Congratulations to Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw: the City of Brotherly Love has, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Monday, July 18, 2022, hit 300 murders for the year!

Of course, the city is still behind last year’s pace, but not by much, not by much, just 1.32% down from last year’s 304 killings as of the same date.

Monday was the 199^th day of the year, so Philly is seeing 1.5075 murders per day, which projects out to 550 for the year. Calculated another way, taking the percentage of total murders for the year compared to 2021, I can also project 553 homicides.

But those numbers might be a touch low. As I noted on July 9^th, Philly saw a drop off in the homicide rate between July 9^th and the end of the Labor Day holiday weekend last year, but, at least in the last ten days, I have seen no evidence of such a drop-off this year.

For four straight years, 2013 through 2016, Philly saw fewer than 300 murders for the entire year.

As of 8:32 AM EDT, The Philadelphia Inquirer hasn’t even noticed, nor are there any stories on either the website main page or crime page.

Update! As of 1:04 PM EDT, the Inquirer still has nothing on hitting 300 murders.

Update! The Inky has gone all cool, and rather than putting time stamps on their articles, you see things like “Updated an hour ago”. Well, it’s 6:38 PM EDT, and “updated an hour ago,” Chris Palmer and Mensah H Dean wrote the Inquirer article finally noting that yeah, there have been 300 killings in the City of Brotherly Love.

Three hundred people have been killed in homicides in Philadelphia in fewer than 200 days this year, according to police — a grim tally that has been fueled by an alarmingly violent July, during which 43 people have died in just 2½ weeks.

Police said the year’s 300th killing occurred just before 10 p.m. Monday in West Philadelphia, when 18-year-old Lameer Boyd was fatally shot while standing on the 500 block of West 52nd Street. Investigators recovered more than 50 rounds at the scene from three guns, said Chief Inspector Frank Vanore, and detectives were seeking video and other evidence to learn more about the crime. No one was arrested.

The killing meant the city has reached 300 annual homicides at a rate surpassed only by last year, when the troubling milestone was reached on July 16. By the end of 2021, police said 562 people had been slain in homicides, the highest total in at least half a century.

Few other years in recent memory come close to rivaling the city’s current level of gun violence; as recently as 2017, the city recorded fewer than 300 homicides for the entire year.