Jill Porter: Trouble and travesty

What we thought we were seeing, when the state police helicopter began circling the sky above MOVE headquarters late Monday afternoon, was a cop with a serious case of macho.

He was turned three-quarters out the open helicopter door, his legs dangling over the side as the chopper banked at a steep angle and circled back over the house again. The crowd on the corner of 62nd Street and Larchwood Avenue made up of reporters, photographers and onlookers stared up at him, amused at what appeared to be pointless and risky posturing. The copter had appeared not long after police had ordered all other helicopters out of the sky for reasons that were not then clear.

But what we were seeing wasn't some daredevil cop indulging in theatrics: He was leaning out the door so he could drop explosives on the rooftop of the MOVE compound. What we were seeing was the moment trouble turned to travesty.

Moments later, a roar briefly shattered the heat and the boredom and the waiting for something to happen. Onlookers cried out and ducked, and ran for cover. And then came the first small wafts of black smoke. It was weak and seemed to dissipate immediately; it seemed innocuous.

A few moments earlier, an 18th District cop who regularly patrols the Cobbs Creek neighborhood where MOVE members lived stood eating a roast beef sandwich provided by the FOP, holding the plastic wrap around it as he ate it with one hand, and held a soda in the other.

It is a nice neighborhood, he said, with friendly people who take care of their houses.

"Look at the gardens," he said, gesturing down Larchwood Avenue with his sandwich.

He had never had any run-ins with MOVE because, he said with a meaningful smile, he had never been allowed to deal with them.

"No uniformed officers were allowed to answer any call on the 6200 block of Osage Avenue," he said, except for something very minor like a parking violation.

"Too sensitive," he said.

Only civil affairs officers handled problems on the MOVE block.

"This isn't a police problem," he said, gesturing two blocks away, where the MOVE compound was under siege.

"This is a political problem."

Indeed.

*

They gave Osage Avenue to MOVE a long time ago and they had to burn it down to get it back.

What happened Monday was inept and outrageous, but certainly not deliberate. Police and city officials may have been stupidly shortsighted in having no back-up plan to the unsuccessful tear-gas assault; they may have been incompetent in not foreseeing that a bomb could cause a major fire; fire officials may have been utterly lacking in judgment when they chose not to fight the fire immediately. But they certainly never intended to destroy a neighborhood held hostage by MOVE's harangues and loathsome lifestyle.

But what police and city officials did before Monday was deliberate: They looked the other way while MOVE stockpiled weapons and intimidated neighbors and made threats and violated all manner of city regulations. And that led inexorably to the stand-off that turned a neighborhood into a pile of rubble.

Instead of forcing MOVE to adhere to the same rules that govern the rest of the city, instead of reacting immediately to small violations with appropriate responses, the city let a manageable situation escalate into an incredible tragedy.

Why did MOVE qualify for exemption from civilization? Who decided to let them accumulate gas and water bills and not shut off utilities? Who decided not to prosecute for housing and building code violations? Who decided to keep uniformed cops away from their block? Who decided to sacrifice the neighbors, to let them be beaten and intimidated in their own back yards? And why? Because the MOVE comrades killed a cop? All the more reason not to let them get a fraction out of line again, not to let them think they're too hot to handle. I want to know who decided to cut them a wide berth and I want to know why.

A political problem, indeed, Mr. Goode.

*

There is much that was incredible about what happened in West Philadelphia this week, not the least of which was hearing respectable people still trying to legitimize the urban terrorists who ruined their neighbors' lives with their verbal and physical assaults.

On the radio Monday afternoon, I heard a community activist say the siege was unnecessary, that MOVE wasn't so bad. It was "a matter of opinion," she said, as to whether they made life miserable for their neighbors: It becomes a "dictatorship" when we insist that people live a certain "lifestyle."

And that's another unfortunate aspect of what happened in Cobbs Creek this week. The assault on the MOVE compound was so ill-planned and tragically executed that it overshadows the evils of MOVE itself and engenders sympathy where there should be none - except, obviously, for the children. MOVE members had ample opportunity to avoid the confrontation and certainly to save their children.

Clearly, they sought the violence that resulted in their deaths. Or maybe they thought the city wouldn't really crack down, wouldn't really resort to desperate measures like a bomb dropped from a helicopter to get them out. After all, they'd been getting away with flagrant abuses of the rules for a long time. Why should they think the city had decided to start calling the shots now?