National Guard begins pulling out of Philadelphia as peaceful protests continue

• Peter Crimmins/WHYY
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  WHYY arts & culture reporter Peter Crimmins first became interested in radio in the fourth grade, when he hid a homemade, contraband crystal-diode radio in a shoebox and smuggled it into the Boy Scout summer camp.
  Subsequent radio projects were more successful. For eight years, Peter was the producer and host of a radio show about cinema — “Film Close-Ups” — on KALX in Berkeley, Ca., and was senior producer at Ben Manilla Productions in San Francisco (i.e. the paying gig). After wandering the freelance universe for a few years, he joined the WHYY staff. He rides his bike to work from South Philadelphia.

 Emma Lee / WHYY

The National Guard protects the Frank Rizzo statue in Philadelphia.

The National Guard has begun to pull out of Philadelphia, but they are not going far.

A spokesperson for Mayor Jim Kenney, Deanna Gamble, said the armed soldiers have begun to demobilize from the city.

“They will, however, remain in the area for the next few days in the event their support is needed again,” she added in an email.

The guard has been in Philadelphia for ten days at the city’s request to help other law enforcement in neighborhoods where looting took place, and to be posted around certain commercial corridors and government buildings, including the Philadelphia Police Department headquarters in Old City, during the prolonged period of protests.

They were also on hand when the Frank Rizzo statue was removed early in the morning last Wednesday.

WHYY is the leading public media station serving the Philadelphia region, including Delaware, South Jersey and Pennsylvania. This story originally appeared on WHYY.org.

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