Give a “cut-above” credit to Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey for quietly traveling to barber shops in numerous neighborhoods around the city to talk with customers, engaging in conservations about community perceptions of police.

The Commissioner taking his time to listen — getting earfuls from folks sharing their complaints and kudos — is smart policing. This is the type of initiative needed to move the phrase “community partnership” from a politically popular cliché to an effective crime fighting practice.

Commissioner Ramsey and Mayor Nutter both know about and care about doing something about the biggest crime related problem confronting Philadelphia: the outrageous levels of murders.

The victims of those murders are disproportionately young Black males as are the perpetrators.

As Philadelphia Tribune City Editor Daryl Gale perceptively noted in a commentary last week, “young Philadelphians are so hopeless and filled with shortsighted desperation that they’ve engaged in what could well be the first case of self-inflicted genocide in human history.”

The 324 murders recorded in Philadelphia last year produced the unenviable distinction of ranking Philly as #1 in murder rates among America’s ten largest cities…more than New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston.

And before the smoke of New Year’s Eve fireworks dissipated the smoke of gunfire besmirched the dawning of 2012 with another spate of homicides around Philly.

Mayor Nutter, during his inauguration speech last week for his second term, described this murderous behavior among some (and certainly not all) young Black men as “a local and national epidemic not sufficiently talked about, much less tackled.”

Mayor Nutter went beyond the standard “we’re going to put more police on our streets — 120 new officers on foot patrol by summer this year” by promising to “continue to build partnerships with the community through community policing and Philly Rising.” Let’s hope that 2012 is truly the year for new commitment and new thinking in City Hall about engagement with “community” in crafting and implementing crime reduction strategies.

One of the biggest failings in Philadelphia regarding crime reduction is the failure of City Hall to effectively work with community groups that daily work in the trenches with those impacted by crime and those apart of destructive criminal behavior.

As one community activist noted during an interview last week, “There’s been a disconnect between police and community initiatives. The City has to work in partnership with communities. There are groups out there working on violence reduction that never get credit.”

While politicians and police officials talk about partnerships with communities you rarely see community groups included in press conferences where City Hall pats itself on the back by announcing reductions in murder rates and/or decreases in crime generally.

Community based violence reduction efforts already confront uphill battles on the front lines from those they are trying to impact who feel these efforts have little influence among the power-brokers in City Hall and Center City corporate suites that hold real sway over matters involving employment, education and criminal justice policies.

City Hall brushing aside these efforts — deliberately or inadvertently — reinforces the perception of powerlessness of those efforts in the minds of people those efforts are trying to reach. Community groups are getting ready to launch a new violence reduction initiative captioned “Live and Let Live” — phrasing that tactically addresses a prime trigger for much of the conflicts leading to fatal violence: arguments over perceptions of someone not “respecting” someone.

The Mayor, City Council, corporate and civic leaders need to back these kinds of community initiatives, not just with making the easy endorsements but with resources inclusive of providing money.

Mayor Nutter deserves credit for declaring during his inauguration speech his willingness to “extend a hand” to persons ready to “put guns down.” Nutter said, “We must show them that if you put the gun down we’ll work with you to put a book in your hands, to put some work and a job in your hands, to put a paycheck in your hands.”

To transform the mayor’s sincere rhetoric into reality City Hall has to stop shooting itself in the foot with counter-productive practices like the Police Department’s Stop-&-Frisk campaign and the sweet-heart Project Labor Agreement Nutter announced late last year for trade unions with a history of racial discrimination.

Stop-&-Frisk is infused with racial profiling mainly targeting Black and Latino males. This dragnet policing alienates people who the police need for cooperation in identifying criminals. Commissioner Ramsey bemoaned the lack of community cooperation in solving murders and the impact that has on lower rates of solving murders yet some of that lack of cooperation comes from adverse reactions to offensive policing.

As law professor Sherrilyn Ifill noted in a short essay posted recently on The Root there are “unintended consequences” from the Stop-&-Frisks in New York City that like Philadelphia overwhelmingly targets non-whites. “Fostering a relationship of hostility with the city’s Black and Latino male population is not only wrong; it’s also not smart policing,” Ifill wrote noting disincentives like discouraging providing police with crime solving tips.

Last June the Nutter Administration entered a legal settlement to reform Stop-&-Frisk yet months later the mayor committed city-funded construction jobs exclusively to discriminatory building trade unions, the types of jobs needed for that “hand-up” referenced in his inauguration speech.

The time is ripe for real engagement with communities.

