LONG!
A derogatory, hypocritical article that
acknowledges that self defense issue
groups may have been correct while
blatantly insulting them. The writer
here has taken a devisive tone. The
"teflon bullets" comment, a mainstay of
anti-self defense whiners, makes yet
another unwelcome appearance; if the
local police, whom that statement is
attributed to, actually believe in the
myth, they should be corrected. DA Lynne
Abraham opposed concealed carry in
Philadelphia several years ago but the
massive escalation in violence she
feared in an already dangerous city she
was unable to police never came to be.
Jeff
What if the Gun Nuts are Right?
Address:http://www.citypaper.net/article
s/040600/cs.coverstory1.shtml
April 6–13, 2000
cover story
What if the Gun Nuts are Right?
Top gun: U.S. Attorney Michael Stiles
quintupled his office's prosecution of
pistol-packing felons last year, with
only a minor impact on the federal
court's workload.
photo: Shoshanna WiesnerCould locking up
bad guys save more lives than gun
control? The success of Operation Cease
Fire suggests the answer is yes.
by
Noel Weyrich
Gerald Smith probably had no idea how
much trouble he was in when the cops
busted his crack house on South Bouvier
Street on January 11, 1999. Although
Smith was arrested on serious charges
(police said he was carrying two huge,
illegal handguns and had sold crack
cocaine to an undercover cop) his past
experiences with the Philadelphia courts
suggested he had little reason to worry.
Even with two robbery convictions on his
record, Smith hardly stands out in a
justice system that handles 4,000 gun
possession cases per year and has room
for only 5,600 prisoners. Smith likely
thought he'd be arraigned, released and
home for dinner. Eventually, he would
trade a guilty plea for a suspended
sentence and probation.
But the prosecutors in the Philadelphia
District Attorney's Office made sure
that Gerald Smith never got a third
chance in Philadelphia's felon-friendly
courts. Under a then-new program called
Operation Cease Fire, the District
Attorney's Office shipped Smith's case
over to the U.S. Attorney's Office. They
literally made a federal case out of it,
and Gerald Smith has not been home for
dinner since. Instead, he was placed in
federal custody, awaiting trial for
violating strict federal statutes on
illegal guns and drugs. With no chance
of a suspended sentence or probation,
the goateed 34-year-old with the winning
smile and 2-year-old twins was staring
at 30 years of hard time in a federal
lockup.
To Smith, a veteran defendant in
Philadelphia's courtrooms, it must have
seemed like he had landed in another
country.
Behind bars: Caught with two illegal
handguns, Gerald Smith was sentenced
last week to seven years in a federal
lockup. In the city courts, he would
have gotten probation.
photo: Philadelphia Police
DepartmentSince January 1999, the
federally funded Operation Cease Fire
program has hauled more than 300 of
Philadelphia's most egregious gun
offenders off the streets and into
federal court. In 1999 alone, gun
possession indictments by the U.S.
Attorney's Office here more than
quintupled from 1998. Out of 173 gun
cases disposed of, only one defendant
was acquitted, while 149 others simply
pleaded guilty and went straight to
federal prison.
Philadelphia's rates of shootings and
killings have been dropping steadily
since Cease Fire's launch 15 months ago.
And although no one can be certain what
role Cease Fire has played in making the
city a safer place, it's hard to imagine
how so many dangerous characters could
be put out of action without making some
impact on crime. The only other program
in the country like Cease Fire —
Richmond, Virginia's three-year-old
Project Exile — has been widely credited
with helping cut that city's murder rate
almost in half.
Perhaps what is most curious about both
Cease Fire and Exile is that they are
pet projects of the gun-loving fanatics
who run the NRA — the National Rifle
Association. In fact, it's doubtful
Cease Fire ever would have happened
without prodding from the NRA.
For decades, the NRA had complained
rather hollowly that guns don't kill
people, that criminals kill people.
Congress, they said, should stop cooking
up new restrictions on law-abiding gun
owners since federal authorities were
doing little or nothing to catch and
prosecute convicted felons who violate
existing gun laws. Intellectually, they
had a point — why pass new laws when you
don't use the ones you've got? But the
argument was always tainted by
association, dismissed as little more
than a specious debating trick to help
defend any number of the organization's
unpopular positions.
In the last few years, however, the NRA
finally started putting some of its
considerable wealth and influence toward
a federal crackdown on felons with guns
— and the payoff is shaping up to be
huge. By helping first to fund public
outreach efforts for Project Exile, and
then lobbying Congress to find seed
money for Cease Fire, the NRA has
spawned a federal gun-enforcement
movement that has taken the U.S. Justice
Department by storm. In January,
President Clinton asked Congress for an
extra $280 million for 1,000 new
prosecutors and investigators to work on
gun cases. Although Clinton has been a
frequent target of the NRA's contempt
and derision, this is the first time any
White House has ever sought such
substantial funding to enforce gun laws,
many of which are more than 30 years old
and hardly ever used.
With their history of fanatical
opposition to even the simplest of
gun-control measures, the NRA and its
Pennsylvania affiliates have long been
political pariahs in Philadelphia, a
city that has been bleeding to death for
decades from drug-related warfare. Many
local police, in particular, despise the
NRA for its insane opposition to a
federal ban on Teflon-coated
"cop-killer" bullets — bullets designed
for the express purpose of piercing
police body armor.
Yet with Exile and Cease Fire, it is
quite possible that the NRA has already
helped prevent more gun violence in
Richmond and Philadelphia than any
gun-control law ever has.
True, the NRA may be a bunch of gun
nuts. But when the NRA claims that
controlling criminals makes a lot more
sense than controlling guns, the Cease
Fire experience in Philadelphia suggests
that on this single point, the gun nuts
may be right.
part 2
Copping a plea: Police Commissioner John
Timoney wants a statewide
one-gun-a-month law to cut down on
illegal handgun resales. The glut of
guns on the streets, he says, makes the
city's high homicide rate inevitable.
photo: Sandor Welshpart 1
John Timoney was in the New York Police
Department for 27 years. He has worked
as a police consultant to big cities on
four continents. Yet he says he's never
seen anything like the gun culture among
criminals in Philadelphia.
"There is clearly a gun attitude in this
town that I've never experienced
before," says Timoney, who estimates
that Philadelphia police recover about
the same number of illegal guns each
year as New York's police do — even
though New York is five times as big.
