"Perfect storm" behind murder in Philadelphia

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Jerry Watson knows the mean streets of North Philadelphia, and he has the scars to prove it.

The 51-year-old stonemason, sitting on a wall in the Germantown section of the city, says he was stabbed in the neck with the sharpened edge of a Pepsi bottle by one of a group of eight or nine men who attacked him as he was walking his dog.

In an earlier incident, he says he was shot in the head while dealing drugs, and spent six weeks in a coma.

Watson, who is black, is lucky to be alive in a city that has the highest homicide rate among the 10 biggest U.S. cities, and where the killing continues after hitting a nine-year high of 406 in 2006.

"Civil law is nonexistent," he says. "It's just street justice, survival of the fittest. You have to have a certain kind of macho. You have to be a goddamn commando. You have to have a scowl on your face."

As of June 1, there have been 167 killings in Philadelphia, up from 151 in the same period of last year. By comparison, New York City, with six times the population but much tougher gun laws, recorded 176 murders in the first five months of 2007, down 17 percent from a year ago.

The FBI's preliminary uniform crime report for 2006, released June 4, showed Philadelphia's murder rate at 27.8 per 100,000 inhabitants -- the highest among the 10 largest cities.

Philadelphia's dead and wounded are mostly young black men subjected to a cocktail of drugs, guns, poverty and a brutal street culture that has long tormented U.S. inner cities.

Watson says there is little or no respect for the police and so people adopt their own laws of violence and machismo in order to survive in a city where a quarter of the 1.5 million people live at or below the federal poverty line.

PERFECT STORM

Elijah Anderson, a University of Pennsylvania sociology professor who has studied inner-city street culture, says residents of areas such as Germantown are pulled down by low wages, falling welfare payments and increasing globalization that exports already-scarce jobs overseas.

Add drugs, easily available guns, and an underground economy and you have a "perfect storm," he says.

"Most people in this city are decent and have conventional aspirations, but that doesn't count for much in a lawless public space," Anderson said. "The attitude is: 'If you mess with me, I will hurt you.' People develop short fuses. Even the most innocent something can turn into a beef."

Street machismo is also fueled by a perception among the black community that past injustices have been caused partly by their own failure to fight against the system, Anderson argues. "They think, 'The way we got into this mess is by being docile,'" he said.

Watson's companion Isaiah Sutton, 45, isn't shy about showing the evidence of his years on the streets of one of America's most dangerous cities.

Asked during a sidewalk interview if he had ever been shot, Sutton pulls up his shirt to reveal two long vertical scars on his torso from surgery to repair stab wounds, and a number of smaller scars in his back and side which he said came from bullet wounds.

Sutton, a funeral director for 10 years, is out of work because of a bad back. He won't say where his money comes from now.

At a laundromat in the ironically named Nicetown section of North Philadelphia, 51-year-old Lenise Miller said the neighborhood where she has lived for 40 years has declined because of a lack of jobs.

Miller gestures across the street toward a derelict building which she says once housed a bank and a print shop but which has been empty for years, and is now a danger.

"This building needs to be torn down," she says. "Because it's in a black community, it's not going to be torn down. This used to be a nice community."