While I normally check the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page in the morning, I don’t on the weekend, because “statistics reflect the accurate count during normal business hours, Monday through Friday.” But I did check it today, after seeing an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about two more people being killed. The page still shows the 132 listed as having been killed in Philly at the end of April 8^th, but noted that at the end of Friday, April 9^th, there had been an even 100 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love on that date in 2020.

2 dead, 8 shot in violent overnight in Philly

Two of the five shootings involved a total of three victims on their way to the store. And a triple shooting occurred at an illegal after-hours club, police said.

By Diane Mastrull | Saturday, April 10, 2021

Two men are dead and six others injured in a total of five shooting incidents in less than nine hours Friday night into Saturday morning throughout Philadelphia, police said.

All but one of the shootings were in North Philadelphia, and three of the victims had been on their way to the store when struck by bullets, according to police. One incident was a triple shooting outside of an illegal after-hours club, police said.

The first of the shootings was reported just after 10 p.m. Friday at Front and East Champlost Avenue. There, on the 5900 block of North Front Street, police said they found a 20-year-old shot multiple times. He was transported to Einstein Medical Center Philadelphia, where he was pronounced dead at 10:47, police said.

That makes the total 133 by the end of Friday; the Philadelphia Police close their daily count at 11:59 PM each day.

Still, 133 dead, compared to 100 last year, is a 33% increase, a very neat ¹/₃. For every three people murdered in Philadelphia last year, four have been killed so far this year.

Yeah, that’s a kind of ghoulish calculation, but I’m kind of a numbers guy. I like hard data, information not tainted by politics, and the raw numbers of homicides isn’t something that can be massaged.

The Philadelphia Police Department and District Attorney Larry Krasner like to claim that, overall, crime has decreased in the city. The obvious question is: is that true?

There are two kinds of crimes: crimes of evidence and crimes of reporting. If a man rapes a woman on the streets of Philadelphia, as far as the police are concerned, if it wasn’t reported, it didn’t happen. It is commonly assumed that most rapes go unreported, with some guesstimates being as high as 90% not reported. Crimes like robbery might go unreported if the victims do not trust the police or think it will do any good, or are fearful of revenge by the criminals. When your city is stuck with a District Attorney like Mr Krasner, who doesn’t believe in prosecuting criminals, or sentencing them harshly when they are prosecuted and convicted, what reason is there to report that you were robbed?

But murder is different: it is a crime of evidence. It isn’t easy to dispose of a dead body in a way that it won’t be found, especially if you haven’t carefully planned things. You’re looking at 100 to 300 pounds of dead meat, bone and fat, and something which will put off a strong and nasty odor after very little time. The vast majority of dead bodies get found.

Of course, in Philadelphia, a whole lot of murders are open and in public: drive up or drive by shootings, essentially public executions, in which the shooters are only concerned with escape, not hiding the fact that someone was killed.

So when I read that most crime had decreased in Philadelphia, I just flat don’t believe it. Murder isn’t normally an entry-level crime; guys who shoot other people have usually been bad guys before that. And if they’ve been bad guys before that, District Attorney Krasner and his ‘social justice’ prosecution policies don’t really believe in getting them locked up for long anyway.

That’s something that the reporters and editors of the Inquirer ought to investigate. Send reporters door-to-door in the same neighborhoods in which the majority of the murders have occurred, and investigate, ask the public whether they have been crime victims and have decided against reporting such to the police. It will take a while, and it will take more than one reporter, but isn’t that what investigative reporting requires?^[1]The Inquirer article author, Diane Mastrull, lists as her biography blurb, “I’m a distance runner – in real life, as a breaking news editor, and as president of the NewsGuild.” I … Continue reading