In March 1998, when Timoney arrived here
as police commissioner, Philadelphia was
one of the only major U.S. cities that
was not seeing any meaningful declines
in murders and shootings. And it didn't
take him long to figure out that the
root cause of the problem wasn't just
out on the streets. It was also in
Philadelphia's courtrooms.
The very week Timoney arrived, a
drug-related shootout in a crowd outside
Penn's Palestra left one shooter dead,
three innocent bystanders injured and a
21-year-old under arrest for murder. A
subsequent newspaper story revealed that
the alleged killer and his victim had
both been recently convicted of
possessing illegal weapons. They would
have been in jail that fateful day if
not for the lenient probationary
sentences they'd gotten from the
Philadelphia courts. One of their judges
was even quoted as saying, "I got him
for simply carrying a gun, not using a
gun. It was just a gun case."
"Just a gun case!" Timoney fumed at the
time, with disgust in his voice. "That's
disgraceful."
But with gun cases in particular,
Philadelphia's justice system has been
badly broken for a very long time.
Unlike most states, Pennsylvania forces
counties to fund their own court
systems, so money is tight and judges
are under pressure to avoid building up
backlogs of cases. When someone stands
accused of mere illegal possession of a
gun, judges typically hand out
probationary sentences in exchange for
guilty pleas — just to clear their
calendars and avoid time-consuming jury
trials.
It is a kind of chronic dysfunctionalism
that has plagued big-city courts for
decades. The famed Harvard
criminologist, James Q. Wilson, pointed
out way back in 1973: "For those who
believe in the theory of deterrence, it
is a grim irony: The more crime
increases, the more pressure on court
calendars, and the greater the chances
that the response to the crime increase
will be a sentence decrease."
When it comes to guns, this cycle of
escalating caseloads and reduced
sentencing has reached a kind of
vanishing point in Philadelphia. Any
potential deterrent effect has
disappeared entirely here. In fact, when
a kid gets caught by the cops with an
illegal gun in Philadelphia, the worst
thing likely to happen to him is that he
loses his gun. If America had fought
World War II the way Philadelphia fights
gun violence, this article might well
have been written in German.
So the benefits of taking gun cases out
of the local courts, especially
Philadelphia's courts, is not lost on
John Timoney. In fact, he worked with
federal prosecutors in New York in a
similar effort to work around the
crowded local courts. It was the NYPD's
remarkable success in reducing gun
crimes (in the absence of any new gun
laws, murders dropped by half in just a
few years) that helped inspire Project
Exile in Richmond.
But Timoney says he's not willing to
grant the NRA the other side of their
equation — that traditional gun control
doesn't work. During recent budget
hearings Timoney assured City Council,
despite some vocal skepticism, that
Pennsylvania desperately needs
legislation that would restrict gun
buyers to just a single gun purchase
every 30 days. The objective of such
"one-gun-a-month" laws is to prevent
lawful gun buyers from purchasing a
dozen guns at a time, and then reselling
them illegally out on the streets.
"Until you control the supply of guns in
this city," he says confidently, "you
will always have a relatively high
murder rate in Philadelphia."
City Council, though, has some reason to
be skeptical. The problem with Timoney's
assertion, which is commonly repeated in
some form by many law enforcement
officials, is that it is hard to find
any evidence that it's true.
For instance, Maryland passed a
one-gun-a-month law in 1995. While the
number of legally sold guns has
declined, the state's largest city,
Baltimore, continues to have a
staggering murder rate almost twice as
high as Philadelphia's. Maryland's law
was based on Virginia's one-gun-a-month
statute, which passed in 1993.
Subsequent studies showed that while
that flow of illegal guns exported from
Virginia to other states had been
curtailed, urban gun crime was
unaffected. In fact, the homicide rate
in the state capital of Richmond
rocketed to its highest level ever one
year after one-gun-a-month passed.
Richmond, then, is arguably the best
case of how gun law enforcement has
succeeded where gun-control laws have
failed. A city of just 203,000 people,
Richmond is one-seventh the size of
Philadelphia. Its ghettos are not nearly
so large nor so desperate as
Philadelphia's, but for its size,
Richmond is a far more violent place.
Particularly in the impoverished,
largely African-American sections of
Richmond, gun violence was out of
control for much of the 1990s. By 1996,
with a homicide toll of 140, Richmond's
murder rate was among the 10 highest in
urban America — more than twice as high
as Philadelphia's and five times higher
than New York City's.
In early 1997, the Richmond U.S.
Attorney's Office huddled with police
and local prosecutors to try and solve
some of the city's gun problems, which
included the familiar scenario of
crowded courts, overwhelmed judges and
jails with revolving doors. What
resulted was the first and only
concerted effort to federally prosecute
every gun law violator in a single U.S.
city.
Federal gun laws are tough, particularly
on career criminals. Any felon with an
illegal gun, for instance, typically
gets five years, but a felon with three
violent crimes or narcotics in his past
gets a minimum of 15 years for carrying
a gun. Repeat offenders caught with
drugs and guns can get 30 years or more,
but even with no prior record, a
gun-and-drug offender gets a mandatory
five years.
For a felon, even having ammo is a
federal crime. In a famous case in
Boston, a notorious gang leader was put
away for 20 years after police found a
single bullet in his pocket.
Although the NRA was initially wary of
Project Exile, it eventually got on
board behind the effort in a big way,
contributing thousands of dollars toward
posters, billboards and TV ads that
proclaimed a new truth to the city's
criminal community: "A gun will get you
five years in federal prison." Publicity
was almost as important as the
prosecutions themselves, since the point
of Project Exile wasn't to lock people
up — it was to deter gun crime through
the promise of swift and certain
punishment.
Hundreds of felons with guns were
indicted during Exile's first year
alone, and by the middle of 1998,
Richmond's overall violent crime had
fallen 60 percent. A top NRA official
boasted to the Wall Street Journal that
Project Exile "says with deadly accuracy
that guns are for the law-abiding. That
hasn't been said anywhere else in the
country, and it is changing criminal
behavior in Richmond."
Realizing it had stumbled onto a public
relations gold mine, the NRA went
scouting for a bigger city to replicate
and show off the program. It found
Philadelphia, home of its 1998 national
convention and of Mayor Ed Rendell, who
was developing a national profile on
gun-control issues.
