Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter gave an hour of his time this week to answer resident questions that came to host NBC 10 by way of email, Twitter and Facebook, as we reported on Technically Philly in sharing video of the event.

Nutter has already been praised for use of Twitter – a move we had asked him about during a Q&A in July 2010 , a few months before the city imported communications director Desiree Peterkin-Bell, who had helped transform Newark Mayor Cory Booker into an urban political social media star.

The Ask the Mayor event — prompted by NBC 10 social media hire Lou Dubois and Bell — was unique, interesting and compelling. NBC 10 deserves credit for only sharing a single softball question — about cheesesteaks, of course — and Nutter and his team deserve praise too for participating in something new and relatively open. It was clear and admirable that Nutter hadn’t been prepared for the questions.

Granted, none of those questions amounted to public affairs journalism, but many did seem to represent the perspective of Philadelphians. Watch the five video segments of the event here or watch the first below and see what I learned about Nutter watching them.

What was most interesting to me though was the opportunity to watch some 40 minutes of Nutter speaking without a speech. I came away with a few takeaways about him:

1. He knows governance — Throughout the several dozen questions, Nutter offered very practical, straightforward answers. He seemed like a smart, practiced man of governance. And that has largely been the most accurate swipe against him: he’s been just a competent caretaker. Any high-minded rhetoric we heard from him was — get ready for the surprise — while campaigning. Remember Nutter the tax man? That said, I was impressed to see the inspiration set aside for directness. One thing that hasn’t changed — from his days on City Council — is that he is good in the wonkish detailed corners of government.
2. He hasn’t fully grasped the public-private partnerships his administration has embraced — I’m interested in being able to separate what decisions a leader OKs and what decisions a leader seems to lead, if not conceive of himself. The city is full of examples of cost-cutting private partnerships — something I’ve seen with a growing frequency — but I didn’t catch any highlight of that at all. Nutter quickly mentioned PhillyRising, but not its use of community groups. When asked about the need for trash cans in South Philly, I expected a call for civic action. He didn’t, nor did he talk about any of the other initiatives in that vein. He had a traditional top-down perspective on governance.
3. He hasn’t lost that ‘dry wit’  — When first running for mayor in 2007, every profile that came out mentioned Nutter’s ‘dry wit,’ his deadpan demeanor. If you catch it, he’ll make you laugh. At one Nutter press conference I was in, I asked what differentiated Philadelphia enough to earn a grant from IBM, he looked at me and said, “we’re just better,” and, for a moment, looked for another question, before a trickle of laughter brought him to dive a little deeper. Yes, I remember that Michael Nutter. In the fifth segment of the NBC 10 piece, Nutter answered with exaggerated disbelief at a resident’s request for the city to shake down people who rummage through recycling. “Of all our problems, I am not going to send people after someone with a cart to get a few aluminum cans,” he said. He was funny: “I was feeling some kind of way,” he went on earlier. He can be fun — and, well, he can even do so while acting black — but it’s not something he has always succeeded at sharing, like the legendary Ed Rendell.
   
4. He still doesn’t have a central issue – This is not news (and Patrick Kerkstra has argued it’s an asset) but it seemed as clear on this night as I had ever recognized before. I remembered candidate Nutter talking tough on crime because he needed to do so and really seeming to dive into the ethics and efficiency of a new Philadelphia government. Yet, in an hour of question answering, I heard no talking points on making City Hall cleaner, leaner and greener, though he does have progress to point to. Early on, I had thought technology would be of interest to Nutter — its ability to cut costs, offer transparency and improve systems seems to fit — but nothing has emerged. He was even fed a question about the city’s Wireless Philadelphia initiative and had no real answer. The public-private partnerships mentioned above or the green movement abounding citywide could be subjects to grab hold onto, but I didn’t see it. He got handed a crappy economy — I buy into that — but nobody’s central issue should be a recession.
5. He thinks his central issue is education — He was given a great question: what was the city’s most important problem and how he and others were facing it. He went hard on education and was suddenly where he got the most rhythm of the night. “It should be the centerpiece of everything we do.” He called for volunteerism and for parents to demand more of their kids. With Arlene out — even if she was the victim — maybe that is a subject he can run with in a second term.

White House Urban Entrepreneurship forum Better Together panel, featuring (from left) moderator Kathleen Warner from Startup America; Doug Rand from the White House Office of Science and Technoogy; Sherryl Kulman from the Wharton Program for Social Impact; Prof. Youngjin Yoo from Temple University's Fox School of Business; Jane Vincent from the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Dept and, behind the camera, me.

One of seven White House Urban Entrepreneurship forums across the country was hosted at Temple University in Philadelphia Monday, and, in addition to Technically Philly being a media sponsor, I served on one of a dozen panels.

Find the Livestream and Technically Philly coverage of Philadelphia Mayor Nutter’s address here.

I was on a panel called “Better Together: Public-Private Partnerships to Accelerate Urban Entrepreneurship and Startups.”

Unfortunately, our time was truncated due to a late start, so I spoke briefly once and answered one question.

I spoke about Technically Philly involving itself in connecting startups and entrepreneurs with the city, by way of Philly Tech Week, the Open Data Philly initiative and further fostering collaboration in various corners of the region’s technology community.

White House officials are holding these forums, from Newark to New Orleans, to connect and discuss ideas with local business leaders and entrepreneurs. Philadelphia’s forum coincided with a meaningful minority business event. The forum was co-hosted by the White House, The Office of Mayor Nutter, U.S. Departments of Commerce, Energy, Labor, Treasury, Education, and several federal, state, and local agencies.

