BY JEFF DEENEY The media discussion of the Kensington Strangler has at this point strayed pretty far from the essential questions, so I would like to try to bring it back to center. When I say the discussion has strayed from the essential questions and has stopped really informing media consumers I would point to Dave Davies’s unfortunate interaction with Mayor Nutter on WHYY  last week. The intent here isn’t to beat up on Dave, because I think nearly all agree that he’s about the best we have going in terms of Philly reporters. But the fact that even Dave couldn’t come up with a solid set of questions for the Mayor shows how out of the loop on this story most reporters are, even the ones doing the actual reporting on it for the papers and other major media outlets.

Dave asked two questions of Mayor Nutter about the Strangler, the first of which was a boiler plater about progress in the police investigation, for which Mayor Nutter gave a boiler plate response that yielded little insight into why there is no suspect yet despite apparently abundant resources. Nutter’s assurances come amid continued reports of violence and rape that are flooding out of Kensington at a greater rate than ever before now that newspapers have decided to finally pay attention to them. I think this disconnect left a big opening for Davies to put some hard questions to the Mayor about the persistent lawlessness of Kensington and the adjoining Badlands where the crimes have taken place. Instead, Dave posed a follow up question about the Guardian Angels.

Note to the press: the Guardian Angels are not the story. In fact, I would argue that the Guardian Angels are NEVER the story, regardless of what the story is. If you are reporting on them, it’s likely that you’ve lost the thread. I think most people know that Curtis Sliwa of the Guardian Angels has one priority above all others: to get Curtis Sliwa’s face on television. His assertions to the Philly media (that practically tripped over itself to get cameras and microphones in his face) that people in Kensington will talk to the Guardian Angels when a pervasive Stop Snitching culture keeps them from talking to cops is bullshit and he can produce zero evidence to support this assertion.  My counter assertion for Sliwa would be that the kind of dudes who hang at the Somerset El stop think his Guardian Angels are a bunch of corny looking clowns in their jackets and berets, consider them akin to mall cops, and about as worthy of respect and inclusion in their tight knit little world of hustlers and prostitutes. Which is to say not much. Again, it’s worth noting the sharp increase in news reports of rapes and assaults under the El since their arrival. That shouldn’t surprise anyone, because the Guardian Angels don’t prevent crime. If Curtis Sliwa gave a shit about crime in Kensington, his Guardian Angels would have been there before there were TV cameras, and they were not. If they gave a shit about crime in Kensington they would stay after the cameras have moved on, and they will not. Stop talking about them.

What is completely absent from the media coverage of the case is any serious discussion of the prevalence of sexual violence against prostitutes in Kensington that long predated the arrival of the Kensington Strangler. There has been no discussion of police attitudes towards prostitutes who work the Avenue, who universally testify to having previously attempted to make reports about rapes and assaults to unsympathetic cops who told them such reports were a waste of time because prostitutes were making them.  Rape and assault, the women are told, is all just part of that “lifestyle choice.”

There is a cause and effect between lax societal attitudes towards protecting sex workers and the increasingly violent environment sex worker are forced to work in.  The same scenario has played out not only in Kensington but in every other major city where a serial killer has preyed on prostitutes. That open season has been declared on sex workers while police look the other way has been widely telegraphed. Men know they can go to places like Kensington, pick up a girl, rape her, beat her up, and dump her back on the Avenue with little fear of consequences. This has created an ideal proving ground for serial killers who know where they can go to find throwaway women who are easy sport. It’s happening in New York right now as it is happening in Kensington. Last year it was Anthony Sowell in Cleveland. In 2007, it was Atlantic City, and so on.

