A crackdown on Kensington's open-air drug market is coming, but will it work?

City workers are reportedly going to start clearing out encampments on a two-block stretch of Kensington Avenue near Allegheny on Wednesday. Drug users and others who are living on the street will be offered access to social services like shelter housing and recovery treatment and made to leave the area.

The city has cleared encampments in the same spot and other parts of Kensington many times in the past, and arrested drug dealers, only to see them reappear within days. The Parker administration says it's developing a long-term policing, human services and neighborhood revitalization plan to keep that from happening, but it's unclear when it will launch.

Here's a look at the recent history of Kensington's drug market and the current effort to address the neighborhood's challenges.

Operation Sunrise and beyond

Once a busy neighborhood packed with factories, Kensington experienced deindustrialization and white flight in the 1950s. It became an economically depressed haven for drug dealers and users, who took over abandoned homes or operated openly in the streets.

Community groups and the city periodically made efforts to combat what was described as the largest open-air drug market on the East Coast. 

In 1998, for example, Mayor Ed Rendell and Police Commissioner John Timoney launched Operation Sunrise, which sent in police to arrest prostitutes and dealers, L&I workers to seal abandoned houses, and sanitation workers to sweep the streets. 

The neighborhood got renewed attention starting about eight years ago, when the opioid epidemic was exploding. The Conrail tracks in Kensington's "Badlands" became a major drug encampment and librarians at the McPherson Square branch famously became experts at reviving overdose victims.

Police arrested hundreds of people and the tracks were cleared, but despite the efforts of Mayor Jim Kenney's administration the larger drug problem seemed largely unchanged or even got worse, with 650 or more people living on the streets. 

The national press frequently covered Kensington, and Dr. Mehmet Oz talked to drug users there when he ran for U.S. Senate in 2022. During last year's mayoral campaign several candidates spoke vaguely about ending the drug market through tougher policing or increased provision of social services. 

After Parker won the Democratic nomination last year, she pledged to have the National Guard come in to help shut it down. (Gov. Josh Shapiro, who would have to approve a guard call-up, quickly shot down the idea.)

When she was inaugurated in January, Parker released a 100-day action plan that made a priority of public safety and specifically charged her new police commissioner, Kevin Bethel, with "developing a strategy to permanently shut down open-air drug markets, including in Kensington."

Anticipation and alarm on the streets

In January, the mayor appointed a new deputy police commissioner, Pedro Rosario, to focus specifically on cracking down on drug dealing, shootings, and other crime in Kensington. 

A new "Kensington caucus" of City Council members proposed a system of "triage" centers where unhoused people experiencing addiction could choose to go into treatment or else potentially face jail time. Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, who represents the neighborhood, also won approval for an 11 p.m. curfew for smoke shops and certain other businesses in a section of Kensington.

An apparent increase in police targeting drug users caused alarm among people living on the street and nonprofit organizations that help them, especially after heavily armed law enforcement agents from the state Attorney General's office were seen rounding people up near Kensington and Allegheny avenues in early February.

Bethel said that, shortly after Parker's 100th day in office — in early April — police would begin more actively enforcing laws against illegal drug use and minor crimes that have often gone unpunished, while taking care to offer people treatment options. Rosario later began recruiting officers for a Kensington task force.

In March, Parker released her budget proposal for the 2025 fiscal year that begins July 1. It includes $100 million for "triage and wellness" facilities and would increase the police department budget. 

At the same time, she proposed ending support for needle exchange programs that reduce the incidence of HIV and other diseases among intravenous drug users, in part by cutting $900,000 from the city's contribution to Prevention Point, a social service organization in Kensington.

Block-by-block enforcement

On the mayor's 100th day in office, the city released a promised policing plan with some details of what Bethel is calling the Kensington Community Revival.

The police department said it will employ a Weed and Seed strategy, in which police and prosecutors work to remove criminals who "engage in violent crimes and drug abuse" and bring in human services like drug prevention, intervention, and treatment, along with neighborhood revitalization resources.

The effort will focus initially on a triangular zone bounded by E, Jasper, and Tioga streets and Indiana Avenue, and eventually expand outward. 

The plan calls for creating an interdisciplinary team that can bridge multiple mayoral administrations, maintain community partnerships, do targeted drug investigations to clean up problems street corners, end the carrying of illegal firearms and "establish reinforcement contingencies to eliminate Kensington as the narcotics destination of Philadelphia."

The plan lays out five phases: warning drug users of their final opportunity to get services; an intense, extended, block-by-block enforcement period; heavy patrolling to keep sidewalks clear and make improvements like better street lighting; handing the blocks "back to the rightful owners of the community"; and a final phase-out period as police move on to other neighborhoods.

Obstacles and skepticism

Over the past month, police and city workers have been visiting people living in tents on Kensington Avenue, letting them know about shelters and treatment options. Police could start removing about 75 people this Wednesday, the Inquirer reported.

But the encampment clearing is separate from Bethel's Kensington Community Revival, Managing Director Adam Thiel reportedly said. As Parker's term as mayor moves into its fifth month, it's still unclear when that longer-term "weeding and seeding" will formally launch.

Part of the holdup may be the lack of sufficient treatment beds for potentially hundreds of people who come off the streets in a short period with drug addictions, infected wounds, mental health issues and other challenges. 

To help fill the gap, the city plans to create a shelter and triage center at a former nursing home facility it owns in Fairmount — although the plan took the area's councilmember, Jeffery Young, by surprise and he has expressed opposition to the plan. 

I want you to hear this directly from me: I do not support a triage center at this location without undertaking a thorough review and discussion with the community to address potential implications. #fightingforthe5th pic.twitter.com/7tuiKi8bxc

— Jeffery Young, Jr. (@cmjyoungjr) May 2, 2024

It's also unclear how and when drug users might be prosecuted or threatened with prosecution. District Attorney Larry Krasner halted prosecutions for prostitution and low-level drug users years ago, and he told the Kensington Voice he doesn't support increasing them again, although he thinks the triage center concept could work.

Law enforcement officers and others have accused Krasner of being soft on crime, and some Philadelphia cops are reportedly skeptical that a crackdown on drug dealers will succeed unless prosecutors start winning stiff sentences.

Other critics, including some of those living on Kensington Avenue, note that past crackdowns have simply displaced dealers and users for a short time, and expect that will happen again this time around. 

Bill McKinney, executive director of New Kensington Community Development Corporation, said the current effort is the fourth plan to "fix Kensington" in the last 20 years. He warned that the city's plan could fail if it doesn't address the deeper societal problems that have allowed the drug market to persist for generations.

"Without a greater plan that deals with the core causes of how we got here in Kensington, after the initial 'successes' from cleaning, curfews, and policing are celebrated, the crime, drugs, and encampments — which relocated for a time — will return," he wrote in the Inquirer.