Harrisburg Police Officer Josh Hammer, left, and Michelle Landolfa.
The hoop appeared about three weeks ago—a red milk crate with the bottom cut out, affixed to a black backboard fashioned out of what looked like a small door.
Michelle Landolfa didn’t know who put it there, on a telephone pole near the corner of Penn and Woodbine streets Uptown, above a NO PARKING – STREET CLEANING sign. But on Tuesday night, around 8 p.m., she stepped out onto her back porch to smoke a cigarette, looked down at the hoop, and saw something unusual: a Harrisburg police officer playing basketball with one of the neighborhood kids.
“It was awesome,” Landolfa recalled. Through friends’ Facebook posts, she’d been following the riots in Baltimore after the death of a black suspect in police custody—a situation she described as a “little bit of a race war, little bit of cops-versus-civilians.” She took out her phone and, her battery dying, shot a series of short videos. Then she posted one to Facebook, writing above it “In light of Baltimore.”
“I thought, ‘Look who’s playing with your kids, though!’” she told me. “He was sweating, busting moves and playing ball.”
Landolfa has lived on her corner for about two years, at the end of a street people call “the bottom.” “Like, ‘Where you at?’ ‘I’m at the bottom,’” she said. Many of the blocks Uptown are lovely, with well-kept brick houses and flowering trees in the yards. The 2100-block of Penn is not one of them. In addition to the deteriorated housing stock—behind the hoop is a home with a crumbling porch and a boarded-up, busted window—the street is afflicted by crime, drugs and litter.
Of the 49 houses in this stretch, between Woodbine and Maclay, seven are owner-occupied. “There are as many abandoned as with people living in them,” Landolfa said. “I’ve counted.” Gary Neff, who owns six properties there, described it as “probably the worst block west of 3rd Street.” He attributed its decline partly to a “feeding frenzy” before 2008, when inexperienced landlords were able to secure cheap financing and acquire units they couldn’t manage.
“There’s a lot of houses that’s not even—you can’t live in ‘em,” Lori Counterman, who has rented on the block for four-and-a-half years, told me. “We’re lucky. We have good landlords. But a lot of landlords that own houses that are boarded up and shut down—they’re like slumlords. They don’t want to fix anything. And then the people have to move out. And we lose good neighbors that way.”
In the morning, Landolfa showed the Facebook post to her mother, Sonja Lloyd. “She said, ‘Mom, look, my video has, like, 800 views!’” Lloyd recalled. They were getting ready for work, and when they looked again, the number had climbed past 10,000.
The officer in the video was Josh Hammer, of the Harrisburg police department’s street crimes unit. Hammer is white, with a stocky build, square face and short blonde hair. Landolfa recognized him from his visits to the Sunoco gas station a block away, across from the governor’s mansion, where she used to work. “He does have a good reputation on the street,” Lloyd told me.
By Wednesday afternoon, Hammer was back on the block, along with Police Chief Thomas Carter, Sgt. Milo Hooper of the street crimes unit, Landolfa, Lloyd and State Representative Patty Kim. Kim, who lives a few blocks away on N. 2nd Street, had caught wind of the video earlier that morning. “It was refreshing to see something caught on tape with police that was positive,” she said. A “generous donor,” whom she did not name, had paid for a regulation hoop and several new basketballs.
While volunteers puzzled over assembly instructions, the officers milled about, talking to reporters. Hammer said he’d been passing by the block on a routine patrol and “saw some kids playing basketball, and it seemed like a good time to interact.” The boy in the video, a 10-year-old named Jeremiah, stood wearing a black polo, black slacks and a pair of Jordan sandals, studying a vein in his arm. “I just didn’t want to get embarrassed and lose in basketball to these guys,” Hammer said.
Chief Carter was asked what sort of directives, if any, had led to the outcome in the video. “I simply tell my people to treat people the way you want to be treated, or that you want other officers to treat your family member,” he said. “You gotta look at our youth growing up. A lot of them weren’t even born when we started having run-down houses, run-down churches, trash in the street, drugs all over the place. They have a feeling of hopelessness, you know?”
“We’re trying to change that culture,” he went on. “We’re a compassionate agency. And we’re trying to police that way, which simply means, you know, you’re out there, you’re listening, you’re talking to people, you’re understanding what their quality-of-life issues are, and you’re doing your best to try to change that.”
Down the block, perhaps two dozen people had come out on their porches, some of them eyeing the news crews with interest, others seeming not to notice them at all. A young man swept trash from the sidewalk into a litter-strewn gutter. Several kids picked up basketballs and started dribbling in the street for a cameraman.
Landolfa wore a white T-shirt with the words “I MATTER” written across the front. “It makes me proud,” Lloyd said. “Because here my daughter took a video, and through the video she’s able to have people donate and do something good for the kids.”
An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Gary Neff, who owns properties on the 2100-block of Penn Street, as a “former city firefighter.” Although there is a Gary Neff who previously served as the city’s deputy fire chief, that Neff and the one in the article are not related.
