Karen Heller: Trying to keep the peace on a glorious day

The newly combined 22d/23d Police District, headquartered at 17th and Montgomery, is a hard, complicated piece of real estate, only 3.7 square miles yet responsible for a tenth of the city's violent crimes.

Wednesday was a glorious day in North Central Philadelphia. Temple students and neighbors were out soaking up the sun. So were the dealers, working the corners.

"It's like Christmas" given all the activity, said Officer Ray Kuemmerle, though not necessarily in a good way.

The district went five days without gunfire, then had three shootings that night. "Everyone with the same story," said Capt. Branville G. Bard Jr., 17 years on the force, in charge of a staff of almost 300. "They weren't doing anything, then a bullet grazed by."

The 22d/23d is one of the busiest of the city's 21 districts. "We have a large transient population, high density, and very dramatic socio-economic circumstances, lots of people living below the poverty line, while the community involvement is lower than we'd like," Bard said.

"Overall, things are getting better. Our drive is to get the numbers even lower."

In the summer of 2007, the 22d went an entire month without a murder, rape, or robbery with a gun. "The only way this works is doing foot beats, bike patrols, constantly policing so the cops own their little area," Bard said. "We don't want to see gambling in the middle of the block, gentlemen hanging on the corners."

Kuemmerle and partner Tony Soliman ride patrol, doing tactical work, wearing plainclothes in an unmarked car everyone knows. There's gambling in the middle of many blocks and gentlemen, known dealers, on almost every corner. It's 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

"When you come to the 22d, you're a real cop," said Kuemmerle, eight years on the force, two years in this district. Hours go by where all the partners do is disperse action, move life along.

"We know our bad guys," Bard said. How many reside in the district? Four hundred, most with double-digit arrests, "though that's probably an understatement," Bard said.

There are 20 gangs, members coming and going due to incarceration, injury, or death. "There's no pension plan in this business," he said. Last year, there were 36 homicides in the 22d and 23d, out of 305 in the city.

A game of craps "can escalate to thousands of dollars," said Soliman, who has a master's degree in criminal justice from St. Joseph's. "Then the loser can get angry, take out a gun." Best to break up a game before it becomes a situation.

Soliman and Kuemmerle are gathering intelligence, scoring bigger arrests. They had a homicide suspect on a year-old cold case. "We softened him up nice" with questioning for detectives, Soliman said. The suspect confessed to the murder, then threw in a three-month-old homicide. "A twofer," Soliman said.

"We're trying to stop the right people," said Deputy Commissioner Kevin Bethel, Bard's boss, in charge of half the city's districts. "We target guys who are constantly carrying guns."

Getting a case to stick, following it through the courts, securing cooperating witnesses, all prove a challenge.

"You've got your people who are too scared, and your people who flat-out don't like the police," Soliman said. "There are the guys who want to settle their own scores. Then you have the people who don't care what happens. They'll tell the police everything, often Vietnam vets. We love those guys."

We have no more chance of winning the war on drugs than we have of winning the war on poverty. Police try to keep crime at bay, to make the neighborhoods safer for the honest people who live there, by reducing violent crimes. This year, there have been five homicides in the 22d/23d, the rate severed by half, but there's been a spike in robberies, assaults, and domestic violence.

"Poverty is the core of everything, but you can make a difference," Bethel said. "But there are drugs being sold across the city, the country, in the suburbs."

Sometimes it seems as if the police are a dam trying to keep the criminal element from flooding the territory. How will the level ever subside? "Education, education, education," Bard said. It's midafternoon, and a good number of the gentlemen should be in school but aren't. More jobs would help, too.

"There are fantastic, hardworking people in the district," Bethel said. "Good police work takes time. You need good leaders, a good staff, a good plan. You can feel this working. All we can work toward is for the numbers to continue to come down, for more people in the area to want change. Then we'll see what happens."