The street beat: The very Rev. Jonathan N. Clodfelter, rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Frankford Avenue, regularly walks around the neighborhood in an effort to connect with the community. He says drugs are an obvious problem, as well as violence. Clodfelter regularly attends Frankford Civic Association and police-neighbors meetings. MARIA POUCHNIKOVA / TIMES PHOTO
Jon Clodfelter doesn’t like a lot of what he sees in Frankford.
And Clodfelter, rightly, the very Rev. Jonathan N. Clodfelter, sees quite a bit. For the 12 years he’s been rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Frankford Avenue, Clodfelter’s made a habit of walking around the neighborhood.
“A good pastor is in everybody’s business,” Clodfelter said last week.
Some people are fine with that, glad to see a cleric making his presence known, some move away. Still others try to hit him up for cigarettes or money.
“I just talk to people and listen,” he said. “I try to meet five people a day.”
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Clodfelter sees a lot of drug dealing on the streets of his parish, which more or less mirrors the boundaries of the 15th Police District.
Walking around Frankford, he sees “telltale signs of the drug trade… all over the streets.”
Drug trafficking is “right out in front of everybody,” he said. “It’s wanton.”
But Clodfelter sees beyond the obvious, which is why he plans to give a community impact statement at the upcoming sentencing of a drug dealer later this month. Frankford’s narcotics trade affects everything, he said last week inside St. Mark’s — the users, families, businesses, the entire neighborhood. He’s been to court two other times, but, in both cases, sentencings were continued.
“We have to figure out a way to get between the citizens and the drug dealers,” Clodfelter said.
“If people can’t feel safe, their quality of life is terrible… they’re stuck on whether or not they can go to the grocery store without being shot,” he said.
He named a few neighborhood drug corners in a late September letter to Mayor Michael Nutter that was copied to Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey: Womrath and Griscom streets, Tackawanna and Orthodox, and Church and Worth streets.
Lt. John Stanford, a police department spokesman, last week said officers are very familiar with what’s happening on those corners and have been hitting those locations again and again. Clodfelter said he can see a difference.
“I’ve noticed that in the last two weeks,” he said.
It’s not just drugs that plague the neighborhood, he told Nutter, it’s violence. “When a guy gets shot, it affects the whole neighborhood,” he said.
When Clodfelter wrote to the mayor on Sept. 24, he said several people had been murdered in the previous six months. But it was one slaying in particular that prompted him to write to Nutter for help in Frankford.
On Sept. 14, Megan Doto was fatally shot near Griscom and Adams and her unborn baby girl, due a month later, died, too. Clodfelter saw that tragedy as “a wakeup call,” he told the mayor in his letter, and he expanded his walks on Frankford streets to include Doto’s neighborhood.
“I have talked to residents, learning from them how the drug trade works. I have stood and spoken with the dealers. I have explored alleys where stashes are kept,” he wrote.
One of the things he’s learned from residents is that they’re afraid to go to the police about what they see going on around them. Some people just talk to him, he said.
“The drug dealers grew up here,” Clodfelter said. “They know everybody and where they live… If you get marked as somebody who is a snitch, that’s terrible.”
Since he wrote to the mayor, he has talked to police officials and met with a few in his office in St. Mark’s.
“It helped me to understand some of the difficulties the police have,” he said. Police learned how important the problems of drugs and violence are to the community.
He intends to keep pushing for government responses, keep walking Frankford’s streets and keep going to community meetings. Go to a session of the Frankford Civic Association or a police-neighbors meeting, you’re likely to see Clodfelter or the Rev. Phillip Geliebter, a deacon at St. Mark’s. Going to those meetings puts the priest in contact with those “who care and are involved in the life of the community,” he said Monday.
In his letter to the mayor, the pastor suggested pooling multiple assets “to have a significant impact by creating what might be the urban equivalent of shock and awe.”
He believes the city can best battle the drug trade by putting together representatives of the DA’s office, the Department of Human Services, the police commissioner’s office, the Department of Licenses and Inspections, the Streets Department and the school district.
Add to those officials representatives of businesses, churches, community residents and nongovernmental agencies and “my hope is that we can create — what might be called — zones of peace in critical neighborhoods of our city.”
Any feedback from city government on those ideas? From law enforcement, yes, Clodfelter said. From anyone else? No.
The police aren’t enough. The city has to come at the problem with all it has and from every angle, even down to finding something else for the drug dealers to do that “will give them money and respect.”
“You do not attack until you’re prepared to win,” he said, “and we’re not going to win unless we put every single asset together.” ••