As the local U.S. Attorney Michael
Stiles remembers it, Cease Fire happened
very fast. "The next thing I know I'm
hearing from Sen. Specter, who wants to
give funds, and I'm ultimately in a room
with Charlton Heston and Rendell, and
I'm saying, 'Hold on, I'm the U.S.
Attorney, let me have some impact on how
we construct this program.'" U.S. Sen.
Arlen Specter, an NRA supporter and a
former district attorney, arranged a
special $1.4 million appropriation for
Stiles to hire five extra prosecutors
and for the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco
and Firearms to assign 10 extra
investigators to its nine-county Eastern
Pennsylvania district.
By January 1999, Operation Cease Fire
was launched, with the NRA providing
some cash assistance for promotion and
publicity. Charlton Heston came to town
to deliver the check and, while the TV
cameras rolled, growled out a challenge
to felons with guns to "make… my… day."
Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne
Abraham, who had run a similar, smaller
scaled program in the early '90s called
FAST (Federal Alternatives to State
Trials) said she was glad to cooperate,
but expressed utter disgust that such a
program was necessary.
"This program is an indictment of the
local court system, of the failure of
our local judges to live up to their
sworn constitutional duties," she said.
"Our judges don't treat guns and drugs
seriously, so we'll have federal judges
do it. It's outrageous."
A sample of Cease Fire convictions of
dangerous repeat offenders shows just
how the program succeeds where the local
courts have failed:
Jermaine Parks, 28, was sentenced to
five years in November 1999 after police
caught him prowling in an alley, packing
a loaded .45 caliber revolver. Parks had
seven prior gun-related convictions,
including three as a juvenile, but had
never served more than two years in
prison for any of his offenses.
Omar Best, 24, was sentenced to 105
months, almost nine years, in November
1999 after police responded to an
anonymous "man with a gun" call at 18th
and Cumberland in North Philadelphia.
They recovered the firearm from Best
after he tried to run away. Best had
previous convictions for illegal guns,
robbery and indecent assault. He had
never been sentenced to more than 23
months.
Antonio Harrison, 27, was given 193
months — 17 years — last September for
being a felon in possession of multiple
firearms. Harrison was a suspect in a
murder when detectives with a search
warrant found nine different illegal
firearms in his home. Harrison's
previous convictions included four
gun-related offenses for which he had
never been given more than 23 months.
part 3
She'll be the judge: District Attorney
Lynne Abraham complains that local
judges betray their sworn duties by
habitually giving free rides to felons
with illegal guns.
To a repeat offender like Gerald Smith,
who may have grown accustomed to the
discount sentencing in Philadelphia's
Criminal Justice Center, appearing in
federal court just a few blocks away
comes as a rude shock.
In the words of one federal prosecutor,
"It's a world away from the place down
the street."
Federal courts, for instance, rarely
grant release on bail to violent
offenders awaiting trial. If federal
prosecutors take your case, it means
they're 95 percent sure they'll win. And
federal prison inmates, unlike state
prisoners, don't get paroled or released
early for good behavior.
"Sometimes," says the prosecutor,
"they'll say 'OK, how much time will I
serve on a five-year sentence?' and
their attorneys will have to explain
that five years means five years."
Gerald Smith pleaded not guilty, and
during his trial he experienced what
might have been his only bit of luck
since his arrest. The undercover cop who
testified he'd bought crack from Smith
turned out to be under investigation by
police Internal Affairs. With the
credibility of one of his main witnesses
suddenly in doubt, the nervous
prosecutor offered Smith a deal during a
lunch recess: Plead guilty to the gun
count, and we can forget the drug
charge.
Smith took the gun count alone, with a
penalty ranging from 84 to 105 months —
about seven to nine years. It was a far
cry from the 30 years he had faced
earlier that day, but in Philadelphia's
justice system, there are convicted
killers serving far less than 84 months.
Because every Cease Fire case is based
on the confiscation of a gun, mainly by
Philadelphia police, Stiles says the few
Cease Fire cases that actually go to
trial are short and have few witnesses.
"They're quick," he says. "Generally,
you're dealing with officer credibility.
You know, somebody says, 'That wasn't my
gun,' 'I didn't have the gun, the
officer put it on me,' or 'That thing he
saw me throw down wasn't a gun.'"
It may be part of the reason these sorts
of cases have been a kind of stepchild
in the world of federal prosecutions.
Gun possession cases tend to be ugly and
dull, not at all the kind of work that
federal prosecutors or, for that matter,
federal judges had in mind when they
accepted their jobs. High profile U.S.
Attorneys like Rudolph Giuliani make
their marks bringing down criminal
empires and matching wits with
white-collar embezzlers, the stuff of
books and movies.
But it is the U.S. Justice Department in
D.C., led by the attorney general, that
ultimately sets the budgets, and thus,
the agendas for the regional U.S.
Attorney's offices around the country.
And since Congress started passing stiff
federal laws against illegal guns and
drugs in 1968 (the year of the Martin
Luther King and Bobby Kennedy
assassinations) no Justice Department
has ever seen fit to push for anything
resembling comprehensive enforcement of
those laws. Over the years, Congress has
passed new laws and federal sentencing
commissions have instituted increasingly
heavy penalties for simple gun
possession by a felon, repeat offenders
and career criminals. People have been
occasionally singled out for
prosecution, but for the most part,
federal gun possession laws have been
ignored by all of the last six
presidential administrations.
Early in the days of Project Exile, the
Richmond U.S. Attorney's Office ran into
resistance from judges who believed that
ordinary gun cases are not a federal
matter. Several federal judges in
Richmond said the federal government
should not pick up the slack for what
was evidently a failure of state and
local government. One wrote to Chief
Justice William Rehnquist to complain
that the project was upsetting the
constitutional balance of powers between
the federal government and the states.
Stiles says he's heard no such
complaints from federal judges here, and
that with so few cases actually reaching
trial, Operation Cease Fire has been a
minimal burden to the judicial calendar.
Any leftover doubts about doing gun
cases in federal court, he says, "have
really been superseded by national
developments regarding gun violence, and
by the success of these projects.… It
would be reckless to speak for the
[Clinton] administration, so I don't
want to do that," he adds. "But it is
clear that there's been a national
executive [branch] response to a rash of
firearms violence that's troubling
people. I think that's how it has
developed."
Since last October, after U.S. Attorney
General Janet Reno asked all of her U.S.
