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Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

In a recent report, researchers from the Brookings Institution talked with residents in four major cities about their perceptions of crime in their cities' downtown areas. One of the cities that the report studied was Philadelphia. City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia is arguably the birthplace of American democracy, the hallowed ground where the Declaration of Independence was signed, and the US Constitution was written.

Of course, it's also a thoroughly modern city. It boasts the downtown that makes other urban leaders envious, historic architecture, diverse cultural venues, and great restaurants. The Brookings report found that Philadelphia also suffers from the thoroughly modern problem of a disjointed perception of crime in its downtown, which is not necessarily borne out by the evidence. We decided to talk with Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney as part of our ongoing series 23 Mayors in 2023.

Jim Kenney: My name is Jim Kenney. I'm the mayor of Philadelphia.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When Jim Kenney was elected to the Philadelphia City Council in 1992, he was just 32 years old and after decades of service, he was elected mayor in 2016 and then reelected in 2020. As a term-limited city leader, Mayor Kenney is in the final months of serving a city that he has spent most of his adulthood being part of. His pride in the city was readily apparent in our conversation.

Jim Kenney: I think we have the best hospital systems in the world. People come from all over the world to go to medical school and dental school and nursing school here. We retain a lot of those physicians and dentists. Also, our educational system is good. We have Penn and Drexel, St. Joe's and La Salle and Community College of Philadelphia, Villanova and all the institutions in the Philadelphia region, we attract students from around the country and around the world.

Tourism is a big issue for us. Also, our hotels are starting to fill up again almost to pre-pandemic capacity. We're starting to get some of our convention business back then we're very happy and proud that business is coming back.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Even though we come together to discuss perceptions of downtown, the mayor also has some favorite locales in the part of the city where he grew up, South Philly.

Jim Kenney: We have a large urban park called Franklin Roosevelt Park. We call it FDR and you can drive back there and get all kinds of exotic food, talk to really nice people, and see the real flavor of Philadelphia and its cultural and ethnic makeup.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In your experience as mayor, is this fear of rising crime greater than the realities of rising crime in the center city?

Jim Kenney: In the center city area, I think the fear of it is stronger than the actuality of it. As you read in the Brookings Institution study they called Philadelphia in their words remarkably safe downtown. They also indicated that they believed that part of the issue was the coverage of the media on the issue. Now, I will admit, as mayor for almost eight years now, post-pandemic, during the pandemic we've seen increases in violence, both gun violence and homicide in neighborhoods that traditionally have been laced with poverty and other issues like drugs and disinvestment.

We're working hard to get our arms around that and we're not going to give up. The other issue for us, frankly, is that we live in a state where it's harder to get a driver's license than it is to buy a semi-automatic handgun and get a permit to carry. Part of what we're dealing with now is everybody's got a gun seemingly, and everybody can conceal it and people tend to want to use it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay, to be clear, although violent crime has not spiked in downtown Philly, the city is dealing with a meaningful increase in gun violence and homicides across the larger city and metropolitan area. Following national trends, robberies, shootings, and homicides all rose in Philadelphia as the city emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, but also in line with other cities across the country, the most vulnerable neighborhoods are those where residents of color and poor residents are most likely to live. Violence, like the city's poverty rate of nearly 23%, is concentrated.

Jim Kenney: The disinvestment part, one of the things that we're trying to do in this upcoming budget is to appropriate money to pay for people's court fees and fines, and also try to figure out a way to get their probation supervision covered because right now that comes out of the person's pocket. People getting out of jail who want to maybe get straight and get training and get to work wind up being debilitated with all these fees, fines, and supervision fees that if we can help them with that, we can maybe get them on their feet and into a better direction sooner.

The other thing we're working on is a SEPTA Transit Paths for about 25,000 Philadelphians under the poverty level, and also we're planning on giving all of our city employees a transit pass to keep them, it's a retention effort, but also to get more people onto the transit system. The more people we have, the safer that actually becomes. There's investments that we're making besides police.

There's investments in recreation that we're making. We have a rebuild program which is paid for by the beverage tax in Philadelphia. It's the largest city in the country with a sweetened beverage tax. We have 72 construction and planning projects going on at our rec centers and libraries. We want to create equity in the neighborhoods so that these young kids who are sometimes picking up a gun will go to a state-of-the-art basketball court, or arts program, or gymnastics as opposed to hanging on the corner and getting in trouble.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Of course, all of this means that crime is at the top of the agenda in the crowded Democratic primary to serve as Philly's next mayor. While the city's next leader will be critical in setting the agenda and securing the resources to address violence and poverty, current mayor Jim Kenney encouraged us to look to solutions from some of the folks who truly embody the spirit of the city.

Jim Kenney: There's a young man by the name of Deion Sumpter, and he runs our Group Violence Initiative. He's out on the street with his employees and his colleagues every week, every weekend, engaging young people at risk, people who may be on our radar screen because they've had involvement with the criminal justice system, or we just know them from DHS.

They engage with those young people, they engage with their families, their grandmothers, their mothers, their aunts and to try to get them in the right direction and to tell them that there's opportunity for job training, for healthcare, for if you have a family and you need diapers for your kids or food, all those things that drive people to do desperate things.

