From left: Mike Bobby, who takes it upon himself to remove graffiti from Fox Chase and Steve Phillips, Fox Chase Town Watch president, display their patrol gear. Photo by Morgan Zalot.

When Stephen Phillips saw a group of teens brutally beating Eddie Polec to death from his Fox Chase doorstep in 1994 and no police responded to his 911 calls for help, he and a group of community members decided something needed to be done.

“You’d rather be proactive than reactive,” Phillips, who raised three children in the neighborhood, said. “Our community was reactive to the tragedy.”

Polec, then 16, a Cardinal Dougherty High School student who lived in the neighborhood and the son of a well-known crossing guard in the area, was beaten with bats by a mob of teens from a local suburb on the steps of St. Cecilia’s Church. Phillips said more than 30 calls were made from the area to 911 during Polec’s in a span of 20 minutes, but no police were dispatched to the scene until it was too late to save the teen.

“It was a major failure of the Philadelphia 911 system,” he recalled. “[Polec] was literally an innocent bystander.” continue reading »