Teddy Bear with Brass Balls

Unless you live in another area or you're living under a rock, you've probably heard quite a bit about the guy that shot and killed Philadelphia police officer Chuck Cassidy during a botched armed robbery last Tuesday. His name, they found out last week, is John Lewis, and they found him in a homeless shelter in Miami this morning.

I wouldn't have written anything about this, save for the revelation that Lewis was in the city as recently as Friday. With the largest police manhunt in Philadelphia history looking for him. Where was he before he hopped a bus for sunny Florida? Oh, hanging out in the Criminal Justice Center.

Wait, what? The Criminal Justice Center located two blocks away from LOVE Park? The same LOVE Park where Matt and I spent our lunch hour watching every politician in the city rain fire and brimstone down on this guy, imploring him to surrender himself to police. In what was supposed to have been an election rally, they instead spoke for roughly an hour about the shooting, the manhunt, and the level of violence in the city of Philadelphia. Meanwhile, every cop is combing the area, taking the wrong people into custody, harassing potential suspects three or four times a day, all while Lewis was hanging out picking his nose in the Criminal Justice Center down the street. Every description I've read about this guy in the newspaper and online has been that he's a big teddy bear - which means that either he has split personalities and one of them is this hard-ass killer that few people have met before last week, or else he's some super law-abiding citizen that shows up for his court dates even when everyone in the courthouse is out to arrest him.

Of course, that's not as ironic as this part: the commissioner of the Miami-Dade police department is former Philly commish and crime crusher John Timoney. His mug is on Philly.com now as his department looks quite good compared to that of current Philly P.D. Commissioner Sylvester Johnson's. Philadelphia cops didn't even know Lewis was on the bus to Miami until he was already halfway down the Eastern seaboard - and yet, Timoney's boys had the cuffs on Lewis within 48 hours of his arrival (yes, they were tipped by an employee at the shelter, but still.) A lot of people would like to see Timoney take his old job back here when Nutter takes office, and I can see that happening unless John is too attached to that warm weather to come back up north in January. Whatever the case, it's probably not good that a "teddy bear" like John Lewis was able to elude the largest manhunt ever administered by the Philadelphia Police Department last week, and one hopes that some sweeping changes will take place if they have a prayer of dealing with the crime problem around here in the near future.