Just a Little Respect, Please

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 28, 2010

What is going on in Coatesville?

That is the question Judge Thomas G. Gavin posed last week, albeit somewhat rhetorically, in response to hearing about a near-riot that broke out in the lobby of a district court in Valley Township, the city’s neighbor and near-twin sibling.

The story, when you tell it, is something you might expect from a gritty urban crime novel: A young man disappears, and a city man is later arrested and charged with his murder. Police say the victim was shot, then his lifeless body dismembered with a chain saw. During their investigation, police say the accused’s mother purposefully tried to keep them from searching her son’s SUV by dumping it in a high crime area in New Jersey.

At the mother’s preliminary hearing, tensions directed by the murder suspect’s family against that of the victim boiled over. The suspect’s sister and cousin lost control and tried to attack one of the victim’s cousins. His sister swung violently at her while dozens of others stood and watched, then fought her way through police officers who tried tor restrain her to the point she had to be forced into a bathroom by three uniformed men – including the township chief of police – and held down against her will. His cousin tried to join in the fray and fight, all the while holding in her arms her own infant child.

Both were arrested and charged with various crimes, including assault, resisting arrest, and endangering the welfare of a child.

Gavin, never one to shy away from commenting on matters outside the realm of the courtroom, took the time to explain to the two women his own experience in Coatesville. As a young assistant district attorney, he’d come to the city in the early 1970s and remembered sitting in the district court handling all sorts of cases. But none like the ones they presented.

“Coatesville was a different place in the 1970s than it is today,” he said.

I agree. The city is different today than it was when I first went there to cover City Council in the 1980s. Then, even as the shadows were gathered around the Luken’s Steel Co. operations there, some had high hopes for the city’s revitalization, and put their energies into re-establishing the city’s image as the show place of Chester County. There was a pride at the bottom of the way people spoke of the city, the way they wanted it to be considered.

What makes it different is anybody’s guess. A downward spiraling economy. The lack of political acumen on the part of city leaders. An endless drug culture that offers fast money, slow dissipation, and eventual ruin. A lack of understanding and the will to help by those outside its limits.

Some of what has gone on there is beyond there is beyond tragic. This year, I attended the trials of two young city men not even out of their teenage years who decided to accompany older men they should not have trusted to West Chester for some easy money coming from the robbery of a borough drug dealer. The dealer ended up losing his life in a shooting that made no logic or sense. The two men face the reality of spending the rest of their lives – 50, 60, 70 years? – behind bars. One shakes one’s head in disbelief and disgust.

Ask Gavin what is wrong with the United States of America and he will likely offer up an opinion or three or “how long have you got?” Ask him what is wrong with Coatesville and the answer comes back in one word. “Respect.”

“Part of what changed is the respect individuals in Coatesville don’t give to each other anymore,” he said in sentencing the two women to prison. “They don’t have any respect for the system, and they don’t have any respect for themselves. And when you have no respect for yourself and no respect for the system, you have chaos.”

One of the women involved in the district court melee had shouted out an epithet that people in law enforcement have, quite frankly, become used to across the board. “(Blank) the police,” she shouted as they tried to control her and calm her down. This stuck the judge as beyond unacceptable.

“The only things that saves us from chaos is people like the police officers who stepped in to handle things like this,” he said, perhaps thinking of the men and women who work to solve the crimes that are committed against Coatesville residents every day, even though they themselves are refused the respect of those they are trying to help.

“It’s about time that people in Coatesville, instead of saying (blank) the police, say thank you to them. The police are the ones that are keeping that city from collapsing altogether,” he said.