Attorneys to review and report on their
gun enforcement activities, statewide
versions of Exile and Cease Fire have
sprung up in U.S. Attorney Offices in
Colorado, Louisiana, South Carolina and
Texas.
At 9:30 last Wednesday morning, lawyers
for both sides chat in hushed tones in
courtroom 17A as they await the start of
Gerald Smith's sentencing hearing.
Compared with the Criminal Justice
Center's cramped courtrooms, 17A is a
vast and imposing throne room of
justice, with a 25-foot ceiling and a
huge brass-colored seal of the United
States displayed on the wall above the
judge's head. From the colonial portrait
on the wall to the height of the judge's
bench, everything in 17A communicates
that you are breathing the rarefied air
of the U.S. judicial system, confirming
that this represents another world.
As Smith enters the courtroom in
handcuffs, he flashes a big smile at the
woman with two children in the third row
— the lone spectators in the silent,
starkly lit room. "Dada!" one of the
children murmurs softly, followed by a
shush from her mother. As they await the
arrival of the judge, Smith looks back
at his children and mugs for them. He
points his index finger forward, and
waggles his thumb — pretending to shoot
at them.
Chief Judge James T. Jones enters, and
all eight people in the room rise.
Smith's attorney makes a pitch for a
sentence on the low side of 85 months,
noting that his client had pleaded
guilty to the gun charge. He also asked
that the judge recommend Smith be placed
in a federal prison close to
Philadelphia. His daughter, the attorney
explains, has sickle cell anemia, and he
wants to be close to her.
Judge Jones slouches on the bench, some
30 feet from Smith, as the guilty man
contritely promises to take college
courses in business and real estate
while in prison. "Basically, I just want
to apologize to the courts for putting
you through this trouble.… I'm just
asking for you, when you make your
decision, that you be soft in your
heart."
So far in Richmond this year, there are
signs that the tide of gun violence has
turned.
Only 252 guns have been confiscated in
Project Exile arrests during the first
quarter of the year, compared with 331
at this time last year — a drop of 24
percent.
"That's pretty significant," says
Christie Collins, a Richmond police
spokesperson. "We'd like to think that
that's because there's less out there."
There have also been only 11 murders in
Richmond in the first quarter of the
year, compared with 20 killings by March
31 a year ago. If the first-quarter rate
holds up over the entire year (like it
did in 1999), Richmond will have its
lowest murder rate since 1970.
For Philadelphia, this high point in the
Richmond experiment could be a harbinger
of things to come, though the two
programs differ in one important way.
While Richmond federally prosecutes
every gun case in the city, the U.S.
Attorney's Office here can handle only
about one-third of the estimated 1,000
"federal-eligible" gun cases in
Philadelphia. That means a triage of
sorts has to take place in the District
Attorney's Office to determine just
who's bad enough to take to federal
court.
"Any case involving drug trafficking and
a firearm gets you into federal court,"
says George Mosee, who heads the
District Attorney's narcotics division
and recommends Cease Fire cases to the
federal system. "We're looking for the
ones we really want off the streets." Of
the 143 defendants Mosee passed along to
Cease Fire in 1999, 67 of them had at
least two prior convictions for violent
or drug-related crimes, and 42 of them
had at least three such prior
convictions.
Despite the limits on the numbers of
cases he can pass along, Mosee has
managed to derive a halo effect from
Operation Cease Fire, even with cases
that don't go federal. For instance, by
merely threatening to take their cases
to federal court, Mosee's unit has
persuaded at least 10 gun offenders to
plead guilty in Common Pleas Court and
accept sentences of up to seven years in
state prison.
What remains to be seen, though, is
whether the focus on just the most
egregious repeat offenders will earn
Cease Fire the same fierce reputation on
the streets here as Exile has in
Richmond. Police there have videotapes
of house searches in which suspects have
been heard protesting, "No guns here.
Project Exile, man!"
With the Clinton administration now
planning to replicate Cease Fire and
Exile all over the country, it's finally
time to ask the one remaining
fundamental question: How could such an
elemental duty as enforcing the laws of
the land go ignored for so long, and
waste so many lives in the process?
Harvard's James Q. Wilson, again a sage
before his time, wrote in 1983 that "For
reasons best known to state legislators
who talk tough about crime but
appropriate too little money for
big-city court systems to cope properly
with lawbreakers, the struggle against
street crime that has supposedly been
going on for the last decade or so is in
large measure a symbolic crusade." He
could have said the same thing about
Congress and its gun laws.
Recent polls may shed some light on how
things have persisted this way for so
long. According to the Gallup Polls,
Democratic voters believe the need for
new gun laws is more important than
strictly enforcing existing laws by a
margin of 58 percent to 35. Republicans,
on the other hand, believe the opposite,
by a margin of 50 to 37. Yet Republicans
are least likely to support the
increased government spending needed to
enforce the laws, while Democrats are
unconvinced that increased spending to
enforce laws would do any good.
And with the Justice Department and
federal judges historically seeing gun
cases as something fit only for their
poor cousins who toil at the local
levels of government, there has been no
natural constituency for enforcement of
laws that might have saved thousands of
lives and left untold numbers of
potential criminals "scared straight"
and avoiding criminal involvement
altogether.
It all adds up to a gruesome conclusion
that both sides of the gun debate have
for decades played to the emotions and
prejudices of their core constituencies,
which are mainly white and suburban,
while ignoring all the people in the
country's biggest cities who have been
killed, injured and terrorized every day
by criminals that their own federal
government was either too arrogant or
too politically craven to bother
prosecuting.
When Smith is finished with his
statement, Judge Jones mutters absently
that he should get himself in a drug
treatment program in prison. Then,
almost casually, the judge utters the
sentence — 90 months, with three years
of supervised probation to follow, along
with drug aftercare. Jones grants Smith
credit for his 15 months already served,
but denies Smith's request to be
recommended for a federal prison close
to Philadelphia. The judge's words run
together as though he is dispensing with
a distasteful task. There is an arid
efficiency in the transaction, between
judge and convict, that seems both
brutal and bloodless.
Handcuffed again, Smith smiles to his
family and mouths, "Did you get my
letter?" And just like that, he
disappears through the tall woodgrained
doors of 17A. Gerald Smith won't have
another chance to carry a loaded gun on
the streets of Philadelphia until the
year 2006.
