Kensington's State of Emergency

The humanitarian crisis in North Philadelphia

Getty Images - People gather on a street overtaken by opioid users in Kensington

“It’s a humanitarian crisis,” Philadelphia’s councilman at-large, Allan Domb, told me about the city’s Kensington neighborhood—now the largest open-air drug market in the United States. One evening last November, Domb rode with a city cop through the streets of Kensington and encountered what he described as a nightmare, stopping the cruiser over and over again because of the number of drug users that were so high they “were just laying down in the middle of the road.” 

A subsequent ride-along convinced Domb that the problem had grown beyond the scope of what the city could fix by itself. “We saw the aftermath of seven shootings that night—all drug related,” he said. “This is the root of a lot of the violence.” Since the start of 2022, more than 1,345 people have been injured in Philadelphia shootings, and 311 people have been murdered—a six-month homicide rate that already exceeds the total killed in the entirety of 2016. As in several other cities across the nation, gun violence has flourished here since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. But so too has the drug trafficking, particularly in Kensington, leaving scores of dead drug users in its wake. By the end of 2020, Philadelphia counted the second-highest number of annual drug-related overdose deaths on record—81% of which could be attributed to fentanyl, the potent synthetic opioid that rules the Kensington drug trade. “We need to shut down the drug traffic,” Domb told me. “It’s just too easy to get drugs in Philadelphia right now. And people know it.”

Three months ago, Domb and the rest of the 17-member city council unanimously voted to declare a state of emergency in Kensington. Normally deployed after a major natural disaster, a state of emergency designation unlocks a bigger tranche of public funds and resources to rapidly respond to the devastation. In 2018, Philadelphia’s Mayor Jim Kenney used a lesser disaster declaration that removed Kensington homeless encampments (which soon returned) and expanded drug treatment facilities, but that only tapped city agencies and hardly made a dent in what’s become “conditions unimaginable anywhere else in Philadelphia,” said council member Maria Quiñones Sánchez. A state of emergency that uses Pennsylvania or federal funds for a neighborhood drug overdose crisis would be unprecedented—but Kensington’s long-standing drug problem with heroin, crack and, more recently, opioids has accelerated to epic proportions and become a crisis of such intensity that it’s now “an opportunity to declare the neighborhood a FEMA site,” Domb said. “A hurricane or a tornado, that could be an hour or two. But this? It’s been going on for 25 years, and right now it’s the largest humanitarian crisis in the country.”

FEMA has never deployed an emergency crisis operation to an urban neighborhood where the only disaster is human-made—but Kensington doesn’t exactly have a precedent. 

As a national figure for progressive criminal justice reform movement, the city’s second-term district attorney, Larry Krasner, has taken an academic approach to crime in Kensington, slotting its rampant drug trade, prostitution, and gun violence as downstream of larger systemic ills.

 “The solution has been ‘more cops, lock ’em all up,’ and that’s what’s been said for 60 years,” Krasner told a crowd of Kensington protestors that had gathered early in the pandemic to criticize city officials’ mishandling of their neighborhood. A crackdown on dealers was exactly “how you got here,” Kranser told the crowd. As an advocate for less punitive drug policies, Krasner this year also argued against the idea that “arresting people and convicting them for illegal gun possession is a viable strategy to reduce shootings.” Krasner instead has made the hallmark of his office the exoneration of those wrongfully convicted while taking a hard line against corruption and aggressive uses of force by the city’s police. 

Kranser’s counterpart in the state attorney general’s office, Josh Shapiro, the current Democratic candidate for governor, has pursued a more aggressive approach to Kensington, running a crackdown targeting the drug trade operations that have made the neighborhood into what his office estimates to be a billion-dollar drug marketplace. Most recently, the attorney general apprehended 23 people tied to the Coates family, a father-and-son drug-trafficking outfit that had rented out blocks in Kensington for other dealers to sell fentanyl and other narcotics at $3,000 a week. The Coates operation now faces RICO charges and will likely struggle to reclaim its dominance in Kensington, but it’s an open question if competitive operations haven’t already moved in on the turf when smaller dealers rarely face charges from the local prosecution.

“The drug stings by the attorney general’s office, I applaud it—it’s excellent,” said councilman Domb. But the resolution for the state of emergency backed by the city council, he says, needs more than any one existing office can provide. “We need a team with one field marshal in charge of a 6 to 12 month total cleanup and restoration of Kensington. And I don’t mean to move the people there to another neighborhood. We must completely shut down the drug traffic and then help all those people that need help. Take them off the street, get them treatment, and get them back into our society.”

Domb says the council’s resolution can’t move forward without first getting Mayor Jim Kenney to make the request for the emergency declaration from Gov. Tom Wolf, but that the mayor has continually postponed meetings about the effort. In a statement, the mayor’s director of communications, Kevin Lessard, said that “while we are supportive of all attempts to gain additional resources for City, any planning efforts must include authentic community input.” With Kensington in her district, councilwoman Sánchez has been a full-throttle supporter of the state of emergency declaration, saying that “we need all hands on deck, at every level of government, to support neighbors and families and address this public health and safety crisis with meaningful relief measures, policy change, and restorative community investments.” 

Gov. Wolf, a Democrat, has made his own moves to address the Kensington overdose epidemic as part of a statewide effort to thwart the opioid crisis, but the 21-day opioid disaster declaration that he made more than a dozen times since 2018 ran into opposition from the Pennsylvania General Assembly, whose Republican leadership has been resistant to passing legislation that would expand the opioid disaster designation. “The governor remains committed to making this issue a top priority,” Elizabeth Rementer, the governor’s press secretary, said by email, adding that the governor’s administration has been discussing the Kensington crisis with “the mayor’s office on a regular basis.” 

Councilman Domb realizes that turning Kensington into a year-long FEMA site is a far-fetched scenario, but the attempt is worth it when “the neighborhood people feel like the city has forgotten them. Because the city has said it’s okay what’s happening in Kensington. For 25 years, nothing has changed, it’s only gotten worse,” he said, adding that the resolution “is a dream—but, you know, if you don’t dream, it never happens.”