A city-state-federal policing partnership criticized as threatening the civil rights of immigrant populations in Philadelphia was the focus of a short brief I had in today’s Metro, following a brief interview with state. Rep. Babette Josephs following a press conference in City Hall.

Read it here.

I wrote a fairly large profile of Josephs for the Inquirer last summer. Fair or not, a group of self-labeled reformers in Harrisburg called Josephs a mythological three-headed dog.

I was unable to include a brief interview I had with City Councilwoman Maria Quiñones-Sánchez on the matter, portions of which you can see after the jump, in addition to quotes from Josephs that were cut, more from the Nutter administration, other sources and one interesting concept of the story that didn’t make it into the piece.

Just this week, CityPaper had a more in-depth piece on Secure Communities.

The note announcing the press release can be seen here. Some more perspective from the left, via Young Philly Politics, can be seen here. Some news coverage of the initiative from California here and some from Arizona here.

The federal government gives its take on the initiative here.

Something that the other reports didn’t address, but Josephs mentioned to me, though space prohibited its inclusion:

“We’re also about to do the [national] census, and we count documented and undocumented people so we can really know our country, to get an accurate snapshot. The people who are chilled by this program are hesitant to come forward and be counted. Yet those are the communities that we definitely need to count so we know who is here, for funding roads and schools and lunch programs… A lot of these people come from countries where the police have conduct that is unprofessional, and then they come here and we show them the same kind of thing.”

A few other items from Josephs that didn’t make it into the piece:

• “The real obligation of the federal government here is to do comprehensive immigration reform. … Instead the immigration authorities are reaching into local communities to get them to do the job that needs to be done by Washington. I call on our senators and representatives to start working on a comprehensive approach to this immigration problem.”
• “The city administration can resist. The city certainly has resisted state and federal policy on gun ownership and we’re continuously in court fighting that, and if we end up in court fighting this program, it will be for the better. The city resisting would be the first step. The pressure is on them… to do the right thing. Philadelphia, a city of immigrants, should resist.”
• “We are calling on the city to resist this program, a great port city, and calling on federal authorities.”
• “I’m always optimistic [about the future of federal initiatives]. The president has committed himself to proposing comprehensive overarching legislative. He’s no slouch. We have such a number of voters, particularly from the Spanish speaking world, who want this. The fallout will be the compassionate.”

Some additional perspective from the Nutter administration via spokesman Doug Oliver:

• “This is not a new program. The police have been sharing information with ICE since 2005, but in the past we had to fax that  information… Now it is automatically pooled.”
• “Only individuals charged with a crime will be fingerprinted, not witnesses or victims, so this shouldn’t have a chilling affect on communities who need to come forward to police.”
• “This relationship with the federal government was already standard procedure.”
• What if someone is wrongly accused, I asked? “Well, if you reach the point where you are being finger-printed, the process will take place.”

Some pulls from the few minutes I shared with Councilwoman Quiñones-Sánchez on the phone:

• “First, I am not in favor of people coming here illegally, but there is a big difference between being undocumented and being illegal… Many of the undocumented people we’re talking about are children who were born here so are, in fact, citizens…”
• “We say we’re a city that welcomes immigrants and we know how important they are, but then this, well, this sends a contradictory message about our city.”
• “We shouldn’t be doing this, it’s federal issue and we don’t have the training on our level.”
• No estimate was given on how many people this could affect: “We focused on the spirit this is done, not the numbers,” she said.
• “We’re taking processes that have issues already and creating mechanisms that can’t be used appropriately.”
• “Pennsylvania takes federal money with caveats, and, as a first-class city, Philadelphia has to decide if this is right for us.”
• “Ideally the mayor would say no to the feds in the sharing of this data, until we can really examine the implication,” she said. “I expect him to do so.”
• “We’ve seen ICE be very heavy-handed, clearly this information sharing has an ulterior motive to bad consequences.

A photo I took of the police district headquarters where Mayor Nutter spoke yesterday.

For free daily newspaper Metro Philadelphia, today I covered a press conference and related fallout from Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter warning of the Plan C budget he says he’ll be forced to introduce if two provisions aren’t passed by the state legislature.

I wrote a main brief on Nutter’s use of political theatrics: framing the legislative fight by a fight over cops and firefighters, groups that are taken very seriously in the part of the city he made the announcement.

Mayor Michael Nutter surrounded himself with police officers — and the Northeast Philadelphia residents that lean on them — to continue sending his message to Harrisburg yesterday that the city will be in dire straits without action from lawmakers.

Read the rest here. I also wrote a small sidebar item on some reaction from neighborhood onlookers.

Read the related story I wrote for NEastPhilly.com.

Below see some extra material that didn’t make it into either story.

