COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE - BUDGET - - - Room 400, City Hall Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Tuesday, April 24, 2007 10:15 a.m. - - - PRESENT: COUNCIL PRESIDENT ANNA C. VERNA COUNCILWOMAN JANNIE BLACKWELL COUNCILMAN DARRELL L. CLARKE COUNCILMAN FRANK DiCICCO COUNCILMAN WILLIAM GREENLEE COUNCILMAN JAMES F. KENNEY COUNCILWOMAN DONNA REED MILLER COUNCILMAN FRANK RIZZO COUNCILMAN DANIEL SAVAGE BILLS 070114, 070115 and 070116 RESOLUTION 070128 - - - V A R A L L O Incorporated Litigation Support Services Eleven Penn Center 1835 Market Street, Suite 600 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103 215.561.2220 215.567.2670 2 4/24/07 - WHOLE - BILL 070114, ETC.
Good morning, everyone. I regret the delay. This is a continued public hearing of the Committee of the Whole, and I would ask Mr. McPherson to please call the first department to testify. MR. McPHERSON: District Attorney's Office.
My name is Lynne, L-Y-N-N-E, last name Abraham, A-B-R-A-H-A-M, and joining me is Al Toczydlowski, our Deputy, and he will spell his name for the record because I can't.
3 4/24/07 - WHOLE - BILL 070114, ETC. T-O-C-Z-Y-D-L-O-W-S-K-I.
Madam President and members of Council, I think of all the things that are brutal and grotesque in this era of shooting and killing across this nation. Philadelphia certainly stands among the top two or three in the country for shootings and killings. As a matter of fact, with regard to black homicides in this country, Pennsylvania is number one, with Philadelphia providing the majority, if not the overwhelming majority, of black homicide victims and perpetrators in this Commonwealth. Recent studies are absolutely astounding with regard to the number of shootings and killings that are occurring in Philadelphia, and last night will give you just a perfect picture in small letters about how things are going in Philadelphia. m. at 30th and Cumberland, one male was 4 4/24/07 - WHOLE - BILL 070114, ETC. shot in the chest and died. m. on the highway, a male was shot in the lower body. Shooting in the 19th District at 5322 Race Street on the highway at 8:20, 19-year-old male shot in the upper leg. 25th District shooting at 9:10, 3rd and Indiana, 16-year-old female shot in both legs. , 948 Carver Street, 21-year-old male shot in the upper leg and transferred to Albert Einstein Medical Center. , an 18-year-old Hispanic male shot in the lower body. , a shooting at 7736 Fayette Street in West Oak Lane, a 32-year-old male shot in the abdomen, in critical condition. m. at 54th and Lindbergh on the highway, 22-year-old male shot in the right leg. He is in the hospital. Over the weekend we had ten 5 4/24/07 - WHOLE - BILL 070114, ETC. homicides, one early last evening. That makes it by my count, bringing the 4 total of homicides in Philadelphia this 5 year to 128. 6 This is a time when in addition 7 to the shootings and killings, we have 8 for every fatality at least five and 9 sometimes more than five people who pick 10 up guns and either point them at, use 11 them or critically injure another person in this city. Against this backdrop of 406 homicides last year, a pace that rivals and exceeds last year's pace, and on top of all of the other crime that faces Philadelphians, from house stealing to child abuse to domestic violence to narcotics activity to life quality crimes to robbery, rape, kidnapping, assaults and the whole panoply of white-collar frauds that are perpetrated against citizens, the Mayor proposes, astoundingly, for at least the second time in two years -- as a matter of fact, 6 4/24/07 - WHOLE - BILL 070114, ETC. I think it's fairly clear that out of the eight years he's been in office, the majority of those times he has sought to limit, if not completely demolish, the morale of the office and the effect of the office by cutting, trimming, obliterating positions. This year's budget, if passed by Council in its present form, will mean that 11 additional prosecutors will be laid off. 12 We have already seen over the 13 course of years what has happened in our office because of these cuts. And I'm not unmindful that Council last year, and for which I am extraordinarily grateful, restored to our budget half of what the Mayor cut, and that went a long way to helping us. But, for example, our Economic Crime Unit, which handles house stealing, which many Councilpeople are interested in, crimes of will forgeries and deed forgeries and scams against the elderly and cyber crimes like identity theft and phishing and all the other -- 7 4/24/07 - WHOLE - BILL 070114, ETC. phishing with a P-H-I-S-H-I-N-G, for the record, phishing with fake websites, we've lost half of that unit because of funding cuts, and that means that these long-term, very complex investigations of scams and frauds, which are multi-faceted, multi-defendant, extremely burdened by tons of paperwork, have had to wait in line and sometimes, in fact most of the times, our Chief, Lisa Caulfield, has told me we just refer them to the civil authorities and say, Get a lawyer and do the best you can.
