A Prayer for the City (58 page)

At a meeting the previous February in the Cabinet Room, eighteen of the city’s most powerful black ministers armed with a list of written demands had surrounded the mayor as he sat at the table. They knew how the game was played, for the first thing on their agenda was the statement that the “clergy here this morning is a cross section of denominations representing hundreds of thousands of voters.” They said they expected the mayor’s next appointments to both the Board of Education and the Zoning Board to come from their own list. They expressed their unequivocal support for the black police commissioner, Rich Neal (despite misspelling his last name), and made a point of telling the mayor that they had heard rumors that he was planning to fire him. They suggested that “serious attention be paid” to appointing an African American male as the superintendent of the city’s public school system. At one point, Rendell left the room to get something, and right before he went back inside, he said with a
chagrined smile on his face, “Being mayor means having the right to be held up—stick a gun in your ribs.” He did his best to be conciliatory, and although the meeting was tense at times, the appropriateness of the mayor’s responses to the demands was enough to induce the ministers to utter a little prayer at the end, giving thanks to “our mayor, our beloved mayor.”

Rendell and his handlers also sought the endorsement of the
Philadelphia Tribune
, the city’s black newspaper. Regardless of what his critics said, Rendell had done, within rigorous financial constraints, as much as any mayor could have done for the black neighborhoods of the city. Clearly Cohen hoped that would be enough to get the
Tribune
’s endorsement, and he blanched at the suggestion that he might have been trying to sweeten the pot just a little when he had helped the paper get approval over the summer for adequate press parking spaces on the street outside its offices. The two issues were completely separate, he said—even if he did file the thank-you letter from
Tribune
publisher Robert W. Bogle under “politics.”

A series of secret focus-group sessions had been held in August to assess the mayor’s performance, and they once again revealed the mayor’s Achilles’ heels: neighborhoods and crime. Rendell began to talk about crime more frequently, blasting judges, promising more police under the Omnibus Violent Crime Control and Prevention Act that had just been signed by the president. It was hard to know what effect any of the new rhetoric was having, and in the middle of November of 1994, in the space of forty minutes, it all became moot anyway.

The first calls started coming in to 911 operators around 10:00
P.M.
and were responded to as if the desperation of them, the insistence that the police come because something horrible was happening, weren’t a cause for action but were a cause for resentment. The undercurrent of the operators’ attitude was so strong that the only explanation for it could be traced to the inevitability of race: the operators, most of whom were black, were clearly bristling at what they believed to be the pushiness of one white caller after another, as if they were the only ones who had to deal with crime in the city.

At least thirty-three calls were made to 911 by people in the neighborhood of Fox Chase who were frantic about what was happening. From the time of the first call it took forty minutes for a police car to be dispatched, and when the police finally did arrive, it was too late anyway. The boy that some of the callers had been so desperate and upset about, sixteen-year-old Edward Polec, had been beaten so severely with baseball bats by an angry mob that he had seven skull fractures. Bent on revenge for what turned out
to be a bogus claim of rape, a group of teenagers had tripped up Polec and then beaten him to death near the church where he had once been an altar boy. He died the next day.

In the first days after the incident, news of the conduct of the 911 operators, but not the contents of the tapes, started making its way into print. Then, on the day before Thanksgiving, the tapes themselves were released to the media, and what was a personnel and procedural problem with 911 became an unmitigated disaster. The transcriptions were shocking enough, but the audio took listeners to the very limits of belief, for it revealed an almost surreal give-and-take between callers who were in hysterics and begging for help and 911 operators who were rude, arrogant, and disdainful. The story of the tapes led the Thanksgiving Day broadcast of the ABC nightly news, which from Rendell’s perspective meant he now had a national story on his hands. He was in North Carolina, vacationing with his wife’s relatives, and so was temporarily insulated from reporters and questions, but Cohen knew the situation was “white hot.” Reporters were staking out the mayor’s house, and talk of the tapes was everywhere, and media requests from all over the country were piling up, and almost the second the mayor returned, Cohen told him he had to do something and do it quickly.

Rendell listened to the tapes, found the conduct of the 911 operators appalling, and publicly announced that three operators would be fired and three suspended. It was a decisive action, motivated by genuine outrage, and it produced a remarkable but all too predictable result.