A lede that wasn’t:

• Something Mayor Nutter can still be sure of is police support in Northeast Philadelphia. So he used that certainty yesterday to help him with something far less preordained: Philadelphia’s fiscal stability.

Other

• “We have already been cut by the last budget. I don’t want to see what will happen next,” Tara E. Smith, Germantown resident and community support services staffer of Operation Town Watch
• Faced with a $700 million budget shortfall, Nutter described the “dangerous” effects his Plan C budget could cause
• With that date looming and the state legislature still tangled in a budget debate, Nutter has gone on a publicity blitz.
• Last Thursday, at a City Hall rally, he outlined the new budget he says he would be forced to submit if those provisions aren’t answered.

Jeff Jubilerer, a political consultant with Center City media firm Ceisler Jubelirer.

• “It’s late, but it’s not too late because the budget hasn’t passed. Still, Nutter has no choice but to be using every weapon in his Swiss army knife,” he said. “That what [we] saw today.”
• “There’s probably nothing more powerful than public safety… for a statement.”
• “There’s only so many times in a day that Michael Nutter can say the same thing. He needs some help.”
• He’s a smart guy. He knows where to go. He’s been to Harrisburg numerous, countless times. There’s not much more of that he can do. He needs to bring new voices into the fold to apply pressure.
• No one is against cops. No one is against firefighters or anything that the mayor said will be cut. He’s smart. He’s going to need to break through this clutter and this logjam. What is going to take the state legislature to take up Philadelphia’s call?
• “Nutter to his credit made some reference that maybe he would have approached [the library fight] differently. That shows some learning. He’s not new to the game. Now he clearly has everone in his world with him. In a way he has to make it an us versus them thing, but from a message he can’t piss off the legislature. And he hasn’t. He hasn’t said names. He’s outlined doomsday scenarios and he has been to Harrisburg so much and appears to be doing as much.”
• A David Cohen and Mark Schweiker, Rob Wonderling, these are people who Republicans in the legislature or even Democrats from outside the city might be more likely to listen to than a Philadelphia mayor who might not get the same attention.
• Some of the things are out of his control. The Philadelphia delegation isn’t his problem. Still, everybody cares about police. Let’s get that striaght: people in Bucks and Chester counties do want a safer Philadelphia, it’s just not their only or primary focus.

Allan Frank, Philly CIO

After announcing the birth Technically Philly, I haven’t more than briefly mentioned the news site for Philadelphia’s technology community, even though I’ve been writing there sometimes more than seven times weekly.

Today, we ran an editorial that I particularly liked, so I thought I’d share. My two co-founders and I share the stance and both helped a great deal, but I took the lead on writing this one. I’m eager to see how our readers react — if they will at all.

Here’s a test.

Just how innovative and influential, forward-thinking yet practical is the technology community in Philadelphia? Because you’re being challenged.

We’re still reeling from a presentation that Allan Frank, the city’s chief information officer, gave at a meeting of Refresh Philly Monday night. Read the rest here.

Check below for a couple grafs that didn’t make it in.

• Focus groups and forward-thinking headfirst development, which were suggested, aren’t standard-fare for big city bureaucracies — something that didn’t need to be explained by Frank, who remained more relaxed and upbeat than his blue suit and grandfatherly spectacles, slouched on his nose, might have suggested.
• He did admit that the his staff haven’t even established a clear list of top technology priorities.
• So, we fear our community and Frank’s staff could be swallowed whole by the clarion call for his “Digital Philadelphia.” We all know technology involves — or should involve — too many facets of government to be so broad in his exhortation of our community.
• At the meeting, we heard comments asking for open source development, a reference to a future wiki for the city of Melbourne, Australia and snickers. Frank addressed the realities of a mobile component being perhaps more valuable, as cell phone technology develops and spreads more rapidly than more traditional computer-based units do.

I am always insistent that an editorial make a clear argument and expectation for change. I hope it can be seen that this editorial argued the Philadelphia technology community needs to take a lead in effecting responsible IT change for the city.

What do you think about it? Should we write editorials in a “community” news setting?

From left: Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia; Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina; Representative John Lewis of Georgia; and Representative Artur Davis of Alabama. (Nigel Parry for The New York Times)

Interesting, if already well-circled, story in the recent-most New York Times Magazine, entitled “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?”. Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter got some face time in its main graphic, as seen above, and in a large portion of the story, briefly excerpted below. A beginning excerpt that stuck with me:

Obama was barely 2 years old when King gave his famous speech, 3 when Lewis was beaten about the head in Selma. He didn’t grow up in the segregated South as Bill Clinton had. Sharing those experiences wasn’t a prerequisite for gaining the acceptance of black leaders, necessarily, but that didn’t mean Obama, with his nice talk of transcending race and baby-boomer partisanship, could fully appreciate the sacrifices they made, either. “Every kid is always talking about what his parents have been through,” Rangel says, “and no kid has any clue what he’s talking about.”

