Philadelphia City Council’s Committee on Public Safety is going to address witness protection. Finally.
By Denise Clay-Murray
Thanks to a resolution passed by Philadelphia’s City Council last week, I decided to take another look at Councilmember Curtis Jones’s Blueprint For A Safer Philadelphia.
Council voted to allow the Committee on Public Safety to hold hearings on ways to protect witnesses to crime. During the 2023 political season, the topic of unsolved murders and why they remain that way came up a lot and the conclusion reached was that people were living by the adage, “snitches get stitches.”
Or, in the case of witnesses willing to testify about a crime they observed in Philadelphia, snitches get shot to death. Or have their houses firebombed. Or have their families threatened.
Witness protection is a problem in Philadelphia for a couple of reasons. One, there aren’t a lot of places to hide witnesses. According to the Blueprint for a Safer Philadelphia, the fact that witnesses were sequestered at the Philadelphia Marriott, which is right across the street from the Criminal Justice Center near City Hall, was one of the worst-kept secrets in town.
It’s also hard to relocate witnesses. In a city where affordable housing is scarce, moving people in the nation’s poorest large city from house to house, even for their own protection, costs money that people don’t have.
We won’t get into the whole “Philadelphians won’t leave their neighborhoods” thing. Maybe it’s just my Army brat life, but if I needed to leave town for my safety, I’m out. I might miss my corner store, or the cheesesteak place I used to frequent, but I can go back when the bad guys are in jail.
On page 30 of the Blueprint for a Safer Philadelphia, the problem of witness protection was addressed. Among the suggestions made were creating an interagency, interstate program that allows the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to develop housing that witnesses could live in while they wait to testify. Once the trial is over, these individuals could either be allowed to return to their homes or moved to another location.
Another solution proffered was to put more money into state, city and federal budgets to go toward witness relocation.
All of these suggestions are good.
They’re also needed and have been for a while.
On some level, I’ve been writing about the problem of witness protection here in Philadelphia for a very long time. In the early 90s, when the drug making the lives of Philadelphians miserable was crack, many of these crimes went unsolved because potential witnesses didn’t feel they’d be protected if they spoke up.
Most of the time, unfortunately, they were right. And for many of the same reasons outlined in the Blueprint for a Safer Philadelphia.
What makes this decision to talk about witness protection different, is that City Council is actually going to do just that. The public will be invited to share its insights on ways that people who want to step up and help police hold criminals accountable can do so without their lives being threatened.
There is no date set for the hearings, but once there is, we’ll share it in Hanging In The Hall and hopefully, City Council chambers will be a full house.
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