On the night of Feb. 21, just after 6 p.m., the Harrisburg fire department responded to a call about the partial collapse of a building on S. 12th Street, near the border between Harrisburg and Steelton.
The building, a three-story brick warehouse on a steeply sloping road above S. Cameron, had been abandoned for several years. Its south wall, covered in scraggly vegetation, had long showed a 10-foot-by-5-foot hole from a prior collapse. This time, the roof had caved in, dragging power lines down onto a neighbor’s porch and spilling bricks from the north wall into a nearby yard.
Crews evacuated two families from a neighboring property and searched the premises for squatters. More than an hour later, around 7:40 p.m., police arrived with the building’s owner, a 48-year-old pastor named Augustus Sullivan. Sullivan is the founder of the Victory Outreach Christian Church, which had once called the building home. Tall and fit, with closely shaved salt-and-pepper hair and a trim goatee, he showed up wearing a baseball cap and a nondescript puffy coat. Most of the reporters on the scene appear not to have recognized him. Ewa Roman, with CBS21, later recalled hearing a small commotion, followed by a voice saying, “The owner’s here, the owner’s here.” News cameras surrounded Sullivan, filming and taking pictures while officers led him in handcuffs to a police van.
A few days before the collapse, at a public forum in city hall, Harrisburg’s new mayor, Eric Papenfuse, had promised to take a harder line on blight. The forum, hosted by PennLive, featured a panel discussion with the mayor, the police chief, the public works director and members of City Council. It covered topics ranging from snow removal to police patrols and potholes.
When the moderator brought up blight, Papenfuse laid out his vision for enforcement. It included merging the city’s codes office into the police department and conducting warrant sweeps to catch known offenders. It also included increasing misdemeanor charges for negligent property owners, for things like creating a public nuisance and reckless endangerment. “In many cases we know who the largest offenders are, we know where they live, and it’s simply a matter of going out and, basically, getting them,” Papenfuse said.
On Friday night, police stood outside long enough for Sullivan, ball cap removed, to be photographed and filmed by news media. He was ultimately charged with three misdemeanors: public nuisance, reckless endangerment and failure to prevent a catastrophe. After his arrest, the fire chief held an impromptu press conference at the scene, during which he adopted the same tough stance as the mayor. “I think this should send a resounding message to the slumlords in the city of Harrisburg that we will no longer play the game with you,” he said. “We are going to come after you, and we are going to make the city right again.”
On Monday, the city released a stack of records showing a series of codes violations for the church going back to 2008. By that point, a clearer picture had emerged of exactly whom the city had arrested. Sullivan, who formally goes by the title The Apostle Dr. A. E. Sullivan, Jr., is the president of the Interdenominational Ministers Conference of Greater Harrisburg, a politically active association of black preachers. In the fall, he had spoken out forcefully against the state-appointed receiver’s recovery plan for the city. He had even shown up in Commonwealth Court to protest its confirmation, though he filed no formal objection. In early 2013, it was rumored that he had contemplated running for mayor.
Sullivan’s arrest polarized the community. Some saw a justly harsh response to dangerous negligence—the collapse would ultimately displace nine people for more than a month. But others saw a politically motivated attempt to humiliate a prominent black leader. The day after the arrest, Sullivan’s attorney told a reporter for PennLive that her client had no knowledge that the building was unsound. She would later complain of “disparate treatment,” citing a “long list of people” facing similar violations who were not arrested in the same manner. (Sullivan has since filed a civil complaint, alleging that, when the city eventually demolished the church, it did so without proper notice and at an excessively high cost.)
It’s one thing to make a campaign promise, and another actually to follow through, especially when doing so implicates people with deep ties in the community you serve. In the weeks after the collapse, Papenfuse stood by his officers while Sullivan’s supporters rallied. The mayor’s crackdown on blight, barely inscribed as policy, was facing its first real test.
