My restaurant’s window was smashed in Philadelphia, where our leaders are failing their most basic duty: to protect all of us from an assault by a man who, by his own account, was “born with a silver spoon in his mouth.”
The assault was by one of the city’s notorious gangbangers, one of the young men who’ve taken the streets of Philadelphia in the last 40 years and made Philadelphia the city where people are shot dead on the streets.
In response to this assault, Philadelphia’s leaders are offering a $250,000 reward for his capture and prosecution.
“We don’t have to talk about why [the crime] should be investigated, and we don’t have to talk about why it shouldn’t. We have to talk about how it should be investigated,” Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania told me today on air at 11:00 Eastern.
“I know that he’s responsible for this crime. I just want to know how he’s going to get out of the hospital he’s taken — you know, he needs to be in prison, but I don’t see why his hospitalization should prevent him from being investigated and prosecuted.”
That’s what we’re told is on the table in this case.
“What it means is that we don’t want him to be able to get through this hospital without — not be able to get out of the hospital without the protection of law enforcement.”
But Governor Wolf isn’t convinced:
“I don’t see that we could put that into the best interest of justice, because what we don’t need for justice in this case is the appearance that this is going to be any different than other violent crimes that are going to be investigated.”
Wolf didn’t offer a source for that claim, and I couldn’t find support for it on the web.
I asked Wolf if, by calling for a $250,000 reward, he was in a position to issue a “show cause order” to anyone who provided information that could lead to the man’s capture, and said a show-cause order would require the person who provides information to appear in a court of law.
Wolf said that was “what we intend to do.”