Temple’s Looming Choice
Credit: Joseph Lobalito/Temple University
Ever since a 17-year-old carjacker killed Temple’s Sam Collington under the blazing November 28 sun, much of the University’s solutions to crime and violence have concerned beef, both in and around their North Philadelphia campus. Increase the Temple security force by a third, mandated University President Jason Wingard, and bring more police patrols to bear on the streets that crisscross our compact campus. Furthermore, Temple wants to install more emergency phone-towers on its walking paths, send a shuttle to move students and staff around campus, and put this some of this new infrastructure on the state and federal governments’ respective tabs. But a flurry of bike-bound billy clubs or gun-toting guards may do little to address Temple’s biggest safety problem: Its awkward divorce from the safety of North Philadelphia as a whole.
Temple’s theory of safety, at least publicly, seems to twist itself around the inevitability of antagonism between campus and community. As long as the university’s there, the story goes, someone is going to have it in for the young, mostly middle- and upper-class people who frequent its halls, cross its streets, eat at its restaurants, and live in its ever-growing supply of housing. No action from Wingard, or the army of students and staff for whom he is responsible, will change these facts of Temple life, so the college’s best move is to build an iron buffer between itself and the mean streets of Philadelphia. When that program fails, Temple’s system of a down provides an easy, instant solution: More police! More checkpoints! More campaigns with names like “Brotherly Love Against Gun Violence” or “Shoot Basketballs, Not People”! More everything to create more daylight in Temple’s dealings with North Philly!
But there is no daylight in Temple’s dealings with North Philly, in part because its rotund facilities are oriented around the section’s central arteries of Broad Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue. Any police officers stationed to keep watch over the site where Collington’s untimely death took place would also find themselves staring at hundreds of people each day who could arouse the kinds of biases and suspicions for which law enforcement has become sadly famous. Temple’s campus force would be tasked with lording over land that may have been someone’s church, or hair salon, or tax preparer, or lunch-break favorite, less than five years ago, to say nothing of the churches, hair salons, tax preparers, and lunch-break faves that might have to make way for more Temple offerings five years from now. Even the community outreach program — a stylistic footnote amid Wingard’s conjuring of policial fire and fury — would need to tread lightly, lest the largest educational facility in all of North Philly attempt to connect with locals using implants with a limited understanding of residents’ real worries and concerns.
While a handful of college kids might feel safer if the spring semester were to resemble the funeral scene from The Dark Knight, they would still find themselves sharing a grocery store, three train stations, and more than a few restaurants with a group of people whose bodies and properties are threatened by Temple — and the state actors who come along for the ride — much as Temple feels threatened by them. Crucially, they’re the ones who might have to take the stand when someone does commit a crime against the people of Temple, or step in to tone things down when a chance encounter starts to go south. If Temple is going to be anything close to a safe place for its students, instructors, and admiring visitors, the people who live around Temple in perpetuity need to know that their lives will get better as Temple gets bigger.
In the future both near and far, America’s 32nd-largest university will continue to grow up and out of its present digs. Their ability to overpay for the land next door will cause property taxes to rise; their students’ ability to attract new kinds of businesses will both pave the way for exciting commerce and close the doors of city regulars. Perhaps most pressing, the University’s status as the apple of city government’s eye will bring both the promise of a newfound peace and safety and the threat of the old returning tensions. This story can have a happy ending, where peace, prosperity, and potential live side-by-side in a pastoral academic realm. Or, it can be the curtain call of a tragedy, in which the souls who raise concerns about gentrification get vindication as Temple ramps up a lethal tug-of-war with its environment. But there’s one big difference between this current epoch and most of the university’s competitions.
This time, the ball’s in Temple’s court. They, perhaps alone, can decide whether or not college and community get to write this story together.
