Enough Ferguson hypocrisy from liberal Democrats

Mayor Nutter and D.A. Seth Williams seem to be interested in criminal-justice reforms only at a distance.

Last night, as hundreds wound their way through Center City, protesting the announcement that Darren Wilson, the Ferguson, Mo., police officer who shot and killed Black teenager Michael Brown, would not be indicted, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter felt compelled to hold a press conference at City Hall just before midnight.

"I am perplexed and astounded that in this case, the prosecutor certainly took as long as he wanted to explain everything (and) I did not hear any explanation, or more importantly a justification, for why that young man was shot," he said, according to the Associated Press.

It was a remarkable sentiment coming from a mayor who has shown little interest — arguably none — in substantive reforms to his own city's criminal-justice system.

Nutter has opposed efforts to increase the funding and stature of the city's hard-working but mostly toothless Police Advisory Commission — this despite rampant excessive use of force and corruption as exemplified by the recent federal indictment of six narcotics officers for running a violent six-year-long robbery operation out of the police department. Many officers accused of simply beating, punching or stomping on civilians, however, are not prosecuted or substantively disciplined. Yet, Nutter's spokesperson once told me that the Mayor "believes that the current institutional arrangement works."

District Attorney Seth Williams has a similar penchant for professing outrage against distant injustice. This morning, he told 900AM WURD that the events in Ferguson (while he refrained from criticizing the grand jury decision) were a testament to the fact that "so many people feel the life of a young Black men is less than that of others."

After unarmed Black teen Trayvon Martin was gunned down in Florida by vigilante George Zimmerman, Williams released a photo of himself donning a hoodie in solidarity. (Nutter called Martin's killing "an assassination.")

This D.A., however, has little empathy for the victims of his own misbegotten initiatives, including a nationally notorious civil-asset forfeiture program that seizes cash and even homes from people who have not even been convicted of a crime; the same D.A., last year, did his best to keep Eugene Gilyard and Lance Felder, two Black men from North Philadelphia, imprisoned for life for a murder it became clear they did not commit. Williams has, in fact, fought most any effort by the Pennsylvania Innocence Project to exonerate the wrongfully convicted.

When it comes to a basic civil-rights issue like marijuana, Williams at first promoted himself as a progressive and touted a diversion program for small-time possession. But Williams, like Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey (all three of whom are Black), strenuously opposed decriminalizing marijuana in Philadelphia despite the fact that 83 percent of the 4,314 marijuana-possession arrests made by Philly police in 2013 (according to Police Department data) were of Black people. (White City Councilman Jim Kenney ultimately forced their hand.) Stop-and-frisk (according to the most recent report from 2013) is still rampant, ostensibly with the consent of both mayor and D.A., despite a monitoring program overseen by a federal court. In some police districts, "broken windows" policing — searching and ticketing low-income people for low-level infractions like drinking or selling loose cigarettes — remains very much the status quo.

The list goes on. District Attorney Williams' office continues to rely on the testimony of Philadelphia Police narcotics Officer Christopher Hulmes despite the fact that he admitted in open court to committing perjury. Not only does the D.A. rely on his testimony, he has failed to prosecute Officer Hulmes for violating the law. Williams' office has, however, charged Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility inmate John Steckley with assaulting corrections officer Tyrone Glover. This even though Glover was caught on tape beating Steckley. Glover, of course, was not charged.

Mayor Nutter's spokesperson, recently confronted with evidence that city Prison System guards can mete out beatings against inmates with impunity, insisted that independent monitoring was "not needed" because "the Administration believes the procedures in place to review allegations or incidents are equal to the task."

Philadelphia has a mayor and a D.A. who would seem to be anything but progressive rabble-rousers — unless, of course, it involves some other city's problems. For protesters, Brown's death is a symbol of the way American cops and courts devour generations of young Black men. But it also became a media spectacle moderated by the inane likes of Wolf Blitzer, and therefore an opportunity for opportunist liberal politicians to present themselves as civil-rights militants.

Philadelphians know that Ferguson is not far from home.