Philly officials, residents ask, “Why the rise in cop-killings?”

November 20, 2008 05:44 AM

By Barbara Laker, Dana DiFilippo and Wendy Ruderman
Philadelphia Daily News

PHILADELPHIA — Five dead cops in just 13 months.

As Philadelphia prepares to bury yet another cop Monday, people - from police rookies in the roll-call room to working Joes in the neighborhood - are asking why.

Is it a random rash of murder and mayhem or is it symptomatic of a crumbling, overwhelmed criminal-justice system?

Two cops - Sgt. Timothy Simpson, the latest loss, killed on Monday, and Officer Isabel Nazario - died after being struck in their patrol cars. The three others - Sgts. Stephen Liczbinski and Patrick McDonald and Officer Chuck Cassidy - were gunned down by thugs.

“I’ve been in policing for a long time and I’ve been through a lot of police funerals and seen a lot of police deaths, and I don’t recall seeing this many in this short span of time,” Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey said Tuesday.

Ramsey and District Attorney Lynne Abraham blame lenient judges and bail commissioners. Some rank-and-file cops point to increased pressure to boost their arrest numbers. Armchair court observers give three reasons: Parolees released early from overcrowded prisons; the tens of thousands of criminals on the loose with active bench warrants, and a system that fails to rehabilitate offenders.

Meanwhile, community leaders argue that criminals have lost all respect for the law and will avoid apprehension at all costs, not caring who lives and who dies.

Dr. Lawrence Sherman, director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, gives another reason that is much simpler.

“We recruit them to be heroes, and to be a hero, you take chances,” Sherman said. “Once you take chances, chances can become a reason for bad things happening.

“There’s all this theorizing, when it all just could be chance. It could just be a brief run of bad luck that could go away.”

Some cops, however, privately grumble that they’re under unprecedented pressure to boost their “activity.”

When Ramsey and Mayor Nutter took over earlier this year, both pledged to crack down on crime and try to stem murder and violent-crime rates that ballooned under their predecessors’ tenure. They wanted a back-to-basics approach, transferring officers out of specialized units to general street patrols and urged cops to stop and frisk possible suspects to take the streets back from criminals.

Pedestrian stops swelled this year, with nearly 181,000 through Halloween, compared to 138,205 for all of last year. Car stops are on pace to at least match last year’s total of 315,633, with more than 301,100 through Halloween, said Lt. Frank Vanore, a police spokesman.

Experts say because there are more stops, there are more pursuits, both on foot and in police cruisers, although those statistics aren’t readily available.

Philadelphia police are permitted to chase a suspect if they deem the offender threatens the safety of officers or the community.

Monday night, police began chasing William Foster on Frankford Avenue near Clearfield Street after he sped through at least one red light. Vanore said yesterday that he didn’t know if the officers who chased Foster had other reasons for doing so.

Foster, of Levittown, was driving through Port Richmond after buying heroin at 10:30 p.m., according to police, and in the midst of the police pursuit, Foster crashed into a squad car driven by Sgt. Timothy Simpson, killing the 20-year veteran. At the time, Simpson, 46, was responding to a priority call of robbery in the area of 3100 Aramingo Ave., police said.

On Sept. 5, Officer Isabel Nazario, 40, an 18-year-veteran, was killed when a stolen SUV that police say was driven by 16-year-old Andre Butler slammed the cruiser in which she was riding. At the time, Nazario and her partner, Officer Terry Tull, were rushing to join the pursuit. When Butler allegedly broadsided Nazario’s cruiser in the crash, she was killed instantly.

John McNesby, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge 5, acknowledges that some commanders have pressured the rank-and-file to be more aggressive in policing.

But he traces the “unbelievable” wave of police fatalities this year back to the criminal-justice system, blaming it for revolving-door justice has allowed some of the region’s most prolific and violent thugs to victimize again and again.

Daniel Giddings, 27, had been released from prison for a month and was a wanted felon when Highway Patrol Officer Patrick McDonald stopped him for a traffic violation Sept. 23.

Giddings bolted and McDonald pursued him. McDonald didn’t have a chance. Giddings pulled out a .45-caliber semiautomatic weapon and shot McDonald at close range. He continued to shoot him after he fell to the ground.

Giddings was fatally shot by another Highway Patrol officer responding to a backup call.

Gov. Rendell ordered a review of the circumstances leading to Giddings’ parole. “We are looking at it to see if it was a bad judgment call,” Rendell had said.

Nutter and Ramsey both demanded an inquiry of the state Board of Probation and Parole.

Giddings was released Aug. 18 from Frackville maximum-security prison after serving 10 years of a six- to 12-year sentence for robbery, aggravated assault and possession of an instrument of crime. He walked away from a halfway house in Philadelphia seven days later.

Common Pleas Judge Lynn Bennett-Hamlin could have sentenced him in 2000 to a maximum of 45 years in the case. Instead, she sentenced Giddings to the minimum mandatory sentence, even though the prosecutor argued that Giddings was likely to re-offend because he had an appalling juvenile record that began at age 10, when he allegedly beat up and robbed a mentally challenged man.

Giddings became a problem prisoner who spent 537 days “in the hole,” or solitary confinement. Yet he was still freed two years shy of his maximum sentence date - Sept. 2, 2010.

Giddings was a wanted man. Problem is, there are thousands more like him and too few cops to nab them. In Philadelphia, there are more than 55,000 people on the run and only 56 investigators and four supervisors responsible for catching them.

“It’s a chronic problem, but it’s been around for a long time,” said Sherman, of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology. “It was a problem 10 years ago. It was a problem 20 years ago.”

Probation officers are handed piles of impossible caseloads. Each Philadelphia probation officer has 185 convicts to supervise, Sherman said.

“That number is one to every 15 in Sweden,” Sherman said. “It would help if there were more probation officers. There’s very little they can do when someone disappears. They’re simply overwhelmed.”

William M. DiMascio, executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, said the system doesn’t work because it’s based on punishment, not rehabilitation.

“We need to confront the roots of crime,” he said. “We think locking them up is the answer. It isn’t.”

Convicts have to be given job skills and aided in re-entering society, he said.

“They call it the Department of Corrections. It’s really the Department of Punishment,” DiMascio said.

He added, “We can’t turn everybody around and make them model citizens, but we can do a better job.”

Three of the five slain cops were shot down by gun-toting criminals who appeared to have hearts of ice:

John “Jordan” Lewis allegedly shot Officer Chuck Cassidy at close range after robbing the Dunkin’ Donuts in West Oak Lane on Oct. 31, 2007. Lewis then leaned over Cassidy’s body and took the officer’s service weapon before fleeing, police said.

On May 3 of this year, Howard Cain allegedly fired a Chinese-made SKS assault rifle at Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski as Cain and two accomplices - Eric DeShawn Floyd and Levon Warner - fled the scene of a botched robbery at the Bank of America branch inside the ShopRite in Port Richmond.

Sultan Ashley-Shah, a North Philly community activist, said he wonders if simmering tensions between cops and residents in poor, minority neighborhoods play a role in the uptick in violence against police and have contributed to the diminished level of respect for the law.

“Even young kids don’t have the element of respect for police officers that we once had when I was growing up,” he said. “It’s ridiculous how many kids are out there being violent. And at some point in time, there has to be a medium where both sides can come together and be heard.

“We have an all-out vigilante war going on - people shooting cops, cops shooting people,” he said. “It’s gotten lawless here in the city of Philadelphia.”