The mayor was accused of racism because all six of those disciplined were black. It was a ridiculous and spurious charge prompted by black politicians who were obviously trying to shore up their strength within their own constituencies and by those who were obviously hoping to induce Dwight Evans to challenge the mayor for reelection in the Democratic primary. Almost ironically, Rendell first heard of the charge minutes before a private meeting with several powerful black ministers in the city in which he planned to ask for their political endorsement so as to shove Evans further out of the race. When the meeting began, he told the ministers he had had no idea that all the disciplined operators were black, and given Rendell’s personal and political views, this was an assertion that rang true. The Rendell administration had paid copious attention to every decision that even remotely involved race, and it seemed ridiculous to think that Rendell would have disregarded the
issue now, particularly if doing so meant flinging the door open to a black challenger.

Sitting at the round table in his office, he pointed out his efforts on behalf of the city’s black community. He pointed out the number of blacks who had been hired by the city. He pointed out that the city had both a black police commissioner and a black fire commissioner thanks to his appointments. Most important of all perhaps, he pointed out how debilitating it would be for him to engage in a bitterly contested campaign, particularly when so many obstacles were still facing the city. “I need to be able to spend one hundred percent of my time on these issues. I cannot be campaigning six hours a day. I cannot worry about having to raise money.”

He didn’t try to bully those around him at the table. He didn’t promise them the sun, and he didn’t suggest that there was some specific quid pro quo for their support. He spoke without venality or secret motive. He did not want a challenger not merely for his own sake but for the sake of a city that needed him not sixteen hours a day or eighteen hours a day but every single hour if the city was still to have a chance.

“The last thing we need in this city is a black-white election,” he said with a sense of sorrow, well aware of what such an election would be like—bitter, divisive, fueled by spoken and unspoken hatred.

He asked for their support, and the ministers, while cordial, gave no commitment one way or another. In the succeeding days, the drumbeats protesting the mayor’s behavior only intensified, spreading the gospel of a mayor who not only had turned his back on the city’s neighborhoods but also was a racist. Speculation about Dwight Evans heightened—with everything to gain and nothing to lose, he would jump in.

Rendell needed something to diminish the chorus that he was a downtown mayor driven by the edifice complex—a desire to build monuments, just as a little boy stacks wooden blocks one upon the other. Then, toward the end of December, came a momentous announcement.

The federal government had determined the winners of the intense competition for the six urban empowerment zones. Each zone carried with it a $100-million grant in antipoverty aid to be used to create jobs, improve education, and fix up housing. As an added incentive to create jobs, each zone would also be able to offer businesses lucrative federal tax breaks. Given his close relationship with both the president and Cisneros, many had thought the city would be an automatic winner, in particular since it
had filed a joint application with Camden, New Jersey. The legislation for the empowerment zones had been written by New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, and he had inserted a provision that at least one zone consist of an urban area covering two states. Bradley readily acknowledged that the language was meant to favor Philadelphia and Camden, and only two other areas filed applications under the bistate criteria. But if Rendell had learned anything in his political life, it was that there are no guarantees. In the passing of a single second, one man’s supposed fortune could turn to misfortune, and so the city’s application was exhaustive.

Empowerment zones were at the center of Clinton’s urban policy, and for well over a year, Rendell had been plotting a strategy to obtain one. The most direct competition came from the area of Kansas City, covering both Missouri and Kansas. It wasn’t the quality of that area’s application that worried Rendell. When it came to need, there simply was no contest, and Philadelphia’s application was a harrowing reminder of how deeply entrenched the problems were: an income gap between rich and poor that had gone up 14 percent between 1984 and 1990; a ranking of second among cities in the country in the number of people age sixteen or older not working; a number of vacant homes that was greater than that of Detroit and St. Louis combined; a mortality rate among “Philadelphians of color” that was worse than that of Panama, Romania, Jamaica, and Bulgaria. But Rendell also knew that whereas need sometimes counted in politics, more often it did not, and he feared that the president might want to offer a zone to Kansas City as a showing of goodwill toward a U.S. senator from Kansas who was thinking of seeking higher office.

Atlanta won an empowerment zone. So did Baltimore. So did Chicago. So did Detroit. So did New York. And so did the joint application submitted by Philadelphia and Camden. The formal announcement, elaborately coordinated by the White House, had both the president and the vice president on conference-call hookups with seventeen places. Since everybody could hear everybody else, Rendell instinctively realized what was happening—a veritable “oink fest,” as he described it, in which everyone,
everyone
, would want to say something to the president and offer effusions of praise and thanks that would make the Academy Awards seem like an admirable model of restraint. He hoped against hope that it would not happen, and things were OK for a while, but once Zell Miller, the governor of Georgia, got the ball rolling, he knew the cause was lost, and when his turn finally came, he took advantage of it. “We want to say thanks to you and the vice president for not losing faith in American cities,” said Rendell.