Phillyist Playlist: Bob Dylan at the Liacouras Center
What to Do with Your Transpass
Jonathan Safran Foer at the Free Library
Constitution Center Invites Artists to Revisit WPA
Yo, Philly in the News
It's official. The No Duh of the Year Award goes to SEPTA. For a number of reasons, of course, but the one that got our goat this morning was decision to remove the malt liquor ads from two buses. According to the Inquirer, SEPTA officials have concluded that the giant, tacky Colt 45 ads plastering the buses might be a bad idea given the hold violence has on our city. To that we say, Obvs.
Let's get real here. What neighborhood do you think these buses were in? You can bet your ass it wasn't Rittenhouse.
This Phillyist was visually assaulted by one late last week, on the corner of Girard and Broad. Our blood boiled as it cruised by the BP Station on the corner, headed deeper into North Philadelphia. Because people who are shooting each other at numbers higher than we can count really need a giant reminder of that legal substance which likely contributes to the death toll.
We're glad the ads are coming down, but their existence in the first place was bad form. Enjoy your $600K, SEPTA. That money's dripping in blood.
Image credit: Flickr user noahwesley
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
You're kidding right? I mean an ad for guns is one thing, but an ad for beer is another. Is it possible to stop ragging on SEPTA for one f-ing day in this city? Now, by way of advertising on TWO buses in the entire war trin city SEPTA is getting blamed for inspiring violence. Well lets see if the murder rate drops in North Philly now. SEPTA is an easy target. Perhaps we should start to ask how each one us can HELP the situation instead of blaming a struggling, under funded, but otherwise well run transit authority.
Not kidding. At all. Chew on this:
---
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Research has shown a strong correlational relationship between alcohol and violent crime. A greater density of alcohol outlets is associated with higher rates of assaultive violence, independent of other factors, according to a 1995 study in the American Journal of Public Health.
In more than 50 percent of all assaults and homicides, the assailant is under the influence of alcohol, according to a 1990 study in The International Journal of the Addictions. And victims of crime are also influenced by alcohol. More than a dozen studies indicate that 50 percent or more of homicide victims had been drinking at the time of their murder, states a 1993 Alcohol Health & Research World report.
--
So no. I don't take it lightly. Although I do agree with you that we should all ask how we can help.
@ pencopal-
beer and guns don't kill people---people kill people. You can't blame alcohol, or the media or whatever other crutch you have for the cities crime problem. Drunk or not, they'll still kill each other...they might just have better aim.
Your statistics are irrelevant. If the ads were for $500 dollar bottles of red, no one would be complaining.
I think public transit is a much better place for booze ads anyway. It implies "get drunk, take the bus," as opposed to billboard ads that imply "you and the captain [Morgan's that is] can make it happen while driving down the interstate."
BTW-
way to go from which may/may not border on truth:
"that legal substance which likely contributes to the death toll."
to totally outlandish:
"Enjoy your $600K, SEPTA. That money's dripping in blood."
Nothing like a FOX News worthy exaggeration to push your propaganda. The money is far from dripping in blood [SEPTA didn't take payments to run people down in the street...yet...]
It's quite clean and paying for needed improvements.
Cheers!
Pencopal your argument would be stronger if SEPTA was selling booze. An advertisement is not an alcohol outlet and the study cited says nothing about advertising from what I can tell. The study appears to be from 1998, not 1995. See NIH citation.
Advertising doesn't work anymore, anyway!!!!!
I would venture to say that violence is somehow core to American culture. We love us some guns. We tend to solve alot of our problems with violence (the current administration) We shoot first ask questions later. Let God sort the our the bodies. We are in the middle of spiritual crisis. No, I'm talking in the Christian sense, but something much, much deeper.
Re: spiritual crisis. I agree. At its core, to me, is a lost sense of interconnectedness.