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A week and a half before the collapse, Sullivan was preaching in a church in São Marcos, a town in the southernmost state of Brazil. He had arrived that morning, Tuesday, Feb. 11, and would stay in the country for nearly a week, preaching in and around the state capital, Porto Alegre. His host for the trip, a pastor named Mauro Lastra, recorded his itinerary in a guestbook on Sullivan’s website. According to Lastra, Sullivan mostly preached in the evening, in services that ran until midnight or later, and that often included weeping, speaking in tongues, “healings” and “deliverances.” “The service ended and no one wanted to leave,” Lastra wrote of one church visit, from which the pastors didn’t return home until 4 a.m. “The Ap. Sullivan was praying one by one until all are blessed by God.”
The Brazil visit was one of the several international trips Sullivan has made in recent years, in his capacity as the CEO of Apostle A. E. Sullivan Global Ministries. On his website, Sullivan identifies himself as the “Founder, Chief Apostle, Senior Bishop & Presiding Prelate” of a global network that includes “over 5,750 churches in 54 nations.” In 2010, according to a related Facebook page, he went on a “gospel crusade” to Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In November of 2012, he traveled to the Caribbean for 18 days, visiting places like St. Kitts and the Cayman Islands. In June of 2013, he spent 11 days in the Philippines; in November, he traveled to Paris and Brussels.
It’s not clear whether Sullivan funded these trips on his own or through his corporation. Although the Global Ministries is a registered non-profit in the state of Pennsylvania, it was only incorporated last October, and there’s little public record of its activities. Before each trip, however, the network would petition Facebook followers for financial assistance, referred to as a “love gift” or “seed.” The fundraising was usually explicitly about Sullivan’s international ministry; in requesting checks for the trip to Paris, for example, supporters were instructed to put “Attn: Crusade to France” on the envelope. But the checks were usually to be made out to an entity closer to home—the Victory Outreach Christian Church.
Sullivan founded the V.O.C.C. in January of 1999. His church was non-denominational and formed in the evangelical mold, with a strong reliance on scriptural interpretation and a tone of revivalist fervor. “We are anticipating a mighty move of God,” the church’s Facebook page says in one post. “God is confirming His word with signs & wonders following,” it says in another. His services often featured “altar calls,” during which people in attendance come forward to the preacher and publicly recommit themselves to Jesus Christ. In a photo of one altar call, during his trip to Brazil, a small crowd presses towards Sullivan, their eyes closed and their arms raised. In the center is a woman with a stricken look. Sullivan, his back to the camera, reaches out to touch her cheek.
Sullivan’s formal religious training took place at the Grace Bible Institute, a school of theology that opened around the same time as the V.O.C.C., initially operating out of a church basement in Steelton. (In his resume, Sullivan also claims to have graduated from the Interdenominational Theological Center, a consortium of historically black seminaries in Atlanta, although the ITC’s registrar had no record of this.) Isaac Edwards, a graduate of the Grace Bible Institute whose father, Peter Edwards, was its founder and president, told me the school had an open-ended style of instruction, emphasizing that many matters of religion were “up for interpretation.” Its curriculum drew on the work of various Protestant theologians, especially Charles Hodge, a leading figure in a 19th-century tradition known as the Princeton Theology, which emphasized scholarship and devotion to the Bible.
Grace Bible Institute had a brief tenure. Isaac told me it was “hard to get people to pay” their tuition, and after his mother died in 2005, his father closed the school. While it lasted, Grace also seems to have struggled with a tension, not unheard of in religious studies, between the anxiety over official recognition and the primacy of personal faith. In one sense, the thinkers who inspired its creation spurned the need for official endorsement. Another theologian who featured prominently in studies at Grace was John Wycliffe, the 14th-century English reformer who, in a rejection of Roman Catholic hierarchy, encouraged a movement of itinerant preachers who lacked any formal consecration. At the same time, like other institutes of higher education, Grace offered bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees. It sought accreditation, and, according to Isaac, received it, though the agency he referred me to, TransWorld Accrediting Commission, claimed never to have heard of the school.
In the summer of 1999, Sullivan moved his church into the property on S. 12th Street. After the collapse, it was reported that the building was 117 years old, but Ken Frew, with the Dauphin County Historical Society, says it might be significantly older. An 1871 city map identifies a brick building on the site as the Lochiel School, which educated the children of immigrant workers at the nearby Lochiel Iron Works. Apparently it was conceived as a market house, with an auditorium on an upper floor, but that purpose was quickly abandoned. In 1909, students relocated to the new Foose School on S. 13th Street, after years of what a Harrisburg Telegraph article described as “many severe criticisms” of the 12th Street building’s “poor adaptation for school purposes.” The paper said people called it the “old barn.” Sometime after the students left, it became a candy factory. In 1967, Cumberland Electronics bought it, and it spent 26 years as a warehouse, storing TV antennas and vacuum tubes.
