Philadelphia’s first female mayor, Cherelle Parker, was elected on Tuesday, ushering in a new era with her promise to use heavy-handed law enforcement tactics, such as mobilizing the National Guard, to crack down on the city’s pervasive open-air drug markets.
At a town hall meeting in recent weeks, a resident asked Parker to clean up Kensington, which Fox News described as “the epicenter of the nation’s opioid crisis” due to its high concentration of drug addicts and infamous street drug market.
“Will I call on them to help us, for example, shut down the open-air drug market in Kensington that’s being allowed to prevail?” Parker echoed the constituent’s question, affirming unequivocally that the National Guard will be instrumental to her strategy.
Parker told the Philadelphia Inquirer that she planned to use a strong intergovernmental approach to organize the clean-up of Kensington and end the open-air drug market in the neighborhood, where addicts openly inject drugs and frequently collapse on sidewalks and streets.
Based on statistics from the year 2021, fentanyl and xylazine, a cheap but deadly veterinary sedative, are highly sought after in this area.
Parker, a veteran of the Philadelphia City Council and the state legislature, will become the city’s first female mayor and 100th mayor overall. Since 1952, Democrats have held the office of mayor of Philadelphia.
This person has been in power for 71 years.
Mayor Parker has promised to make Philadelphia the “safest, cleanest, greenest” city in the United States.
“I’m uniquely prepared to make the city the safest, cleanest, greenest big city in the nation with access to economic opportunity for all,” Parker said. “I communicated to the people that if they gave me the opportunity, I wouldn’t be afraid to make those tough decisions, to implement that vision I share with them and that I would remain my authentic self.”
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