PHILADELPHIA — After an hour of at times gut-wrenching testimonials about the effect of the drug and gun crisis in Philadelphia, Mehmet Oz, who convened the community discussion, was asked what he could do about those issues as a U.S. senator.
“We do have to deal with the education system, and I think the collapse of the public school systems in places like Philadelphia has dramatically worsened what was already a bad trend,” Oz told reporters after the event.
He said Congress should create a large fund of public money to allocate to each state to support school vouchers.
The response was one of a handful of ideas floated by Oz, who consistently highlights crime and drugs in Philadelphia on the campaign trail, though oftentimes without specific proposals on how he could address those problems in the Senate.
Oz's opponent, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who was endorsed by the city’s Black police union on Thursday, released a statement accusing Oz of “exploiting Philadelphia’s crime for political gain.”
Oz repeatedly referenced Philadelphia when talking about crime during a sit-down interview with NBC News on Thursday.
“Some of this is subpoena power to ask cities: What are you doing? How is it possible that in a short period of time you’ve created changes that are not for the betterment of people living in Philadelphia?” Oz said. “Many people here in Philly think they’re part of a social experiment that’s being done on them, and they don’t understand where they are in the equation, how come they’re not being valued, and it seems to always be that the criminals who are getting all the attention.”
He said he’d support school choice and bringing a liquid natural gas export facility to Philadelphia to help the city.
Oz, who is backed by the Fraternal Order of Police, held his Thursday discussion on “safer streets,” at a catering company in South Philadelphia. Former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain; Mike Bresnan, president of the city’s firefighters and paramedic’s union; several Republican ward leaders; and some Oz supporters attended the event.
It’s at least the third such event in Philadelphia as Oz has worked to tap into concerns about rising gun violence in the city by attacking his opponent as soft on crime. Oz often brings up the lieutenant governor’s work on the Board of Pardons and his support for reforming state mandatory life sentencing guidelines for second-degree murder.
Oz has been scrutinized over a similar but smaller roundtable in Germantown in September that focused on gun violence. At that campaign event, Oz sat beside Sheila Armstrong, who shared her story of losing two family members to gun violence, but it was revealed this week that she works for Oz’s campaign. She’s Philadelphia regional director, the campaign said, when asked by The Philadelphia Inquirer about her role this week.
Thursday’s hourlong discussion was mostly dedicated to highlighting the ongoing suffering in the city. Clarice Schillinger, a former GOP candidate for lieutenant governor and a prominent school choice advocate, said one of the Philadelphia SWAT officers shot this week is a friend and security guard. Community activist Ikey Raw, who was also at Oz’s September roundtable on gun violence, said it was easier to buy fentanyl than baby formula during periods of the pandemic, and a Kensington resident who was also with Oz when he visited the neighborhood last month said human feces is everywhere there.
Oz, who rose to national fame as a daytime TV talk show host, knows how to moderate a compelling conversation. And the issues he’s highlighting are real-life tragedies for many Philadelphians. But discussions of solutions were minimal.
Oz brought up the lack of police officers and need to improve officer retention, harsher penalties for drug dealers, and speeding up crime-victim compensation. In his interview with NBC, Oz said he opposes mandatory minimum sentences at the federal level for fentanyl dealers, saying he thinks it should be left up to judges.
At Thursday’s event, Oz continually stressed his opposition to (and highlighted Fetterman’s support for) supervised injection sites, which do not currently exist anywhere in Pennsylvania.
He also said in a follow-up interview with reporters that “with regard to drugs, we have got to take detox more seriously.” He suggested he’d support an involuntary detox program to push people suffering from drug addiction who commit minor crimes into detox.
“They break the law because they’re living outside, they’ll urinate or defecate, they’ll do something that allows you to justify it,” Oz said. “You’re trying to walk them by the hand, take them to detox ... and give them five days of an opportunity to at least find out who they are again, and you have to do it over and over and over.”
He referenced Miami as a city that’s had success with driving down addiction.
When the Inquirer followed up, the campaign sent a link to an article detailing a pre-arrest diversion program in Miami that appears to mirror one that already exists in Philadelphia.
Oz also said on Thursday he supports decriminalizing marijuana for medical uses. “As we get more comfortable understanding what marijuana can and can’t do and standardizing what it is, then other opportunities may open,” he said.
(He told NBC that President Joe Biden’s move to pardon some federal marijuana convictions was a “rational move.”)
Fetterman, who has argued he’s better equipped to take on crime issues given his 13 years as a mayor of a town that dealt with the opioid crisis and gun violence, pointed to Oz’s opposition to gun control as a policy that would hurt not help Philadelphia’s crime problem.
“If Dr. Oz actually cared about crime he’d be offering some real solutions,” Fetterman said. “Instead, he won’t do the literal first thing to keep our neighborhoods, and our police officers, safe: He doesn’t support a single policy to get guns off our streets and out of the wrong hands.”
Oz opposes red flag laws, universal background checks, and “any gun control measure that infringes upon the Second Amendment,” according to a post he authored on his campaign website. “I will fight against federal gun control schemes and I will vote for judicial nominees who share my view,” he says in the post. He’s dodged questions about whether he would have supported the bipartisan Gun Safety Act that was signed over the summer.
The event Thursday included several Democrats-turned-Republicans frustrated by gun violence who shrugged off Oz’s anti-gun-control stances.
“The problem is the ghost guns, the illegal guns. They’re already illegal, so it’s how do we stop that?” said Carnel Harley, a Republican ward leader in Nicetown who left the Democratic Party six years ago. Harley said he didn’t mind that Oz came to the discussion without a lot of answers.
“One thing I liked about him is, he didn’t say what he could do. He asked what do I need him to do for our community.”
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