Last week, we at PGN were honored with the Community Engagement and Enrichment Award at the Center City Crime Victim Services annual event. PGN was represented well by our director of advertising and marketing, Dan Calhoun.
We at PGN are honored and appreciate the notice of our efforts over the years to safeguard our community with information and advocacy. This is a crucial issue for our community. Our community suffers disproportionately on the issue of crime — hate crimes, random attacks and even murders, along with so many other crime-related issues.
From day one, this paper has worked in many fields to help ease or at least inform the community, from helping to organize the local businesses in the midtown area for the first 13th Street Business Association to the Washington Square Town Watch, which got its start running out of our offices. We worked with numerous district attorneys and, at times, took D.A.s to court. Same with the police department. Our latest way to highlight this issue is our regular feature, Gayborhood Crime Watch, which came from a suggestion from Fran Price and the Philadelphia LGBT police liaison committee.
We are at times victims and we must learn to protect ourselves, and PGN has been a leader in this field, from the 13th Street Business Association in the 1970s until today, as we still are in pursuit of the truth about what happened to Nizah Morris on that fateful night in 2002.
The fact that Center City Crime Victim Services recognized the work of the PGN staff through the years is truly an honor. We thank them and are grateful for it — and we promise to continue to live up to that honor.
Mark Segal, PGN publisher, is the nation’s most-award-winning commentator in LGBT media. He can be reached at [email protected].