The high-cost risk of stop-&-frisk?

ABDUL WASHINGTON spent much of Saturday, June 19, grilling in back of his Logan home for his wife's 36th birthday. And because Father's Day was the next day, he'd planned a big celebration.

"I invited the whole block," Lakeisha Kellam, Washington's wife, said at their home on Franklin Street near Rockland.

The party began about 4 in the afternoon, said Washington, 31, and several families spilled out of their homes, sharing food and laughs on their stoops as kids played basketball in the street.

The merrymaking lasted late into the night but the mood soured about 1 a.m. Sunday after a police cruiser showed up and Washington and an officer exchanged words.

The heated conversation escalated into a confrontation with the officer and her partner, who pushed Washington against a wall and beat him with a baton, neighbors said. Other residents rushed over, yelling at the cops to stop hitting Washington, who is disabled.

The rush prompted more police cars to respond and soon led to a melee that resulted in charges against four residents and a police Internal Affairs investigation into alleged excessive force.

A hazy, black-and-white video of most of the incident, pulled from a surveillance camera perched on a neighbor's house, doesn't show a clear-cut aggressor.

But what is clear is that an increasingly tense relationship between residents and a handful of police officers from the 35th District, headquartered at Broad Street and Champlost Avenue, contributed to the chaos that erupted that night. And the incident has prompted questions of whether aggressive policing tactics such as stop-and-frisk do more harm to neighborhood relations than they're worth.

"Michael Nutter messed it up when he did that stop-and-frisk," said block captain Dawn Rykard, who saw the cop's baton striking Washington's legs. "Everybody's got rights. But that's when they [the police] got out of control.

"That's when they thought they can go around and do everything to everybody and they can say anything to anybody."

John McNesby, president of the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, said that some officers may be more aggressive than others - but they're the ones that tough neighborhoods need.

"We're always guilty until proven innocent," McNesby said of some city residents' perceptions. "But the same cops that are out there active and hustling, they're the ones [people] call upon when they need help on the street."

Residents of the neighborhood near where the party took place said that they - and especially young black men in the area - feel harassed by police because of frequent stops. Some residents allege that police have cursed and used racial slurs against them, calling them "bi---," "whore," "motherf-----" and "monkey."

"The 35th District, they will harass you for nothing," said Antonius "Tone" Newman, 28, who cleans schools and has been stopped twice in the last year. "I can be coming home from work, with my name on my shirt, and they'll stop me and say I 'fit the description' - that bothers me a lot."

One afternoon this spring, in April or May, he said, he was on his way to work, waiting at a bus stop on Wyoming Avenue and Roosevelt Boulevard.

"The next thing I know, two bike cops rode up behind me . . . . They told me to stand up against a wall," he said.

Newman said he had to wait until a robbery victim came to clear him as a suspect. By then, though, he'd missed his bus and arrived about 30 minutes late to work.

Police stopped pedestrians in the 35th District 11,610 times in 2009, according to police statistics obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a right-to-know request. That's a slight dip from 2008 but a whopping 170 percent increase from 2005, when just shy of 4,300 pedestrians were stopped.

It was in this context that the incident at the impromptu block party on Franklin Street occurred.

About 1 a.m. the night of the party, a handful of kids were playing basketball on a hoop that was in the street against the curb while dozens of neighbors sat on their stoops finishing plates of grilled chicken, potato salad, macaroni, yams and Spanish rice.

A patrol car pulled up and parked in an alley that connects with Franklin Street. After sitting in the cruiser for a few minutes, talking with people in the street, the officers got out of the car and approached Washington, a self-employed vendor.

He said that one of the officers yelled that the boys playing basketball "needed to get their behinds home before I call DHS."

Washington told her that parents were outside with their children: "I said, 'They're OK. They're just playing basketball. Ain't nothing wrong with that, is there?' "

Several neighbors said that the officers never said why they came to break up the party or if a noise complaint had been filed.

Surveillance video shows the two officers talking with Washington for a couple of minutes, then one officer reached out to touch him. The video shows Washington, who walks with a limp, jerking his arm away, but he says that he had stumbled backward.

The sudden motion appears to have been the spark that caused the officers to shove Washington against the wall, but it's not clear why he was hit with the baton. About 50 neighbors rushed around the officers, yelling at them to stop beating Washington.

