Saturday, June 14th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
posted by Isaiah Thompson
At about 10 o’clock yesterday morning, Philadelphia police officers from the 9th District, including plain-clothes detectives and a police captain, showed up at a worn-down building on Ridge Avenue and 17th Street and began knocking.
Daniel Moffat, a 28-year-old resident and co-owner of the building, answered the door. It was not long before he was taken outside and detained. Moffat watched from the squad car as the officers entered the building and detained three other residents who were inside.
Then a funny thing happened: Homeland Security showed up. And more detectives. And then the Crime Scene unit. And then more detectives. And the Fire Marshall. And Licensing and Inspection. And then more detectives. All day long and into Friday evening, the building was crawling with officials from one agency or another.
Why the fuss?
9th District Captain Dennis Wilson told the four detained — and later insisted to City Paper — that he and his officers came to respond to a simple complaint that people were staying in a vacant house. It was only after his officers entered, he says, that he found further cause to detain the residents and, indeed, call in Homeland Security and a small army of detectives.
“Everything’s wrong in here,” he told CP gravely from the building’s doorway. “We’re still investigating this property and we’re still investigating these people.”
Indeed. At least three police officers at the scene, including Wilson himself, confirmed in one way or another that — whatever the initial motivation for their visit — they were now busy investigating the residents, whom they accused vaguely of being “terrorists.”
“Lemme ask you this,” said one Crime Scene officer. “Why’s there literature about killing cops in there?” He declined to be more specific.
“Propaganda against the government,” chimed in officer John Taggert, also with Crime Scene. Taggert, who was nice enough to grant CP “three questions, and only three questions,” didn’t elaborate on the nature of the “propaganda.”
Captain Wilson took the accusations a step further. “They’re a hate group,” he asserted. “We’re trying to drum up charges against them, but, unfortunately, we’ll probably have to let them go.”
Let them go they did — 12 to 14 hours after the residents had been detained, they were mysteriously set free without charges (the police released the last two, both female, at 3:30 in the morning, says Moffat).
Without charges, of course, the police are under no obligation to provide evidence of terrorism or other malfeasance. But the Fearsome Four (let’s call them) have their own theory as to what motivated the police to come calling yesterday.
Some of the residents of the building, including Moffat, had been circulating a petition protesting recently added police cameras in the neighborhood. Moffat also helped distribute a petition calling for further investigation into the recent and infamous police beating of three unarmed suspects.
Moffat and others believe that the police are targeting them for their neighborhood activism. “If they interpret that as being hate literature, that’s their prerogative, but it’s my constitutional right, you know?”
None of the literature, Moffat insists, contains hateful, violent, or incendiary language.
The building, meanwhile, has been sealed shut. Robert Gilbert, who co-owns the building with Moffat (no relation, he says, to the Gilbert of the ‘Gilbert’s Shoes’ sign in front of the building) was on the scene yesterday afternoon, looking out, he said, for his friends’ property and his own building. “What I don’t understand is why they came in without notifying me, the owner,” he said. “My name’s on the deed. It’s not hard to find me.”
Here is the residents press release.
http://phillyimc.org/en/node/68939
