For three years, Sonja Bingham, a 55-year-old mother of three, started every day the same way: with a broom. At dawn, she would come out to sweep away the damage from the previous night—the syringes, the fentanyl baggies, the cigarette butts, and the half-eaten sandwiches. And sometimes as she swept, she couldn’t help but think that the city of Philadelphia would’ve never let this fly during the crack epidemic.
“They threw our black asses in jail,” says Bingham, who’s speaking to me in her living room where there’s a TV streaming the live feed of four security cameras placed throughout her property.
