A series of police sweeps over the last few months appear to have reduced the number of homeless drug users living in parts of Kensington, but several months into the city’s neighborhood improvement effort, locals say the problems associated with its open-air drug market remain largely unaddressed.
The city launched the first major Kensington sweep of Mayor Cherelle Parker’s administration in early May. Dozens of police officers and crews with street-sweeping trucks and leafblowers descended on the blocks just south of Allegheny Avenue and barred entry to the street. They dismantled a tent encampment, offered services to the tent-dwellers, placed metal barricades along the sidewalks and power-washed the street and sidewalks.
The Police Department also launched a five-phase plan, called the Kensington Community Revival, aimed at reducing crime, “securing the neighborhood,” and returning control of the streets to residents.
Police have continued to periodically make mass arrests for narcotics and other offenses, sometimes in conjunction with quality-of-life sweeps by sanitation workers and code enforcement officials with the Community Life Improvement Program, who seal abandoned buildings, shutter noncompliant businesses, and tow cars.
Following such a sweep last Wednesday morning, a few white police SUVs were parked along Kensington Avenue and mini-streetcleaning vehicles zoomed up and down the road under the elevated SEPTA tracks. In front of Allegheny station and the mostly shuttered storefronts, the sidewalks were nearly empty.
But a few blocks further on, close to the Somerset El and on side streets, dozens of people experiencing homelessness or nodded out on fentanyl were hunkered down on the sidewalks, some of them sheltered with umbrellas and surrounded by piles of belongings.
The cleanup in May “was for TV,” said a man hanging out on Kensington Avenue, who gave his name as Jefe and said he’d been visiting the neighborhood for more than a decade. “Everybody that they cleared out is back down here right now, laying down somewhere. They might have just been around the corner. They still around, though, bro.”
Complaints about a lack of services
People walking on Kensington Avenue on Wednesday said they have noticed an uptick in arrests and the more frequent cleaning. But some said those efforts have not been accompanied by better access to housing, health, and drug treatment programs that would provide a way out for those living on the street and more comprehensively address the drug market.
“The city’s not doing nothing, not at all, nothing,” said Juan Martinez, a drug user who said he previously lived in Prevention Point shelters in Kensington. “I’m not saying that [Parker] is a bad mayor, but she needs to look at what’s really going on out here. Arresting people and putting them in jail is not the place. We need help. You know, this is a disease. It’s rough.”
(One of those arrested, 31-year-old Amanda Cahill, died in jail on Saturday, reportedly to due to possible complications of drug withdrawal.)
Leek Stevens, an auto mechanic who splits his time between West Philly and his girlfriend’s place in Kensington, said he was on his way to a suboxone clinic he visits regularly for addiction treatment. He said cleanliness is the least of the area’s challenges, and he questioned why the city couldn’t get a handle on the rampant open drug dealing.
“You still have the drugs and the violence, which is a major problem,” he said, mentioning a recent incident in which four people were shot on G Street. “You got people fighting over blocks, corners, you know? That’s the issue. I don’t see that changing no time soon. Something has to happen.”
The Parker administration pushed back against the perception that it isn’t providing sufficient help for people in Kensington experiencing homelessness and addiction, or doing enough to stop the ongoing violence there.
“The revival of Kensington is not going to happen overnight or within months,” said Sharon Gallagher, a spokesperson in the Managing Director’s Office. “It is going to take time to revive and revitalize a community that has been devastated by illegal narcotics and violence for many years. We are making progress and will continue until Kensington is a safe and healthy community again.”
Harassment or drug enforcement?
The latest sweep took place Wednesday morning. It was centered on the 3200 block of G Street, near the recent shooting, said Sgt. Eric Gripp, a police department spokesperson. Police also arrested people on Cambria Street near Kensington Avenue and other locations, said Bill McKinney, who lives nearby and is executive director of the New Kensington Community Development Corporation.
McKinney said he was walking to work around 8:15 a.m. Wednesday when he saw bike officers putting plastic handcuffs on about 10 homeless people on Cambria Street. Gripp said the police department arrested a total of 34 people that day.
Martinez said he was on Cambria at the time but walked away to avoid arrest. He described the sweep, which he thought was timed to the start of the school year, as a kind of superficial harassment where police were looking to clear the street by arresting whoever they could find for minor offenses.
“Normally the sanitation department comes to tell everybody to move so they can clean up the street,” he said. “What happened was police came instead, and they started randomly just grabbing people and asking them for their identification to run to see if they have any warrants. If they didn’t have that, they would arrest them for just having any [drug] paraphernalia.”
Gripp said 30 people were arrested for possessing narcotics, one for narcotics and an outstanding warrant, and the others for warrants, including one for felony aggravated assault. He said 13 of those detained had residences, and he denied officers were targeting people experiencing homelessness.
“No one was arrested for loitering or for the ‘crime’ of being homeless. It’s not a crime to be unhoused,” Gripp said. “The individuals were arrested for narcotics possession or because they have a warrant.”
Police were focusing on the G Street area near the shootings, but they arrested people in a number of locations after seeing suspicious behavior and conducting searches, he said.
Gripp noted that the department is still in the second part of its five-phase Kensington Community Revival plan, which was announced in April.
The second phase was initially described as a “multi-day initiative” consisting of intensive, block-by-block sweeps with arrests for narcotics, prostitution, and quality-of-life crimes. City leaders have not stated a timeline for switching to the third, “hold” phase, which is supposed to involve heavy patrolling to prevent the return of nuisance behaviors.
