This article is by AFRC 2130.401, Carceral Crisis: The Question of Abolition classmates Andrea Barajas, Aanika Beller, Kayla White, Janay Draughn and Paola Naughton, under their instructor Dr. Timothy Malone.
Photo Credit: William Thomas Cane / Getty Images
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On February 1, the Philadelphia Police Department’s (PPD) Special Response Team, the Pennsylvania State Police, the attorney general’s Bureau of Narcotics Investigation department and Homeland Security jointly conducted a militarized raid in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood.
The law enforcement quaternity, heavily armed and dressed in military fatigues, appeared from countless police vans and armored trucks, and arrested and disappeared allegedly dozens of unhoused people who are suspected by police of using drugs, according to eyewitnesses and organizers cross-checking with the 24th precinct. Organizers and community members on the ground are working to locate those people, who were forcibly arrested and transported to unknown jails and treatment centers or deposited onto streets in other areas.
This unsettling raid continues the city’s steady escalation of aggressive law enforcement tactics deployed since the start of Mayor Cherelle Parker’s tenure. PPD has used tactics like “jumpouts” — a paramilitary practice in which plainclothes cops in unmarked vans spontaneously jump out without identifying themselves to intimidate and arrest people during neighborhood sweeps that deliberately target the unhoused, drug users and participants in the Kensington Street economy.
In addition, encampments that once held dozens of people have been dismantled and emptied of residents whose health and location are currently unknown. Billy Ray Boyer — a member of the Philly-based, radical harm reduction organization SOL Collective and Critical Resistance, notes that police have widened their dragnet, arresting more and more people on paraphernalia charges. Such arrests explicitly violate the negotiated protections granted through the Syringe Services Program at Prevention Point, which prohibits the arrest of anyone presenting a card verifying receipt of their syringes from the program. Boyer described the escalation of police action in Kensington as “atomic bad.”
The Philadelphia Coalition for Dignity in Treatment released a statement that described the police action as “a blatantly inhumane escalation of police violence against drug users, who already face high levels of criminalization and violence at the hand of the state.… People who use drugs are our neighbors, friends, loved ones, and constituents. They are not political pawns you can use to win elections, or surplus populations you can disappear into prisons or violent treatment facilities.” It is an escalation of this exact type that we expect to continue over future weeks and months.