By the time Sullivan’s V.O.C.C. held services there, the building had been a church for several years. Initially, Sullivan rented the space from a Spanish-language congregation that had bought it in 1993. In 2004, Sullivan entered an agreement to purchase the building for $25,000—$10,000 upfront, plus three-and-a-half years of interest-free monthly installments of $350. The agreement included a clause acknowledging the property’s “good condition” at the time of sale, although David Rodriguez, a reverend with the Spanish church, told me that bricks were already falling down when the building changed hands. “They told me they were going to renovate,” he said.
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In July of 2008, about a year later than expected, the V.O.C.C. finally finished its monthly payments, and Rodriguez deeded the building to Sullivan. The trouble with the city’s codes department began almost immediately. In October, the fire bureau forwarded a complaint that bricks were falling from the building’s south wall. A codes inspector named Charles Jenakovich paid a visit and filed a notice of non-compliance. A month and a half later, after Sullivan took no action, he returned and issued a citation. “Extremely hazardous condition as bricks falling from over 30 feet onto public area,” he wrote. A couple of months later, in January of 2009, the city condemned the building.
The paper trail following the condemnation order is a good study in the frustrations of codes enforcement. Per the order, the V.O.C.C. had to cease use of the building immediately and, within 20 days, obtain permits for either demolishing the property or bringing it up to code. Sullivan acknowledged the order within a couple of days, eventually obtaining a $50,000 bid from a renovations company for necessary repairs. But after that, Sullivan appears to have done nothing further for more than a year. The next citation is dated April 23, 2010, when Jenakovich visited and noted a “[f]ailure to repair or demolish unsafe structure.”
The first delay was only the beginning. For the next year, Jenakovich issued citation upon citation, about once every two months, as Sullivan continued to do nothing. Codes citations work like parking tickets: the owner can plead guilty and pay the fine, or he can appeal, but the city will continue citing until the underlying issue—the illegally parked car, the property’s non-compliance—is resolved. There is a way to ramp up the pressure: upon the fifth guilty plea, the citation becomes a misdemeanor. But unfortunately, as with parking tickets, building citations can also be ignored, at which point enforcement depends on the district judge.
In April of 2011, the church building suffered another partial collapse. On April 25, Jenakovich issued a final citation—his ninth since the condemnation. David Patton, the city’s codes administrator, wrote to Pierre Ritter, then the police chief, requesting a reckless endangerment charge. That same month, Sullivan’s wife had passed away, and, according to Patton, then-Mayor Linda Thompson postponed enforcement, saying that Sullivan needed time. Patton recalls telling Thompson he was sorry about Sullivan’s wife, but then adding, “Some people are going to join her if we don’t do something.”
On June 2, 2011, Sullivan met with city officials and Thompson, who granted him 30 days to come up with a plan. Once again, Sullivan stalled. In early August, Patton emailed Thompson’s director of building and housing, Jack Robinson: “The time for him to do something has way expired. I need to know what’s going on.” On Aug. 17, a passerby called to alert the city that bricks were falling from the building and the barricade had been removed. On Oct. 7, Patton sent another email to Robinson: “Bishop Sullivan has yet to do anything about his deteriorating property…As we approach the freeze thaw season, my fear is that there will be a collapse…again.”
Finally, in late October of 2011, Sullivan obtained a structural analysis of the church, which determined that the building was salvageable but had “a number of major structural deficiencies.” In addition to the partially collapsed wall, the engineer also noted that the roof was caving in and that the floors on the lower stories were insufficiently supported. A month later, at the behest of the city, a York-based contractor provided a demolition estimate of $212,000.