A derogatory, hypocritical article that
acknowledges that self defense issue
groups may have been correct while
blatantly insulting them. The writer
here has taken a devisive tone. The
"teflon bullets" comment, a mainstay of
anti-self defense whiners, makes yet
another unwelcome appearance; if the
local police, whom that statement is
attributed to, actually believe in the
myth, they should be corrected. DA Lynne
Abraham opposed concealed carry in
Philadelphia several years ago but the
massive escalation in violence she
feared in an already dangerous city she
was unable to police never came to be.
Jeff
What if the Gun Nuts are Right?
Address:http://www.citypaper.net/article
s/040600/cs.coverstory1.shtml
April 6–13, 2000
cover story
What if the Gun Nuts are Right?
Top gun: U.S. Attorney Michael Stiles
quintupled his office's prosecution of
pistol-packing felons last year, with
only a minor impact on the federal
court's workload.
photo: Shoshanna WiesnerCould locking up
bad guys save more lives than gun
control? The success of Operation Cease
Fire suggests the answer is yes.
by
Noel Weyrich
Gerald Smith probably had no idea how
much trouble he was in when the cops
busted his crack house on South Bouvier
Street on January 11, 1999. Although
Smith was arrested on serious charges
(police said he was carrying two huge,
illegal handguns and had sold crack
cocaine to an undercover cop) his past
experiences with the Philadelphia courts
suggested he had little reason to worry.
Even with two robbery convictions on his
record, Smith hardly stands out in a
justice system that handles 4,000 gun
possession cases per year and has room
for only 5,600 prisoners. Smith likely
thought he'd be arraigned, released and
home for dinner. Eventually, he would
trade a guilty plea for a suspended
sentence and probation.
But the prosecutors in the Philadelphia
District Attorney's Office made sure
that Gerald Smith never got a third
chance in Philadelphia's felon-friendly
courts. Under a then-new program called
Operation Cease Fire, the District
Attorney's Office shipped Smith's case
over to the U.S. Attorney's Office. They
literally made a federal case out of it,
and Gerald Smith has not been home for
dinner since. Instead, he was placed in
federal custody, awaiting trial for
violating strict federal statutes on
illegal guns and drugs. With no chance
of a suspended sentence or probation,
the goateed 34-year-old with the winning
smile and 2-year-old twins was staring
at 30 years of hard time in a federal
lockup.
To Smith, a veteran defendant in
Philadelphia's courtrooms, it must have
seemed like he had landed in another
country.
Behind bars: Caught with two illegal
handguns, Gerald Smith was sentenced
last week to seven years in a federal
lockup. In the city courts, he would
have gotten probation.
photo: Philadelphia Police
DepartmentSince January 1999, the
federally funded Operation Cease Fire
program has hauled more than 300 of
Philadelphia's most egregious gun
offenders off the streets and into
federal court. In 1999 alone, gun
possession indictments by the U.S.
Attorney's Office here more than
quintupled from 1998. Out of 173 gun
cases disposed of, only one defendant
was acquitted, while 149 others simply
pleaded guilty and went straight to
federal prison.
Philadelphia's rates of shootings and
killings have been dropping steadily
since Cease Fire's launch 15 months ago.
And although no one can be certain what
role Cease Fire has played in making the
city a safer place, it's hard to imagine
how so many dangerous characters could
be put out of action without making some
impact on crime. The only other program
in the country like Cease Fire —
Richmond, Virginia's three-year-old
Project Exile — has been widely credited
with helping cut that city's murder rate
almost in half.
Perhaps what is most curious about both
Cease Fire and Exile is that they are
pet projects of the gun-loving fanatics
who run the NRA — the National Rifle
Association. In fact, it's doubtful
Cease Fire ever would have happened
without prodding from the NRA.
For decades, the NRA had complained
rather hollowly that guns don't kill
people, that criminals kill people.
Congress, they said, should stop cooking
up new restrictions on law-abiding gun
owners since federal authorities were
doing little or nothing to catch and
prosecute convicted felons who violate
existing gun laws. Intellectually, they
had a point — why pass new laws when you
don't use the ones you've got? But the
argument was always tainted by
association, dismissed as little more
than a specious debating trick to help
defend any number of the organization's
unpopular positions.
In the last few years, however, the NRA
finally started putting some of its
considerable wealth and influence toward
a federal crackdown on felons with guns
— and the payoff is shaping up to be
huge. By helping first to fund public
outreach efforts for Project Exile, and
then lobbying Congress to find seed
money for Cease Fire, the NRA has
spawned a federal gun-enforcement
movement that has taken the U.S. Justice
Department by storm. In January,
President Clinton asked Congress for an
extra $280 million for 1,000 new
prosecutors and investigators to work on
gun cases. Although Clinton has been a
frequent target of the NRA's contempt
and derision, this is the first time any
White House has ever sought such
substantial funding to enforce gun laws,
many of which are more than 30 years old
and hardly ever used.
With their history of fanatical
opposition to even the simplest of
gun-control measures, the NRA and its
Pennsylvania affiliates have long been
political pariahs in Philadelphia, a
city that has been bleeding to death for
decades from drug-related warfare. Many
local police, in particular, despise the
NRA for its insane opposition to a
federal ban on Teflon-coated
"cop-killer" bullets — bullets designed
for the express purpose of piercing
police body armor.
Yet with Exile and Cease Fire, it is
quite possible that the NRA has already
helped prevent more gun violence in
Richmond and Philadelphia than any
gun-control law ever has.
True, the NRA may be a bunch of gun
nuts. But when the NRA claims that
controlling criminals makes a lot more
sense than controlling guns, the Cease
Fire experience in Philadelphia suggests
that on this single point, the gun nuts
may be right.
part 2
Copping a plea: Police Commissioner John
Timoney wants a statewide
one-gun-a-month law to cut down on
illegal handgun resales. The glut of
guns on the streets, he says, makes the
city's high homicide rate inevitable.
photo: Sandor Welshpart 1
John Timoney was in the New York Police
Department for 27 years. He has worked
as a police consultant to big cities on
four continents. Yet he says he's never
seen anything like the gun culture among
criminals in Philadelphia.
"There is clearly a gun attitude in this
town that I've never experienced
before," says Timoney, who estimates
that Philadelphia police recover about
the same number of illegal guns each
year as New York's police do — even
though New York is five times as big.
