Frank’s politics were insider, patronage politics in a patronage town. The metropolis-destroying cost for these entitlements would sink the city long after his terms in office ended. He was wildly popular with his white ethnic, working-class base, and generally unpopular with the marginalized people he could look down on from the high second-floor windows of Philly’s monolithic City Hall, a shrine to democracy and governmental power that is open to all its people, a place where a man like him made little sense.
Frank Rizzo’s isn’t the only legacy to shape Philadelphia. City Hall is planted right at the center of the city, where Broad Street and Market Street cross. The magnificent and antique building was once the largest masonry structure in the United States, a full city block of pillars and archways supporting lounging statues of human figures. Its stature would make more sense in Washington, D.C., or ancient Greece, but somehow it ended up in this mostly working-class town. The structure’s highest point—the equivalent to about twenty stories in a modern building—is a single domed tower topped by a statue of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, who fled England after being arrested and prosecuted for his egalitarian Quaker religious beliefs.
It is unusual to top a government building with a gigantic statue of a man who was arrested and prosecuted for crimes, much less to mandate that no structure in the city can be taller than the top of his bronze hat (a rule that remained in effect in Philadelphia until the 1980s), but there stands William Penn even now, who went to trial as a criminal defendant. Penn’s supposed crime was protest in England, a place where religion and speech were not free. When England clamped down on a Quaker religious service by locking the Quakers’ meetinghouse, Penn went ahead with the meeting in public anyway. He was arrested and charged. At one point during Penn’s trial, the jurors, who were disinclined to convict him, were jailed without food by the judge to force them to find Penn guilty. The jury resisted anyway, and Penn was acquitted before the young aristocrat left the country altogether, probably to the great relief of the English establishment and his father.
Penn’s experience of being prosecuted unfairly in England likely helped shape his wish list of rights in the New World. He wrote The Frame of Government in Pennsylvania, a mini-constitution for the Pennsylvania colony that protected against the repression he experienced in England and was intended to attract freedom-loving new residents to Pennsylvania. The Frame of Government evolved into Pennsylvania’s constitution and its famous declaration of rights:
That all power being originally inherent in, and consequently derived from, the people; therefore all officers of the government, whether legislative or executive, are their trustees and servants, and at all times accountable to them.
Pennsylvania’s constitution eventually informed the U.S. Constitution on matters close to Penn’s heart and neck: religious freedom, separation of church and state, the right to a jury trial, and jury independence.
Although the record is mixed, Penn’s and the Quakers’ egalitarian philosophy was mostly reflected in efforts to abolish slavery. As early as 1688, German Quakers protested slavery, and many Quakers engaged in other anti-slavery work for two centuries. The Quakers’ egalitarian impulse would be reflected in Philadelphia’s architectural simplicity; affordable row houses helped Philadelphia to have the highest rate of home ownership among the ten largest cities for many years, despite Philadelphia’s becoming the poorest city among them. The city’s economic decline has helped preserve the unadorned and functional early American Bauhaus style.
Arguably this history of abolitionism, egalitarianism, and respect for human dignity and human rights was the foundation for the diversity Philadelphia now enjoys. The demographics today are roughly 42 percent Black, 41 percent white, and 17 percent other people of color who are mostly of Latinx and Asian heritage. The Philadelphia area is also home to the densest grouping of Quakers in America, about half of the American Quaker population. In modern times their members include those who also call themselves Buddhists, Jews, or Christians, and plenty of agnostics and atheists. For many years the affluent Chestnut Hill section of the city’s quarterly Quaker meeting was populated by aging European Jews who had survived the Holocaust and were welcomed in by the Quakers in the area. Their gratitude attracted many of these survivors to the Quaker tradition and its Sunday meetings, which some of them attended for the rest of their lives.
Philadelphians like to think that Penn’s struggle and the best part of the Quaker tradition birthed a city with egalitarianism and justice in its DNA. I like to think that. But for many years, if you really wanted to understand criminal justice and governance in Philadelphia, or maybe just understand Philadelphia, after you looked up at William Penn at City Hall you could go across the street and do what I did in 1991 on that sunny day in the Italian Market—meet Frank.
You used to just have to cross the multilane car circle that surrounds City Hall to face him. There you would see an imposing, larger-than-life bronze statue of Frank Rizzo: unsmiling with an immaculate suit, his right arm raised, elbow slightly bent, presenting one right palm in what the sculptor may have intended as a wave to the multitudes but always looked to me like a fascist salute. Or maybe the artist was slyly sculpting something his patrons didn’t see. That statue is gone now.
The Frank Rizzo statue was Philly’s version of a bronze Confederate general on a horse. Many considered it shameful that Frank’s statue was so proximate to Philadelphia’s home of governmental power, especially with no other mayor’s statue around. Over the past few years, and before Frank was removed, the Rizzo statue was frequently enclosed by police barriers and sometimes protected by a police guard during large gatherings or protests. It was splashed with paint repeatedly.