At some point, Sullivan seems to have gotten the impression that the city would delay enforcement indefinitely while he sought funding for repairs. In February of 2012, after a few failed attempts to find financing and four months of inaction on the property, he met with PNC Bank. A week later, he wrote to Patton: “We talked about a number of things but some of these things do not move as fast as we like. Bankers and banking moves at a pace all of its own unfortunately.” He seems to have placed a higher priority on other parts of his ministry. In one Facebook post, from March of 2013, Sullivan directed followers to verses in Matthew and II Timothy “to firmly see & accurately know that we are living in ‘the last days’ and ‘the end times.’”
“I didn’t understand how somebody so vocal in the community could be doing this,” Patton told me. During a site visit, one of his officers noticed that the V.O.C.C.’s signs had been removed from the building. They assumed Sullivan was trying to dissociate himself from the property. Feeling no support from the mayor, Patton kept a subfolder of email correspondence and other records on the building—in the event of a collapse, he wanted a record of his efforts.
After Sullivan filed his civil suit, many of the folder’s contents wound up appended to the city’s objections. At the bottom of the file is an email Patton sent to Mayor Thompson, dated Feb. 12, 2013. The church property, he wrote, was “getting worse,” and he had managed to track down Sullivan’s home address. “I have 5 warrants for his arrest,” he concluded. “Permission to execute.” The mayor did not reply. (In a March 21 interview with abc27, Mayor Thompson said she had given Sullivan “no preferential treatment,” though she did acknowledge working with him while he sought “financial aid.”)
Patton, who continued paying visits to the site, told me he had a feeling something would happen this year. “It was really plaguing my mind, that someone would get hurt,” he said. I thought of a clip from Fox43’s coverage the night of the collapse, in which one of the evacuated neighbors, rattled and on the verge of tears, wonders in fragmented English about what might have happened if the church fell another way. “How many families, you know?” she says. “We can die.”
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In the weeks after the collapse, the church community rallied behind Sullivan. As president of the Interdenominational Ministers Conference, Sullivan had close ties to local black church leaders, several of whom complained about the city’s response. Among those church leaders was the Rev. Earl Harris, one of the IMC’s vice presidents and the longtime pastor of St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church.
On Sunday, March 16, St. Paul’s hosted a summit for regional civil rights leaders, union organizers, clergy members and other community leaders. The event was originally slated to discuss anti-union measures in the state legislature, but, by the time it arrived, Sullivan’s arrest had become part of the program. “Come Hear the Community Response to the Unprecedented Handling of a Community Leader Bishop A.E. Sullivan of the IMC,” one event poster said.
At the summit, a long succession of speakers took to the podium, including Rick Bloomingdale, the president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, several local pastors, and Jerry Mondesire, the president of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP. (Mondesire has since been suspended, following an inquiry into his alleged financial mismanagement of his chapter.) State Rep. Patty Kim, whose district includes Harrisburg, and who meets regularly with Mayor Papenfuse, offered a word of support for Sullivan that was noticeably hedged: “I wish he wasn’t the one to be an example of a slum landlord.”
Harris, when he spoke, described the mayor’s actions as “bullying.” He worked up to a climactic conclusion, urging people to translate their anger into political action. “We need to band together, we need to raise finances together, we need to make sure that this man gets the message that he will never do this again,” he said. “And if he keeps this attitude, if he doesn’t change it, we need to drive him out of office!” The crowd erupted with applause.
Two weeks later, I attended a lunchtime strategy meeting in the basement of St. Paul’s. Following Sullivan’s arrest, a group calling itself the Coalition for Social Justice of Greater Harrisburg had begun to meet regularly, to discuss possible actions in Sullivan’s case and, according to its Facebook page, to more broadly “affect social change.” Harris and Sullivan were there, along with Reggie Guy, of the MLK Leadership Development Institute, a local non-profit. A circle of chairs had been set out at the foot of a small soundstage, and a group of 20 or so gradually filled them, including Sullivan’s daughter and mother and a couple of his parishioners.
Sullivan wore a maroon suit and glasses. He led an opening prayer, closing his eyes and rocking back and forth gently. Afterwards, while people filled their plates with food, I took a seat beside Sullivan and asked him about the history of the V.O.C.C. He didn’t have an exact date for when the church moved to 12th Street, saying it “started piecemeal,” but that it was “early on.” I asked about the circumstances that led to his founding a church, and he said he would have to speak with his legal counsel before answering any more questions. (Sullivan and his lawyers declined subsequent interview requests.)
