Killadelphia: Murder Rate Rises in Philly
In Philadelphia, the new year started much like the old one ended. Between Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning there were more than a dozen reported shootings and six murders.
For residents of the 14th and 39th Districts, this was nothing new. Both districts are among the city’s top ten for violent crimes.
Last week, as 2011 drew to a close, the year-end crime-statistics report secured the city an unenviable first, yet again: Not only was Philadelphia’s murder rate up, but Philadelphia once again leads the nation in per capita murders, with 21 murders per 100,000 residents. The next closest cities are Chicago, with a mere 15 murders per 100,000 residents and Dallas with 13.
Among the top ten most populous cities–Philadelphia is the fifth largest–the city not only has the highest murder rate, it also has the lowest murder closure rate.
City leaders were quick to point out that the 2011 rates were still lower than they were a decade ago. The Mayor and Police Commissioner preferred to look at the numbers from 2007, the year Mayor Nutter first took office, when the numbers were higher than in 2011.
But that spin was cold comfort to Philadelphians weary of the violence as well as of hearing their city referred to as “Kill-adelphia” by national news media. Violent crime has decreased throughout the U.S. in the past decade with an even bigger drop since 2006. But while murder rates were down in other major American cities, Philadelphia’s murder rate is up yet again, bucking the national trend.
One reason for the increase cited by Mayor Nutter last week is the abundance of guns in the city as well as the ready access to them, due to lax gun laws and the volume of straw purchases, where people without criminal records buy guns and sell them to felons. Nutter did not mention gang violence in his response to the new stats, but gangs remain an issue in the city.
According members of the local anti-violence group Mothers in Charge, which convened a motorcade protesting the violence on Dec. 30, guns are even being rented out for drive-by shootings in neighborhoods like North Philadelphia, Nicetown, Germantown and West Oak Lane.
At the swearing-in speech for his second term on Jan.2, Mayor Nutter was asked about the murder rate. He proffered additional statistics unknown to many Philadelphians. Nutter said nearly 75 percent of Philadelphia’s murder victims are black males as are more than 80 percent of the perpetrators. Nutter declared these statistics on Philadelphia’s violence “a local and national epidemic that is insufficiently discussed, let alone taken on.”
Nutter asserted that the new murder stats would be taken seriously, that foot patrols would be increased by 120 and that there would be more car patrols in areas of the city where violent crime is most prevalent. But according to the Mayor, one-third of the city’s budget is already being used for criminal justice spending. And Nutter noted that money is desperately needed for other services, like the city’s seriously troubled school district.
As the only black mayor of a top-ten city, Nutter is under significant pressure to combat a murder epidemic where the demographic of both victims and perpetrators is disproportionately black. Some of the discontent with Nutter’s first term as mayor was directly related to what many in the African-American community saw as over-reaching with his stop-and-frisk program and conversely, what others saw as not enough attention to the crime problem.
Thus, while the Mayor didn’t shirk the issue, for those living with the day-to-day violence, his suggestions and promises seemed like more lip-service to a dangerous reality for which there seems no actual solution and insufficient response to the breadth of the problem.
Germantown and West Oak Lane are two of the neighborhoods facing a dramatic upswing in shootings. The 14th and 39th Districts are both in the top ten districts for murders, attempted murders and other violent crimes in the city, but a recent spate of shootings over the holidays has put residents in those areas more on edge than usual.
A few days after Christmas a woman on Rittenhouse Street was shot in the face as she lay sleeping in her bed at home–a stray bullet had gone through her window. The two men responsible for the shooting, brothers, were the subjects of a manhunt. One was captured and the other turned himself in to police.
Last week in West Oak Lane, a 67-year-old man staggered into a hoagie shop bleeding from gunshot wounds. He said he’d been shot multiple times by a man he didn’t know. No suspects were arrested.
Another man was shot at Germantown and Haines and left in critical condition in the same week. Again, no suspects.
A mother shot and killed a man in West Oak Lane who was allegedly beating and robbing her son outside their apartment building. After reviewing the evidence, police determined the shooting was justified.
Grim as these crimes are, they are hardly unusual. A quick check of the police blotter for any given week in Philadelphia puts Germantown and Oak Lane in the top tier for murders and attempted murders in the city. Gunfire has been a constant in my lower Germantown neighborhood for the past 20 years. Wayne Avenue near Wayne Junction is often like the Wild West with random shooting at all hours.
One issue not discussed by the Mayor nor Police Commissioner Ramsey is the closure rate on cases, which at 60 percent, is much lower than either Chicago or Dallas. The Mayor also did not mention that he had promised to lower the murder rate in Philadelphia by between 30 and 50 percent when he took office. Those who remember that promise found the spin put on the new stats bothersome. (Some in the Mayor’s office said the stats were artificially skewed by the seven infants murdered by Dr. Kermit Gosnell at the abortion clinic in West Philadelphia. “Take those killings out and the numbers aren’t that bad.”)
The numbers are indeed that bad no matter how one spins them. Philadelphia has yet to find ways to either control the plethora of illegal guns in the city or alter the no-snitching “philosophy” that prevails in most of the cities more violent neighborhoods and which impedes the police in closing murder cases. In addition, the young black men who are the perpetrators of the majority of these killings have been raised on murder as a staple of daily life. Talk to anyone on the street in these high-risk neighborhoods and they can recite a list of victims of shootings, many of them resulting in death.
The Mayor adding some foot patrols and revving up the car details in some neighborhood hardly seems enough to address the rate and extent of the violence. That said, Nutter can’t fight this battle to keep Philadelphia’s young black men from killing on his own. We have a responsibility as members of this community to help staunch the bloodletting. The question for 2012 is, how and where do we start?
