After reporting last month that the city agreed to increase presence on the Schuylkill River Trail after a string of incidents, it appears things have gone back to status quo.
The recap: Runners and bikers began to discuss incidents of harassment on Facebook and a bunch of media outlets continued to spread the word. A police presence was placed on the Schuylkill River Trail after the media attention.
A little over a month later, Run215 founder Jon Lyons has been receiving an increase of personal Facebook messages about incidents reoccurring lately. In addition to hearing these stories, there are other problems that have been ignored after the chatter calmed down online. He also noticed the same street light has been out on the trail for the past month, which is one easy fix for the city.
Lyons expressed additional frustration after reaching out to Councilman Kenyatta Johnson’s office. After scheduling a meeting and a few reschedules, they later cancelled the meeting because the “situation was being handled”.
Lyons wants to work with City Council to create solutions. In response, he created a Facebook event (join it and invite your friends) to spread the word, since he does think that “solutions are possible”.
He includes 5 ways to suggest that City Council can address the issue:
(Editor’s note: With 4000+ runners strong on the Facebook group, this is the perfect opportunity to organize after school or similar programs on the trail.)
So what can you do to reach out to your City Council member? Here’s 3 ways:
All that info is online at Philadelphia City Council’s website. And when citizens start contacting their City Council rep, they start paying attention.
As Lyons says it best,
“Do you want Philly to be a first rate city? Let’s start acting like it.“
As a refresher from our last post:
Call 911. You must file a police report (and then stay for the cops to show up.) Unfortunately, it makes the police jobs difficult when incidents are NOT reported.
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