“We demand that everyone who talks to us, or writes for us, or takes pictures for us, or makes merchandise
for us, should live in our world of extravagant expectations… We have become so accustomed to our
illusions that we mistake them for reality. We demand them. And we demand that there be always more of
them, bigger and better and more vivid. They are the world of our making; the world of the image.”
-Daniel Boorstin, The Image
While Boorstin may have written these words more than forty years ago, his perception of that “thing”—the
“image”—resonates no less today than it did then. Boorstin’s commentary was remarkably prescient, articulating
the image as a “pseudo-ideal…synthetic, believable, passive, vivid, simplified, and ambiguous,”
visible public `personality’ as distinguished from an inward private `character.’”
Despite the relative unease evoked
by the suggestion that the image, artificial in its construction, has in fact become reality, that “the shadow has
the importance of the image to everyday life is indisputable. Effective self-presentation is
rooted in the language of images.
The image of the Philadelphia Police Department upon the eve of Bill Green’s election to the office of
mayor of Philadelphia in November 1979 was a tarnished one. As a reporter for the Daily News claimed in 1988—if
the department’s image was to be charted, “the line would scrape the bottom during the four years [Frank] Rizzo
served as commissioner—from 1967 to 1971. The line would edge up during the eight O’Neill years [following
Rizzo’s tenure as commissioner], but only slightly.”
By August 13, 1979, the U.S. Justice Department had filed a
civil rights suit against the city and 20 of its officials, including former Mayor Rizzo, for violations against the basic
constitutional rights of Philadelphia’s citizens,
a suit Virna Canson, director of the Western Regional Office of the
NAACP, proclaimed was “long overdue.”
Interpreted by many as just another piece of evidence reinforcing the
frequent claim that police brutality and corruption were widespread and systematized within the Philadelphia Police
Department, the suit, though eventually thrown out of court, nonetheless reaffirmed the city’s dire need for reform.
Green, many hoped, would be the man to institutionalize this reform—to rejuvenate the city that had lost 90,000
jobs between 1972 and 1980, was mired in fiscal crisis, and characterized by strained race relations. It was a tall
order to fill.
1
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1961, 1987): 5-
6.
2
Boorstin 185.
3
Boorstin 187.
4
Boorstin 204.
5
Tom Schmidt, “Tucker’s Tenure Set High Mark in Department History.” Philadelphia Daily News [Electronic
version] May 26, 1988: Local, p.03.
6
Sal Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America (Philadelphia: Camino Books, 1993): 241.
7
“Brutality Suit `Long Overdue’” Sun Reporter (1968-1979) [Electronic version] San Francisco, Calif.: August 23,
1979 Vol. XXXVI, Iss. 34, p.2.
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Convention