Linn Washington Jr. is a graduate of the Yale Law Journalism Fellowship Program.

The very first mention of Philadelphia in the national news for 2012 was not very encouraging. We actually made number one in a significant statistical category, but it’s nothing to write home about. Residents of the City of Brotherly Love murder each other more often than anyone else in America’s ten largest cities.

Heck, the mayor of Washington, D.C. is already bragging about losing the “murder capital” status to Philly, and using it to push his public safety agenda. When the numbers were announced last Friday, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray called a press conference, where he crowed, “The days when the District was known as the nations ‘Murder Capital’ are long behind us, and the plans we are announcing today will enable our police to continue this progress.”

There were 324 homicides in Philadelphia last year, up from 306 in 2010. Sure, that’s down from 2007’s high water mark of 391, but 324 murders in one year is ridiculous no matter how you parse the numbers.

As if to drive that point home for the nonbelievers, already there were six murders in 2012, and we’re only a couple of days into the new year.

About 85 percent of those murdered were young Black men, almost the exact percentage of the murderers themselves. Simply put, young Philadelphians are so hopeless and filled with shortsighted desperation that they’ve engaged in what could well be the first case of self-inflicted genocide in human history.

Our young men are willfully doing what nearly a hundred years of Ku Klux Klan raids could not do — what the night riders, cross burners and skinheads have only dreamed of in their wildest fantasies: the slow, deliberate extermination of the Black race.

Think about it for a minute. For every murder, there are two Black men taken out of the picture: the victim, who was deprived of life itself, and the killer, who is then deprived of any chance at a productive life by rotting in prison for dozens of years. Two sets of children are deprived of their fathers. How many of those children will then grow up in poverty and despair, repeating the same cycle of victim/perpetrator for yet another generation?

Fortunately, these facts are not foreign to the powers that be. In his second inaugural speech Monday morning, Mayor Michael Nutter called the phenomenon of young Black boys murdering each other “the epidemic not sufficiently talked about.”

Nutter is brainstorming with city, state and federal law enforcement agencies to come up with a strategy for combating handgun violence. Handguns are the weapons of choice for urban killing, used in more than four out of five of last year’s 324 Philadelphia murders.

The devil, as always, is in the details.

Any solution will require an entire sea change, a paradigm shift on two fronts: first, laws must be changed or amended to specifically target people who have no business with guns.

Not as easy as it sounds, given that anywhere outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, you’ll be hard pressed to find even a handful of state legislators willing to talk about gun control. Our local leaders have tried for years to implement common sense controls in Philadelphia, only to be shouted down by the rural gun nuts that hate Philadelphia anyway, and don’t much care if Black folk shoot each other until the cows come home.

The second hurdle, sadly, is internal. There are those among us — decent, enlightened, aware Black people — who bristle immediately at any notion that part of the blame lies squarely on our kids and what influences them. This is a mistake, because burying our heads in the sand won’t help them. They need to understand that their future (and ours) lies in their hands, and that future is determined by whether they’re carrying a book — or carrying a gun.

Sure, you can blame the white man for manufacturing all those guns, and legislators for allowing the guns to proliferate in the Black community — but while that’s true, we have to admit, at least to ourselves, that it isn’t the whole story.

White men are not driving in from the suburbs to gun down our children every weekend in our communities. State legislators are not shooting up bars, nightclubs, bowling alleys and house parties in Black neighborhoods.

Our children are doing that. The mayor was right when he correctly identified it as an epidemic. And it’s up to us — all of us — to stop it.

Daryl Gale is the Philadelphia Tribune's city editor.

Back when I was in the military, Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” was pretty much required reading. Commanders quoted from the book freely and often, and everyone, down to us lowly deck swabbies, were supposed to understand its metaphors and hidden meanings.

An all-time favorite passage was, “Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought.”

Translation: A well-planned strategy of deployment, mapped out to the smallest detail, is as much a guarantor of success as a hastily formed plan is a guarantor of failure.

Every smart military commander knows this. Smart politicians know it too. In fact, you’ll often hear politicians quote Sun Tzu, although few of them seem to understand the practical modern day applications.

President Barack Obama understands.

In fact, I’m going to give the brother his just due. Obama is the smartest man in Washington, bar none. He just ran rings around the Republican leadership, beat them to a pulp at their own game, and left them confused and wondering what to do next. On the deficit, the GOP’s core issue and dog whistle talking point, Obama just pulled off what could be the greatest smackdown in congressional budget history.

