The Philadelphia Experiment: A Theory About Conspiracy Theories
By: Robert Skvarla
Tags: Philadelphia, Conspiracy Theories, Conspiracy

I had an interesting conversation with a friend recently. On Wednesday, August 14, 2019, a shootout broke out between the Philadelphia Police Department and a man armed with an assault rifle in the Nicetown-Tioga section of Philadelphia. I live in Philly and follow local social media religiously, so I decided to dive headfirst into news about the event. Both on the date in question and in the days that followed, Philly Twitter was alight with bits and pieces of information sourced from local media or ripped from police scanners and friends of friends in law enforcement. This isn’t unusual. Anytime an event like this happens people want the most up-to-date information possible and they want to feel like they’re contributing in some way. But in following the story, I noticed something else was happening.

The day after the standoff Twitter user @JFULLSTRENGTH shared a video of two police officers tending to a wound one of the officers had suffered in the course of the shootout.

In the video, we see the two rushing to a police car, one grabbing something out of the passenger side, and then the same officer dousing the second’s arm with a liquid. JFULLSTRENGTH surmised this was evidence of something nefarious: “Did he actually shoot six officers? Because, here is a video of a Philadelphia police officer, spraying himself with fake blood.”

The video is obviously not evidence of crisis actors or staged injuries. Other Twitter users were quick to point out that the first officer was tending to the second’s wound by pouring iodine on it, while others shared HD versions of the video which clearly showed the second officer bleeding before any liquid spilled. That didn’t stop JFULLSTRENGTH’s comment from going viral; it now has almost 40,000 retweets and 71,000 likes. I myself quote tweeted it to point out how bad information can spread across social networks. This set off an exchange about the nature of conspiracies and the popularity of conspiracy theories.

Before we begin, some background: Philadelphia is one of the oldest cities in the United States. Like all old cities, it has a history shaped as much by its longevity as by any individual event — on a long enough timeline, eventually, conspiracies (or events that appear as such) are bound to occur. But Philly’s conspiracies intersect at a unique point between politics and race. On August 31, 1970, Police Commissioner (and later Mayor) Frank Rizzo led a squadron of officers to the Columbia Avenue headquarters of the Black Panther Party and raided the building, forcing Black Panther members to strip and walk out into the street semi-nude. Rizzo, a product of a specific time and place, had a history of antagonizing the city’s communities of color, particularly its black residents. So the idea that the Philly PD might have been targeting a black liberation group based on its presence wasn’t entirely unfounded.

In 1974, investigators uncovered over 400 officers taking bribes and other kinds of kickbacks. Claims of corruption plagued the department again in 1981, 1995, and 2009. It seems that every decade has brought a new scandal. The latter two, though, involved groups of officers targeting black and immigrant communities for extortion. Again, it’s not hard to understand why, in light of the department’s history of a lack of accountability, some Philadelphia residents might look upon the motives of the department suspiciously.

And, of course, there was the 1985 MOVE bombing, wherein the Philadelphia Police Department engaged in an hours-long shootout with another black liberation group, MOVE, that culminated in the department dropping two one-pound bombs on MOVE’s compound. The bombing ignited a fire that burnt down 65 homes in the immediate area and killed 11 MOVE members. Mind you, the department had already been in a shootout with MOVE once before, in 1978, and some believed the bombing may have been payback.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

To be clear: the Philadelphia Police Department did not stage anything in the video. JFULLSTENGTH’s take is horribly misguided. I bring these events up not to attack the Philadelphia Police Department or imply any wrong-doing but to illustrate why many in the city harbor a strong distrust for the department and the institution of policing as a whole. The pervasiveness of corruption throughout the department’s history has helped to shape its image in local communities, and contributed to Philadelphia’s image more generally. Right or wrong, the city consistently ranks as one of the “most dangerous” big cities in the United States, and one of the reasons for that is an image of lawlessness among members of law enforcement. While things are getting better, there is still a divide between the department and the communities it serves.

I also mention this because it provides context for the exchange I had with my friend. His concerns were ones I’ve heard echoed in the past but were unable to connect to the city’s history until recently. They also reflect how conspiracy theories take shape, by whom they’re created, and the extent to which they may or may not be valid.

