I have (mostly) resisted the math when it comes to killings in the City of Brotherly Love so far this year, because it seemed too early in the year to draw conclusions based upon the numbers. January and February being winter months, when murders are normally less probable, seemed to me to be poorer indicators than they might be, but the city has reached early numbers which are staggering.

As of 11:59 PM EST on Monday, February 28^th, the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page reported that there had been 84 homicides in the city, compared to 77 on the same date in 2021, and 60 in 2020. There had also been 60 murders as of February 28^th in 2007.

That’s where the numbers start to get dicey: in 2007, Philadelphia finished the year with 391 homicides, while 2020 saw 499. In 2007, 15.35% of the year’s total killings were by the end of February, while in 2020, it was only 12.02%. 2007 was a reasonably normal year, while 2020 saw the beginning of the COVID-19 panicdemic pandemic and the death of the drug-addled convicted felon George Floyd in a legitimate arrest that went wrong, leading to the summer of fire and hate. In 2021, 13.70% of city homicides had been committed by February 28^th, very close to the midway point between the rates in 2007 and 2020.

The chart at the right shows the percentages of the murders in the city as of February 28^th by year, for every year since 2007, and they are all over the board. 2011 and 2014 saw over 18% of the homicides as having been committed by that date, while 2010, 2016, and 2020 saw percentages in the 12 to 13% range. The average works out to 14.52% as of the end of February.

If the average holds true, Philadelphia is on pace for 578.52 homicides in 2022, which would break last year’s all-time record of 562 by a 2.85% margin (for 578 murders) to 3.02% (for 579). If 2020’s percentage, the lowest on the chart, is the metric, it would be 698.84 killings, 613.14% if last year’s percentage turned out to be the number, but ‘only’ 448.96 if the highest percentage on the chart, 2011’s 18.71%. 449 homicides would still put 2022 into 5^th place since records were kept beginning in 1960.

For 2022 to see only 400 murders, a full 21.00% would have had to already have occurred, a number far higher than anything in the historical record, and for the final number to be 500, 16.80% of the homicides would have already happened.

I admit it: I can be a numbers geek at times, and numbers tell part of the story, but not the whole thing. And with three homicides just yesterday, as of 9:30 AM EST on Tuesday, March 1^st, there isn’t a single mention of any of the three homicides that occurred yesterday in the city on either the main page or the crime and justice page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website. To the editors of the Inquirer, which used to call itself a “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People.”

Instead, what we have is an “anti-racist news organization,” one which seems to be dedicated to reporting only those stories which cannot be seen as reflecting poorly on any minority group. The “public ledger” function has clearly gone, as the newspaper’s website main page maintains stories from several days ago, but can’t bring itself to mention that three murders occurred in the city yesterday.

Why? The Inquirer is very, very good at covering stories in which the victim was clearly an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or, most importantly, a cute little white girl. When Samuel Sean Collington, a Temple University student approaching graduation was murdered. Mr Collington was a white victim, allegedly by a black juvenile in a botched robbery. On December 2, 2021, the Inquirer published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him. Five separate stories about the case of a murdered white guy. The newspaper even broke precedent when it came to Mr Collington’s murder by including the name of the juvenile suspect in the case, and delving into his previous record.

Oh, it’s not as though the Inquirer doesn’t publish stories about black victims, at least when it comes to black victims who are ‘innocents’. The murder of Samir Jefferson merited two stories, and four stories about the killing of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes.^[1]I did note my suspicion that young Mr Stokes might not have been quite the innocent the Inquirer, and writer Anna Orso, made him out to be. A story is merited if the victim was a local high school basketball star, and cute little white girls killed get tremendous coverage: a search of the newspaper’s website for Rian Thal returned 4855 results! But for the vast majority of black victims, Inquirer coverage is a couple paragraphs, mostly in the late evening, and which have disappeared from the main page of the newspaper’s website by morning, if even that much.

Why? it’s simple: reporting about black bad guys getting killed by other black bad guys, in the words of the Sacramento Bee, “perpetuat(es) stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.” In her “apology to black Philadelphians and journalists,” publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes did not use those specific words, but the effect has been the same: no reporting of stories which might tell readers what they already know: that the vast majority of the murder victims, and their killers, in the City of Brotherly Love are black males who have been involved in the gang or criminal lifestyle.

This is what happens when the Inquirer, the third oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the country, goes from being a “public ledger” to worrying about being a “white newspaper” in a “black city.”

Philadelphia isn’t even a “black city.” The 2020 census found that just 38.3% of the city’s population were non-Hispanic black, and Hispanics, who can be either black or white, made up 14.9%. Between non-Hispanic whites, 34.3%, Asians, 8.3%, and “other groups,” 4.3%, the city is 46.9% non-black, and it doesn’t take a terribly large percentage of the Hispanic population being white to get the city to majority non-black. The non-Hispanic white population of the city have certainly declined, but they are hardly gone.

Those are just numbers, but that the newspaper called Philadelphia a “black city” underscores the problem; though highly segregated by neighborhood, Philly overall has a very ‘diverse’ — and I have come to hate that word — population. Today, by Miss Hughes order, the “Independent Newspaper for All the People” has become a newspaper for the “black city” that Philly really isn’t. In a time in which Philadelphia has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, and newspaper circulation is falling, how much sense does it make to tell half or more of the city’s population not to bother to subscribe?

Of course, the Inquirer isn’t just a Philadelphia newspaper; it serves the suburbs in a fairly large metropolitan area, and that area is very much majority white:

It seems as though Miss Hughes has told about 80% of the potential metropolitan area subscribers not to bother; the newspaper isn’t for them.

I am a big fan of newspapers, having been a paper boy starting in junior high school, delivering the Lexington Herald and Lexington Leader in my hometown of Mt Sterling, Kentucky. I used to, before retirement, pick up the dead trees edition of the Inquirer to take to the plant every day before work when I lived in the Keystone State, and I’m a digital subscriber even today, now that I have retired back to my home state. Being mostly deaf now, print media is important to me. And something I very much regret is seeing what was once one of the nation’s premier newspapers not only having gone downhill in terms of circulation — something happening to almost every print newspaper these days — but seemingly committing suicide by its editorial policies.