Gunshots at the playground
Something unsettling happened a few weeks ago and I've been trying to make sense of it. I took our three year old Thisbe to a playground on a Sunday. The night before, she'd asked to go to a special playground called Smith Memorial, which I thought was a great idea. So the next morning we packed up our cargo bike and headed out.
Smith Memorial is a few miles away, maybe a forty minute bike ride, and it was hot. As we headed north to where Girard Avenue meets 48th street (these details become important later), Thisbe saw another playground. As we passed by it she asked to stop and go there instead of Smith. I'd noticed this playground before on our trips in this direction. I'm always interested in new places and like to explore the city, and I welcomed the shorter ride given the heat, so we pulled off and went.
The playground, in the center of Clara Muhammed Square, was empty. No one was there. Maybe a few adults slowly walked by or through the park, but it was quiet. There was an old decrepit church west of the park and a newer church building just to the north. There weren't many cars passing by. There was some trash around the park and the playground, but the whole site was pretty good compared to others I'd seen. The equipment was also in fine shape. But it was a little spooky and sad nonetheless.
Thisbe didn't pick up on that. She ran right over to the playground and started playing. She loves having a playground to herself and this one's features were really good for her: two climbing walls, three slides, and bars that she could almost reach and hang off from. There were also a circle of rings bigger kids could swing on, like monkey bars.
Adding to the spookiness, there was an old gray bedsheet tied to these rings lengthwise. The whole sheet hung down like a big billowing seedpod, the breeze catching in the fabric and making the whole thing breathe, like it was alive, or some kind of ghost or alien. I thought maybe it meant something, like a pair of shoes tied at the laces and tossed over a power line, but I'd never seen anything like it before. It was unnerving.
After a few minutes of Thisbe playing happily there was a huge sound: cracks and pops exploded erratically, maybe five or ten of them, after which a car's wheels screeched. They came from northwest of us, only a few blocks away, near the corner of a larger avenue called Belmont. The sound could've been fireworks, but even though it was 10am on a Sunday morning, I knew what it was: gunshots.
I looked over to Thisbe, who was playing on a slide just a few feet away. She hadn't noticed. I looked around and nothing seemed different. I noticed the church just north of us was letting out and groups of older Black folks were walking slowly in their Sunday best to their cars. They had all stopped walking, some in the middle of the parking lot, and turned their heads northwest towards Belmont where the shots had rung out.
A few minutes after the screeching of the wheels, which I imagine was a shooter or target speeding away, I heard sirens. Police and emergency vehicles were rushing to the scene, coming up the streets leading to Belmont and Girard. The churchgoers still stood still, watching and listening, talking to each other, some shaking their heads.
There was no one else on the playground with me and Thisbe. The gray ghost of the bedsheet breathed and billowed in small breezes. We were both fine. Everything was fine. But my chest and stomach were locked in a kind of ossified terror, my heart was beating in my ears, and it felt like my veins were buzzing with terrible electricity.
I have an overactive imagination so I was picturing lots of awful things, too awful to describe in detail, though I'm sure you can guess the basics: me getting shot, Thisbe getting shot, any of the church folk getting shot, the bullets whizzing by or ricocheting towards us, a fire fight breaking out, etc. I was thinking of what I'd do in any of those situations. Would I grab Thisbe and run with her somewhere? What would we do if I got hurt? If she did? Would I call police or someone else? Would I scream? Would the old churchgoers be able to get to us?
I was thankful for the buildings between us and the shots. I'm used to hearing gunshots in our neighborhood, sometimes pretty close by, but we're usually in our house. Being out in the open like that with no one else was scary. Then I got even more freaked out when I realized that, if we hadn't stopped at Muhammed park, we would've been biking through the Belmont and Girard intersection right around the time of the shots. What would've happened then? We were on the cargo bike, but even if we'd been in a car...
And on and on. The sirens rushed past us and Thisbe held her ears, watching an ambulance drive by us. The churchgoers continued to their cars. The tense quiet returned. Thisbe was having a good time and there didn't seem to be any imminent danger, so we stayed. I tried to forget about it but I was quite shaken and talked about it with my partner later that day and night. I'm still unnerved.
Feelings
My experience with these gun shots is just one relatively minor drop in the sea of suffering, trauma, and death coursing through Philadelphia and other places across the country in every region and sort of place, whether city, suburb, or rural area. It's a daily experience to read about shootings on the street, individual killings, and mass shootings. The issue of gun violence was thus a huge and decisive issue in the recent Democratic primary here, so much so that the Inquirer was measuring voting patterns against proximity to gunshots.
(Just last week there was a mass shooting that happened about ten blocks away from our house in Kingsessing, at 56th and Chester Ave, where a neighbor fired an AR-style rifle into a party on July 3rd at night, killing five people. It's national news. But we should note that according to the Inquirer, homicides in Philly have decreased 20% since last year.)
So another feeling I had in the wake of the experience I described above was shame. So many people in my city, neighbors and peers and community members, have either been shot or had family members and friends get shot, that, seeing my feelings of fear from the outside, it seemed obvious and short-sighted and sort of embarrassing that only now would I start feeling and thinking about guns and street violence with the depth it deserves.