This is a terrible thing to inflict upon seniors, the vulnerable and others who are taken advantage of. That's just one of the things that we've lost. We've lost our truancy prevention program. We've lost our local intensive narcotics effort program. We've had to cut down on other units. There are 21 lawyers in the Homicide Division who are struggling with hundreds of cases, more than the actual numbers of 8 4/24/07 - WHOLE - BILL 070114, ETC. homicides, because in many of the cases, although the number of dead is 406, the numbers of perpetrators, accomplices co-conspirator can be three, four, five, six or more. And sometimes the case, as one of the cases was this past year, there were four defendants accused of murdering a young girl in Southwest Philadelphia. There were four trials. The prosecutor went from one courtroom to the other to the other to the other, without a break, for weeks upon weeks, months, trying each of the four defendants separately, because unlike in former times when all the defendants were joined in one room, many defendants now are separated, so the case has to be retried and retried and retried before different judges and different jury panels. It is not uncommon for our prosecutors in our major trials, our major felony rooms, our career criminal rooms and our homicide rooms to be literally exhausted from just handling 9 4/24/07 - WHOLE - BILL 070114, ETC. the sheer weight and number of cases. There's an interesting by-product to all of this. 9 billion surplus to help him in his -- now, this is an astoundingly large budget, so this is not Philadelphia and I'm not trying to make the comparison, but this is instructive, I think. 1 billion, a huge, huge number. But almost four billion of that came from monies encouraged by the real estate boom in New York, which allowed it to be added to the budget and they cut taxes. This is an important signal, because Philadelphia can do the same thing. We can encourage an economic boom, a building boom of not only condos but of businesses in the City and encourage people to not only come here 10 4/24/07 - WHOLE - BILL 070114, ETC. but stay here. We won't lose our brain power by having young people come here, go to college and other schools here and then leave the City. We will encourage people to come and stay here if we are perceived to be a safe city. The perception right now is quite the opposite. We are on every blog in this country as an unsafe city. It's not just the local headlines that call us Killadelphia and other terrible things, and 52nd and Market being dubbed "death row" by the Philadelphia Daily News. It's not just that that's bad enough and hurtful enough for those, like many of us, who have spent our entire lives in Philadelphia and intend to remain here. It's a disparaging mark on all of us from around the country. It allows the people looking at Philadelphia as a possible place, saying, I don't think I'll come to Philadelphia. If you look at violence in our schools, which is portrayed, as it should 11 4/24/07 - WHOLE - BILL 070114, ETC. be, as difficult and dangerous for teachers and students alike, people say, Well, I don't think I want to put my children in the Philadelphia public school. A woman came up to me and said, Oh, thank goodness we can stay in Philadelphia. My child got in a certain school, which she perceives as safe. She said, We were thinking of leaving the City. It's a young woman with a child in grade school, which I happened to visit just the other day. There are wonderful children in this city. They want to live in a safe environment. They don't want to be frightened by the things they see and hear in their neighborhoods and surrounding their every aspect of their life. So I think what we need to do is take a leadership role. I'm not afraid to do the hard things that need to be done. We've absorbed cost cuts in the 12 4/24/07 - WHOLE - BILL 070114, ETC.
past, and what it meant was cutting manpower, shifting people out of units, seeing people leave the office for the fat salaries of $135,000 a year at law firms, and by the time they leave us, after only a few short years, they make more and they live outside of the City and take their children out of Philadelphia public schools and don't pay the kinds of real estate and other taxes that we have. We need to take a leadership role and we need to tell the Mayor, This is the end of the road. 1 percent out of our budget and leave us with a budget shortfall which means that I have to lay off 13 lawyers. This city can't afford it. The people can't afford it. And I want to show you 13 4/24/07 - WHOLE - BILL 070114, ETC. something that I think will help you sort of crystalize what we're talking about, the wide swaths of Philadelphia. I brought this map -- and I would ask, by the way, the