.

Believing that "access is king," he'd perch on a leather loveseat in Room 212 of City Hall for hours and days at a time, dressed in a nondescript gray suit and conservative black shoes, jotting down everything he overheard as Ed Rendell plunged in to manage the basically unmanageable city of Philadelphia.

If asked, he would say who he was and what he was up to. But people rarely asked because he was so obviously one of those earnest young suits always seen dancing at a politician's beck and call.

He was so convincing a nonentity that Henry Cisneros, then secretary of Housing and Urban Development, turned to him after discussing some very hush-hush matter with the mayor and instructed: "Don't let any of this get to the press."

Well, Mr. Secretary, you'll be relieved to know that he didn't give it to the newspapers or TV.

But, er, sir:

He put it in hardcover.

The Badlands outside, filth inside

One of the hardest things to convey in words is what the decrepitude of a major city is truly like. I tried to get at it with this one.





CITY POLICE WORK IN A "PIGPEN" AS RED TAPE DELAYS A NEW STATION
BYLINE: Howard Goodman, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. A01

The reek, the stench, the stink from the juvenile detention cell should be enough in and of itself to force the closing of the headquarters building of the 24th and 25th Police Districts of North Philadelphia and Kensington.

But that would ignore the uncollected garbage bags cluttering the grimy stairwells, the overcrowded offices for detectives, the permanent grime on their gray metal desks, the heating system that goes awry and the air-conditioning that doesn't cool, the unusable locker rooms.

The roaches.

A state legislative report, released in December by Rep. Benjamin Ramos, a Democrat from the area, called the facility "totally inappropriate and unsafe."

As if that were news. Back in 1995, the city government set aside $8 million for a new facility for the 24th and 25th, after Mayor Rendell toured the run-down station at the request of the police wives' organization. "One officer described it as a pigpen," Rendell said in his 1995 budget address, "and he was being charitable."

Three Januaries later, $8 million is still set aside for a new building. Blueprints are ready. But with the tortoise pace of a bureaucracy trailing political and community bickering, no site has been determined and no groundbreaking is in sight.

Police here patrol some of the lowest-income and highest-crime swaths of Philadelphia - a battered landscape of ruins, marked by graffiti, brazen drug-dealing, domestic chaos, sporadic gunfire.

To lock up suspects, question witnesses, write reports, wrap up their shifts, officers trek back to a headquarters at Front and Westmoreland Streets that's every bit as bleak as the turf outside.

"The 24th and 25th contain some of the poorest and worst conditions in the city," said Robert Borden, treasurer of Philadelphia's Fraternal Order of Police, showing the place to a visitor recently.

"It's hard on a police officer, and it compounds it even more if you come in and this is your building."

Here's what it's like. When corporals with desk jobs take a day off, sergeants flip a coin to see who fills in. The loser stays indoors.

"You'd rather be out on the street," said Sgt. Joe Jackson, referring to terrain so chaotic that it's been nicknamed "the Badlands" and "Oz."

Voices sound off on crime

In his second term, Mayor Ed Rendell was hugely admired for having revived Philadelphia's finances and injecting bolts of confidence into a city that never had much to feel good about. But he hadn't been paying enough attention to public safety. And people let him know it.





IN PHILA., RISING FRUSTRATIONS OVER CRIME
RESIDENTS AND LEGISLATORS SOUND OFF - AND WONDER IF RENDELL IS LISTENING.
BYLINE: Howard Goodman, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. A01

The voices are of citizen outrage.

Lorraine Dubzak, Rhawnhurst: "I go to Center City periodically. I have a permit to carry a weapon . . . The 15th Street Concourse, I haven't been down there for a while. I'm walking, I'm like . . . where the hell is everybody? . . .

"I had a guy follow me down there. I just reached into my waistband, clipped my clip in, and I walked and I just watched what I was doing. . . . You have to watch yourself."

Inez Porter, Cobbs Creek: "I don't have a drug corner in my area, I have an infestation. . . . I see the nonchalant attitude of the police on the street and the radio. . . . Nobody answers my letters."

The Rev. Kermit Newkirk, Logan: "People are leaving the city in droves. It's crime, schools. People in the inner city, they aren't even surprised by car theft anymore. We have people come out of church, the car is gone. It's not a major thing. It's just the cost of going to church."

Voices of outrage - out of earshot of Mayor Rendell.

In every corner of the city, sentiment is rising for a smarter, more aggressive attack on crime.
To many Philadelphians, crime is no abstraction, no statistic, no headline. It's the anxious undercurrent of everyday life.

And they're wondering if the most popular mayor in the city's recent history hears their cry.

Library makes for good story

Covering a municipal government is usually an immersion in stories of frustration. So I seized the chance to report good news like this.