Harris, wearing a sweater and blue jeans, approached the podium. He began by discussing a City Council hearing scheduled for that evening, during which the heads of fire, police and codes were supposed to discuss “standard procedure” for handling building violations. Questions about procedure had become a fixation for Sullivan’s supporters—the claim that he received unfair treatment depended on how such cases were normally handled. In particular, Harris took issue with what he described as Sullivan being brought to the scene and “posed” for the news cameras. As a local deacon had put it, speaking to a television crew during the March 16 summit, Sullivan had been made to “do the ‘perp walk,’ handcuffed and shackled.”
“We’ve never had an arrest handled like this,” Harris said. He insinuated that the mayor had some control over when the collapse occurred, noting that the timing of the arrest looked “preconceived.” “If you want someone to spend the night and the weekend, when do you arrest them? Friday night,” he said. (In fact, Sullivan was released early Saturday morning.)
Harris then linked Sullivan’s treatment to larger trends of injustice. He and other ministers had recently returned from a trip with local rabbis and high school students to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. He had been particularly moved, he said, by an exhibit called “Some Were Neighbors,” which emphasized the point that Nazi collaborators “were those that were complicit with their silence.” He then returned to Sullivan and the response from certain local ministers. “I’ve heard nothing from the downtown clergy. I’ve heard nothing from the Jewish community. I’ve heard nothing from the Roman Catholic community. I’ve heard nothing from the Lutheran community,” he said. “The silence has been deafening.”
Sullivan spoke next. His attorney was there, and there was a limit to what he could say, but he wanted to clear a few things up. He began by addressing something “lingering out there” about his past. In the month since his arrest, some outlets had reported on a guilty plea Sullivan had entered in 1998 for a harassment charge—a low-grade misdemeanor. “The inference was that it involved a woman,” Sullivan said. “And it did not involve a woman. I was protecting my child, and it was 16 years ago. And every father worth a grain of salt protects his child.” He suggested that people had dredged up his court record “as a way to fracture this community.”
Sullivan also wanted to discuss the breadth of his work outside the church. For many years, he said, his attention to his own affairs “went lacking” because he was “always being called on for everything else.” On top of being president of the IMC, pastoring his church and overseeing his global network, he had served as a vice president of the NAACP, as religious affairs chair for the state and on the governor’s advisory commission for African American affairs. “In all these different capacities and in other ways, I was always giving, giving, giving,” he said. When his wife passed away, he lost the “one person” who was looking out for him. “There was nobody right there on the scene to take care of my things,” he said. But, he added, “I was not just sitting around. I was fighting for everybody else, and a lot of my things did not get addressed.”
The discussion turned to local issues of social justice. The group talked about the need to accurately inform their community, especially young people. Sullivan noted—and “we keep saying it,” he said—that there was “no black newspaper, no black radio station, nothing of that.” It was hoped that the Coalition’s Facebook page could help fulfill that role. (The next day, the page posted a photo of the city’s new firefighter hires, along with a short article that included the line, “Don’t strain your eyes, there are no known African Americans or Hispanics in this group of fire recruits.”) Reggie Guy, of the MLK Leadership Development Institute, spoke at length, connecting Sullivan’s experience to what he perceived as a larger assault on minority power in the city. “We are gentrifying this community, and we are chasing people out,” he said.
Afterwards, I spoke with a young couple introducing themselves as the Davises, who sat against one wall with a baby in a car seat at their feet. The mother, Clarissa, had joined the V.O.C.C. in its beginnings, in the summer of 1999. Through Sullivan’s church, she said, she had come to know her purpose. She felt his arrest was a “very big injustice”: if there were anything he could have done to avoid the collapse, he would have done it. “He’s an impeccable man,” she said.
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After the meeting at St. Paul’s, I visited the demolition site. The downslope side of the building was completely intact, while the other half was torn wide open. Beyond a pile of bricks, lumber and split-face concrete blocks, you could see into the room where services must have been held. A drum set and a pair of pulpits remained onstage, beneath a large painting of a lake under a clear blue sky.