Perception of a lack of services
In June, East Division Inspector Anthony Luca said police were “going to be pushing the crowds” on the sidewalks, the Kensington Voice reported. “The more you move them, the more they get frustrated, and maybe they’ll say, ‘Oh, I gotta get help,’ ” he said.
But Martinez and others argue help is not reliably available. Those detained Wednesday were not offered access to the Police-Assisted Diversion (PAD) program, which connects drug users and others to services rather than arresting them, he said.
“What happened with PAD? That’s the whole purpose of why PAD was developed,” he said. “If we’re not out here selling drugs, and we’re using, and you find us with drugs, we need help. If you want to arrest us, fine, but take us to a program. The jails are overcrowded.”
Martinez also criticized the administration for “trying to close down Prevention Point,” for requiring stores and restaurants in Kensington to close at 11 p.m., and for allegedly trying to prevent charitable groups from giving food to people who are homeless.
(Prevention Point remains in operation, but Parker cut city funding for its needle exchange program. Councilmember Quetcy Lozada has called for the organization’s programs in Kensington to be shut down and has proposed barring mobile care vans from much of the neighborhood.)
“I understand [Parker] is trying to clean up the city, which is perfectly fine, but … what’s the harm of feeding the people? She’s trying to stop everything that benefits the people who are homeless or addicts,” Martinez said.
According to Gallagher, the spokesperson for Managing Director Adam Thiel, the city does provide substantial services to people living on the streets in Kensington, in large part through outreach teams managed by the Office of Homeless Services and the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual DisAbility Services (DBHIDS) that are in the neighborhood on weekdays.
They offer “engagement, relationship-building, connections to resources such as shelter, behavioral health housing programs, behavioral health treatment, connection to physical health treatment, and other supportive services,” she said.
The teams also hold weekly “Wellness Resource Fairs” and twice-weekly service connection events in locations around Kensington, sometimes in connection with site cleanups, she said.
“The OHS and DBHIDS teams are trying their best to encourage people living on the streets, many with addictions, to move to shelters the city and their providers make available,” she said.
Unclear agency partnerships
A couple hours after Wednesday’s arrests, McKinney, the NKCDC director, returned to Cambria Street to make sure belongings left behind by those who were arrested didn’t get thrown out. He exchanged brief greetings with two white-shirted police higher-ups, who surveyed the scene and drove away.
McKinney has long been critical of multiple administrations’ approaches in Kensington. The arrests, he said, were typical of what he described as a fractured and incomplete strategy for addressing the drug market and improving residents’ quality of life. That morning he had spoken with leaders at the city’s Opioid Response Unit and at Merakey, a drug treatment provider that contracts with the city, and neither were aware of the police sweep, he said.
“I don’t see a plan. I see pieces and parts of a plan, but everything isn’t in place, and it can’t just start with an arrest,” he said. “We have to take care of the residents, but we also have to be responsible in dealing with people who are out in the streets, sick and suffering.”
Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel has said the department intends to treat people on the street humanely, and suggested that the department would work with other agencies to offer them access to treatment rather than charging them. Immediately after the May encampment clearing, it was a law enforcement official — Chief Public Safety Director Adam Geer — who came forward to explain that outreach workers had provided help to 32 people living on the street and would continue looking for people who needed assistance.
But Gripp, the police department spokesman, said while there may be occasions when people arrested for drug possession are immediately offered services or diversion, it isn’t guaranteed to happen. He acknowledged that in the past the police have been criticized for ignoring or not detaining people who openly deal or use drugs on the street in Kensington, but said those suspected of committing crimes are now being treated the same wherever they are in the city.
Gallagher, meanwhile, emphasized that the police usually — although not always — operate independently from the outreach workers overseen by Thiel, and the managing director is typically not aware of police sweeps until after they happen.
“The OHS and DBHIDS staff are not part of arrests the PPD make,” she said in an email. “People are NOT being arrested for living homeless on the streets. People being arrested are breaking the law. They have existing warrants; they are buying narcotics from drug dealers on the street. That is illegal. Under the Parker administration, individuals are now being arrested for breaking the law.”
Those same people “also can be connected to treatment through our outreach teams … [but] it is not appropriate or safe for our outreach teams to be on site when people are being arrested,” she said. “The services PPD provides and what our outreach teams provide are very different and often they should not work together on a site. Sometimes they do.”
A dire shortage of treatment beds
McKinney noted that the Parker administration earlier this year talked about creating a set of “triage centers” where homeless drug users could get speedy health care and help finding housing.
That plan faced resistance and was apparently dropped in favor of building a massive, new, city-owned shelter and drug treatment complex in Northeast Philadelphia, called the Riverview Wellness Center. The project is expected to be completed in 2027.
Officials have said that, for the time being, there aren’t nearly enough shelter and treatment beds in the city for all the people in Kensington and other neighborhoods they would like to move off the streets.
But McKinney argued the city could do a better job of coordinating with other organizations that already provide those services, rather than simply arresting people for relatively minor offenses and then releasing them back onto the streets without further help.
“You can’t say we’re going to put everybody in a triage center when there’s no triage center, right? So where are folks going at this point, and are they receiving the supports that they need? I think that’s very questionable,” he said. “Everyone would like for this to change, but we’re operating at probably 20% of the capacity and the capability of what we could be doing, because we’re not properly partnering with everybody that is out here and can help.”
The city, instead, is depending on a limited range of resources, which consist largely of police, he argued.
“I’m not going to fix a window in my house with a hammer,” he said. “But if you’ve only got one tool, you just keep using it, and you end up with a bunch of broken glass.”
The article was updated Monday to include the death of Amanda Cahill.
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