The middle of the center section on the lower level of the Merriam Theater Tuesday night seemed well-acquainted.

Across rows, middle aged men with ruddy cheeks talked about seeing each other last on trips to Key West, sneaking a six-pack into the historic theater and shared the kind of general chatter of people who knew each other well a long time ago.

The lights came down around 7:15 p.m., too early to know exactly how well or from when they knew each other. It would only be a guess that they all came from the same neighborhood, but that was how the audience felt last night at the world premiere of the ‘Barrel of a Gun,’ the feature-length documentary from Tigre Hill meant to finalize the 30-year-old controversy around Mumia Abu-Jamal’s convicted killing of police officer Daniel Faulkner in December 1981.

Maureen Faulkner at the 1981 funeral of her cop husband Daniel Faulkner.

THE EVENT

It was a sell-out crowd, and, in addition to old neighborhood buddies, their younger ilk, a strong FOP presence and a few scattered journalists, there was more of a political presence than I expected.

Throughout Hill’s film, Gov. Ed Rendell, who was district attorney from 1978 to 1985, kept insisting on how overwhelming the evidence was, suggesting that the decades-old controversy was nothing more than the result of confusion, orchestration and a smart, successful manipulation by Jamal, from behind prison bars — where he is still on death row pending appeal.

If there was ever evidence for that, it was the presence of much of the city’s political elite.

Mayor Michael Nutter and former District Attorney Lynne Abraham were there, as were possible (and former) mayoral candidate Sam Katz and talk show host Michael Smerconish, who co-authored a book with Faulkner’s widow Maureen Faulkner, who was also present, as was Councilman Jack Kelly. I also saw current District Attorney Seth Williams and 2009 Republican candidate for city controller Al Schmidt.

Even for Philadelphia, that’s a lot of Democrats — Katz was once a Republican but has since returned to his original Democratic registration, making Kelly and Schmidt the lone Republicans I noticed — for a documentary that takes a fairly hard stance on what is considered the right-leaning side of things.

Race is involved, too, as Jamal has largely been seen by his supporters as the victim of mainstream white oppression.

Though elected with great help from white voters, Nutter and Williams are both black, meaningful for the particular case and the city’s long racial divides. Katz,who is white, has also reportedly been chasing black support for another mayoral run.

With those reasons to not attend as politicians, their attendance seems to suggest the opposition isn’t seen as all that credible.

Below watch 6ABC coverage of the documentary, which debuted the same night as a rival take defending Jamal.

With little exception, the crowd was decidedly and vocally certain of Jamal’s guilt. If their applause during the documentary when choices phrases highlighted that perspective didn’t make that clear enough, the handful of times someone shouted out ‘kill him’ did.

Basically, the premiere had the feel of a beef and beer and political fundraiser mixed in with a rally and film showing. That might be like other premieres. I wouldn’t know.

It feels uncomfortable when media — documentaries, news pieces or anything of the like — bring about rounds applause. Something seems like they should make people think, not rally.

THE FILM

That said, filmmaker Hill, as he did with his popular 2006-released documentary Shame of a City, focused more on what he thought was the truth than objectivity for objectivity’s sake, a sentiment foreshadowed during the night’s opening remarks by the film’s executive producer Kevin Kelly, an organizer in a younger, more progressive Republican movement in Philadelphia.

Below, watch the film’s trailer.

A bit of a dump of my thoughts:

• Barrel felt very similar to Shame. You might say it is Hill’s motif:  black titles with white text, broken up by TV news clips and live footage of rallies and interviews. Michael Smerconish was in both — and wrote a review of the film. A stance from the filmmaker felt very present.
• Two recurrent conventional wisdom defenses of Jamal’s guilt is his brother’s refusal to ever testify and the remarkable coincidence it would have to be for Jamal to be stationed at 4 a.m. exactly where his brother was pulled over for going the wrong way down a one-way street. …But I kept wondering how Jamal could have known that was where his brother would be pulled over if the crime was pre-meditated. I may be missing something simple, but I wish there was a more continued focus on the details of the case.
• Philadelphia and race were mixed in, of course, and it does seem like Hill likes very much to be a black man taking a stance that comes in opposition to those of a lot of black men involved in the issues.
• I felt like there was some confusion between the debate about whether Jamal shouldn’t receive the death penalty because that form of justice is immoral or because he was truly innocent. There’s a real distinction there that I didn’t always feel.
• The only other real review of the film I saw was from Jason Fagone for Philadelphia magazine, and it seems I left the premiere with a similar first inclination:

Hill started off with a great portrayal of the scene and time (the “combat zone” of 12th and Locust, which is now the gosh darn gayborhood) but then jumped the shark a bit with a long-winded dissection of Jamal’s participation with the Black Panthers.

It was provocative as far as being a motive — Jamal killed Faulkner as a revolutionary act — but it seemed to fall flat by not even addressing where the Panther movement came from, regardless of how ideologically distant they are.

So, mostly I was a bit underwhelmed, though it didn’t help that I am personally more interested in the Katz-Street mayoral election from Shame than I am in the 30-years-old Jamal case. That said, it might have something to do with the first seeming to do a better job of moving from humor to drama to fact, with certain perspective interwoven.

Barrel just seemed, like with the applause of the event, very reaffirming, more than Shame.

Tigre Hill is easily one of the most serious, best known documentarian making feature films about issues in Philadelphia. I enjoyed it because of the subject matter and the discussions, but I’m not sure if it furthered the conversation as much as others have said.

I very much look forward to what Hill will do next and would happily pay for another of his film’s premieres or recommend someone buy Barrel if they have particular interest in the topic or perspective.

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