If you take one step even further back from this picture what emerges is another line of reasoning that cannot be denied. Fact: Kensington is a decades old longitudinal study in the criminalization of drugs and prostitution, and the brutal and totally lawless underworld there where women are routinely raped and beaten for sport is the logical outcome of such drug and prostitution policies. When drugs and the sex trade are mutually criminalized, drug addicts and addicted sex workers are pushed to furthest fringes of society because they have to take any an all steps necessary to evade arrest.  And there, on the fringes, without the basic protections we all take for granted, they scrape desperately to get through each day, “surviving, not living” as one woman shared with me.

What results in the worst case scenario of drug criminalization is “the Tracks;” a vast and totally desolate wasteland that comprises the old freight way whose train tracks cuts across the Badlands and Kensington. This mile-long expanse of shoulder high scrub cut through with walking trails is like some kind of hellish forest scene you would see in a Hieronymous Bosch triptych.  The Tracks are dotted with clearings in the brush where mattresses lay in the mud and the entire expanse is carpeted with needle wrappers, used condoms, empty dope bags and other refuse.  When you are there you can still see row homes in the distance, and you feel frighteningly far away from the rest of the world.  It’s inside Philadelphia, yet outside society entirely. Addicts who shoot drugs there report that the cops never come to the Tracks, unless a foot chase leads them there. Cops avoid the area, they consider attempts to patrol its vast interior to be a waste of their time.

So what about all this? When does anyone ask the Mayor, “You realize the police have ceded an entire section of this neighborhood to total lawlessness, because they don’t care how many hookers get raped or how many junkies OD on the Tracks, right?” How about, “Mayor, even if the Strangler is caught, what fundamentally changes about Kensington?  Doesn’t the pervasive culture of rape and violence persist even after he’s caught? Are you committed to providing protection for the city’s prostitutes, and how will you do that without decriminalizing drugs and prostitution? Because what we’ve been doing for decades isn’t working, and nothing ever changes in societies with punitive drug policies except more ruined lives and overcapacity prisons.”

But, alas, that’s not what Davies asked the Mayor, nor has anyone else in the media, so we don’t know where Nutter would stand in a more substantive debate about punitive drug and prostitution criminalization policies and the clear cause/effect relationship it has with life quality in the Kensington section of Philadelphia. Nor do we know what the Mayor would say when confronted with fact the that according to nearly all prostitutes that work the stroll the sexual violence against them is more or less condoned by the Philly PD as a reasonable disincentive for engaging in sexually criminal behavior.

The fact that there seems to be so few people in the Philly media scene who are literate on drug policy and sexual violence issues, and able to see how these issues should be driving the story at hand, is really troubling. Let’s all be glad that at least Curtis Sliwa got his face in the paper, though. I’m sure the women who work the stroll (at least, those who managed not to get raped or beat up in the past two weeks) send their kindest regards to his Guardian Angels for keeping them safe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jeff Deeney is a freelance writer whose work has appeared on The Daily Beast, PW, City Paper and the Inquirer. He focuses on issues of urban poverty and drug culture. He is currently working on a book about life in the crossfire of poverty, drugs, guns, and the bureaucracies designed to remedy them, all of which informed his experiences as a social worker in some of the city’s most dire and depleted neighborhoods.

KENSINGTON STRANGLER: 4th Woman Found Dead

KENSINGTON STRANGLER: Breaking The Silence Of The Lambs

RELATED: Deeney Discusses The Kensington Strangler On Radio Times

RELATED: On The Kensington Strangler

The 1930s collection examines America’s response to the unprecedented economic crisis that threatened the nation during one of history’s most tumultuous decades — a decade that is increasingly a touchstone for our own. In a series of five films, this AMERICAN EXPERIENCE explores politics and culture during the Great Depression through eyewitness accounts and rare archival footage. The 1930s (which will air locally on WHYY TV starting tonight at 9 PM and runs for the next five Monday nights) touches on themes straight from the 2009 news headlines — beginning with the problems with banking security, stock market manipulation, and speculation that led to the Crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression.