Start putting the pieces together, and watch the man’s genius at work.

That bitter fight a few months ago over raising the debt ceiling triggered the formation of the debt supercommittee, six Republicans and six Democrats whose job would be to cut through the gridlock and figure out a way to cut $1.2 trillion from the national debt.

As you recall, the GOP threatened to hold the entire government hostage over the raising of the debt ceiling, a routine formality afforded without much debate to every president in modern history. In fact, those same Republicans had no objection to raising the ceiling under Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush seven times.

See, it all goes back to the GOP’s core strategy, as outlined more than two years ago by Sen. Mitch McConnell and others: to make sure that Barack Obama is a one-term president. Not to make America a better country, not to serve their constituents to the best of their abilities, but to do everything in their power to nullify Obama’s initiatives and policies, no matter how worthy or necessary.

Knowing that, Obama would have to know the supercommittee would crash and burn through their deadline this week without having accomplished a single thing. They were, predictably, handcuffed by the deadlock they willfully created.

So what happens, and how does that benefit the president?

Now, those spending cuts the GOP were dead set against go into effect automatically in January 2013, after next year’s elections for president, and for congress. That means large cuts to the defense budget, but no cuts at all to Medicare and Social Security, the Democrats’ bread and butter. And as a bonus, also in January 2013, the federal tax rate shifts back to the rates during the Clinton era, before Bush’s millionaire tax loopholes.

By banking on the GOP’s hatred of him, and by betting on their willingness to act against their own interests, he got what he wanted without much sacrifice on his part. Knowing their blind allegiance to a pinhead demagogue named Grover Norquist and a no-taxes-forever pledge he made them sign, Obama watched while the GOP members of the supercommittee backed themselves, and their party, into an uncomfortable corner.

They were now, like it or not, the party of the one percent. While they have always been the unflinching champions of greedy bankers and corporations, they were forced, maybe for the first time, to admit it in front of the nation.  

By publicly defending the very thieves who sank our economy in the first place, and by demanding that the middle class, not the richest one percent of Americans, shoulder the burden of fixing that economy — the GOP has put themselves right where the president wants them — shooting blindly in every direction.

Couple that with the pitiful collection of dullards and maniacs they’ve decided are their best chance of beating Obama next fall, and you can see how the president must have seen this coming eight or ten moves ago, and like a chess grand master, skillfully maneuvered his opponent into a position of vulnerability.

He fooled the entire leadership of the Republican Party. They will never give him credit for it, but he made them all look foolish, and gave himself another leg up on his re-election campaign.

I’ll give him credit, though. Barack Obama is the smartest man in Washington.

With all that’s been going on in our fair city lately, you may have forgotten that there’s a major election less than six weeks away. I think this time around the incumbents prefer it that way.

The School District of Philadelphia, and the School Reform Commission that runs it, have squandered whatever public goodwill they still had. School superintendent Dr. Arlene Ackerman got her nearly million-dollar payout, and instead of going away quietly, has lobbed incendiary grenades at everyone she feels is responsible for her ouster.

Most people would be lounging in a beach chair, sipping on some fruity rum drink with a tiny umbrella in it and toasting their good fortune, but not Ackerman.

She has implicated SRC chair Bob Archie, Mayor Michael Nutter and state Rep. Dwight Evans, among others, as major players in this shameful fiasco that just won’t go away. If she’s telling the truth, those three guys are guilty of serious ethical breaches and violations of the public trust, if not outright crimes.

Archie, partner at Duane Morris, one of the city’s top law firms, has been a power broker in this town for many, many years. While the general public may have just learned of him since his appointment to the SRC, the movers and shakers have long known Archie, and his reputation for getting deals done.

The problem is, the School District is not a private law firm, and deals made on their behalf are public deals using public monies, secret agendas and closed door meetings have no place in a public entity, even though we all know that in Philly, that’s generally how things work.

But Archie turned in his resignation from the SRC early this week, leaving the School District’s governing body with just two members. (SRC member Johnny Irizarry, perhaps seeing the handwriting on the wall, quit the same day as Archie.) Mayor Nutter quickly appointed old friend and former employee Wendell E. Pritchett, chancellor of Rutgers University, to fill one of the empty slots, but the damage is done, and the District is almost completely rudderless, at least for now.

I don’t know how he’s managed to do it, but so far Nutter seems untouched by this whole stinking mess. After all, the mayor appoints two SRC members, and he certainly played a large role in Ackerman’s departure — the hideous details of which have yet to come to light.

