I noted yesterday that the homicide problem in Philadelphia is not one of too few police, or even a ‘progressive’ District Attorney, but a problem of culture, in which some idiot thought that the best way to handle an argument was to just shoot the guy. Yeah, he “won” the argument, I suppose, but if he’s caught he might just spend the rest of his miserable life behind bars. The idiot who ‘settled’ his argument on Hallowe’en by shooting another man in the chest could, under Pennsylvania Title 18 §2502 be charged with Murder of the first degree, though third degree seems more probable. First degree murder is punishable by life in prison without the possibility of parole, or even a death sentence, though District Attorney Larry Krasner refuses to pursue capital sentences, while third degree murder, a first degree felony in the Keystone State, carries a sentence of ten to twenty years in prison.

So, about what were the two men arguing that is somehow worth ten to twenty years in the state penitentiary? Was the one man blocking access to the street as he was helping a lady move from the 2500 block of Carroll Street? Did the two men have a previous beef with each other?

The Philadelphia Shootings Victims Database details, in an awkward format, the people shot and killed in the City of Brotherly Love. There are times that I wonder if that awkwardness is deliberate, because you have to import the .csv file, and open it in Microsoft Excel, alter some of the column widths, and then hide data columns which are mostly meaningless. The data column for whether the victim is Latino or not is stupidly placed, and the fatality column is at the far right hand side. Someone more easily frustrated than me would have given up!

But one thing is obvious: the cultural problems which have led to the huge murder rate in Philly are not evenly spread among the residents of the city. The 2020 census as reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer shows just 38.3% of city residents as being non-Hispanic black, and in the October shootings chart above, all but one of the Latino victims listed are listed as white Latino, not black Latino. Black male Philadelphians have been the victims of shootings in 61.31% of the cases, and overall blacks have been the victims in 72.36% of shootings.

Non-Hispanic whites have been the victims in ‘only’ 5.53% of the cases in October, despite being 34.3% of the city’s population. There were no reported incidents of Asians being shot.

The shootings database reported 199 people shot in Philly in October of 2022; the same database, if you scroll farther down, shows 181 reported shooting victims for October of 2021. As we have previously noted, the number of homicides is slightly lower this year as opposed to last, but with the number of shootings being 9.94% higher in October alone, and 2.45% (2004 this year vis a vis 1954 through October in 2021) higher than 2021, I see that attempted murders — and I count every shooting as an attempted murder — have increased. The Philadelphia Police Department’s scoop-and-scoot policy of taking victims directly to the ER rather than waiting for an ambulance, even more experience in dealing with shooting victims by the hospitals’ emergency staff, and perhaps even lower shooting accuracy by the gang-bangers “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,”^[1]We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes … Continue reading blasting away at their rivals.

The city’s elected leadership want to blame guns, as does the Inquirer and practically every other group around. But, last time I checked, guns were completely inanimate objects, and didn’t care who held them or carried them or owned them. If the problem was guns, we ought to see the shootings and killings rates closely match the demographic percentages in the city, and we should see the homicide rates in Philly fairly similar to the rates throughout Pennsylvania; we don’t.^[2]As we have reported previously, Pennsylvania’s firearms control laws are pretty much uniform across the Commonwealth; state law prohibits municipalities from imposing restrictions which are … Continue reading

No one will address the real numbers, and no one will conclude that yes, this is primarily a cultural problem among the black and Hispanic communities of Philadelphia, because that would be raaaaacist.^[3]The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer managed to admit that people’s race determined how safe they feel, but had a not-so-subtle undertone that white people make places safer. I will … Continue reading I can say it because I’m retired, have no job from which I can be canceled, and no employer who can somehow be punished. But if the problem of homicides in our cities — more cities than just Philadelphia — cannot be honestly recognized for what it is, then that problem can never be addressed, never be solved.