In 1933, newly-elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched an unprecedented economic stimulus package as part of what he called the New Deal. One of the most popular New Deal programs, The Civilian Conservation Corps, put young men to work for $1 a day. Two months later, thousands of skilled workers began construction on Hoover Dam, one of the greatest engineering projects of the modern era. Meanwhile, farmers and residents of the Great Plains suffered through a catastrophic eight-year drought in Surviving the Dust Bowl. Finally, Depression-wary Americans found an unlikely hero in a champion Thoroughbred horse named Seabiscuit. “The past offers us the opportunity to see the shape of human experience,” says AMERICAN EXPERIENCE executive producer Mark Samels. “As we navigate through our current global recession, the likes of which we haven’t seen in more than 75 years, Americans can look to the ’30s to help understand how we got here, and where we may end up next.”

Samels was named to lead PBS’s flagship history series, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, in 2003 after serving as senior producer since 1997.  Produced by WGBH/Boston, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE is television’s most-watched and longest running history series, and the recipient of every major industry award, including the Peabody, Primetime Emmy, Writers Guild and duPont-Columbia Journalism Award.  Recently we got Samels on the horn and asked him to explain the series.

PHAWKER: First of all, can you thumbnail what the series is all about and what the motivation was behind creating it?

MARK SAMELS: The 1930’s is a mini-series within American Experience on PBS. Certainly after the election of Obama last year, a lot of comparisons were beginning to be drawn between the 1930’s and our current administration. With the financial crisis and everything people started talking about the similarities when Franklin Roosevelt took over. We got to thinking we have such a strong series of films we made about the 1930’s that we never really brought together as a collection, and if we produced a new program we could have a really nice well-rounded collection of shows that I think would open discussions into our gaps of understanding about the present by looking back at the lessons that the 1930’s offer. They’re not identical because history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but there’s some embedded lessons about how this country responded to crisis; looking back we had economical crisis, environmental crisis, and I thought it would be valuable to open discussion on our current situation.

PHAWKER: The series is going to run on five succeeding Mondays, so I thought we could go through each of the episodes and speak to what you see as each one’s modern analog, the first one being The Crash of 1929

MARK SAMELS: It’s a bit odd to be doing a series on the 1930’s and having an episode on 1929, but the 30’s began, in a big way, with the stock market crash in October, 1929. We have a program about that that looks back at this boom, the roaring 20’s when income was skyrocketing. There were bubbles of all sorts in real estate, investments, and stock markets. Sounds a lot like what’s happened in the last six or seven years leading up to our own crash last fall. This kinda gets things flowing, but it just shows the 1920’s as being eerily similar to the first decade of the 21st century.

PHAWKER: The next episode is the Civilian Conservation Core.

MARK SAMELS: That’s a new production that we just put in the works in March. What attracted me to that topic was the New Deal that Roosevelt ushered in in dramatic fashion in the first hundred days of his administration, with remarkable speed and tremendous impact over the long term. By far one of the most popular programs was the Civilian Conservation Corps. It was put into law within a week and within a month 25,000 young men signed up to be part of the Corps. By the time the program had run its course 10 years later, somewhere around four million men had signed up. It was a direct relief program for millions of American families. Secondly, it came about at a time when the U.S. environment was in really bad shape. Farms were dealing with years of erosion. There were a tremendous number of problems with the land in America that Roosevelt knew firsthand from his experience. First he dealt with the land problems in America and it wasn’t until later that he started building the lodges and bridges and national parks that we now use. I can tell you that if you’re taking a hike in a national or state park you’ve probably walked over ground that the CCC has cleared. If you’ve driven by fields in the Great Plains they’re housing and producing corn now because in the 1930’s they were repaired by the CCC. The crisis we have now with global warming, there was a similar crisis in the 1930’s.

PHAWKER: Next episode, Hoover Dam.

