Heard in the Hall

The press crashed what Mayor Nutter intended to be a private budget briefing for City Council yesterday. The fullest accounts of the incident can be found here and here, while the Inquirer report dealt principally with the substance of the meeting. Reporters, who tend for obvious reasons to take an expansive view of state open meetings law, felt that the session (which included well over a quorum of council members) constituted a public meeting under the act. Nutter's administration takes the view that it is free to hold closed informational sessions with council, so long as no work is done on legislation. It isn't a new disagreement. Governments and the press dispute the scope of the law all the time. In December, for instance, City Council held what amounted to an illegal closed meeting to hammer out an agreement on minority inclusion for the Convention Center expansion project.

What was new was the tenor of the confrontation between the press and the Nutter administration. It wasn't a friendly disagreement. At one point Councilman Frank Rizzo cracked, "the honeymoon is over."

Nutter administration officials are plainly angry about the incident. They say that the administration has so far been remarkably open and transparent. That is absolutely true. Reporters' questions are answered promptly. Facts and figures that in past administration were difficult to obtain without filing an official and time consuming right to know request are now handed over with little to no fuss. And Nutter and his senior staff remain remarkably accessible to the press.

But given his campaign commitments to transparency and open government, Nutter is being held to a higher standard. The press isn't alone on this either. It's clear that at least a few council members also felt the meeting should have been open. How else would reporters have known there was a meeting to crash?

Bonus reading: a state primer on the open meetings law.

Among the top City Hall brass who Mayor Nutter did away with upon taking office in January was Prisons Commissioner Leon A. King.

But a few weeks ago, King resurfaced. His new boss: City Councilman Frank Rizzo.

“He’s smart, he knows the people, and he knows his way in and out of the Law Department,” Rizzo said of King, the No. 1 prison official throughout most of former Mayor John Street’s administration. Before that, King worked as a city lawyer on prison issues, and in that role he helped negotiate the end of litigation that kept the prison system under federal court oversight for nearly two decades.

Rizzo turned to King after his longtime director of legislation left for a private-sector job. “Our professional relationship is a good one,” the councilman said.

How long will King stay? “Who knows,” Rizzo said, acknowledging that King is now making about half of the $128,000 he earned as prisons commissioner. “I’m sure he’ll find a job eventually that will pay him the money he is used to making. But for now, he is doing a valuable service to me.”

As Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey explained his sweeping reorganization of the Police Department to the media last week, an odd couple stood shoulder to shoulder behind him: Fraternal Order of Police president John McNesby and Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Everett Gillison.

McNesby was livid in January, when Nutter named Gillison - a lifelong public defender - his public safety czar. The biggest FOP objection to Gillison's resumé was his representation in 2006 of Solomon Montgomery, who was convicted of killing Police Officer Gary Skerski.

McNesby publicly condemned Gillison's appointment in a letter. Later, when McNesby discovered that he and Gillison were booked to appear on the same panel at a Temple Law School forum on gun violence, he refused to share the stage with the deputy mayor and walked out on the event.

"That's old news," McNesby said last week, when asked about his feud with Gillison. "We made our point on that and moved forward. We're professionals, we do what's right for the city."

Gillison turned the other cheek when McNesby objected to his appointment. In remarks he made to a reporter before Ramsey's news conference, Gillison said he thought he was making progress on winning the police over.

He was right about that.

It's worth noting that all this happened before Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski was shot and killed by a bank robber on Saturday.

Crime has gone down by 13 percent in the areas where the city's first 18 crime cameras were installed beginning in 2006, a Temple University professor has found in a study.

With the city in the process of installing 250 cameras following the pilot project, Jerry Ratcliffe, an associate professor of criminal justice at Temple, found the decrease mostly among "disorder offenses" as opposed to violent crime. Ratcliffe and fellow researcher Travis Taniguchi took into effect the spread of crime to surrounding streets.

The first cameras were put up at 12 sites, but some were so close that Ratcliffe consolidated the study to 8 distinct sites.

The results differed widely from the eight locations studied, and some areas showed no impact at all by the cameras. "That crime did not reduce in the surveillance areas of half of the sites examined cannot be ignored," says the study, which calls for further research to understand the different results for each camera. The report is available here. Ratcliffe is a former policeman and author of the new book, Intelligence-led Policing.

Last August The Inquirer did its own analysis of the city's 18 closed circuit crime cameras, which had been installed a year previously. Crime statistics around the cameras showed two trends: Around highly visible, unmonitored cameras, crime went down; around less visible, constantly monitored cameras, crime went up. Experts suggested that the more visible cameras discouraged crime, while the less-visible, fully monitored cameras may have led to more reported crime because police caught more crime as it was happening.

Ratcliffe said some area may not have shown a positive impact on crime stats for this reason. He has submitted his study to the city, which is spending $8.9 million this year to install the new cameras, all of which will be fully monitored and highly visible, combining the best aspects of the two different cameras used in the pilot program.

City Council's Public Safety Committee on Wednesday will look at the way the city handles Protection from Abuse Orders.

Councilman Bill Green called for hearings to explore why some abuse victims apparently are made responsible for serving protection orders on their abusers. Philadelphia Police believe they should be in charge of delivering such orders, Green said. Nearby counties are expected to testify about how their systems are run.

The hearing is 10 a.m. in Council Chambers.

The Mayor of Iraq's third-largest city was touring city government Thursday, including a stop in City Council, where he received a warm welcome and got to watch a sleepy Council session.

Zuhair Mohsin Mohammed Abdulazeez, the mayor of Mosul in northern Iraq, is on a 10-day tour of the states, with stops in Minnesapolic, Philadelphia and New York. Mosul, a city of 2 million, is beset with problems, and Abdulazeez is examing everything from budgeting to cultural funding to solid waste.

Councilman Bill Green was his tour guide in council. Below is a briefing on his trip from the International Visitors Council of Philadelphia:

Slain Police Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski was remembered today as husband, father, dedicated officer and, lest we forget, a huge Flyers fan.
With team scheduled for Game 1 of it playoffs series with Pittsburgh tonight, 24-year-old Matt Liczbinski asked mourners to perform, in honor of his father, what may have been a first-ever Flyers cheer at Sts. Peter and Paul Basilica. Taking a time out from "all the seriousness," Matt Liczbinski led the congregration in "Let's Go Fly-ers" chant, complete with da-da-dadada clapping.

Sports, in life and death. That's Philly, baby.

So far, Mayor Nutter is a pretty popular guy in Philadelphia. But it's looks as though his appeal isn't limited to the city, or even to the region.

According to an internal presidential poll obtained by The Inquirer, Nutter has fast become relatively well-known and well-liked on a statewide level. More than 60 percent of respondents statewide were familiar enough with the mayor to have formed an opinion of him, and his favorable-to-unfavorable ratings ratio was almost 3.7 to 1, which is outstanding.

"I'm impressed," said Pennsylvania pollster Terry Madonna.

"His image is very strong, he's considered kind of an independent reform voice."

The poll also offered a close-up of public opinion in a few congressional districts in and near Philadelphia, where Nutter fared even better than he did statewide. That backs up anecdotal evidence suggesting the mayor is wildly popular in the suburbs.

And it raises an interesting question for him: What role, if any, will he attempt to play in suburban politics? State Democrats think suburban Republicans are highly vulnerable. Might Nutter fund-raising and campaigning on behalf of some challengers put Democrats on top?

The poll's findings should be taken with a few grains of salt. First, the poll is dated. It was conducted in late March. Also, the copy obtained by The Inquirer was heavily redacted, and no sample size was available. Still, internal campaign polls are generally considered to be reasonably accurate.