As we have noted many times, Philadelphia has been seeing a huge surge in homicides, and Mayor Jim Kenney wants no part, no part at all, of accepting responsibility. District Attorney Larry Krasner is also famed for passing the buck, while Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, the Mayor’s hand-picked stooge, is far more concerned about inclusion and diversity than enforcing the law. To be fair, with Let ’em Loose Larry not seriously prosecuting most crimes, Commissioner Outlaw is really kind of helpless.

First, the math. With at least five homicides reported on Saturday and Sunday, Philly is sitting at at least 369 homicides as of the 247^th day of the year, for a killing rate of 1.4939 per day, which works out to a projected 545.28 killings for the year. However, an alternate way of projecting the numbers, using 2021’s record-setting pace, gives us 574.52 projected murders.

Let’s tell the truth here: the vast majority of homicides in the City of Brotherly Love are perpetrated on black victims by black killers. As bad as Philadelphia’s homicide problem is, it is very much a black problem, while white Philadelphians see themselves as much safer.

We have noted that the homicide rate in Philly came down under previous Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, and that, as of August 9^th, Philly had seen more homicides this year than any full year under Mayor Nutter and his staff.

Mr Nutter, like Mayor Kenney, is a liberal Democrat. Mr Krasner is a hard-left Democrat, sponsored, to the tune of $1.45 million by George Soros, while the previously elected District Attorney, Seth Williams, was also a liberal Democrat, though maybe not quite as far left as Mr Krasner. Mr Williams had his own legal problems, and was forced to resign after a federal conviction, for which he spent 2½ years in federal prison.

Every elected official in the chart to the left is a Democrat; Democrats outnumber Republicans about 6 to 1 in registration in Philly, and the last Republican mayor left office while Harry Truman was still President.

But if they’re all Democrats, and mostly liberal ones in a chart which begins in 2007, there has been a clear and dramatic difference in how the city’s leadership has performed when it comes to homicides. Mr Nutter inherited 391 murders from his predecessor, John Street, and while the glide path was certainly uneven, the number of killings was reduced to under 300 in his last three years in office. There was a dip of three murders in Mr Kenney’s first year, but then the killings increased rapidly, over 300 in Mr Kenney’s second year, and by the third year were higher than in any of his predecessor’s eight years.

While Mr Krasner specifically campaigned on reducing sentences, not pursuing convictions for certain minor’ offenses, and investigating the Police Department, there had been some sentence reductions in Mr Williams’ last few years as well.

While pondering all of this, an uncomfortable thought popped into my head, and I will admit to not knowing the least offensive way to put it, but here it is: when dealing with a murder problem that is very heavily skewed toward Philadelphia’s black population, is it possible that Messrs Nutter, Williams and Ramsey, who are all black men, were simply paid more attention to by the city’s black community than Messrs Kenney and Krasner, who are both white, while Commissioner Outlaw is black, but is also a woman? Is it possible that the previous city leadership were simply more respected by the black community than the people currently in office?

I do not know the answer to the questions I just posed, nor do I know how one would go about researching them, but they are really questions which should be asked.