Speaking of which, isn’t this the same mayor who campaigned four years ago on clean government and an end to municipal corruption? Isn’t this the guy who promised us transparency, integrity and accountability in City Hall? Now he’s lobbying local rich folks for Ackerman’s buyout money and keeping it hush-hush, and if Ackerman’s accusations are to be believed, he’s turning a blind eye to corruption by sitting on a report which would blow the lid off the Martin Luther King charter school scandal, and was not averse to holding 5-year-olds ransom by threatening the end of all-day kindergarten simply to advance his political agenda.

Now, it seems to me that a man — especially an incumbent mayor up for re-election in a few short weeks — would vigorously, publicly and immediately defend himself against such vile accusations.

His opponent in November is Democrat-turned-Republican Karen Brown, who has been making some noise herself lately by demanding a number of debates with Nutter before Election Day. Nutter’s people have agreed to only one public forum, which in all honesty makes more sense for them. You don’t give an unknown opponent the opportunity to compete on your level if you’re the incumbent — especially when you’re favored to win by a landslide.

But it does leave a cloud hanging over the election in many ways.

What if the GOP had put up a serious, well-developed candidate in this race? Would Nutter’s confidence level be as high, especially considering the huge pile of hypocrisy and bad faith that has shown up on his doorstep lately?

Nutter will certainly win, and probably by the predicted margin, but when he does his first phone call of thanks should be placed to Vito Canuso and Mike Meehan, the city’s GOP leadership.

By randomly plucking Brown from obscurity rather than grooming, preparing and financing a genuine alternative candidate, Canuso and Meehan have virtually assured Nutter’s re-election at a time when a little healthy competition could have at least raised the level of discourse.

I have the uneasy feeling that we’re about to get exactly what we deserve.

No matter which of the four remaining doofuses (or is that doofii?) survives the spring primaries to emerge as President Barack Obama’s GOP opponent in November, my vote is going to Obama.

Not because we share a political party, or even because we share a skin tone, but because he is simply the best man for the job. Better than that, Barack Hussein Obama is the coolest guy ever to walk planet Earth. Cooler than the Rat Pack. Even cooler than Steve McQueen, if that’s possible.

Here’s a guy who mercilessly ridiculed Donald Trump at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner — and I mean he lit into ol’ Helmet Hair with such ferocity that the loudmouthed television host immediately abandoned his wild talk about securing the Republican nomination — then calmly went back to the situation room and ordered the Navy SEALs to put two slugs in Osama bin Laden’s head.

This same guy stood before Congress and the nation for an hour and five minutes Tuesday night and delivered one of the most passionate, well-written State of the Union speeches I have ever heard. Meanwhile, what he knew, and we didn’t — was that he had ordered that same SEAL team to storm a compound in Somalia where American aid worker Jessica Buchanan and Poul Hagen Thisted, a Dane, have been held hostage since they were kidnapped at gunpoint by Somali pirates in October.

The SEALs safely rescued the pair, and killed all nine of their captors — all while their commander-in-chief nonchalantly laid out his case for a lasting economy and an end to obstructionist partisan bickering.

That is too cool for words. We should replace the tune they always play when the president enters the room, “Hail to the Chief,” with Isaac Hayes’ theme from “Shaft.”

(I can almost hear it now. “You see this cat Obama was a baaaaad… shut yo’ mouth.”)

The only clue he left, and purely accidentally, was when microphones picked up his congratulations to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta as he entered the House chamber. Obama pointed his index finger in a “You da man” gesture at a smiling Panetta and said, “Good job tonight. Good job.” Enterprising reporters descended on the Pentagon to find out what the president meant, and were then told about the rescue operation.

The State of the Union speech itself was a classic, on par with Bill Clinton’s historic final speech to Congress — and almost as long. Obama covered a lot of ground — from jump-starting the economy, to green energy, to the widening gap between the haves and the have nots — with the ease and deftness of a master orator.

To be fair, even for Democrats, there are many reasons to question Obama’s policies, especially when it comes to capitulating to GOP demands in the name of compromise. The Republicans have proven time and again that their only goal is to bring down his administration, and aren’t interested in anything that doesn’t help them accomplish that goal. Yet he continues to seek the high road, to reach across the aisle in search of common ground — and to vainly attempt diplomacy and negotiation with people who can’t spell or define either word. I suppose you could argue that those are good qualities, but I have to admit it’s starting to get on my nerves.