In March 1998, when Timoney arrived here
as police commissioner, Philadelphia was
one of the only major U.S. cities that
was not seeing any meaningful declines
in murders and shootings. And it didn't
take him long to figure out that the
root cause of the problem wasn't just
out on the streets. It was also in
Philadelphia's courtrooms.
The very week Timoney arrived, a
drug-related shootout in a crowd outside
Penn's Palestra left one shooter dead,
three innocent bystanders injured and a
21-year-old under arrest for murder. A
subsequent newspaper story revealed that
the alleged killer and his victim had
both been recently convicted of
possessing illegal weapons. They would
have been in jail that fateful day if
not for the lenient probationary
sentences they'd gotten from the
Philadelphia courts. One of their judges
was even quoted as saying, "I got him
for simply carrying a gun, not using a
gun. It was just a gun case."
"Just a gun case!" Timoney fumed at the
time, with disgust in his voice. "That's
disgraceful."
But with gun cases in particular,
Philadelphia's justice system has been
badly broken for a very long time.
Unlike most states, Pennsylvania forces
counties to fund their own court
systems, so money is tight and judges
are under pressure to avoid building up
backlogs of cases. When someone stands
accused of mere illegal possession of a
gun, judges typically hand out
probationary sentences in exchange for
guilty pleas — just to clear their
calendars and avoid time-consuming jury
trials.
It is a kind of chronic dysfunctionalism
that has plagued big-city courts for
decades. The famed Harvard
criminologist, James Q. Wilson, pointed
out way back in 1973: "For those who
believe in the theory of deterrence, it
is a grim irony: The more crime
increases, the more pressure on court
calendars, and the greater the chances
that the response to the crime increase
will be a sentence decrease."
When it comes to guns, this cycle of
escalating caseloads and reduced
sentencing has reached a kind of
vanishing point in Philadelphia. Any
potential deterrent effect has
disappeared entirely here. In fact, when
a kid gets caught by the cops with an
illegal gun in Philadelphia, the worst
thing likely to happen to him is that he
loses his gun. If America had fought
World War II the way Philadelphia fights
gun violence, this article might well
have been written in German.
So the benefits of taking gun cases out
of the local courts, especially
Philadelphia's courts, is not lost on
John Timoney. In fact, he worked with
federal prosecutors in New York in a
similar effort to work around the
crowded local courts. It was the NYPD's
remarkable success in reducing gun
crimes (in the absence of any new gun
laws, murders dropped by half in just a
few years) that helped inspire Project
Exile in Richmond.
But Timoney says he's not willing to
grant the NRA the other side of their
equation — that traditional gun control
doesn't work. During recent budget
hearings Timoney assured City Council,
despite some vocal skepticism, that
Pennsylvania desperately needs
legislation that would restrict gun
buyers to just a single gun purchase
every 30 days. The objective of such
"one-gun-a-month" laws is to prevent
lawful gun buyers from purchasing a
dozen guns at a time, and then reselling
them illegally out on the streets.
"Until you control the supply of guns in
this city," he says confidently, "you
will always have a relatively high
murder rate in Philadelphia."
City Council, though, has some reason to
be skeptical. The problem with Timoney's
assertion, which is commonly repeated in
some form by many law enforcement
officials, is that it is hard to find
any evidence that it's true.
For instance, Maryland passed a
one-gun-a-month law in 1995. While the
number of legally sold guns has
declined, the state's largest city,
Baltimore, continues to have a
staggering murder rate almost twice as
high as Philadelphia's. Maryland's law
was based on Virginia's one-gun-a-month
statute, which passed in 1993.
Subsequent studies showed that while
that flow of illegal guns exported from
Virginia to other states had been
curtailed, urban gun crime was
unaffected. In fact, the homicide rate
in the state capital of Richmond
rocketed to its highest level ever one
year after one-gun-a-month passed.
Richmond, then, is arguably the best
case of how gun law enforcement has
succeeded where gun-control laws have
failed. A city of just 203,000 people,
Richmond is one-seventh the size of
Philadelphia. Its ghettos are not nearly
so large nor so desperate as
Philadelphia's, but for its size,
Richmond is a far more violent place.
Particularly in the impoverished,
largely African-American sections of
Richmond, gun violence was out of
control for much of the 1990s. By 1996,
with a homicide toll of 140, Richmond's
murder rate was among the 10 highest in
urban America — more than twice as high
as Philadelphia's and five times higher
than New York City's.
In early 1997, the Richmond U.S.
Attorney's Office huddled with police
and local prosecutors to try and solve
some of the city's gun problems, which
included the familiar scenario of
crowded courts, overwhelmed judges and
jails with revolving doors. What
resulted was the first and only
concerted effort to federally prosecute
every gun law violator in a single U.S.
city.
Federal gun laws are tough, particularly
on career criminals. Any felon with an
illegal gun, for instance, typically
gets five years, but a felon with three
violent crimes or narcotics in his past
gets a minimum of 15 years for carrying
a gun. Repeat offenders caught with
drugs and guns can get 30 years or more,
but even with no prior record, a
gun-and-drug offender gets a mandatory
five years.
For a felon, even having ammo is a
federal crime. In a famous case in
Boston, a notorious gang leader was put
away for 20 years after police found a
single bullet in his pocket.
Although the NRA was initially wary of
Project Exile, it eventually got on
board behind the effort in a big way,
contributing thousands of dollars toward
posters, billboards and TV ads that
proclaimed a new truth to the city's
criminal community: "A gun will get you
five years in federal prison." Publicity
was almost as important as the
prosecutions themselves, since the point
of Project Exile wasn't to lock people
up — it was to deter gun crime through
the promise of swift and certain
punishment.
Hundreds of felons with guns were
indicted during Exile's first year
alone, and by the middle of 1998,
Richmond's overall violent crime had
fallen 60 percent. A top NRA official
boasted to the Wall Street Journal that
Project Exile "says with deadly accuracy
that guns are for the law-abiding. That
hasn't been said anywhere else in the
country, and it is changing criminal
behavior in Richmond."
Realizing it had stumbled onto a public
relations gold mine, the NRA went
scouting for a bigger city to replicate
and show off the program. It found
Philadelphia, home of its 1998 national
convention and of Mayor Ed Rendell, who
was developing a national profile on
gun-control issues.
