It was the morning of May 25th, 2022. There was banging on the door of my basement apartment. It was my mom and her friend Chris… and the police. This basement was zoned as a storage facility, the officer told me. It was unfit for living. I could not claim squatters’ rights. I had to leave. Now.
He said they needed to come in. I stepped back from the door, and in they came; a blue-clad swarm of badges, guns and tasers. One… two… three… four… I stopped counting. I called upon the emotional superpowers I had developed as the child of a toxic, abusive family where I had been designated as the scapegoat – I basically have the ability to mentally walk through fire.
“I have a right to due process,” I said calmly. “I have a State ID. I’ve been receiving mail here.” I would spend the next 40 minutes or so facing down an entire squad of police officers and convincing them that it was an illegal eviction. They eventually saw through my mother’s scheme and left.
I had moved into the basement apartment on my parents’ rental property after our house burned down and displaced my family. It didn’t take long for family relations to devolve into a nasty, bitter feud; fighting over insurance money, unresolved family tensions – and the basement.
As time went on I figured out the scam. Chris had been wearing a City Hall visitor’s pass. They had – allegedly – gone to an office in City Hall with fraudulent zoning documents for a storage facility and convinced whoever worked there to send out the police and evict me without warning.
I was going to report my mother for fraud, but where? Someone told me to contact City Council. I was put in touch with a man named Dillon Mahoney, who worked for the District 9 office. He interviewed the officers who were involved that day. I thought my mother was going to be arrested, but all he said was that they couldn’t find the documents. Then I was put in touch with Tonya Woods, a Special Assistant to City Council At-Large. She contacted a police captain who said that he would assign an officer to the case. That captain never came through. Now I was really angry. I wanted to talk to HIS boss.
I reached out to the Deputy Commissioners. Two of them got back to me. D.C. Joel Dales asked the captain of the 35th to call me. We had a spirited back-and-forth conversation. She pushed, I pushed – but we heard each other. D.C. Frank Vanore put me in touch with Sgt. Jackson from Major Crimes. I found the sergeant to be brusque and dismissive. He said that this case didn’t fit the criteria for Major Crimes.
Next, D.C. Vanore put me in touch with Sgt. Duchossois of the 35th. That conversation quickly went south. It was a master class in gaslighting. He basically told me that what happened to me didn’t happen, it was just a routine 9-1-1 call. He refused to watch the lead officer’s body cam footage.
I contacted the sergeant who had come to the scene that day in May. I still had no idea where in City Hall the call had come from. To my shock and horror, neither did he. He said it was radio dispatch. I was talking to some of the most powerful people in the city’s law enforcement, and all of them put together had no idea how this happened. I had never considered this. They were acting as if the command had come down from heaven like a thunderbolt because it kind of did… just disembodied voices over radio dispatch.
D.C. Dales took ownership of the situation and reviewed the body cam footage. Then he had the Chief Inspector look into it. A couple of weeks later I emailed him and he said the Investigations Bureau would be reaching out to me. As in the F.B.I.??? YES!!! I had been in this fight for the better part of a year, but it was worth it.
A month went by, and I never heard from The Bureau. I emailed D.C. Dales. The next day, I got an email from the Deputy Commissioners’ office. They were filing the incident as a “landlord-tenant issue”. The police came to my home and terrorized me without cause, and now the department wanted to sweep it under the rug. The City of Philadelphia’s seat of power and a national landmark had been violated and they were just going to look the other way.
This incident has changed me. I’m now a supporter of the movement to Defund The Police. Philadelphia is collapsing under the weight of widespread poverty and a legacy of systemic racism, and nowhere is that more evident than the police department. Poverty makes people desperate, desperate people do desperate things, and that makes for a grossly overworked police force. The people who run my city didn’t create the system, they inherited it, and they struggle to keep it afloat despite the fact that it is deeply dysfunctional. There is no dollar amount that can be thrown at policing that is going to fix that.
It’s going to take radical ideas, the kind that make people uncomfortable, even angry. Ideas like Universal Basic Income and meaningful reparations for the descendants of slaves.
I grew up in one of the best neighborhoods in Philly, but I’ve also lived in one of its worst. I’ve seen the underbelly: a grown man whipping out his junk and pissing in the middle of the street in broad daylight; people lying on the sidewalk, their backs against bare concrete, roasting in the 100-degree sun like a rotisserie chicken; the panhandlers posted daily outside of Rite Aid as if they were clocking in for a shift; the junkies camped out by the City Hall trolley entrance after hours. Communities with decent median incomes don’t have these problems.
I haven’t given up on getting the justice I deserve. My life matters. It’s somebody’s turn to give a damn.