MARK SAMELS: Hoover Dam is an interesting mash of public works projects. It was operated sort of quasi private public concern; the damming was later seen as environmentally intrusive. Again though, it came at a time when jobs were just non-existent. Today, we’re experiencing 10% direct unemployment, probably another 5-10% people who have given up looking for jobs. It’s very difficult today, but in the 1930’s, unemployment never fell below 25%; it was actually much higher most of the time. It’s hard to exaggerate the bleak job picture for most working Americans, and here was this big project out building this massive dam. It was dangerous work; let’s face it, there was going to be one of the mightiest rivers in the world. It sort of represented a high point of American industrial spirit and our relationship to teeming nature which later came to be questioned by many. It’s a multi-dimensional story of larger than life workers hanging over the side and this big project during the depression

PHAWKER: Next up, Surviving the Dustbowl

MARK SAMELS: This program takes up the theme that the CCC lays down. By the early 1930’s so much of the land in the U.S. was in such bad shape that it really materialized in the form of these massive dust clouds that kicked up this eroded soil in the Great Plains. As one of the guys in the CCC film says, he was sitting in North Carolina and he looked up and watched Kansas go by. That’s more or less what it was like. This really focuses on the human dimension; the families who were living primarily out in Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and the Great Plains. During the 1930’s their livelihood literally blew away. Their houses were gone, their farms were no longer productive, and they just scrambled to get by. Many people made famous The Grapes of Wrath, picked up and went to the promised land of California. Many stayed and tried to to figure out how they could survive in this environmental catastrophe. Very dramatic story.

PHAWKER: And finally, Seabiscuit.

MARK SAMELS: Well, Seabiscuit is a nice compliment to the struggles and tribunals of the 1930’s. In the midst of all these problems and all the crises surrounding them, there was this story that emerged from the most unlikely place; on the racetrack. There was this ungainly not very impressive looking race horse with the unlikely name of Seabiscuit captivated America and really worked its way into their hearts. He began racking up victory after victory to become one of the greatest race horses in history. He went up against the prince of race horses in the 1930’s and managed to beat him. It’s a story of the underdog, which is kind of the archetypal story in American culture. It came to life in the form of the trainer who had an on again, off again career, the owner was a gambler and a ne’er do well, this jockey who was almost killed in the few weeks before a big race and bounce around the race track for years not amounting to much, and his unlikely horse who was smaller and uglier than anything else on the track who managed to win. It became, in a way, a symbol for many people for perseverance, resilience, and the idea that Americans could pull through in the 1930’s.

PHAWKER: Now here’s where you say something inspirational along the lines of those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

MARK SAMELS: Well, I actually shy away from the cliches of our history, but there’s one thing that makes history always worth looking at, and that’s enduring tremendous lessons as well as captivating stories. For me, one of the great legends of history is this sense of humility that people who have come before us have faced difficulties. There’s a comfort in there that people before us have met and overcome obstacles that, looking in our uncertain future, seem overwhelming to people. There’s actually a book of lessons that nestles that comfort, and that’s what we try to do every week on American Experience; try to look at those stories and find out who we are as people, try to see the unrealized aspirations of the American experiment. That’s what The 1930’s is all about. We went through one of the weakest moments in American history, we pulled through, and we came out of it.

The 1930s will air locally on WHYY TV starting tonight at 9 PM and runs for the next five Monday nights

RELATED: First Person Arts is marking the 80-year anniversary of the stock market crash with a one-night, cultural journey back to the 1930s. On Wednesday, November 4, First Person Festival audiences will experience the art and entertainment that brightened peoples lives during those dark times. First Person Arts will kick-off the evening with the opening of the Festival Speakeasy, recreating the electric atmosphere of the prohibition era, with an open bar and private lounge. Following the reception, guests will gather for America Eats! — a family-style buffet with recollections of depression-era food traditions, hosted by author, Pat Willard. The highlight of the evening will be a concert of Songs for Any Depression, featuring the songs of Woody Guthrie performed by his granddaughter Sarah Lee and her husband Johnny Irion, along with other selections by folk duo Kim and Reggie Harris. MORE