On the morning of March 11, 2008, shortly after the bus picked up his twin brothers for preschool, Emill Smith stopped by the house of his mother, Valerie Maxwell, in Chester, Pennsylvania. At 22, he was stocky and athletic, with dark eyes, faint facial hair, and a cursive tattoo on his right hand: "R.I.P. James," in memory of his father, who died in his sleep when Emill was 12. They talked for a while, and he asked if he could pick the twins up from school that afternoon so they could spend time together.
That afternoon, Emill took the four-year-olds to McDonald's and his place before dropping them off at Valerie's: "They almost set the apartment on fire," he joked. "Here, you can have them." As he walked out, he stopped.
"Mom."
"Yes?"
"I love you."
"I love you more."
At 7:15 p.m. that night, Valerie dialed Emill's number to make sure he was home in time for his 7:30 curfew, part of his probation for disorderly conduct in a domestic dispute. No answer. A few minutes later, one of Emill's friends rushed in and collapsed.
Valerie Maxwell's son Emill Smith was shot to death in 2008 after spending the afternoon playing with his little brothers "I just put my hands over my ears," she recalls, tears dripping down her cheek. "I felt it. I felt it. I felt it for a long time."
Emill had been to a neighborhood bar, where a security camera recorded him dancing, hanging out by the pool table, and kissing an old friend on the forehead before leaving. As he got into his car, someone walked up and shot him several times. No one was ever arrested in connection with the crime, and odds are no one will be. That's because, while Chester has one of the nation's highest homicide rates, it has a far lower than average "clearance rate." Not even one-third of last year's 30 homicides have been solved, a rate less than half the national average. Since 2005, 144 killings have gone unsolved.
Tareeah Garret and her son, Asir Hudson, mourn her boyfriend, MacMatherson Miller, who was killed in 2008. He'd just started walking again after being shot 10 times a few months before.
For generations, black frustration with policing has been best described in a two-part statement: Cops don't care enough to solve crimes in our neighborhoods—they just come and harass our kids. Novelist Walter Mosley even built a best-selling detective series around a tough private investigator who does all the serving and protecting that cops won't do on the black side of town.
The bitter irony is that it was this same complaint that helped spawn the aggressive policing tactics now under attack from Ferguson to New York City. In the 1980s, when crack and heroin syndicates swept through black neighborhoods, black parents and pastors were some of the first and loudest voices to demand a war on drugs. What they got was "broken windows" policing—an emphasis on curbing petty offenses to prevent more serious crime.
What they also got were mandatory minimum sentences for shoplifters, indiscriminate stop-and-frisk sweeps, and deadly choke holds on men selling loose cigarettes. There's little evidence that these tactics contributed much to the national decline in crime. But they did erode trust in law enforcement across many communities—leaving places like Chester increasingly bereft of the protection they badly need. With residents both fearful of police and worried about being targeted for talking to them, detectives can't find the witnesses they need to solve crimes, breeding further distrust and a vicious cycle of frustration. A 2014 New York Daily News investigation found that in 2013, police solved about 86 percent of homicides in which the victim was white. For black victims, the number was just 45 percent. And in high-minority communities like Chester, says David Kennedy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, clearance rates for murder—and even more so for nonfatal shootings—can get "pathetically low. They can easily fall down to single digits."
Founded as the settlement of Upland in 1644, Chester once thrived on industry—its shipyard supplied Union soldiers, its steel mills sustained residents through both world wars, and factories, including a Ford plant, offered good jobs for black and white residents through the 1950s. Residents flocked to movie theaters and nightclubs, and legends like Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played streetball at "The Cage."
But in the 1960s and '70s, companies left Chester for other parts of the county, and the city starved for jobs and tax revenue. Toxic-waste processing plants were among the few businesses moving in as middle-class families headed to the suburbs, leaving the city with nearly half its postwar population. And in the '80s, Chester, like nearby Philadelphia, became a hotbed for organized crime and drug trafficking.
Elena Jo McElwee lost her twin brother, Arthur, in 2012 when he was shot while walking down an alley with friends.
Today, smoke still drifts from the stacks of the Kimberly-Clark plant on the Delaware River, where workers make Scott tissue and paper towels. Up the hill are clusters of well-kept redbrick houses around Crozer Medical Center, the city's largest employer. Across Chester Creek are boarded-up homes and the city's Ruth L. Bennett and William Penn housing projects. Some 75 percent of Chester's residents are African American, a third live below the federal poverty line, and unemployment is at 7.5 percent, nearly 2 points higher than the national average. In 2013, the homicide rate here was more than four times that of Philadelphia and Chicago. And in a city of a little more than 34,000, each death sends ripples throughout the community.
There are at least 120 churches in Chester, including the Temple of Brotherly Love, presided over by the Reverend Calvin Williams. Williams lost a son and a nephew to gun violence, and over the last decade, he and his wife, Patricia, have been visiting crime scenes as often as possible, offering prayer and reflection behind the yellow caution tape. "When brothers and sisters can't get jobs, or this little guy is trying to take care of his mother, he's going to find a way," Williams says. "So it becomes territorial. He's trying to make a living, so he's going to do whatever's he's gotta do."
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