Ex-con activist resigns from Phila. police reform task force

Less than a day after Mayor Nutter convened his police-reform task force, one of its members resigned amid controversy over his own teenage criminal background.

Edwin Desamour, an anti-violence activist who works with at-risk teens, served more than eight years in prison for his involvement in a 1989 street fight that killed a police officer's son.

Desamour was one of 24 named Friday to the Police Community Oversight Board.

Mark McDonald, a spokesman for the mayor, said Sunday that Desamour immediately offered his resignation when police objected to his inclusion on the panel, which is tasked with tightening rules on police use of force and overseeing departmental reforms.

When he was 16, Desamour was riding with friends in Port Richmond when they got into a fight with rival teens. Sean Daily, 17, the son of Philadelphia Police Officer Keith Daily, was beaten with a baseball bat and shot in the back. He died the next day.

At the time, Desamour said he was only riding with friends to a party and did not participate in the fight, according to Inquirer reports.

He was tried as an adult and convicted of third-degree murder and was sentenced to 12 to 20 years in prison. After serving 81/2 years, he was on probation for 11 years. Five of his friends were sentenced to life in prison.

McDonald covered the trial for the Philadelphia Daily News.

The case was widely reported, both for the brutality of the attack and the alleged racial undertones - Desamour's group was black and Latino, Daily was white. At the sentencing, shouting and shoving broke out between the victims' and perpetrators' families.

Keith Daily said after the sentencing: "The appropriate punishment would be to put every one of them on a corner, let them get beat by bats, let them scream and try to crawl away, and then have someone shoot them." Keith Daily retired in the mid-1990s and died in 2001, according to news reports.

After his release in 1997, Desamour worked for the Philadelphia Anti-Drug Anti-Violence Network, Women Organized Against Rape, and Congreso de Latinos Unidos. In 2007, he founded Men in Action in the Community, where he serves as a peer mentor to help youth avoid or escape Philadelphia's violence-prone streets.

Desamour, 42, of the Holmesburg section of Philadelphia, could not be reached for comment Sunday. In a 2012 op-ed for TakePart.com, he said he had tried to move forward.

"I live each day with the knowledge that I was involved in an incident where a life was tragically lost. Nothing I do can ever change that," he wrote. "But I have proven that I should not be judged solely by that horrible act. That is not the sum of who I am."

The task force is charged with overseeing the implementation of 91 recommendations from a U.S. Justice Department report that found Philadelphia officers used force too often, and with working on the broader recommendations from the White House Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey chaired that panel.

Nutter said Friday the task force would include people from a wide variety of backgrounds who "share that vision to make policing in Philadelphia better." Among them are City Council members, clergy, Fraternal Order of Police leaders, local lawyers, and activists like Desamour. It is chaired by JoAnne Epps, dean of the Temple University Law School.

Epps and several other task force members contacted Sunday night were surprised to learn of Desamour's resignation.

Among other things, the Justice Department recommended the Police Department establish a specialized unit to investigate all deadly force incidents, train all its officers in the use of Tasers, and integrate the two boards that review officer-involved shootings into one entity that includes at least one civilian member.

The study was conducted at Ramsey's request after police-involved shootings in the city soared in 2012.

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