Deion is a young man. His smile is infectious, his enthusiasm is unbelievable and he's a person with lived experience and he knows where these kids are coming from, and he's one of the most encouraging people in our violence prevention efforts that I've ever met.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, we're not done with Philadelphia yet. We're just going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more from Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney.

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You're listening to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and we've been hearing from Mayor Jim Kenney of Philadelphia for our 23 Mayors in 2023 series. Now, throughout his two terms in office, one of Mayor Kenney's major issues has been a focus on the opioid crisis.

Jim Kenney: The use of opioids and heroin and other things is citywide. It's not just in one neighborhood, but it seems to be concentrated in one or two neighborhoods. Part of the problem is that the cost of heroin and used to be heroin, and now it's not even heroin anymore. It's xylazine and a thing called tranq which is basically animal tranquilizer.

It's so inexpensive that Kensington Avenue becomes a magnet for the region around the country for people who are addicted to come there to get their cheap drugs. They tend to be on the pavement, be on the street. We don't allow encampments. We have certain rules that we have to follow before we can dismantle an encampment. We have to post the area. We have to give them 30 days to make arrangements for their belongings.

If they don't have a place to put their belongings, then we have to take them, store them in a storage facility, and then we can move the encampment. Part of our problem with the encampments and these are people who are good-willed, but they keep coming down and giving people tents and other items which keeps them out on the street as opposed to having them want to go in to available beds for drug treatment.

When you make it easier for a person to stay on the street by giving them a tent, food, money, and other things, it's harder to get them in for the treatment that they need.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When you think about what Philly needs going forward, where does downtown fit in the big story? How much of the focus should be around a downtown centralized business district, and how much should we be thinking about resources into neighborhoods beyond downtown?

Jim Kenney: Downtown sometimes seems to be organic in its development. There are 35% more residents living downtown than there was last year. We had more stores open than closed in 2021 and '22. Foot traffic has been gradually growing since the days of empty sidewalks earlier in the pandemic, but it wasn't what it once was. We have to pay attention to center city as the main employer. A lot of people who live in neighborhoods drive in or use mass transit to commute into town to work.

We do have very robust neighborhood shopping areas in many areas of the city, all over the city that have robust, successful retail operations that employ people from the neighborhood and that provide services for food and clothing and medical and dental treatment, and entertainment to all the residents who live in that neighborhood. We're very proud of our neighborhood business corridors.

The other thing about the neighborhood business corridors is it is even and a starting place for many of our immigrant communities that are coming into Philadelphia and they start businesses there, mostly their mom-and-pop businesses, but they grow and hire people from the neighborhood. We are a welcoming sanctuary city, and we fought hard for that designation.

We pushed off on the Trump administration and ICE when they were chasing our Mexican citizens around, our Mexican residents around trying to put people in jail and deport them. We've taken in literally tens of thousands of Afghan refugees through our airport. We accept buses from Texas and Florida on a regular basis, and we don't turn them away.

We provide the services that they need so they can either stay here and start a family. We're very, very open and understanding and helpful. I was in Philadelphia International Airport when the heavy stream of Afghans were coming in, and I felt like I was standing in [unintelligible 00:11:36], Iowa. It was amazing. I was so proud of the fact that Philadelphia was the place that these folks sought sanctuary and refuge, and we could be a part of making their life in America better.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What are you going to miss most about being mayor and what's at least one thing you're definitely not going to miss?

Jim Kenney: What I'm going to miss, we have a robust PHL pre-K program being paid for partly by the beverage tax, the soda tax. By the time we are finished here in January of 2024, we'll have had 18,000 three and four-year-olds go through a quality pre-K and they get a head start on their kindergarten, their first grade, and hopefully that propels them to get through elementary school, high school, college if they choose.

What I'll miss the most is going to a pre-K just to see these kids and their learning. The thing that you learn is that when they're three and four years old, it doesn't matter what ethnicity or what race they are. They are perfect vessels. All they want to do is talk to you, hug you, want to be taught, and they want to feel love.

If we can get that in their heads before they get potentially ruined by the world, hopefully we can turn some lives around going down the future. That's the main thing I'll miss. The thing I won't miss, here's what I won't miss, and I don't want to pick on our press because I do think they do a really necessary job in reporting the news, both good and bad.

The thing I won't miss is that when we do a press event where we're announcing a training, a graduation carpentry school for a bunch of young guys who are on their way to trouble, and now they're union carpenters and I go into the event and I have a cameraman or a camera person and a reporter outside wanting to ask me about something negative.

They don't even go into the event to see the good that's being done and the constant attention to the negative. There's a lot to be negative about, but there's a lot to be positive about. I wish the coverage is a little more balanced so that people who live in the city are watching that TV broadcast knows, yes, we have our problems, we have our struggles, but there's a lot of good things going on, and let's hang in there and fix it all together.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jim Kenny is Mayor of Philadelphia. Mayor Kenny, thanks so much for your time today.

Jim Kenney: Nice talking to you. Thanks. Take care.

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