"The police called for all this backup like it was a riot because people were yelling at them 'You can't be doing that!' " said Lamar Atkins, who was at the party.

The responding police came upon a volatile scene and arrested four people, including Washington, all of whom claimed that police used excessive force to detain them. The charges against the four range from disorderly conduct to assault on a police officer.

Three of those arrested have filed complaints against police with the Internal Affairs division.

McNesby said that he doesn't know the details of the party fracas, but he said that police had every right to clear the street. At official block parties, McNesby said, "a permit is only until 10 p.m. The street has to be opened up."

Capt. John McCloskey, of the 35th District - where slain police Officers John Pawlowski and Chuck Cassidy worked - said that he doesn't know if there had been complaints of loud music or other problems that night.

"I'm not sure why they were down there," McCloskey said of his officers. "I'm stuck in the middle. I want to back my officers up, if they were doing the right thing. I wasn't up there."

McCloskey said that he has talked with Washington because "one of my officers knows him and said he's a nice guy."

"But I don't know if he provoked the officers. Did he assault them? I really don't know."

The captain also said that the corner of Franklin and Rockland is a known drug area, and that a homicide occurred recently a block away. He said that while children used the basketball hoop most times, drug dealers sometimes hang around it late at night.

"They hide the drugs in the driveway behind the court," McCloskey said.

Rykard, the block captain, said: "We keep this block together. The kids are under control. It's not drug infested. We have nothing to do with the corner [at Rockland and Franklin]."

McCloskey said that he had the basketball court confiscated the day after he spoke with Washington. He said that if a responsible adult promises to put it in a private driveway, off the street, "They can have it back."

Police have been legally free to stop and frisk anyone walking on the street since a 1968 Supreme Court ruling, said Deputy Mayor Everett Gillison, who is in charge of public safety for the Nutter administration.

Philadelphia police have been stopping what they consider suspicious people for years, but soon after Nutter took office in 2008, he called for police to step up their stop-and-frisk efforts to get illegal guns off the street.

Gillison said that the policy has been effective because police confiscated about 22 percent fewer guns this year through Sunday than the same period last year, proving that criminals know about stop-and-frisk and have been leaving their guns at home.

"There are no people in Philadelphia who don't know that stop-and-frisk is at work," he said, calling criminals "hypersensitive" to the city's efforts to eradicate illegal guns.

Gillison said that complaints about improper stops have actually gone down since the stepped-up policy began, with 300 complaints the first year and only 120 complaints last year.

He encouraged those who feel that police officers have been rude or otherwise behaved inappropriately to file a complaint. But people shouldn't fault the stop-and-frisk policy if their real concern is the quality of the contact with a police officer, he said.

"My issue has been, please just don't sit on your complaints and think that something different is going to happen," Gillison said. "We have to change the culture of the expectation of how police officers are supposed to treat citizens in this city."

Critics of stop-and-frisk are questioning whether citizens' civil liberties are being infringed.

David Rudovsky, a civil-rights attorney, noted that statistics reveal that "it's largely minorities, and within that, it's mainly young black men, hugely disproportionate to their numbers in the population."

Rudovsky said that he is working with the ACLU's Pennsylvania chapter to monitor the policy.

"By the police department's own stats, the numbers have jumped quite dramatically . . . yet the number of people, as a result, who are either arrested or found to have some kind of illegal object on them has been very, very small," Rudovsky said.

William Carter, a professor at Temple Law School, who stressed that he doesn't know the facts of what happened on Franklin Street, added that accusations of "overly aggressive policing of minority communities" are usually discussed in terms of civil rights or racial issues.

But Carter said that that may not be the best way to look at the issue.

"It's simply bad policing to police a community in a way that the community feels that it's constantly under suspicion," Carter said. "If the community distrusts you, then the everyday situations, like [on Franklin Street], can spiral out of control.

"There's a thin line between establishing the proper kind of control and authority versus being perceived as establishing disrespect and suspicion of everyone in that community."

Carter suggested that had the block party occurred in another neighborhood, say, Chestnut Hill, rather than in Logan, "The police would have approached the gathering more respectfully. They would not assume there was some underlying criminal activity that could be dangerous.

"And even if the police officers did act disrespectfully, the community [in Chestnut Hill], because they don't have a history of mistrust, would not have reacted in the same way, with anger or tension. They wouldn't have taken it as a sign of disrespect.

"They just would assume the officer has had a bad day."