A look back at the decade’s biggest stories in Pa.

A battleground state in every sense

• Ed Mahon
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  Ed Mahon comes to Spotlight PA from PA Post, where he covered state politics and policy, produced radio stories that were broadcast on public media stations throughout the state and on NPR’s national newscasts, and co-wrote a weekday newsletter. Prior to joining PA Post, Ed worked for six years as an investigative and political reporter for the York Daily Record, part of the USA Today Network. His reporting on failures in Pennsylvania’s system for protecting domestic abuse victims was a finalist in the national 2018 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists in the local reporting category. He was also part of a team whose coverage of the criminal justice system, including the aggressive use of civil asset forfeiture by York County prosecutors, received the 2018 G. Richard Dew Award for Journalistic Service from the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association. Before joining the York Daily Record, Ed covered K-12 education at the Centre Daily Times in State College and worked as a stringer for suburban sections of The Philadelphia Inquirer. He grew up in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.

 AP Photo/Julie Jacobson

Christina Buckless of Baltimore, Md. takes photos of her friends while celebrating New Year's Eve on Times Square Thursday, Dec. 31, 2009, in New York. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

AP Photo/Julie Jacobson

Christina Buckless of Baltimore, Md. takes photos of her friends while celebrating New Year’s Eve on Times Square Thursday, Dec. 31, 2009, in New York. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

Some people don’t believe that a new decade begins a midnight tonight. I think those people are wrong — a year ending with a zero should mark the beginning of a decade.

Either way, I’ve been asking people to share their thoughts about the biggest political and policy stories of the past 10 years in Pennsylvania. (Feel free to chime in via our Listening Post feature).

Now, enter our time machine (pretty popular movie fare this decade) and look back at the teens:

Political shifts: Republicans rode the Tea Party wave to take control of the state House in the 2010 election, with the GOP keeping both chambers of the legislature for the rest of the decade. Democrat Tom Wolf broke the state’s two-term tradition, when, in 2014, he became the first challenger in modern history to defeat an incumbent Pennsylvania governor. Democrats won control of the state Supreme Court in 2015. And in 2016 Donald Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win the state since George H.W. Bush did so in 1988.

Corruption: The decade saw many elected officials receive criminal convictions for corruption of one kind or another, including former state House Speaker John Perzel, former state Supreme Court Justice Joan Orie Melvin, former Attorney General Kathleen Kane and two former state treasurers, Rob McCord and Barbara Hafer.

Failures to protect children: John Finnerty, a reporter for CNHI News Service, highlighted the Jerry Sandusky / PSU child sex abuse scandal and priest abuse revelations in his look back at the past 10 years. And as one person noted on Twitter, the kickback scheme in Luzerne County known as “kids for cash” stretched into the 2010s. (Finnerty also put the natural gas boom, the opioid epidemic and Trump’s win in his top five.)

Oddities: The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Stephanie Farr looked at some of the weirdest stories of the decade. I forgot about many of them, including the hitchhiking robot that was beheaded in 2015. (Also, warning: I read most of the list over my lunch break — which I regretted after reading some of the entries.)

Other lists: Back when the decade started, I worked at the Centre Daily Times. So I was especially interested in Sarah Paez’s look at the big news there. Unsurprisingly, the Sandusky/Penn State scandal made the list. But Paez’s story also explains why five new high-rise apartments and mixed-use buildings have gone up in State College in recent years. And don’t miss PennLive’s piece on the biggest Penn State stories of the decade.

Best of 2019: The staff at PA Post, WITF and StateImpact Pennsylvania list all their favorite books, podcasts, movies etc. from 2019.

Best of the rest

Craig Mitchelldyer / AP Photo

Portland Police Chief Danielle Outlaw poses for a photo in Portland, Ore, on Aug. 5, 2019. (AP Photo/Craig Mitchelldyer, File)

• Danielle Outlaw will become the first black woman to lead the Philadelphia Police Department, which has about 6,500 officers, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports. The Inquirer looks into controversies she faced while leading the Portland, Ore., department, including how the force there handled clashes between alt-right groups and Antifa, and a decision to clear a protest camp that surrounded an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.

• BillyPenn’s Max Marin and Layla A. Jones also took a look at Outlaw’s background and the challenges she’ll face in Philly. Outlaw is scheduled to replace the interim commissioner on Feb. 10.

• The Philadelphia Tribune notes that Outlaw is the mother of two sons and has a two-decade career in law enforcement. As such, “Outlaw said she understood both the fear and suspicions that communities associate with the badge, and the rationale behind police policies and procedures.”

• The Inquirer described Philadelphia’s police department as “plagued by scandal.” The Oregonian, the hometown paper for Outlaw’s current city, called Philly’s PD “beleaguered.” In a statement, Philly Mayor Jim Kenney said he’s confident Outlaw will “implement reforms with urgency, so that racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination are not tolerated.”

• NBC Philadelphia says the city’s people have high expectations for the new police chief. “We are glad that it’s an African American woman,” Solomon Jones of the Rally for Justice Coalition said. “We are glad that the mayor listened to us on that issue. We are willing to give this person a shot. We are willing to give her all the help that she needs from the community because our lives are at stake.”

• Dauphin County commissioners took a bold stand in November, signaling that they would defy a state requirement to select a new voting machine. And then on Monday they … approved buying new voting machines. PA Post’s Emily Previti covered the meeting.

• There was a church shooting in Texas over the weekend, and a terrible knife attack at a rabbi’s home in New York. With security at places of worship top of mind, LNP looks at how Lancaster County congregations protect themselves.