We had previously noted that, despite the occurrence of a documented murder, the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page numbers hadn’t moved.

Now we are informed that it had been a computer glitch, which has now been fixed, and the update is a big one: eight new homicides reported. The First Street Journal had reported, on December 7^th, that there was a statistical possibility, at the margin of error, that Philadelphia had an outside chance of finishing the year with fewer than 500 homicides. That didn’t last long, and by the 12^th, it had vanished, as the city was on a clear path to between 509 and 516 homicides.

We’re so far into the year now, December 15^th having been the 349^th day of the year, that one or two homicides don’t move the statistics much, but eight homicides in four days? That has moved the average daily killings number up to 1.4212, which puts the city on pace for 519 killings, 518.7393 to be more precise.

There’s more. There had been a seeming downturn after Hallowe’en, and that was what had made me hopeful that the city might, just might, finish under 500. But now there have been 51 homicides in the 45 days since October 31^st, 1.3333 per day, and that works out to 18.13333 for the sixteen days remaining in the year, or a total of 514.

Two ways of calculating the trends, and the projected numbers are drawing ever closer. However, the Christmas holidays always seem to be big ones for killings — Peace on Earth, and all of that — and during the last 16 days of 2021, there had been 27 homicides. If the City of Brotherly Love hit that pace again, Philly would finish with 523 murders.

Retired Philadelphia Police Sergeant Mark Fusetti reported that, according to his sources, there have also been 110 “suspicious” and 76 “other” deaths recorded by the Philly Police Department. While there are supposedly no bodies attached to the 76 “other” cases, there are to the 110 “suspicious” ones. Some of the suspicious may be self-defense claims that have not yet been assigned that status, and would not be part of the homicide numbers, but others could be actual murders, but ones which the police have not yet developed sufficient evidence to call them such. Now that Ben Mannes of Broad + Liberty has broken the story of the large number of suspicious deaths — a story that our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper has thus far ignored — one wonders if, as those suspicious deaths get reclassified, will they be added to the ‘official’ homicide totals?