The demolition bid was awarded to Empire Services, a firm with an office in Reading, for $132,000. In the civil complaint, Sullivan says he obtained a qualified bid for $83,000, but the city claimed publicly that the job required specialized equipment, citing the church’s proximity to power lines and neighbors. At the site, an employee for Empire named Tony pointed out the massive excavator, which he said had a reach of 130 feet. “This thing was horrible,” he said of the building. “The trees were what was holding it together.”
A couple of guys drifted over. One of them, wearing a Standard Parking jacket and introducing himself as John, said he had lived in the neighborhood since 1973. Papenfuse had told me that, while he was going door-to-door during his campaign, residents in the area had “begged” him to address the church property. John now told me he was circulating a petition to get the city to knock down more structures. “I’d rather have empty lots than condemned houses,” he said. “How often do you drive through the suburbs and see a burned-out house?”
John lived next door to a rotting corner store that had been abandoned for around 10 years. Last year, some of the building’s windows had fallen out of their frames into his yard. “I got grandkids, man,” he said.
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That evening, April 1, City Council held its hearing to discuss the city’s procedures for violators of building codes. For Sullivan’s supporters, the hearing was bound to be a disappointment before it started. They had originally called for an inquiry into Sullivan’s arrest, hoping council would hear sworn testimony from the officials involved, as it is theoretically empowered to do under the city’s charter. But Neil Grover, the city solicitor, advised that the relevant statute was seldom used and possibly unconstitutional—it would involve council questioning people under oath about matters that might be pending litigation. Instead, as Grover and Council President Wanda Williams explained at the beginning of the hearing, council would simply ask about procedures in general, and not about Sullivan’s case.
The result was a stunted and often bizarre conversation, as council tried to phrase questions specific to Sullivan’s case in sufficiently general terms. Williams began by interviewing the police chief, Thomas Carter, who gave a brisk overview of the police department’s role in a building collapse: secure the area, assist fire and codes. Then Williams asked a question at the heart of the Sullivan case. “Chief, are we consistent in what we do for every violator throughout the city of Harrisburg?”
“I don’t know what you mean by that, ma’am,” Carter said.
“Well, there was some concern that there was an inconsistency in how we, um, attempt to prosecute, or what would you say, arrest the individual,” Williams went on. “Are we consistent when we have violators of building codes? Are we consistent in what we do and how we arrest them?”
“Yes.”
“And this process has been used with other violators?”
“Yes.”
“Other code violators?”
“Yes.”
Williams turned to fellow council members. “Any other questions?”
Five minutes later, Councilwoman Sandra Reid tried to pursue a similar line. After Sullivan’s arrest, it had come out that police had escorted him from his home to the site of the collapse. Afterwards, the city attributed this to Sullivan having a suspended driver’s license, but his supporters suspected an intention to deliver him to news cameras. “Have you ever been called on in your 25 years to take someone to a collapsed building?” Reid asked Carter.
Grover interrupted. “I think you’re now moving into where we are in the middle of the litigation in questions like that,” he said. He offered a rephrasing of the question: do the police ever transport someone with a suspended license when a matter between the person and police arises? But Reid passed on Grover’s suggestion and asked instead about “standard practice” when police show up at someone’s home and have a warrant for his arrest.
“Every situation’s different,” Carter said finally. “But to answer your question, without taking into consideration this situation here, basically, yes, when we go to someone’s house and we have warrants on them, we do charge them right there. But in this particular situation—”
“We can’t talk—I don’t want to talk about this particular situation,” Reid said. “I just want to know, if somebody has a warrant, do you generally arrest them at that time.”
“It depends on the situation,” Carter said.
Eventually, after several false starts, the conversation opened up, and council members began to ask about the blight problem in general. David Patton, the codes administrator, explained that the city’s condemned-buildings list included 364 properties, many of whose owners were “whereabouts unknown.” State law allows potential buyers to start a corporation with virtually no identifying information, and when owners use those corporations to purchase properties, there’s almost no way for codes to track them down. “They go to the corporations bureau, they list a vacant lot or building as an address, and they don’t have to list any principals, agents or fiduciaries,” Patton said. “So who’re we gonna go after?”