I'm also not proud of some of the initial things I felt after the experience, like wanting to flee the city permanently. That feeling quickly dissolves when I remember the exponential increase of indiscriminate mass shootings in every kind of area, suburban and rural and urban, at schools, grocery stores, concerts, parades, synagogues, and churches. It's not like leaving the city is any guarantee. At least the gunshots in Philadelphia are largely targeted at existing conflicts between specific individuals, whereas shooters in suburban and rural areas target anyone and everyone.
Also embarrassing, in a silly way, is my tendency to imagine technologies attached to buildings or street lights, triggered by the sound of a gunshot, that create instant magnetic fields to stop bullets mid-air, like in a sci-fi movie.
But after these feelings and dreamings ebbed a bit I started intellectualizing and politicizing the problem, partially to get away from the bad feelings but also to think about what to do. How should I think about this issue and what can I do about it viz. policy, particularly as a socialist?
A socialist response to gun demand
Socialist responses to something like gun violence tend to be structural, politically and economically. We definitely have to make guns more difficult, if not impossible, to get and use for these purposes. But there are deeper issues at play. To use economic terms, it's not just a supply problem. It's a demand problem. Why is there a demand for guns? Why do people want guns and then want to use them? Of course they don't feel safe because other people get them and use them. But what's at the root of this collective demand for terror? A socialist might look to the society in which this demand exists rather than just the individuals who buy and use guns.
The diverse working class in this country faces hell from repressive apparatuses and economic exploitation, racist and ableist and patriarchal, the combination of which create the conditions for increased street violence, reliance on guns, and the fruit thereof. If it's hard to get education, hard make a living, hard to pay rent, hard to take care of loved ones, hard to have reliable housing, food, and healthcare, and easy to get harassed by police, bill collectors, bosses, goons, and this is true for generations in a way that impacts children and then their kids when they get older--and it's concomitantly easy to get guns--then what do we expect?
The liberal and conservative response to gun demand usually involves more of the same: more funding and maybe reforming of police forces; harsh sentencing; zero tolerance; byzantine prison protocols; middling grants to non-profits who have to hustle private donors every year just to pay their meager staffs; complex means-tested welfare programs; job training; 'creating jobs' by giving tax breaks to private firms that encourages development and thus hiring; etc.
But this is absurd. More state violence and continued exploitation are the problem, not the solution, to this issue. A socialist analysis might recommend a more caring society. We need to reduce the intersectionally oppressive state violence and exploitation that working class communities face and create a society that takes care of its people rather than pushing them to the brink. To get this more caring society we need abolition and redistribution, broadly speaking.
I get all that, and I agree with it, but what's the socialist policy protocol to respond to what I experienced at the playground? What about the people getting and using guns in public places right now? I know vaguely about Australia's buyback program from the 1990s, but what else is there to advocate?
Having worked on campaign platforms in the past, I realized I could read the left candidate for Philly mayor Helen Gym's safety platform to get a picture of what we can push for. These platforms gather together leading thinkers, ideas, and politics that--if done well--can make them helpful articulations for policy approaches to problems like gun violence.
Community safety plan
Gym had five planks on the safety platform, all of which are relevant: restoring basic public safety; spearheading a holistic, justice-driven strategy for preventing and solving crime; implementing a youth anti-violence agenda; investing in communities; building community trust and improving accountability. The word gun appears 38 times and there are a lot of policies to think about here. Let me try to summarize a few from a beginner's perspective.
The first plank has to do with police reforms which are fair enough. The second plank is "taking a holistic approach" to crime, the first part of which outlines how Gym would deal with the illegal gun trade. The platform talks about working with police and other governments. The third plank is maybe the most interesting, where Gym talks about what her administration would do to overhaul the city's approach to gun violence. One specific policy stood out to me:
Provide skilled “violence interrupters,” by reforming and overhauling this critical program. With a large proportion of shootings tied to interpersonal conflict, there is significant need for individuals capable of intervening and diffusing tensions before violence erupts. Helen will ensure the City finally adopts an evidence-based model for this work, using effective, community-based, trusted service providers with the capacity to develop staff who can serve as credible messengers. She will regularly evaluate service providers to ensure that their strategies are working and a worthwhile investment of taxpayer money.
I'd read a long ProPublic piece on violence interruption, which felt promising but also, of course, complicated (as you can tell from all the hedging on this proposal above: there's been corruption in the non-profits tasked with this work in Philly).
The next set of policies from Gym's platform are directed at youth anti-violence since gun violence takes place largely between and among young people in the city. Those policies are consonant with some of the things I've already mentioned, making society more caring and providing more for families and young people through employment, programs, and oversight of too-harsh repressive policies.
You can look at the rest of the platform and maybe poke around the policies. Doing this gave me a sense of the terrain and more to think about moving forward.
It's a more than a month later now as I finish this post. The experience I described above has settled into my psyche, adjusting my sense of normalcy in the direction of gunshots in open areas. I'm more likely to stick to playgrounds I know of course, and I'm still nervous, but I've got some context and know better what to support in trying to reduce the number of shots ringing out.