My First South Philly Review Crime Beat Column Appears Online

My first weekly South Philly Review Crime Beat column appears online ahead of the print newspaper, which comes out this Wednesday.

You can read the column via the link below or the following text:

An interview with Inspector Jamill Taylor, commander of South Police Division

An interview with Inspector Jamill Taylor,

commander of South Police Division 

By Paul Davis

Crime is one of the primary concerns of most South Philly residents. I’ve been covering crime in South Philadelphia and beyond for many years and here in my Crime Beat column each week I’ll cover crime news, crime issues and crime prevention. 

I ventured to the 24th and Wolf Street Police Station and sat down with Inspector Jamill Taylor, the commanding officer of the South Police Division.    

The inspector said the South Police Division encompasses the 1st District at 24th and Wolf, the 3rd District at 11th and Wharton, and the 17th District at 20th and Federal. 

“We cover an area from the Delaware River to the Schuylkill River, and from Lombard Street down to the Naval Yard. So, I’m responsible for everything that goes on in this general area,” Taylor said.

I asked the inspector, a 32-year veteran police officer and South Philly native, having grown up in the 17th District, what were his major concerns about crime in South Philadelphia.

“We are experiencing theft overall. Each district has issues with package theft. Amazon packages are delivered to your house, and you get an alert saying it has arrived, but by the time you get home it’s gone.

“Stolen cars are also an issue. Right now the hottest cars that are being stolen are Hondas and Acuras. We have the occasional tire and rim thefts down under I-95 in the 3d District, which goes from Front Street to Washington Avenue and all the way down to Oregon Avenue, where neighborhood people park underneath I-95 and the various parking lots. With the tire and rim jobs, you come out, and your car might be up on crates.”

Taylor also said that retail theft from CVS, Walmart, Target and other stores is a concern.

“All of these stores experience a high volume of retail thefts, but we have a Retail Theft Task Force that is run out of the 1st District. I have officers that are assigned to investigate retail theft.”

What are your officers doing to combat these crimes, I asked?

“We have a variety of things. We have a Mapping and Analysis System that we utilize to track our hotspots,” Taylor replied. “It gives us a spike detector, so we go on the system daily and we see where we may have had a car break-in within a two- or three-block radius. We then set up a grid where the officers go out on foot or a bike or a patrol car. 

“On the graveyard shift, the overnight shift, between the hours of midnight to 8 a.m., what we’re doing division-wide is we’re having the officers go out, park and turn on their overhead lights and be a physical presence. You sit there for 15 minutes and then it is off to the next location to do the same thing,“ Taylor explained.

“We also utilize our VCRT teams, our Violent Crime Response teams. This is a group of eight officers and a supervisor that I’ll send out on a daily basis at night to those specific locations in uniform. They go out and gather intel on whatever they can find from the pole cameras and some of the citizens’ cameras that are tied into our Safe Cam Program, where we have access to the camera on their house and/or their Ring camera. 

Taylor said that they make arrests, but there is a certain prosecution threshold that has to be met to keep people in jail. So many are out of jail in only 24 hours. He said that it is beyond the control of the police, although he said they keep a check on those who they know are prolific offenders. 

I asked what is the police relationship with South Philadelphians?

“South Philadelphia loves the cops,” he replied. “But in the Grays Ferry area we are tasked with being a guardian to prevent shootings, so we have a lot of presence there. But overall, we have no problems with our communities or neighbors, and even in the Grays Ferry area we have contacts in the community.”

I asked if the police meet with community groups and residents.

“Every district has a community group. The lieutenants in each district have police service area meetings. The lieutenants are responsible to go out to their particular area and meet with the community groups, and each district captain has town halls and Police District Advisory Council meetings with the block captains and the clergy.”

South Philly residents can reach out to their police district to report issues or seek help. For emergencies, call 911.

Paul Davis’s Crime Beat column appears here each week. He can be reached via pauldavisoncrime.com.