At the end of the hearing, during public comment, Rev. Harris stood up and remarked that council’s questions, which he thought were “exceedingly good,” had revealed “inequities in how laws and rules are administered to people.” He revisited his point from the lunch session, about Nazis and their silent collaborators. “They used tactics of humiliation and shame,” he said. “Sound familiar?”
Why has the notion that the mayor staged Sullivan’s arrest to shame him proven so hard to dislodge? The city, for its part, maintains there was nothing personal about Sullivan’s treatment. Papenfuse claims not to have even spoken with police the night of the collapse; the fire chief, Brian Enterline, told me that when codes gave him Sullivan’s name, he “didn’t even realize who it was.”
Yet the perception of a deliberate shaming has persisted. Perhaps, in part, it’s because Sullivan’s treatment had the effect a staged arrest would have aimed for. In an interview a week after the council hearing, Papenfuse suggested that the sequence of cause and effect surrounding the collapse couldn’t have been clearer. Days before it, he publicly pledged misdemeanor charges for negligent landlords. When the collapse happened, the police charged Sullivan accordingly. Afterwards, the city released its list of top violators, many of whom had since “quietly come forward to discharge their warrants.” If Sullivan’s treatment looked like “unprecedented” tough enforcement, perhaps that’s because it was. The new administration had sent the message that it was serious about conquering blight.
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In the weeks since the council hearing, Harris, the IMC and the MLK Leadership Institute have continued to keep the issue alive. On April 4, MLK hosted its annual “foot soldiers” dinner to honor regional civil rights leaders. Tickets cost $45 a head; proceeds, Guy told me, would be split evenly between Sullivan and the families displaced by the collapse of his church. (As of this writing, the IMC had made one donation, a down payment of around $2,000 towards a $4,200 electrical repair it had commissioned from an acquaintance of Guy’s.) Before dinner, Sullivan offered an invocation, and Harris gave a short speech, during which he said Harrisburg was “lucky and blessed” to face financial difficulties, problems in education, “soaring rates of STDs” and blight, “because only God can turn it around.”
On April 8, Harris joined two local rabbis at the Beth El Temple Uptown for a “Freedom Seder,” a shared Passover meal with roots in the Civil Rights era, during which blacks and Jews are urged to contemplate the meaning of freedom and slavery. (Sullivan was billed to co-lead the event, but wound up taking time off to recuperate following the stress of the collapse, Guy said.) Members of the IMC Revival Choir sang spirituals throughout the meal, including several verses of “We Shall Overcome”: “Black and white together, black and white together someday.”
At the end of the meal, I spoke to Guy in the hallway. The council hearing, he said, indicated that Sullivan’s treatment was “a sore that requires healing.” And, he added, it wasn’t just Sullivan. He urged me to consider two other recent issues: the school district, where Papenfuse had publicly called for the removal of the state-appointed recovery officer, and the Paxton fire station, which he had announced would close as a result of the firefighters’ new labor agreement. All of these events, Guy said, pointed to the mayor’s “impulsiveness and inability to sense the mood of his constituency.” “The mayor doesn’t get it,” he said.
I wondered if, conversely, Guy didn’t quite get Papenfuse. Since the moment he first spoke about Sullivan’s arrest, the mayor has been resolute that the city did the right thing, regardless of voters’ moods. “These charges are just the beginning,” Papenfuse said, at his initial press conference after the collapse. Since taking office, he has revamped the city’s in-house demolition team, assembled a task force on blight and embarked on a citywide housing strategy. He also has plans to resurrect a housing court, to remedy what he described as “inconsistent” enforcement by the district courts.
Patton, the codes administrator, says he feels his department is “gaining strength.” The city is slated to hire two additional codes officers this year; in the long-term, Patton also hopes it will assign a police investigator, who can access the state’s law-enforcement database, to building violations. (As a codes officer, Patton is barred from using the database, so he often resorts to Facebook and Google to track down delinquent owners.) Meanwhile, the merger of codes and police, which he credited to Papenfuse, had brought previously disparate efforts “under the same umbrella.” He said the move was emblematic of the mayor’s “government logic” approach—ensuring that people with a common purpose were coordinating their efforts. He was “extremely optimistic” about the mayor’s initiatives, he said. “You can see the electrification of everything here.”