The time has come, Mr. President, to fully implement your most progressive, liberal agenda — intact and undiminished — and let them cry about it later. That is exactly what the Republicans do when they gain power, and how they get things done. Sign the executive orders limiting greenhouse gases, and double our investment in alternative energy sources like wind and solar. Take care of veterans and seniors, and hold corporations and greedy bankers accountable for driving us off the cliff in the first place.

This president has more than earned a shot at a second term. He has proven himself the smartest, most visionary and forward thinking president we could ask for, and stands head and shoulders above the illiterate boob who last held the office. He’s got more family values than Newt Gingrich ever had, more compassion for the middle class than Rick Santorum could ever muster; could never be the entitled elitist Mitt Romney is, and unlike Ron Paul, is completely sane.

At next year’s State of the Union, the entire audience should stand and sing his new theme song in one gravelly, funky voice, “Who’s the cat who won’t cop out, when there’s danger all about? Damn right.”

Can you dig it?

Daryl Gale is the Philadelphia Tribune's city editor.

More than once over the past week I’ve been approached with speculation that at least some of the kids allegedly abused by former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky may have been Black.

Because Second Mile, the foundation Sandusky founded, and from whose participants he chose his prey, has several programs targeting at-risk youth, it’s a reasonable assumption, the speculation goes, that some of Sandusky’s victims could be children of color.

At first blush, it seems logical enough. A disproportionate number of at-risk kids, those who live in poverty, or don’t get enough to eat, or have troubled home lives, are children of color.

But that fact alone — even if true — doesn’t substantially change the story, at least not for me. If the allegations graphically described in the grand jury presentment are true, then Sandusky is an absolute monster. No amount of prison time is sufficient to cover those crimes.

Just hearing the details of what he is accused of doing to those boys makes me re-think my anti-death penalty position. Some people, it turns out, just need killing. If he’s guilty, then lethal injection is too good for him. I’d not only be in favor of bringing back Ol’ Sparky, I’d throw the switch and pay the electric bill.

But that would be true no matter his victims’ skin color. Some acts are so evil; they transcend any human traits or cultural distinctions. Remember Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who cooked and ate several of his victims? Some of those victims were nonwhite, but that fact doesn’t add or subtract from the horrors he committed.

Realistically, we will probably never know the race of most of the kids involved — between sealed court records, grand jury secrecy, gag orders, and the natural reluctance of victims to go public in high-profile cases like this, it’s unlikely that we’ll someday have a comprehensive list with photos to compare the victims’ ethnicities.

And I don’t know for sure that even if we had such a list, it would do much good. But as long as we’re engaging in wild speculation, I can see how that bit of information could prove useful.

Every predator — whether a wanted serial killer or a low-rent purse snatcher — picks their victims with care. They certainly don’t want to get caught, and will choose their prey based on what they perceive as a low level of resistance, (like picking on little old ladies if you’re a purse snatcher) and of course, a fair certainty they’ll get away with it.

If there were some way to prove that Sandusky picked poor Black kids deliberately because he figured they’re less likely to snitch, and less likely to be believed even if they do, well, that little peek into his psyche would be enlightening. And because white men throughout history have used Black men, women and children for easy sexual gratification without guilt or consequence, perhaps that could be seen as an extension of that slave master mentality.

Or if he admitted to a simple matter of believing that the innocence of a Black child is less important than that of a white one. Especially if your way of thinking is that these kids are damaged anyway — so one more indignity won’t matter much. That too, would provide some insight into the twisted mind of a monster, and may even explain some of his actions.

Given what we already know though, that’s not likely either.

Sandusky has already begun conducting interviews proclaiming his unequivocal innocence. He told NBC sports commentator Bob Costas on Monday night that he was certainly not a pedophile, and never sexually assaulted any child.

According to him, all the grand jury witnesses are just plain lying — including a former janitor who had little to lose by coming forward, and a present team employee whose own testimony paints him as a gutless coward who watched a child being raped, then ran back to his office to call his daddy, literally leaving the child in the clutches of a sick maniac.

I have never seen a child raped, thank God, and I hope I never do. But I’m pretty sure that were I to witness such an atrocity, I’d know the difference between what I saw and wrestling or innocent horseplay.

Race, in this instance, is irrelevant. The real tragedy here is that it took 15 years to get around to stopping this fiend, when it could have ended so much sooner, with fewer kids whose innocence, trust, and sense of right are forever lost.

That the budget nightmare currently plaguing the School District of Philadelphia was fully predictable does not make it any less devastating.

Long before he took office, then-candidate Corbett made no secret of his intention to slash public education, which has long been the Republican Party’s prime example of taxpayer-funded waste. Corbett cited as his hero neighboring freshman governor Chris Christie, who at that time was engaged in his own power struggle with schools, teachers and public employees in general.

In fact, when the new crop of GOP governors and state legislators sailed into office on the Red Tide of 2010, they all made pretty much the same moves: Vilify public employees, slash education and crush collective bargaining. From Wisconsin to Ohio to New Jersey, they’ve kept their promises — all while managing to keep millionaires and big corporations safe from taxes and regulations.

They told us what they would do if we allowed them to take office — then they did it. For that, the blame does not fall upon them, or even upon those who voted for them.

Blame falls upon those in the opposing party who, hearing those campaign promises and understanding the horrific consequences, stood by and watched it happen. If you’re a Democrat who failed to vote in the last election, that includes you.

And don’t give me the same old tired excuses, so hackneyed and shop worn the rest of us can recite them by heart: “It doesn’t matter if I vote. Those politicians are going to do what they want to do anyway.” Or: “It’s all a scam, and they’re all corrupt, so what difference does it make?” And my favorite, which will become especially frightening next November: “[insert candidate] is going to win anyway, so my one vote isn’t going to make a difference.”

These are self-fulfilling prophecies. If you don’t vote, then yes, the other side will win, and yes, they’re going to turn you upside down and shake you until the change falls from your pockets. They’re going to reward their friends and punish their enemies, and hammer an agenda you naively thought they’d never get away with.

So when Gov. Corbett announced the state’s newest budget this week, you had to have some idea of what to expect. It’s a lot like last year’s budget, with an extra kick to the ribs of poor people.

The slow dismantling of public education is not a new agenda item. It’s just that the GOP has been previously thwarted in their efforts by vigilant advocates —– whose voices are drowned out now that they’re outnumbered.

That too, is partly our own fault. We allowed the GOP to gain the high ground on the thorny issue of public education finances, which is the basis of their subsequent slash-and-burn budgets.

We stood idly by while cronies, insiders, political patrons and friends-of-friends benefited from contracts and services on the school district’s dime. We knew they were shady, and we knew they were essentially stealing money from classrooms and programs in desperate need. We cringed, but said nothing, whenever someone was caught with their hand in the cookie jar — even remaining silent while they inevitably produced crocodile tears and phony cries of “What about the children?” to silence critics.

Well, the chickens have come home to roost, and the fact is that those adults who have been gaming the system for personal profit for years don’t care any more about the children than the current crop of right wing hatchet men who are determined to gut public education. The school district was a cash cow, and we looked the other way while they milked her dry.

Believe it or not, though, there is still some good that may come out of all this.

Remember the look of sadness on those children’s faces when we tell them there’s no after school programs. Remember how art, music, sports and extracurricular activities enriched your own educational experience as you watch those programs wither and die.

Then use this as an example of what happens when we get complacent. This is our payback for not organizing well enough, for not getting out the vote when we should have, and for not sounding the alarm loud enough when we realized they were going to close more schools and build more prisons.

This coming November, and in the next statewide election, ask yourself whether public education is worth it, and vote accordingly. Do nothing, and…

Well, we’ve seen what happens when we do nothing.

Daryl Gale is the Philadelphia Tribune's city editor.

I am generally reluctant to call out my fellow members of the media for several reasons: First, I understand that all forms of informational media — newspapers, cable news television, news magazines and such — are a convenient scapegoat upon which to blame all of society’s ills, and I refuse to add my own voice to that cacophony of aimless noise.

Second, I know how the media works, and I know how difficult it can be to walk the fine line of getting the story first and getting the story right. I tend to give editors and reporters the benefit of the doubt, knowing — or at least hoping — that they’re doing the best they can and are ultimately only interested in the public good.

But once in a while, I am forced to admit I understand completely why people so vehemently hate the media. This is one of those times.

Over at www.philly.com, the people who bring you the online versions of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, the reader comment section of their online stories has long been a repository for the foulest, most racist vitriol I personally have ever read.

Every crime story with a Black perpetrator will get a comment section filled, and I do mean filled, with hate speech. “Savages,” “animals,” “the usual suspects,” “urban trash,” “ghetto gorillas,” … I mean, they don’t even bother to code it anymore.

At first, I was surprised. Surprised that there were that many overt racists in Philadelphia, and surprised that they’d happily spew their poison in a public forum.

But that’s part of the anonymity of the Internet. Any craven coward can post whatever vile hated they want, knowing their real names won’t be found out — essentially hiding behind their keyboards. This false courage allows them to say things online they would never think to say to any Black person’s face — ever. That post about shipping all the jungle apes back to Africa could have been written by the guy who sits next to you at work.

Until recently, I blamed this phenomenon on the posters. Vicious racists that they are, I reasoned, they would have found a forum for their hatred whether philly.com published their rants or not. Besides, a newspaper (even an online version) has some obligation to allow their readership the opportunity to speak their minds, no matter how objectionable. The First Amendment was written, after all, not to protect speeches about love and understanding, but to protect speech we can all agree is offensive by nature.

As a newsman, I understand these things. But I also understand that a news organization has an equal obligation to community standards. Like most news outlets these days, The Philadelphia Tribune also has a comments section attached to many of our stories online. But if someone posts something over-the-top offensive in that comments section, we have the right, and the duty, to take it down as soon as possible.

I don’t see that happening at philly.com. In fact, considering the stuff that remains up on the site, I wonder how offensive the language has to get before a “comment removed” tag is issued.

And here’s where I officially snatch away the benefit of the doubt. On crime stories on philly.com with white perpetrators, there’s almost never a comment section allowed. In other words, someone over there in the Tower of Truth at Broad and Callowhill decides which stories get commented on and which do not — and melanin seems to be a criterion.

Don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself. Three white guys charged with having sex with a 15-year-old (complete with a photo of the glassy-eyed, meth addict suspect), no comments section allowed. Trial begins in the ballpark beating death last year by some drunken white guys — no comment section.

Three killed in grocery store robbery, Black perpetrators suspected — all the racist comments you could ask for. “Thugs,” “scum,” “savages,” calls to arms and defense of white decency from the dark hordes, and always, always the umpteenth rehashing of John Street’s “brothers and sisters are running the city” comment from a decade ago.

This is just one day’s example, but it’s a pretty good example — and a pretty accurate one.

It would be easy to hide behind the racist posters themselves, but someone over at philly.com has to enable, allow and encourage the behavior to continue.

I guess that defense is that they aren’t burning the crosses — they’re just supplying the matches.

Niggerhead.

There, now I’ve said it too. I’m using it only once, though, and here at the beginning of the column, to avoid confusion with any other vile ethnic slurs you may have heard lately, and to give us a handy reference point for later, when we just refer to it as “that word.”

Even if you weren’t familiar with this particular epithet before last week, you’ve surely had your fill of it by now. So many white people have uttered that word over the past few days you wonder how they ever got by without it. It’s like a mischievous child who learns a new “bad” word. Suddenly, they’re repeating it every five seconds and won’t shut up about it.

It all started, as you know, with a Washington Post piece about GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry and his family’s hunting ranch, which once bore that word as its name painted on a large rock by the entrance. The hullabaloo stemmed around the fact that the Perry family leased the ranch without complaint about the name for several years, then had the name painted over sometime in the early 1980s.

Leaving aside the moralistic questions of why the Perrys didn’t care about the name until it became a political liability, which it would have been with Rick Perry running for public office — let’s just concentrate on that word itself.

Google it, and more than 100,000 references pop up, most in the past week, but some interesting facts about that word pop up as well.

For instance, in the U.S., there were more than a hundred places named that word, changed in 1962 by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, but many local names remain unchanged even to this day. By the early part of the 20th century, there were perhaps a dozen different products manufactured in this country, from bath soap to chewing tobacco, with that word as its official name, often complete with a very unflattering logo, drawing, or photo.

So while that word was buried deep for a little while — long enough for most of us to forget its existence — it has re-emerged with a vengeance, and if the conservative bloggers and commentators have any say in the matter, it could once again become a permanent part of the lexicon.

I’m not just talking about those teabagger wing-nuts who demand permanent access to the n-word as part of their First Amendment right to freedom of speech. I mean regular everyday white folks who claim that because they hear it in hip hop or because some Black people use it regularly, they should no longer feel guilty about using the word — especially in some legitimate context like explaining the Perry ranch controversy.

Which is why, for the past few days on every television news channel, you’ve heard that word more often than the phrase, “We’ll be right back after these messages.” They can’t seem to get enough of it. Even if they’re condemning the word, and angrily rebuking those who don’t, they still feel the need to repeat it a couple of times — you know, just to be sure you heard it correctly.

Even Sherri Shepherd, who could quite possibly be the least intelligent person in America, slammed her “The View” co-host Barbara Walters for using it, but gave Whoopi Goldberg a pass for doing the same thing moments earlier. Unfortunately, Shepherd, who has publicly acknowledged that she doesn’t know whether the Earth is round or flat (I’m not kidding. Really.) was so poor at explaining her reasons for differentiating between Barbara saying it and Whoopi saying it that I fear she only made it worse, at least for viewers of her show.

The fact is, that word is going to be offensive to Black people — whether it’s written on a rock in Texas or spoken by a respected news anchor. The mere fact that they’re just repeating it — or even that they’re repeating it in legitimate context — isn’t going to make it less offensive.

And while there is disagreement — even among Black people — about whether the word itself can be reclaimed and re-purposed or whether it should be banned altogether, there’s little doubt that white people who use it, especially around Blacks, run the very real risk of being misunderstood — and the very real risk of a trip to the emergency room.

I have to admit I still wonder, though, with a name like that, what that chewing tobacco must have tasted like.

I first met Joe Frazier when I was a martial arts-obsessed teenager who wandered into Frazier’s gym on North Broad Street, hoping to get some boxing training. I ran into him many times over the years since, and he was always as kind and gracious as he was that first day.

What struck me at first was his size. At just under six feet tall, maybe 200 pounds or so, he was not the imposing physical specimen you’d expect from the heavyweight champion of the world. Even as a teen, I was larger than he was.

Then he shook my hand. His meaty paw swallowed mine, and his firm grip was almost frightening. But what was so large and imposing about Frazier was not the size of his muscles, but the size of his heart.

He was, without question, the most fierce and determined warrior I have ever seen step into the ring. Even though he was born in South Carolina, he was the prototypical Philadelphia fighter — always walking forward, bobbing and weaving — and steadily launching thunderous left hooks, each with vicious intent.

The last time I saw the champ, a few years ago, he still looked great. I had just interviewed his daughter, Jacqui, now a Philadelphia judge, but then a punishing puncher in her own right.

Smokin’ Joe smiled that megawatt Frazier grin at me, then broke down in a mock stance and feinted a playful, half-hearted left hook in my direction. For just a second there, I was scared out of my wits.

It was the same left hook that broke Ali’s jaw, that knocked Jimmy Ellis through the ropes, which had sent dozens of professionally trained heavyweight fighters crashing to the canvas in a crumbled heap. As quickly as the thought of my life flashing before my eyes, the champ then embraced me in a warm, genuine hug.

That, to me, is the essence of a man like Joseph William Frazier. He was never the aloof, distant celebrity who looked down on the common folk. Joe was the common folk. You could always find Joe, because he was always around. You could run into him at the grocery store, gas station, barbershop or just hanging out in Center City. And he had those same warm hugs for everyone.

I suspect he was aware of his status as a hero to thousands of Philadelphia fight fans, as a true legend in what may be the world’s toughest sport, as a mentor to untold numbers of inner city kids looking for direction, and as the living symbol of the heart, the toughness, the determination and soul of the city that never quite embraced him as warmly as he did us.

Smokin’ Joe Frazier wasn’t just a Philadelphia fighter — he was the epitome of what every kid who ever laced up a pair of gloves wanted to be.

Now that he’s gone, we look around and come to realize there’s not much we’ve done as a city on behalf of a man who has given us all so much.

And that, fellow fight fans, has got to change.

The mighty Joe Frazier gym still sits there on the corner of Broad and Glenwood, except now it’s all but abandoned, used as some sort of discount furniture warehouse.

Here’s what we do: First, restore the gym to its former glory. As much as the legendary Blue Horizon, or even the Uptown, Joe Frazier’s Cloverlay gym is a part of North Philadelphia history. Many of the game’s greats trained there, and many got their start there.

There’s just something special about a boxing gym, and this was one of the most special gyms in the country. The smell of sweat and rubbing alcohol, the sounds of the speed bag and someone skipping rope, and the dreams of young athletes determined to fight their way out of poverty and despair cannot be duplicated in some cookie cutter health club.

There are any number of present and former champions who could easily contribute a few coins to such a worthy cause, and they should be pressed into action.

Second, we rename Glenwood Avenue “Joe Frazier Way” and put up one of those historic markers to commemorate the spot where greatness once stood among us. Call your freshly elected City Council representative and demand it. Call the mayor. Call your favorite radio talk show host.

If we can give an imaginary Hollywood boxing hero a statue at the Art Museum, surely we can spare some glory for a man who was the real deal.