LATEST CHAPTER ON THE FREE LIBRARY IS TALE OF SUCCESS
IN TWO YEARS, 16 BRANCHES HAVE BEEN UPGRADED INSIDE AND OUT. THE RESULTS, INCLUDING COMPUTERS, HAVE DRAWN MORE PATRONS.
BYLINE: Howard Goodman, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. A01

The paint was peeling, the roof unreliable, the fluorescent lights too dim. One recent January, the heater conked out for most of the month.

For an awfully long time, the Paschalville branch library in a shot-and-a-beer section of Southwest Philadelphia had the used-up and left-behind look of a city ruin.

But two years ago, the branch underwent a major overhaul. New paint, new lights, new
computers.

New customers.

"The community loves the building," said Frank Ferguson, head librarian at the branch for 13 years. He tallied 9,500 people coming through the doors in October - the most he can recall.

"The only thing is we're so busy now, we need more staff," Ferguson said.

All across the enormous Free Library of Philadelphia system, tarnished buildings are being restored and outfitted with up-to-date technology in an unprecedented public-private drive slated to yield $75 million by 2000.

And the public is responding. Last year, the central library and its 52-branch system recorded 4.8 million visitors - 800,000 more than in 1993. Borrowers took out 6.5 million items - a half-million more than in the 1960s, when the city had a half-million more people.

The system is in such a frenzy of renewal that two employees spend the bulk of their time planning grand reopening celebrations.

Saving the shipyard

One of the things that distinguished the Philadelphia Inquirer was its frequent use of the reconstruction. Soon after a major news event, reporters would interview the participants to recount behind-the-scenes events and tell the story as a whole, instead of daily increments. The reporting had to be deep, the writing quick.





BEHIND THE SHIPYARD DEAL: A 'HAIL MARY' THAT WORKED
THE NEGOTIATIONS INCLUDED EAGLES GAMES AND CAPITOL HILL INTRIGUE. RISKS WERE TAKEN - BY BOTH SIDES.
BYLINE: Howard Goodman and Russell E. Eshleman Jr., INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS, Inquirer staff writer Craig McCoy contributed to this article.
SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. A01

The clock was ticking on the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in the late summer of 1995, and the city's desperate play for resurrection - a deal with the German shipbuilder Meyer Werft - was collapsing, too.

A week before the end, Terry Gillen saw it coming. Freighted by foreboding, with 2,000 jobs on the block, the city official looked upon a sea of faces at a union meeting.

"What are we going to do with all these people?" she thought.

She was still wondering when the yard formally closed, on Sept. 15, 1995, then again a few days later, when the Meyer Werft deal died.

Yet within two weeks of that debacle, Gillen and William Hankowsky, both of the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp., sent letters to every shipbuilder big enough to possibly expand here.

It was a short list, about two dozen companies. They read a simple plea: We have idle dry docks and a pool of public money; are you interested?

It was a long shot, a Hail Mary, a message in a bottle.

But word came back.

Through the industry grapevine, the Philadelphians heard that one company, the Norwegian conglomerate Kvaerner ASA, might bite.

So began a secret, two-year courtship between a region with a sadly abandoned industrial asset and a global high-tech business giant with a niche to fill.

The new new urbanism: Going rural

What do you do with a city with dwindling population, acres of empty lots? Here was a radical idea: Return the land to agriculture.






DOWN ON THE FARM IN PHILA.
SOME PEOPLE ARE BOLDLY RETHINKING WHAT A CITY CAN BE. ON BLIGHTED OR FORGOTTEN BLOCKS, THEY SEE FIELDS OF OPPORTUNITY.
BYLINE: Howard Goodman, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. A01

Imagine the abandoned factories of Philadelphia's stranded neighborhoods reawakened, producing and pulsing with people at work.

Imagine new life for those brick industrial hulks, in which a bygone Philadelphia made locomotives, hats, saw blades, elevators - now pickings for vandals and shelters for addicts.

Imagine them as Kate Smith does. The agricultural economist, raised on an Iowa farm, aches for the squandered city.

She's eyeing those huge, dark interiors left over from the Industrial Revolution. And she has an idea for them.

Harvest mushrooms.

Why not? Mushrooms are grown indoors. They require a steady supply of unskilled or semiskilled labor, and the city has plenty of that. There's a growing niche market for specialty foods, gourmet or organic.

The idea might collapse when it collides with financial and technical realities. But Smith is optimistic.

"The one thing I know is that everyone has to eat," she says, "and the one sure market is food."

Mushrooms are just one of the brainstorms of a small, unconventional group of Philadelphians - community leaders, intellectuals, businesspeople - who are thinking about the future of the city, and saying "why not?" instead of "no way."

Idea by idea, they are developing a mind-stretching vision of a future Philadelphia. With a nudge here and a nudge there, they're tilting the very notion of "city" to dizzying angles.