The statue was not the only Rizzo image to attract negative attention. Philadelphia is rightly famous for its murals. For the past twenty-five years, the city’s Mural Arts program, run by Jane Golden, has covered the city in almost four thousand gorgeous murals created by professional artists assisted by street artists, at-risk youth, people returning from jails and prisons, and inmates who painted on sail cloth that was later attached to buildings beyond their prison walls. Nearly all of the murals stay spotless, devoid of graffiti tags or other marks, because they are created in collaboration with the communities they reflect—the result of a careful process of research, interviews of neighbors, and group meetings in the murals’ surroundings to determine their content. The murals are everywhere and intended for everyone. The most vandalized mural for over a decade was the one of Frank Rizzo, a head-and-shoulders shot of Frank looming on a three-story-high wall adjacent to the Italian Market.
Rocky Balboa ran through this market in the same era that this neighborhood was Frank Rizzo’s base. The market remains a gem but is no longer all Italian, and the neighborhood around the mural has changed. Gone are the shops with signs saying No Personal Checks, a policy enforced only against Black customers. Gone is the white butcher I saw and heard ask a Black customer if he hadn’t been in the shop for a while because he’d been “making license plates at Graterford” prison. In recent decades, waves of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Mexican, and South American sellers joined the Italian food purveyors on Ninth Street. The neighborhood is not Frank Rizzo’s base anymore. Soon after Frank’s statue was taken down, the giant mural of him was painted over. Unlike Frank’s mural, the solid-colored wall that replaced it is no longer smeared in paint ball splatters, Philly’s commentary on the fifty-year legacy of Rizzo’s hateful approach to racial and criminal justice—an approach that lives on in the powerful police union’s throwback leadership.
Philadelphia is a city of 1.6 million people; the sixth largest city in the United States, it has the fourth largest police department. That department is represented by a single police union. Like it or not, and many active Philadelphia police officers do not, every Philadelphia police officer is required to pay dues to and be a member of �
��the Mighty Lodge 5” of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP). Even retired officers remain members and pay big dues, producing the bizarre result that most of the voting members are retired. The union panders to its retired members, and reflects the voices from the past. They sound more like Frank than they should. The retirees are far more male, white, and conservative than the active officers. Lodge 5 is only one source of the Philadelphia police union’s historic power, which is only now beginning to ebb.
Perhaps more than in any other major American city, police have ruled Philadelphia’s politics for decades. This is in part because they formed the stronghold of Frank Rizzo’s power but also because Philadelphia, like most big cities in this country—from Los Angeles to Houston to New York City—is a predominantly progressive city in an otherwise rural, conservative state with, at least in the case of Pennsylvania, an alarming history of hate groups. The well-worn saying is “There’s Pittsburgh and Philly and Alabama in between.”
Why was this relevant to Philly or to my campaign? Because for over a century in Philadelphia—and big cities throughout the country—the chief prosecutor’s office has been a launching pad for ambitious prosecutors to run for statewide elected office, and eventually national office. And the era of ambitious politicians becoming elected chief prosecutors in order to become elected to even higher office coincides with the rise of mass incarceration in the United States for a reason.
For those politicians who want to win statewide office in Pennsylvania, pleasing the leadership of Philadelphia’s FOP has been a key to unlocking votes in rural counties, the places where people know little about urban life or crime and where jail industries profit from harsh urban policies. Philly candidates for statewide office who please Philadelphia’s FOP are assured of FOP support statewide, even in places where rural bias against a Philadelphia candidate is a potential hurdle. No other public office works as directly with the Philadelphia Police Department as the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office. All an ambitious district attorney in Philadelphia thinking of running for statewide office has to do to get statewide FOP support is pander to the leadership of the Philadelphia FOP, actively favoring police or looking away when politically advisable, which really means sometimes stepping on the necks of everyone not wearing blue.
Philadelphia DAs in the past few decades have included political juggernauts like Arlen Specter, who was voted in at thirty-five before he became a career U.S. senator and the most powerful gatekeeper to the federal bench; and Ed Rendell, who took the post at thirty-three, before he was elected mayor and then governor, and then became the chair of the Democratic National Committee. Rendell was buddies with Bill Clinton, and remains an enduring and powerful centrist voice within the Democratic Party.
Other DAs in Philadelphia of recent memory failed to win other offices, but were no less politically ambitious, including Lynne Abraham (best known nationally for being dubbed “the deadliest DA” by The New York Times), who liked to speak of her “passion” for the death penalty and crowed about the more than one hundred death sentences her office wrestled from Philadelphia juries during her nineteen-year tenure. I used to call her “the Queen of Death.” After Lynne Abraham came Seth Williams, Philadelphia’s first elected African American DA, who styled himself as a reformer while campaigning for DA, only to disappoint, reversing direction once he entered office. Perhaps he imagined running for statewide or even higher office later. He hinted at some dubious similarity to Barack Obama until an indictment ended his second term early and landed him in federal prison.