For black Americans born in the 20th century, the chasms of experience that separate one generation from the next— those who came of age before the movement, those who lived it, those who came along after — have always been hard to traverse. Elijah Cummings, the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and an early Obama supporter, told me a story about watching his father, a South Carolina sharecropper with a fourth-grade education, weep uncontrollably when Cummings was sworn in as a representative in 1996. Afterward, Cummings asked his dad if he had been crying tears of joy. “Oh, you know, I’m happy,” his father replied. “But now I realize, had I been given the opportunity, what I could have been. And I’m about to die.” [Source]

Here is the beginning of reporter Matt Bai‘s lengthy passage on Nutter, later in his piece. Nutter comes off well as always, particularly later in the passage where the most common words in Nutter-stories predictably come up “deadpan” and “dry sense of humor.”

On the first Tuesday in July, I traveled to Philadelphia, the site of Obama’s landmark speech on race, to see the city’s mayor, Michael Nutter. Known as a reformer during a 14-year stint on the City Council, Nutter played a central and intriguing role in this year’s presidential contest, emerging as the black face of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in Pennsylvania at a time when she desperately needed — and got — a solid victory in the state. Nutter certainly wasn’t the only visible black politician to campaign for Clinton deep into the primary season, but he was, in some ways, the least likely. Nutter is only four years older than Obama, Ivy League-educated, bookish and doggedly unemotional. He is, in short, the very prototype of the new generation of black political stars. But unlike Cory Booker or Artur Davis or Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, Nutter sided with Clinton, and he enthusiastically campaigned for her.

I was curious to know whether Nutter, who was elected to a four-year term just last fall, was bracing for the consequences of that decision. About 9 of every 10 black voters in Philadelphia pulled the lever for Obama, according to exit polls, and I heard at least one black Obama backer in Washington vow to make Nutter pay for his apostasy. On the day that I visited him at City Hall, his aides had been reviewing the video of a sermon from last fall in which a prominent black minister in the city suggested that Nutter might have a “white agenda.”

Nutter said he sat down with both Clinton and Obama after his election as mayor and quizzed them about urban issues like housing, education and transportation. Race, he said, hadn’t entered into this thinking. He understood, he said, why the prospect of a black president after hundreds of years of discrimination was “powerful stuff” for a lot of his constituents, but he had a greater responsibility, and that was to run the nation’s sixth-largest city. “In the context of what I do for a living, I’ve not figured out a black or white way to fill a pothole,” he said, in a way that made me think he had said this many times before. Nutter was a delegate for Bill Clinton way back in 1992, and he said that the former first lady had shown a “depth of understanding” of what cities like Philadelphia were facing. It probably didn’t hurt that Obama endorsed one of Nutter’s opponents in last year’s mayoral primary, either…

Keep reading on about Nutter here. It’s worth it, Nutter gets a laugh or two. Or read the piece from the beginning here.

Mayor Michael Nutter was on hand to watch Bank of America award a $1 million grant to the National Constitution Center earlier this month.

“As the leader of our city, it’s very appropriate,” said Tom Woodward, president of Bank America Pennsylvania. “So much of what we’re doing speaks to augmenting education in the region and our city.”

Nutter, just three months into his term, has named a more learned Philadelphia among his highest priorities, so supporting a sizable funding gift to the Constitution Center was sensible, Woodward said.

“They do so much with students and educating our kids in what it really means to have civic responsibility and be an American,” he said. “The educational component is an absolute priority in what we want to fund.”

Much of the funding will go to developing programs for the Constitution Center’s newly named Bank of America Family Theater, beginning with the reopening of “Living News,” which displays constitutional issues that affect the daily lives of everyone.

“When you go through the Constitution Center, whether you are an American or from somewhere else, you leave with an appreciation of freedom,” he said. “This really is about trying to make Philadelphia and the region a better place.”

See other reporting by Christopher Wink here.

Photo courtesy of Bank of America public relations. Depicted from left, Joe Torsella, CEO of the National Constitution Center; Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter; Kenneth D. Lewis, chairman and CEO of Bank of America, and Tom Woodward, president of Bank of America Pennsylvania

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zxCOKG3orQ]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCDJpAnTkSs]

ABC will also follow Nutter to film a day in the life segment. Gibson will host World News from Old City tomorrow night, as well.

The feature comes as Nutter comes into one power of one of the largest cities in the country, determined to take on urban problems with big plans.

World News broadcasts at 6:30 p.m. on ABC 6.