The juxtaposition of the two stories on the front page of today’s Philadelphia Inquirer could not have been more jarring – the feature center story about a young Camden, NJ mother’s grief over the death of her young son in a hail of bullets intended by one miscreant for another like him; and a Column 1 story about Philadelphia’s disappointing new mayor performing public mea culpas for his previous harsh remarks about city department of human services personnel.
Through malign neglect and manifest criminality, employees of the DHS caused the death of a child allegedly under their specious ‘protection’.

It would appear that these two incidents are unconnected. We will examine why this is false.

The shooting death of 4-year old Brandon Thompson is an unfortunate case of an innocent losing his life simply by walking into the sights of a criminal taking revenge on a rival with a firearm. Official denials of the connection of this apparent vendetta with drug dealing ring hollow in light of the alleged perpetrator’s previous arrest for possession, and the alleged use of several 9 mm semiautomatic weapons discharging at least 40 shots. Why Camden police officials would be so quick to deny that the shooting was drug-related is suspicious, to say the least. But even if no drugs were involved, why the heavy weaponry? Why else risk getting arrested and doing hard time for weapons possession (concealed carry of handguns is virtually outlawed in NJ) except to defend a territory of criminal activity? Whatever the reason, the alleged shooter, one Donald Lindsey, 20, of Camden risked serious state time even before the terrible act (characterized by the victim’s mother, who saw it happen as deliberate) was perpetrated.

A couple of miles west, Mayor Michael Nutter (D, Same-Old, Same-Old) was being forced to eat every last word of righteous indignation he had previously heaped on the City Of Philadelphia’s criminally corrupt Department of Human Services by the Department’s bunch of crybaby unionized hacks. Said hacks led the mayor to the microphones by his scrotal sack, rhetorically speaking, to apologize for hurting the legitimacy and the feelings of the bloated, corpulent hordes of tax-eaters. Said tax-eaters ineptly and ineffectually fail to protect vulnerable children from their own families while nonetheless succeeding at clinging to the public teat as their reward for doing so. The death of Danieal Kelly, in 2006 dehydrated and ridden with maggots, is only just now being tied to the DHS by a grand jury.

Nutter’s outrage, while probably heartfelt, is a little bit late, and rendered even more impotent by his ass-kissing retraction. The proper response to the systematic neglect of their alleged duties would have been to close the agency outright and replace it with nothing. Failing that, he should simply have fired every member of agency management, hired outside auditors to review all case records, then fire any agency employee whose cases were handled in an unsatisfactory way. In Philadelphia’s union-dominated government, either move would be the kiss of death for Nutter’s political ambitions.

Two different cities, two dead kids. How to relate them? In both cases, the government interposed itself as a moral agent, in Philadelphia by subjecting family relations to the arbitrary will of a public bureaucracy, severing parental responsibility and replacing it with nothing; in Camden’s case the criminalization of drugs and firearms has led to the concentration of both into criminal hands, leaving law-abiding citizens defenseless to protect themselves, their children, and their property.