How did these ambitious prosecutors pander to the police? My thirty years in criminal justice before becoming DA taught me the rules. They are easy: Don’t hold the small number of criminal cops accountable when their conduct is violent or corrupt. Don’t push back against constitutional violations of individual rights committed by police, or against selective, discriminatory law enforcement. Do issue unnecessary subpoenas to police so they will receive overtime pay for appearing to testify in court. (It’s an invisible political bribe that adds up to tens of millions of dollars, sometimes providing more than the individual officers’ base salaries. Taxpayers be damned.) Cover up the integrity issues of a few bad officers, and cover up evidence that might lead to an acquittal of a defendant when that information reflects poorly on police. Violate the constitutional requirement (known by the name of the U.S. Supreme Court opinion that established it, Brady) that police and prosecutors turn over to the defense information that shows innocence or otherwise helps the defense. Deliver unequal treatment that favors bad police over good ones, inevitably pushing the bums toward supervisory positions. Favor police over civilians. Above all else, if you, a Philly chief prosecutor, want to rise to higher office statewide, you must climb a staircase made from the bodies of powerless people—the politically disconnected, the poor, and Black and brown people—in order to make yourself more palatable to the powerful, including the Philly FOP.
In early 2017, it was the decades-long stench of this pandering by ambitious politicians and Philly DAs—so habitual it was its own institution—that we were running against. Rizzo’s legacy of over-punishment and a racist politics of fear, corruption, insiderism, tribalism, officially sanctioned violence, and destruction of the city’s budget and resources overshadowed Penn’s legacy and the entire city. Throwing paint at Rizzo’s statue hadn’t fixed it. It was time to take away his shadow’s power, even before his statue went away. We had to go inside government and turn on the lights.
I still remember my surprise in 1991 when Frank died suddenly of a heart attack a few days after I met him. A couple of days later I was walking by the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, the gorgeous red-brown stone cathedral that sits midway between City Hall and the art museum. It’s where Philadelphia’s Catholic elite are baptized and married. I didn’t know before I walked by that Frank Rizzo was lying in state. The hours-long line was out the giant doors and went on for blocks. Police cars, barricades, and uniformed cops were everywhere, gathered like a tribe at the death of its chief. I saw a well-dressed, dark-haired woman in heels walking with uniformed officers through the police barriers that excluded everybody else. She was in her thirties, maybe just forty. The fashion looked like money, slightly retro. She was escorted past the long line and immediately entered through the cathedral doors without delay or explanation. I asked someone who she was. No one answered or even looked my way. They heard me. A few minutes later, I overheard one of the officers tell the other that she was Frank’s girlfriend. Frank had been married forever.
Some things in Philadelphia are for insiders to know. The woman’s significance or her reason for jumping the line wasn’t supposed to be for an outsider like me. But what I did know is that, in Philly, outsiders can wait in line or they can find another way. I stayed behind the police barrier with the others for a few more minutes before heading home, a walk that took me past City Hall and the stairs where Frank’s statue would be erected, with private funds, seven years later, in 1998.
Frank came down in 2020, removed by the city twenty-two years after he was installed. People were sleeping when it happened. There was no prior notice after years of controversy and delay in its removal. Frank was disappeared, extraordinarily renditioned—tactics he might have liked to use on the living in his day. But Frank’s day was over. His bronze image was plucked by a crane, covered in a tarp, and driven away on a flatbed truck to an undisclosed location during days of protests around the death of George Floyd that were led by Black Lives Matter. Philly can’t find Frank, or his shadow, at the moment. Some Philadelphians would break it if they could; a few others would try to put it up somewhere else, surrounded by the throwback culture and support that Frank in bronze represents. But Frank’s renditioned statue is in a secret place for now, which William Penn’s statue is not. Frank’s statue came and went beneath the watchful eyes of William Penn on top of City Hall, where he was first installe
d more than a century ago. Penn remains like a restless guardian angel swathed in lights and fog, dusted and oxidized by the weather and the years, as he keeps watch. Even with Frank gone, Penn still has much to guard against.
CHAPTER 5
Decarceration
No man born with a living soul
Can be working for the clampdown
—The Clash, “Clampdown”
Racism, police brutality, corruption, and the myths that justified all three not only persisted in Frank’s long shadow but also morphed into mass incarceration, disproportionately of Black and brown people. Mass incarceration has catalyzed the dismantling of crime prevention, including a social safety net—partly to pay for more jails and prisons, and partly because a safety net was at odds with the myths held dear by a country full of prisons.
In 2017, there were a lot of Franks holding power all over America in policing, prosecution, and politics—which explains a lot about how we got to be so catastrophically over-incarcerated. We see some of mass incarceration’s many drivers in the operation of our cash bail system, mandatory sentencing laws, sentencing guidelines schemes, excessive supervision of people on bail and parole, and knee-jerk violations of parole and probation that too often lead to more incarceration. But behind the mechanics and tactics of any oppressive system, there are always myths—sometimes in the form of unquestioned assumptions. These myths become so familiar and universal that we barely see them.
The omnipresent jails built by Frank and his ilk rest on the cracked foundation that is the myth that people don’t change. People are either very good or very bad—saints or monsters, you see.
For the People Page 8