From 2017: Who was Frank Rizzo? Nearly 30 years after his death, Philadelphians still don’t agree.

In the debate over Rizzo's statue, Philadelphia grapples anew with tough questions. Was he a jackbooted tyrant, or a blue-collar hero who maintained order and looked out for the little guy?

Young and old Philadelphians are wrestling anew with a disagreement that has never been settled. Was Rizzo a jackbooted tyrant who went out of his way to punish black and gay people? Or was he the ultimate son of blue-collar South Philly, a big guy who used his clout to look out for neighborhoods of little guys?

It was his natural charisma, though, that pushed him into another stratosphere. Richard Sprague, the well-known lawyer, said he spent decades sharing meals with Rizzo, often inviting guests to meet the cop who would become an icon. John McNesby's father was a city police officer during Rizzo's heyday."Rizzo was all about fighting crime," said McNesby, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5."It was a whole different atmosphere. Was he a law-and-order guy? Yeah. Did he cut some corners? Probably. But the people at the top thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread."Perhaps because of that, Rizzo was often viewed in the city's black community as a force of oppression and fear.

In what some reports called a"police riot," 22 people were seriously injured and 57 arrested as officers pursued the students. David Kairys, a professor at Temple University Law School, was a civil rights lawyer who often clashed with Rizzo during the 1960s. The Philadelphia Police Department was at that time shooting unarmed people at twice the rate of the New York Police Department."We were more famous for police misconduct than for cheesesteaks," Kairys said.

The city lost 140,000 jobs during his two terms in office, and the population tumbled by more than 260,000. While some might well remember Rizzo as a grandfatherly figure who was happy to help find a government job for a friend or relative, the contracts he doled out to municipal unions helped launch the city's current pension crisis.

"If you talk to African Americans who were close to Rizzo, they would tell you he was clearly a guy who saw things right or wrong, with not a lot of gray in between," Williams said."It didn't matter if you were Italian American or African American."

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