As the local U.S. Attorney Michael
Stiles remembers it, Cease Fire happened
very fast. "The next thing I know I'm
hearing from Sen. Specter, who wants to
give funds, and I'm ultimately in a room
with Charlton Heston and Rendell, and
I'm saying, 'Hold on, I'm the U.S.
Attorney, let me have some impact on how
we construct this program.'" U.S. Sen.
Arlen Specter, an NRA supporter and a
former district attorney, arranged a
special $1.4 million appropriation for
Stiles to hire five extra prosecutors
and for the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco
and Firearms to assign 10 extra
investigators to its nine-county Eastern
Pennsylvania district.
By January 1999, Operation Cease Fire
was launched, with the NRA providing
some cash assistance for promotion and
publicity. Charlton Heston came to town
to deliver the check and, while the TV
cameras rolled, growled out a challenge
to felons with guns to "make… my… day."
Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne
Abraham, who had run a similar, smaller
scaled program in the early '90s called
FAST (Federal Alternatives to State
Trials) said she was glad to cooperate,
but expressed utter disgust that such a
program was necessary.
"This program is an indictment of the
local court system, of the failure of
our local judges to live up to their
sworn constitutional duties," she said.
"Our judges don't treat guns and drugs
seriously, so we'll have federal judges
do it. It's outrageous."
A sample of Cease Fire convictions of
dangerous repeat offenders shows just
how the program succeeds where the local
courts have failed:
Jermaine Parks, 28, was sentenced to
five years in November 1999 after police
caught him prowling in an alley, packing
a loaded .45 caliber revolver. Parks had
seven prior gun-related convictions,
including three as a juvenile, but had
never served more than two years in
prison for any of his offenses.
Omar Best, 24, was sentenced to 105
months, almost nine years, in November
1999 after police responded to an
anonymous "man with a gun" call at 18th
and Cumberland in North Philadelphia.
They recovered the firearm from Best
after he tried to run away. Best had
previous convictions for illegal guns,
robbery and indecent assault. He had
never been sentenced to more than 23
months.
Antonio Harrison, 27, was given 193
months — 17 years — last September for
being a felon in possession of multiple
firearms. Harrison was a suspect in a
murder when detectives with a search
warrant found nine different illegal
firearms in his home. Harrison's
previous convictions included four
gun-related offenses for which he had
never been given more than 23 months.
part 3
She'll be the judge: District Attorney
Lynne Abraham complains that local
judges betray their sworn duties by
habitually giving free rides to felons
with illegal guns.
To a repeat offender like Gerald Smith,
who may have grown accustomed to the
discount sentencing in Philadelphia's
Criminal Justice Center, appearing in
federal court just a few blocks away
comes as a rude shock.
In the words of one federal prosecutor,
"It's a world away from the place down
the street."
Federal courts, for instance, rarely
grant release on bail to violent
offenders awaiting trial. If federal
prosecutors take your case, it means
they're 95 percent sure they'll win. And
federal prison inmates, unlike state
prisoners, don't get paroled or released
early for good behavior.
"Sometimes," says the prosecutor,
"they'll say 'OK, how much time will I
serve on a five-year sentence?' and
their attorneys will have to explain
that five years means five years."
Gerald Smith pleaded not guilty, and
during his trial he experienced what
might have been his only bit of luck
since his arrest. The undercover cop who
testified he'd bought crack from Smith
turned out to be under investigation by
police Internal Affairs. With the
credibility of one of his main witnesses
suddenly in doubt, the nervous
prosecutor offered Smith a deal during a
lunch recess: Plead guilty to the gun
count, and we can forget the drug
charge.
Smith took the gun count alone, with a
penalty ranging from 84 to 105 months —
about seven to nine years. It was a far
cry from the 30 years he had faced
earlier that day, but in Philadelphia's
justice system, there are convicted
killers serving far less than 84 months.
Because every Cease Fire case is based
on the confiscation of a gun, mainly by
Philadelphia police, Stiles says the few
Cease Fire cases that actually go to
trial are short and have few witnesses.
"They're quick," he says. "Generally,
you're dealing with officer credibility.
You know, somebody says, 'That wasn't my
gun,' 'I didn't have the gun, the
officer put it on me,' or 'That thing he
saw me throw down wasn't a gun.'"
It may be part of the reason these sorts
of cases have been a kind of stepchild
in the world of federal prosecutions.
Gun possession cases tend to be ugly and
dull, not at all the kind of work that
federal prosecutors or, for that matter,
federal judges had in mind when they
accepted their jobs. High profile U.S.
Attorneys like Rudolph Giuliani make
their marks bringing down criminal
empires and matching wits with
white-collar embezzlers, the stuff of
books and movies.
But it is the U.S. Justice Department in
D.C., led by the attorney general, that
ultimately sets the budgets, and thus,
the agendas for the regional U.S.
Attorney's offices around the country.
And since Congress started passing stiff
federal laws against illegal guns and
drugs in 1968 (the year of the Martin
Luther King and Bobby Kennedy
assassinations) no Justice Department
has ever seen fit to push for anything
resembling comprehensive enforcement of
those laws. Over the years, Congress has
passed new laws and federal sentencing
commissions have instituted increasingly
heavy penalties for simple gun
possession by a felon, repeat offenders
and career criminals. People have been
occasionally singled out for
prosecution, but for the most part,
federal gun possession laws have been
ignored by all of the last six
presidential administrations.
Early in the days of Project Exile, the
Richmond U.S. Attorney's Office ran into
resistance from judges who believed that
ordinary gun cases are not a federal
matter. Several federal judges in
Richmond said the federal government
should not pick up the slack for what
was evidently a failure of state and
local government. One wrote to Chief
Justice William Rehnquist to complain
that the project was upsetting the
constitutional balance of powers between
the federal government and the states.
Stiles says he's heard no such
complaints from federal judges here, and
that with so few cases actually reaching
trial, Operation Cease Fire has been a
minimal burden to the judicial calendar.
Any leftover doubts about doing gun
cases in federal court, he says, "have
really been superseded by national
developments regarding gun violence, and
by the success of these projects.… It
would be reckless to speak for the
[Clinton] administration, so I don't
want to do that," he adds. "But it is
clear that there's been a national
executive [branch] response to a rash of
firearms violence that's troubling
people. I think that's how it has
developed."
Since last October, after U.S. Attorney
General Janet Reno asked all of her U.S.