After I quote tweeted the video, my friend offered an interesting perspective on the theory: while it was not a “staged” event, it may have formed out of a rational distrust of the Philly PD. I responded with ambivalence because on a fundamental level he wasn’t wrong. Belief in conspiracies is not in and of itself illogical. They happen. It’s the individual beliefs that are suspect. So, distrust of institutions and groups, especially those with a history of corruption, is rational. Our government has engaged in conspiracies at every level. It’s just that the individual beliefs that form out of that milieu extend beyond the bounds of acceptability more often than not.

It’s the difference between believing actors within the government conspire and work together to maintain power to push specific policies out of self interest, which they do, and believing in a shapeless, vague deep-state which has no goals beyond opposing whoever challenges that power, a view held on both the left and the right. Or, for example, it’s within the realm of plausibility that a police department might juke its stats to make a city seem safer than it is (i.e. under-report violent crimes, overemphasize certain kinds of arrests, etc.). In fact, many do: in 1998, the Justice Department began looking into crime statistics reported by the Philly PD, and in 2000, their investigators concluded that the department intentionally under-reported crimes like homicide and rape. That’s a real conspiracy. But it’s not realistic to believe officers used stage blood to make a shooter appear to be a bigger threat. Beliefs like the latter examples in both of these scenarios reduce complex chains of interactions into surface level observations pitting good against evil. So why do these latter examples persist?

Eventually, our back-and-forth extended into a discussion of even wilder conspiracies, and I began to understand why, in certain circumstances, the irrational becomes rational. We touched on the role the CIA may have had in spreading crack cocaine into communities of color and FDR’s “advance knowledge” of Pearl Harbor. The common thread among these was that they contained some formal truth. The CIA supported the Contras both directly and indirectly during their conflict with the Sandinistas, and the Contras were responsible for trafficking cocaine from Nicaragua into the United States, but there are no concrete connections tying the CIA and the Contras to Southern California drug dealers. And while FDR may have been aware that Japan was planning an attack on a U.S. naval base, the specifics are unclear and historians are quick to state he believed the attack was slated for the Philippines and not Hawaii.

Conspiracy theories exist at the nexus between fact and fantasy. They build off real events to connect disconnected or unusual ideas to create simple, concise explanations. In this sense, they’re not irrational. Narcotics officers might actually conspire to target immigrant bodegas owners for cash payouts because those immigrants won’t report the crimes to other officers working for the same department. This has nothing to do with a shootout involving police officers in the same city a decade later, but if enough stories like it appear over time then it becomes easier for tenuous links between the police and conspiracies to pop up because distrust in the institution has become strong enough that disillusioned groups are willing to believe anything negative. Conspiracy theories are often ideas created by groups which hold no power or believe their connection to power is fading, as a way to make sense of why they lack agency over their lives.

In this case, a theory that Philly police staged an aspect of the shootout for some political goal seems entirely irrational at first glance, but it becomes more attractive when you place it in a much longer timeline of events involving the department and its interactions with marginalized groups. Discussions of conspiracy theories frequently lack insight into the groups that gave birth to the beliefs. Individual theorists are easy targets because they can be branded as crazy. Occasionally, this is true. However, belief in conspiracy theories isn’t uncommon. Most Americans now believe in at least one conspiracy theory. The dividing line is the beliefs themselves. The kinds of theories one subscribes are a result of their position in society; the middle class and white Americans are more likely to believe that immigration is a tool enacted by elites to replace them, while Americans of color tend to believe the government is attempting to commit genocide through specific diseases like AIDs or policies which seek to limit population growth. These ideas exist exclusive to their groups precisely because they evolved over time to account for historical events and social interactions: demographic shifts are taking place in the United States and white Americans are now a smaller percentage of the population proportionally, and the U.S. government has conducted unethical experiments on black Americans. That doesn’t mean the individual beliefs are valid or rational, just that belief itself can be a kind of defense mechanism.

It’s easy to write off a single observation from a stranger as either simple ignorance or bad faith. That allows for the social context behind conspiratorial thinking to evaporate. It becomes a problem of the individual. We don’t have to think over why others might latch onto the idea. They don’t know better! They’re trolls! But the conditions under which these ideas form are more complex. They’re sometimes born of real pain. When we account for this, it becomes harder to write every theory off. We’re forced to ask uncomfortable questions of ourselves. Why do people believe such obvious lies? Why are they scared? The Philadelphia Police Department did a commendable job in protecting the lives of hostages, officers, and even the shooter, but distrust still lingers. There are enough examples in the department’s recent history to fuel theories for years to come. Some will be ridiculous, others less so. Understanding the social context behind how they formed will be important in stopping them from spreading.