Gun violence in Philadelphia will not subside with more police. Ed Rendell knows this. More police have only made it worse up till now and will only make it worse going forward. Police only take the weaker gangsers off the street leaving the city’s $ 7 hundred million annual black market for drugs more open for the real predators to succeed and grow. With that unregulated growth comes the economic and political destabilization of poor urban communities.
This is about the political economics of drug prohibition.
Ed Rendell needs the gun violence in Philadelphia.
Ed Rendell needs his ever escalating Jim Crow drug war.
Without the drug war and its violence Rendell would have to campaign for the interests of poverty oppressed urban Pennsylvanians. So too would Bob Casey. But with urban poor communities destabilized and electorally dis-empowered with the violence, crime and the political effects of mass criminal disenfranchisement Rendell and Casey only need to campaign to ‘middle class’ interests. ‘Middle class’, the modern political euphemism for rural Jim Crow interests.