PHILADELPHIA — A shooting of nine people in Kensington, a section of Philadelphia beset by gun violence and an open-air drug market, renewed community leaders’ criticisms of city leadership and heightened calls for a plan to address the neighborhood’s compounding crises.
The shooting Saturday near the intersection of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, ground zero for the city’s opioid epidemic, left all of the victims seriously wounded after police said at least three people jumped out of a car and fired more than 40 shots into a crowd shortly before 10:45 p.m. Eight men and one woman, ranging in age from 23 to 40, were struck and taken to Temple University Hospital.
Four of the men remained in critical condition as of Sunday evening, police said.
No arrests had been made and no weapons were recovered. Additional details were scarce, including what may have motivated the shooting.
There is no neighborhood as burdened by shootings as Kensington, a section of the city plagued by an open-air drug market and high rates of deep poverty. Along the Kensington-Allegheny corridor, there are sprawling homeless encampments, and people in addiction openly use drugs.
Law enforcement officials have said that dealers sell heroin, crack, and other drugs on more than 80 blocks in the neighborhood.
That drug dealing — a near billion-dollar enterprise — has largely fueled the shooting crisis. An Inquirer analysis found that within a five-minute walk of the Kensington and Allegheny intersection, more than 300 people have been shot since 2015, a rate that, per square mile, is 11 times higher than the city as a whole.
Mayor Jim Kenney said in a statement that he was “appalled and devastated” by this latest shooting, sending well wishes to the victims and their families, and urging anyone with information to contact police.
“As I’ve said countless times, the surge in gun violence that we’ve seen across the nation, and here in Philadelphia, is simply infuriating — to me, to other city officials trying to combat this issue, and to leaders in cities large and small across this country. ... Until lawmakers address the ease of access to guns, we sadly will be fighting an uphill battle.”
Some community leaders, though, said it’s not enough.
Maria Quiñones-Sánchez, who represented the Kensington area on City Council before resigning last month to run for mayor, said this was just the latest example of the city’s failure to address the neighborhood’s crises.
”The mayor, this administration has asked a vulnerable, majority Black and brown community to shoulder a citywide crisis,” she said.
She said city leaders have not fully acknowledged the depths of Kensington’s public health catastrophes, let alone come up with a plan to address it. This, she said, has allowed the neighborhood to become a “containment center of free-for-all behaviors.”
”We are traumatizing children, we are traumatizing families,” she said.
Quetcy Lozada, Quiñones-Sánchez’s former chief of staff who is expected to replace her on City Council, said she feels for the residents of Kensington, who she said have been abandoned by city government.
“The government refuses to give them [law] enforcement and they have allowed for that community to be completely occupied by those who are suffering from addiction and those who want to be completely lawless,” she said.
In a statement, city spokesperson Kevin Lessard said that city leaders understand the frustration, but “continue to do everything possible to address the complex and deeply entrenched issues facing the Kensington area.”
Lessard pointed to the Opioid Response Unit (ORU), founded in February 2020, to streamline and coordinate its response to the opioid epidemic.
“While we’ve made progress on some fronts and have engaged a diverse set of community leaders on a regular basis for over a year, we know there is more work to do,” Lessard said.
The struggles of Kensington are deeply rooted and complex. Law enforcement officials say they cannot arrest their way out of the crises there. Clearing one corner just pushes people to the next one over, police say, and many of those living on the street face compounding, unaddressed health and other problems.
Quiñones-Sánchez, though, criticized what she described as a disjointed effort among organizations working in the area. She said they have not evolved to address the new drugs infiltrating the streets, such as fentanyl and xylazine, also known as “tranq,” a powerful animal tranquilizer contaminating the drug supply, and that the city needs to rethink its approach to outreach.
“There is no humanity in letting people, women in particular, live in the streets, be exploited … in order to keep up their addiction,” she said. “We are enabling certain behaviors in the name of harm reduction.”
More than 2,000 people have been shot this year in Philadelphia, and Saturday marked the 60th day on which at least 10 people were shot. While the number of homicides in 2022 is slightly lower than 2021’s year-to-date total, the number of people shot remains higher than ever before.
And within that data is an incalculable human toll — every bullet fired bringing physical and emotional trauma to victims, witnesses, and the surrounding community.
Shortly before the flurry of bullets in Kensington, a 12-year-old boy died after being shot in the head in a North Philadelphia apartment, police said. The circumstances of the shooting, which occurred just after 9 p.m., were unclear, but police said “multiple guns” were found in the second-floor apartment on the 3300 block of North 33rd Street. Inside the apartment was another 12-year-old and at least one adult, police said.
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(Staff writers Juliana Feliciano Reyes, Chris Palmer and Dylan Purcell contributed to this article.)
