Elmer Smith | Another innocent victim who doesn't fit the profile

TYKEEM LAW'S face won't emerge from that maze of murder statistics that pair perpetrators and victims in the city's escalating homicide rate.

He is not one of those people who could just as easily have been the shooter as the victim. He had a mother and father who loved him. He hadn't been in trouble with police. He didn't know the shooter.

Tykeem Law wasn't in the wrong place at the wrong time. He didn't live in one of the police districts with the highest concentration of homicides or shootings. He doesn't fit the profile.

A "new" study released by researchers in the city's Adult Probation and Parole Department found that 30 percent of recent gun-homicide victims faced criminal or juvenile charges when they were shot.

But not Tykeem Law. He is this year's Faheem Thomas-Childs. His smiling face will become the focus of our fears and outrage, at least until the next innocent victim falls.

He was a 14-year-old boy on a bike. He is dead because he didn't get out of the way fast enough to satisfy a driver who was in a hurry to go nowhere. The alleged shooter, Charles Meyers, 18, should never draw another free breath as long as he lives.

Police say Meyers, who had been in such a hurry seconds earlier, slowed down long enough to pull a pistol, reach across a man in the front seat next to him and shoot Law through the passenger-side window.

I can't help thinking that if a plainclothes policeman hadn't been in the car behind Meyers, he might have escaped to kill again. Would either of the two grown men who were in the car with him have come forward, or would they have invoked the insane "no snitch" code that leaves so many crimes unsolved?

That unlinking of crime and punishment, and the perception that most victims and perpetrators are involved in a common criminal enterprise, are part of a cynical narrative that prompted state Rep. Steven Cappelli to dismiss Philadelphia's murder rate as a case of "cultural genocide, to be blunt."

This from a man who is now a member of the state Legislature that rewrote the gun code in 1995 to prohibit Philadelphia and other cities from enforcing laws that used to limit access to gun purchases here.

Meanwhile, the federal government continues its close coupling with the National Rifle Association. One year ago, almost to the day, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to withhold funding from the U.S. Justice Department if it tries to enforce a federal child trigger-lock law.

What makes that one so cute is that the trigger-lock law was part of a compromise that allowed Congress to pass a law protecting gun manufacturers from citizen lawsuits. That part of the compromise wasn't affected by the law that neutered trigger locks.

How can we allow lawmakers to sleep with the enemy and pretend that homicides are a force of nature that they are powerless to confront?

Denise Clayton, coordinator of the city's Youth Violence Reduction Partnership, is running a program that has been instrumental in cutting the gun-homicide rate in half in the three Philadelphia police districts that had the highest homicide totals.

Why hasn't that spread to other districts?

"It costs significant amounts of money to operate," Clayton told me yesterday. "Federal funding ended a couple of years ago, except for the $1.2 million that Sen. Arlen Specter has earmarked for us.

"[State Rep.] Dwight Evans' office has been very instrumental in getting us state funding from the Blueprint for a Safer Philadelphia. But there have been enormous federal-funding cutbacks."

"Enormous funding cutbacks" are what you get when lawmakers settle into the comforting fiction that they can do nothing to keep criminals from killing each other in an urban civil war.

We can't allow Tykeem Law, Faheem Thomas-Childs and hundreds of other innocent victims to be written off as part of the collateral damage.

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith