Policing Drug Houses in the Philadelphia “Badlands”

On March 31, 1992, code enforcement authorities inspected the abandoned storefront of a modest rowhouse on Germantown Avenue while Philadelphia police officers raided an alleged drug house next door. They noticed trash and drug paraphernalia strewn over the floor and learned from police that the building “was a source of drug activity.” When a crack appeared in a supporting wall of the building after authorities demolished the house next door, they decided to demolish it as well.

Yet this building was not abandoned. Helen Anthony, a 59-year-old Black woman, had lived in the building’s upstairs apartment for twenty-three years. She had raised a family there and operated a seafood store from the first floor as the drug industry began replacing vanishing factory jobs across North Philadelphia. When Anthony returned home on March 31, police had reduced her home to rubble.

This paper analyses a carceral approach to racial management that crystallized during the crack cocaine years. Narcotics police during this period popularized a spatial imaginary of Philadelphia’s drug trade that shaped public understandings of the city’s racial geography. They termed the Black and Latinx neighborhoods of North Philadelphia and Kensington where the outdoor narcotics trade concentrated “The Badlands,” using a geologic term to both naturalize and racialize the postindustrial decline of these neighborhoods. “The Badlands” obscured the economic forces and policy choices—deindustrialization, disinvestment, and carceral expansion—that produced the social and political challenges faced by residents of these neighborhoods. This discourse in turn shaped municipal racial management, legitimizing police interventions that increasingly focused on the specter of the “crack house.” During the late 1980s and early 1990s the Badlands discourse culminated in the demolition of over 1,000 buildings—including Helen Anthony’s home.