National Night Out and National Town Watch are projects that make us feel good, for the most part, and today is NNO’s 25th Anniversary. In a city without a lot of foot patrols by police, and with a fair amount of tension between police and residents (both in relative fancy-town and not-so-fancy-town), NNO offers a chance for the police to see regular folks as less of a threat and as possible partners in improving city life, and regular folks get to learn that not all cops want to knock their heads in for chilling on the corner with a beer. These projects do churn up some unfortunate self-reflection, though: what have we become that we need a national organization to remind us to look out for each other and to generally live in a civilized manner? We should just, you know, do that all the time, right?

Anyway, we thought that Philadelphia’s Operation Town Watch would provide links to all the events, making our lazy interns’ lives easier, but nope! So there’s a slew of things going on all over town - click through to see some of what’s up and for further thoughts…

>>>Fairmount Civic Organization and the 9th District got something for the kids in Rodin Park (21st & the Parkway) from 2:00 to 4:00 pm (holy crap, that’s right now!) with the Fire Department, face painting, and something called “Child ID Kits” which makes us think your kid’s DNA might be captured for an X-Files-like experiment.
>>>The Philadelphia Weed and Seed Project (no, not what you think) is offering two Gospelramas in West Philly, from 5:30 pm onwards at Muhammed Park (48th & Lancaster) and in Wynnefield at 56th & Berks.
>>>At 6:00 pm, there’s a sidewalk sale at the Port Richmond Home Depot (2539 Castor Ave.).
>>>And the South of South Neighborhood Association encourages us to do what we should be doing anyway on a day like this: kick it outside, talk to our neighbors, and be a positive part of the fabric of the city.

But there’s some blowback too for this event, sparked in part by the Philadelphia Inquirer tooting its own horn about the repercussions of their 2007 report on Matthew Peskin, head of the National Association of Town Watch. Peskin collects outsized compensation - $300,000, or about a third of NATW’s total budget. This puts him squarely in the local tradition of excessive pay for a certain class of nonprofit managers. Bill Marrazzo, we’re looking at, and more specifically, coveting, your stacks of benjamins, which we imagine are annually hand-delivered to you by Terry Gross in burlap sack with a dollar sign on the side. We’d link to the original Inquirer story, but they make you pay for archived articles like its 1999 or something.

Anyway, Target, whose foundation has given NATW huge gobs of cash for their work, stepped in to teach Peskin a little about best practices. Nevertheless, some organizations have left the fold, renaming their nights other things like “Night to Unite.” The Minnesota Star-Tribune (hometown newspaper of Target, FYI) says pretty much what we’re saying here, but a bit more succinctly in this editorial. (Also, in case you’re worried about reading some strange paper from a town where people are allegedly nice, you’ll feel right at home in their comments section, where one entire entry is simply “yayasout, You are a f***ing moron…period.”) So basically, the concept is good, even if some chump in Wynnewood is getting over on, well, us.

Wait, hey, Liz from next door! How’s your mom? Doing better? Hey, join us for a beer. No, we don’t live in that district where that one cop patrols, so it’s all good. Nice night, isn’t it…
Inky: “There Were Repercussions To Last Year’s Article”
Daily News: “There Were Repercussions To Last Year’s Inquirer Article”
Star-Tribune: Hate The Player, Not The Game

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 2:31 pm.