Ahead of the Kensington crackdown, aggressive policing has intensified

At the Savage Sisters’ drop-in center on Kensington Avenue, a woman who gave her name only as Chrissy teared up as she waited for medical care for the oozing lesions that had devoured her hands and arms.

Four years ago, she became homeless in Kensington after a series of deaths in her family. And now, the animal sedative xylazine contaminating the drug supply is wreaking havoc on her body.

On top of those problems, her boyfriend had been picked up by police and she hadn’t seen him in days. A police officer had attempted to detain her, too — but upon seeing her scabbed wounds, she said, the officer called her “a dirty junkie” and let her go.

“I’m trying to get my life together,” she said one day in March. “My boyfriend said we could get out of here and get a place to live.”

Kensington drug users and service providers say an informal enforcement initiative has been underway for months — well ahead of Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s planned crackdown this week on the city’s internationally notorious open-air drug market.

» READ MORE: All eyes are on Kensington as Parker administration plans to clear homeless from a main corridor

They described it as pervasive harassment by police, initiating stops for previously overlooked offenses in Kensington, such as loitering and possession of drugs or paraphernalia.

That trend is not represented in city narcotics arrest data, which plummeted during the pandemic and remain near the lowest level in 15 years, the District Attorney’s Office data dashboard shows.

While the department says officers are to remain respectful of all members of the public, including people in addiction, Deputy Commissioner Pedro Rosario, whom Parker tapped to lead the Kensington strategy, confirmed an effort to ramp up policing of drug-related offenses that long went unenforced.

“There is political will for a reset in Kensington, whereas it hasn’t been before this,” he said Monday. “The same laws that we enforce downtown, in the Northeast, in South Philly, we’ll enforce in Kensington.”

» READ MORE: Philly City Council criticizes Parker administration for lack of details about Kensington plan

More than 20 drug users who spoke with The Inquirer — most of them on condition that only their first names be used because they were discussing illegal activities — said that the frequency and tenor of law enforcement encounters has been intensifying since January when Parker took office.

“There’s nowhere for us to even be,” said Gary Kidd, 46, who’s from Sellersville but has been in Kensington on and off for the past couple of years. “There’s nowhere for us to sit down.”

He said he’s been sleeping under an overpass in recent months. Almost every morning, police come by and clear everyone out, he said — sometimes forcing them into pouring rain. Some officers are polite, he said. Others show disrespect, and seize his few possessions.

That’s a drastic change from just four months ago, when his only police contact would occur if he happened to wander into a Narcotics Strike Force surveillance to buy drugs, and was arrested.

Rumors have been flying about a surge in arrests for possession of drug paraphernalia — a misdemeanor that has rarely been used as a stand-alone charge in Philadelphia given the city has for decades sanctioned and funded syringe-exchange programs.

Police data show an uptick in such arrests, which went from near zero in 2023 to 50 cases in the first three months of 2024.

Those numbers do not account for what some drug users in Kensington said are informal interactions in which police ordered them to destroy paraphernalia or drugs, but didn’t arrest them. The impact has amounted to an abrupt cultural shift in Kensington — and led some users to voluntarily limit their time in the neighborhood.

The city estimates that 675 people are homeless in Kensington. But in recent months, people like Chrissy said they’ve begun sleeping in other neighborhoods like Center City where they say they feel safer and police bother them less.

“People are going further from [Kensington] Ave: indoors, West Philly, Tioga, the counties,” said Tori McDowell, a staffer at Savage Sisters who is in recovery.

» READ MORE: How Kensington Avenue’s open-air drug market went international — and the city’s fight to take back the neighborhood

Parker’s public-safety plan started with an outreach phase last month, when bright orange notices went up on a two-block stretch of Kensington Avenue, warning of an encampment clearing of the handful of tents that remain there.

Outreach workers have flooded the area in recent weeks. As of Monday, 20 people had accepted housing, according to a city spokesperson. The Parker administration has proposed a $100 million investment in housing and intake centers where drug users can be connected with treatment and other services.

Wednesday’s encampment clearing will, within weeks, lead into a law-enforcement-led approach, which Parker said will include heavy police presence, drug busts, warrant sweeps, and arrests for drug possession, prostitution and other “quality of life” crimes.

She pledged to take control of one to two blocks at a time and then “hold” those blocks — while monitoring for the displacement of problems to surrounding areas.

Savage Sisters’ drop-in center is one of a handful of indoor spaces in Kensington where drug users can get showers, snacks, wound care, and connection to treatment programs — and can hang out for a few hours without fear of aggravating nearby residents, business owners, or police.

But amid complaints from City Council members, the landlord Shift Capital said it would not renew the nonprofit’s lease this fall.

Just down the street, Stop the Risk, a meal program and DIY shelter run by neighborhood resident Patrice Rogers on a lot she’d filled with sheds and an RV, also shut down — a result, Rogers said, of city pressure.

At McPherson Square, a Kensington park once crowded with drug users, the few people sitting on benches said police have made clear the lawn is now off-limits to them.

Janine, 39, said she was killing time in the park before a volunteer shift at Prevention Point.

She said she’s been on edge because police interactions had become a daily occurrence for her since the start of the Parker administration. She said she hadn’t been arrested, but had been threatened with arrest and issued numerous citations, including two $25 tickets for paraphernalia.

“Before, they’d be like, ‘Hey! You OK? You need help?’ Now, they kick you and say, ‘Get up!”

Chris, who is from Northeast Philadelphia and declined to provide his last name, said police encounters — some of which started with him shoplifting a coffee or a bag of chips — have grown more routinely violent.

“They beat me up, threw my book bag in the street, grabbed me by the neck, and threw me in the street,” he said. “They feel emboldened. They know they can get away with it. This is an opportunity to take whatever their feelings and thoughts are about us, and to act on it.”

Police spokesperson Sgt. Eric Gripp said he could not comment on specific cases, but any allegations of abusive language or other misconduct should be reported to police supervisors or submitted as an official complaint. ”It’s completely and totally unacceptable and that’s not how our officers are expected to behave, and if that’s going on, of course we want to know about it,” Gripp said.

At neighborhood meetings, residents of nearby communities have warned that they’re already seeing more people sleeping on the street — raising fears that the city is shifting the problems plaguing Kensington onto them.

“They have started moving into the neighborhood,” said Shannon Farrell-Pakstis, who heads the Harrowgate Civic Association.

That aligned with what some unhoused people who spoke with The Inquirer described as a scattering — into transitional housing or shelters, under bridges or onto SEPTA lines. Some said they’ve given up finding one regular place to stay, but move someplace new each night.

Zack, 40, who’s from Northeast Philadelphia but has been in Kensington about four years, said he’s been there through one encampment shutdown after another — from the train tracks to the underpasses.

The current climate, he said, is the most hostile he’s experienced. Safer drug supplies are more difficult to obtain, and tents are taken down right away.

“You get kicked out of everywhere you go,” he said.

Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University, said the crackdown may solve an optics problem, but it comes at a high cost.

Research has shown more aggressive enforcement contributes to riskier behavior, greater risk of death by overdose, and greater challenges in providing mediation and services to people in addiction, he said.

“Dispersing these encampments simply disperses the problem. It doesn’t solve it,” he said. “But the pressure is on police and politicians to make the problem go away — or to make it less visible at least.”