I had noted on Twitter that the City of Brotherly Love was exceeding its one-short-of-the-record homicide rate for 2020, though we aren’t even through January, the coldest month of the year, and that The Philadelphia Inquirer hadn’t even noticed it:

The current homicide per day rate, in the coldest month of winter, is even higher than December's 1.48 homicides per day. Yet the @PhillyInquirer has zero stories about city homicides on its website main page.

— Dana Pico (@Dana_Pico on gab.com) (@Dana_TFSJ) January 28, 2021

I did see an article on the Inquirer’s website yesterday evening, noting that two men had been murdered in a bodega:

Two men fatally shot in North Philly store

by Mensah M. Dean | January 28, 2021 | 6:17 PM EST

Two men were fatally shot in a North Philadelphia store Thursday in what police are calling a double homicide.

Shortly before 1 p.m., police were called to the Al-Madinah Traders store in the 3600 block of Germantown Avenue, which sells jewelry, perfume, books, and other items. Police said passersby had found the men dead inside the store.

Police did not release the names of the victims, but described one as a man in his 40s who had been shot two times in the face, and the other as a man shot once in the head. His age was not given. Both were pronounced dead on the scene by medics.

As of Thursday evening, police had made no arrests and had not recovered weapons, they said.

The article author continued to note that the number of homicides was well above the same date in 2020, and that two other men had been murdered that morning, on in Kensington and one in the Wissinoming neighborhood.

So, that was four people sent early to their eternal rewards on Thursday, so I figured that I’d see 45 as the total when I checked the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crimes Statistics page this morning. I was wrong; it wasn’t 45, it was 46!

That’s compared to 35 slaughtered by January 28, 2020, a 31.4% increase.

As noted two days ago, the Editorial Board of the Inquirer blamed the Police Commissioner, the ironically named Danielle Outlaw, for the Police Department’s response to the #BlackLivesMatter protests. The Editorial Board thought that Miss Outlaw’s response was too harsh; I thought it too lenient.

But what the Editorial Board did not do was blame the huge jump in homicides on Commissioner Outlaw, or Mayor Jim Kenney, or District Attorney Larry Krasner, the three top law enforcement officials in Philadelphia.

People think of Chicago under its ridiculous Mayor, Lori Lightfoot, as the nation’s murder capital. In 2020, the Windy City saw 769 homicides, 270 more than Philadelphia. But Chicago has a population of 2,710,000, while Philly’s is 1,579,000. Crime rates are compared by rate per 100,000 population, and that leaves Chicago with a homicide rate of 28.38 per 100,000.

Philadelphia laughs and says, “We can beat that!”, checking in with a murder rate of 31.60 per 100,000.

As of January 25^th, Chicago had 44 homicides, compared to Philly’s 37, but the disparity in population means that the City of Brotherly Love was far ahead.

New York City saw a huge rise in homicides as well, from 319 in 2019 to 462 last year, 44.8%, fewer than Chicago’s or Philadelphia’s, even though its population is several times that of the latter two cities.

Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York is on the fast track back to the Hell that Mayor Rudy Giuliani cleaned up, and even the liberal Michael Bloomberg didn’t trash. What New York and Chicago and Philadelphia all need is solid, conservative, no f(ornicating) nonsense mayors, district attorneys and police commissioners who will actually fight crime.