Attorneys to review and report on their
gun enforcement activities, statewide
versions of Exile and Cease Fire have
sprung up in U.S. Attorney Offices in
Colorado, Louisiana, South Carolina and
Texas.
At 9:30 last Wednesday morning, lawyers
for both sides chat in hushed tones in
courtroom 17A as they await the start of
Gerald Smith's sentencing hearing.
Compared with the Criminal Justice
Center's cramped courtrooms, 17A is a
vast and imposing throne room of
justice, with a 25-foot ceiling and a
huge brass-colored seal of the United
States displayed on the wall above the
judge's head. From the colonial portrait
on the wall to the height of the judge's
bench, everything in 17A communicates
that you are breathing the rarefied air
of the U.S. judicial system, confirming
that this represents another world.
As Smith enters the courtroom in
handcuffs, he flashes a big smile at the
woman with two children in the third row
— the lone spectators in the silent,
starkly lit room. "Dada!" one of the
children murmurs softly, followed by a
shush from her mother. As they await the
arrival of the judge, Smith looks back
at his children and mugs for them. He
points his index finger forward, and
waggles his thumb — pretending to shoot
at them.
Chief Judge James T. Jones enters, and
all eight people in the room rise.
Smith's attorney makes a pitch for a
sentence on the low side of 85 months,
noting that his client had pleaded
guilty to the gun charge. He also asked
that the judge recommend Smith be placed
in a federal prison close to
Philadelphia. His daughter, the attorney
explains, has sickle cell anemia, and he
wants to be close to her.
Judge Jones slouches on the bench, some
30 feet from Smith, as the guilty man
contritely promises to take college
courses in business and real estate
while in prison. "Basically, I just want
to apologize to the courts for putting
you through this trouble.… I'm just
asking for you, when you make your
decision, that you be soft in your
heart."
So far in Richmond this year, there are
signs that the tide of gun violence has
turned.
Only 252 guns have been confiscated in
Project Exile arrests during the first
quarter of the year, compared with 331
at this time last year — a drop of 24
percent.
"That's pretty significant," says
Christie Collins, a Richmond police
spokesperson. "We'd like to think that
that's because there's less out there."
There have also been only 11 murders in
Richmond in the first quarter of the
year, compared with 20 killings by March
31 a year ago. If the first-quarter rate
holds up over the entire year (like it
did in 1999), Richmond will have its
lowest murder rate since 1970.
For Philadelphia, this high point in the
Richmond experiment could be a harbinger
of things to come, though the two
programs differ in one important way.
While Richmond federally prosecutes
every gun case in the city, the U.S.
Attorney's Office here can handle only
about one-third of the estimated 1,000
"federal-eligible" gun cases in
Philadelphia. That means a triage of
sorts has to take place in the District
Attorney's Office to determine just
who's bad enough to take to federal
court.
"Any case involving drug trafficking and
a firearm gets you into federal court,"
says George Mosee, who heads the
District Attorney's narcotics division
and recommends Cease Fire cases to the
federal system. "We're looking for the
ones we really want off the streets." Of
the 143 defendants Mosee passed along to
Cease Fire in 1999, 67 of them had at
least two prior convictions for violent
or drug-related crimes, and 42 of them
had at least three such prior
convictions.
Despite the limits on the numbers of
cases he can pass along, Mosee has
managed to derive a halo effect from
Operation Cease Fire, even with cases
that don't go federal. For instance, by
merely threatening to take their cases
to federal court, Mosee's unit has
persuaded at least 10 gun offenders to
plead guilty in Common Pleas Court and
accept sentences of up to seven years in
state prison.
What remains to be seen, though, is
whether the focus on just the most
egregious repeat offenders will earn
Cease Fire the same fierce reputation on
the streets here as Exile has in
Richmond. Police there have videotapes
of house searches in which suspects have
been heard protesting, "No guns here.
Project Exile, man!"
With the Clinton administration now
planning to replicate Cease Fire and
Exile all over the country, it's finally
time to ask the one remaining
fundamental question: How could such an
elemental duty as enforcing the laws of
the land go ignored for so long, and
waste so many lives in the process?
Harvard's James Q. Wilson, again a sage
before his time, wrote in 1983 that "For
reasons best known to state legislators
who talk tough about crime but
appropriate too little money for
big-city court systems to cope properly
with lawbreakers, the struggle against
street crime that has supposedly been
going on for the last decade or so is in
large measure a symbolic crusade." He
could have said the same thing about
Congress and its gun laws.
Recent polls may shed some light on how
things have persisted this way for so
long. According to the Gallup Polls,
Democratic voters believe the need for
new gun laws is more important than
strictly enforcing existing laws by a
margin of 58 percent to 35. Republicans,
on the other hand, believe the opposite,
by a margin of 50 to 37. Yet Republicans
are least likely to support the
increased government spending needed to
enforce the laws, while Democrats are
unconvinced that increased spending to
enforce laws would do any good.
And with the Justice Department and
federal judges historically seeing gun
cases as something fit only for their
poor cousins who toil at the local
levels of government, there has been no
natural constituency for enforcement of
laws that might have saved thousands of
lives and left untold numbers of
potential criminals "scared straight"
and avoiding criminal involvement
altogether.
It all adds up to a gruesome conclusion
that both sides of the gun debate have
for decades played to the emotions and
prejudices of their core constituencies,
which are mainly white and suburban,
while ignoring all the people in the
country's biggest cities who have been
killed, injured and terrorized every day
by criminals that their own federal
government was either too arrogant or
too politically craven to bother
prosecuting.
When Smith is finished with his
statement, Judge Jones mutters absently
that he should get himself in a drug
treatment program in prison. Then,
almost casually, the judge utters the
sentence — 90 months, with three years
of supervised probation to follow, along
with drug aftercare. Jones grants Smith
credit for his 15 months already served,
but denies Smith's request to be
recommended for a federal prison close
to Philadelphia. The judge's words run
together as though he is dispensing with
a distasteful task. There is an arid
efficiency in the transaction, between
judge and convict, that seems both
brutal and bloodless.
Handcuffed again, Smith smiles to his
family and mouths, "Did you get my
letter?" And just like that, he
disappears through the tall woodgrained
doors of 17A. Gerald Smith won't have
another chance to carry a loaded gun on
the streets of Philadelphia until the
year 2006.