THEY ARRIVED IN CENTER CITY as defiant and self assured as the leading wave of the Taliban into Islamabad. Bold, mindless, confident of their ultimate success, true believers without a clue. A lot like that young dirt bike rider who ran down a Philadelphia cop with his motorcycle the other night. I speak of the hip hop wheelie making Visogoths that invaded South Broad last weekend, Saturday around dinner time.
A group of ten to twelve "young black males" on loud motorcycles and four-wheeled "all terrain" vehicles roared up the middle of Broad Street from Pine to City Hall around 6:30 p.m. It was stunning. From an open window of a restaurant on the west side of Broad Street between Walnut and Locust I watched children no older than those dead pirates in Somalia mock authority by doing block-long wheelies. In Center City Philadelphia. In daylight on Broad Street at the dinner hour on a Satrurday evening.
It was appalling. I was embarrassed for my city. These kids are playing the cops like a violin because they know what the police know. They know that the cops won't chase them because when the cops do chase them, one of them, or someone else, tends to die.
The kids, who can be as young as 12, will be doing 60 miles an hour on a motorized two-wheeled vehicle the size of a roller skate, but once a Philadelphia cop attempts to do what any of their parents should do -- stop the kids from doing it! -- the cops become the "cause" of the inevitable accident and the loss of life or bodily function when a kid on a roller skate travelling a mile a minute meets a brick wall.
Or a little girl playing jump rope in front of her house.
And no matter who gets hurt or how, the city gets sued. And where there are lawsuits there are lawyers who, in front of a jury, can turn Attilla the Honda into a panicked child in fear for his life from a pursuing cop car. "Think we should give chase, Whitey?" Harry the cop says to his partner, anticipating the answer, "Oh brother."
This has been going on for years every spring in the neighborhoods. Come warm weather kids on bottle rockets race through South, West and North Philadlphia streets. Unless the police have a net, a coordinated plan to round up these suicidal nitwits, cops know better than to pursue.
But to see them zoom all scary and loud and obnoxiously bold into Center City was like, well, like watching outlaw bikers or drunken cowboys riding into Dodge City on a Saturday night without a marshall in sight..
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