The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated “during normal business hours, Monday through Friday,” so it still shows 397 homicides for the City of Brotherly Love. The next ‘milestone,’ so to speak, would be 400, and The Philadelphia Inquirer actually noticed:

Philly surpasses 400 homicides this year

“I am heartbroken and outraged that we’ve lost over 400 Philadelphians to preventable violence already this year,” Mayor Jim Kenney said Sunday.

by Marie McCullough and Chris Palmer | Sunday, September 26, 2021

Two fatal shootings Saturday night brought Philadelphia’s total number of homicides this year to beyond 400, a tragic milestone reached only twice in the past two decades.

Last year the city recorded 499 homicides, and in 2006 the total reached 406. Philadelphia has not had back-to-back years with that grisly tally since 1996.

“I am heartbroken and outraged that we’ve lost over 400 Philadelphians to preventable violence already this year,” Mayor Jim Kenney said in a statement issued Sunday morning. “I want all residents to know that our administration takes this crisis very seriously and we’re acting with urgency to reduce violence and save lives.”

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner echoed that sentiment in a statement Sunday: “We should all be outraged that senseless, preventable violence continues to claim and break lives here in Philadelphia and in communities across the country that are also experiencing alarming increases in gun violence.”

Sorry, but when I see softer-than-soft-on-crime District Attorney Krasner, who is more interested in keeping criminals out of prison and putting down the police, complaining about the homicide rate, indeed saying anything at all, I know it’s bovine feces. Mary McCarthy once said, concerning Lillian Hellman, “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” The same is true of Mr Krasner; if he told me that 2+2=4, I’d have to check his math.

The Inquirer reported that there have been no arrests in the latest killings.

Two men, 35 and 28, were found shot multiple times in the 2300 block of Jackson Street in South Philly around 9:30 PM, were taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where the younger man died and the older man is in critical condition.

Another fatal shooting was reported, at 11:20 PM at North 26th and West Silver Streets in Strawberry Mansion. The police had not given the paper any further details when the article was published.

Only 29% of homicides and 15% of nonfatal shootings have resulted in arrests by police so far in 2021, according to an analysis by Krasner’s office.

If both fatal and nonfatal shootings are included, 1,696 people had been shot through Wednesday, according to police statistics. That is the second-highest total in any year since 2007, the year police began recording “shooting victims” as a separate statistic from the broader category of “aggravated assault with a gun.”

Experts and officials point to many reasons for the surge in violence, which has been concentrated in neighborhoods with intractable disadvantages, including higher poverty levels, higher blight levels, and lower life expectancies. The reasons include stressors made worse by the pandemic; closures of schools, workplaces, courts, and other institutions that kept people away from feuds; increasing gun sales; and impaired trust in law enforcement after the George Floyd killing and protests.

This is, of course, the usual bovine feces that I expect from the Inquirer. The #woke there all want to blame everything but the culture and the people who live in those neighborhoods. When two men are shot “multiple times,” it was a targeted killing, a planned assassination, something people had time to consider before taking action. When four men were shot during a drive-by shooting in Mantua, “when three people hopped out of a gold or tan SUV at 38th and Aspen Streets at 10:57 a.m. and began firing,” that’s a planned attempt at murder. This photo shows “a detective and an officer looking at evidence under and around a blue SUV” in that shooting, and there are at least 19 evidence markers, normally used to mark the location of expended shell casings, visible.

When the Inquirer blames “impaired trust in law enforcement after the George Floyd killing and protests,” it has to be remembered that the editors of the newspapers deliberately fanned the flames of those protests.

So, what will I find when the police update their Current Crime Statistics page on Monday? The Inquirer article stated that there were “over 400,” which could mean 401 or 403 or 405. The city had been on a two-killings-per-day tear over the past week, so I could easily guess 403, covering Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Former Mayor Michael Nutter published a list of city homicides, noting just who was running the city at the time, and the city has exceeded 400 murders per year only 17 times previously; the record is 500, in 1990, the heart of the crack cocaine wars. With “over 400” murders so far in Philadelphia, this year makes the eighteenth time this has happened . . . but with 97 days, more than three months, more than entire season, left in the year!
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Update: Monday, September 27, 2021:

The Current Crime Statistics page shows that there have been 404 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, September 26, 2021, the 269^th day of the year. The math is simple, if ugly: 404 ÷ 269 = 1.5019 homicides per day. With 96 days left in the year, that works out to 144 more killings, if that rate remains the same, for a projected total of 548 murders for the year.

We noted, on July 17^th, when Philly hit its 300^th homicide of the year, that the then-current rate of 1.5306 homicides per day led to a projected 559 murders. That was actually down from eight days earlier, when an average of 1.5379 worked out to a projected 562 homicides for the year.

Then, for some unknown reason, the homicide rate dropped. We reported, on September 7^th, that despite a subtitle from The Philadelphia Inquirer stating that “The unofficial end of summer didn’t slow a record year of gun violence. Between Friday and Sunday, at least 13 people were shot in Philadelphia, two fatally,” the murder rate actually did slow down a bit, down to 1.4578 killings per day, with a projected 532 for the year.

But there’s more. Over the last 1½ months, the murder rate has really dropped. There had been 314 homicides as of July 22nd, the 203^rd day of the year. Since that time, 46 days ago, there have been ‘just’ 49 murders, a rate of 1.0652 per day. With 116 days left in 2021, if that rate were maintained, there would be ‘just’ 124 more killings, for a total of 487 for the year, 12 fewer than last year, and 13 fewer than 1990’s all time record of 500. If that number was the final one, it would be 75 fewer homicides than the math had projected just two months ago.

Now, for the first time since the late July through August ‘lull,’ if you can call it that, the rate is above 1.5 again. Since Monday, September 6^th, and its reported 363 homicides, there have been 41 murders in Philly, in just 20 days, 2.050 per day!

Are the gang bangers trying to make up for lost time, or something?

There are times I begin to feel like a broken record. I noted that the City of Brotherly Love was up to 393 homicides as of 11:59 PM on Wednesday, September 22^nd. This morning, the Philadelphia Police Department reported that there have been 397 murders as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, the 23^rd. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on three of the killings, but, as usual, I had to dig to find the article; it was not on the Inquirer’s website main page.

Three men killed in separate Philly shootings in a one-hour span

Two shootings happened in North Philadelphia and the third in Frankford.

By Robert Moran | Thursday, September 23, 2021

Three men were killed in separate shootings Thursday night in Philadelphia, police said.

Shortly after 7:30 p.m. a 29-year-old man was sitting inside a silver Toyota Camry on the 3500 block of North 21st Street in North Philadelphia when he was shot twice, police said. The man, whose name was not released, was taken by medics to Temple University Hospital and pronounced dead at 8:07. Police reported no arrests.



2800 block of North Orkney Street, from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

Just before 7:45 p.m., two men were outside on the 2800 block of North Orkney Street in North Philadelphia when they were shot. One of the victims, a 31-year-old whose name was withheld, was shot multiple times in the chest. Police took him to Temple, where he was pronounced dead at 8:09.

The second victim, a 52-year-old man, was shot in the left leg and buttocks. Police took him to Temple, where he was listed in stable condition. Police reported no arrests.

Around 8:30 p.m., an unidentified young man was outside on the 1300 block of Wakeling Street in Frankford when he was shot several times in the head. He was pronounced dead at the scene by medics. Police reported no arrests.

1300 block of Wakeling Street, from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

As usual, Mr Moran’s stories are off of the Inquirer’s website main page by the time the morning rolls around. The newspaper is great on decrying “gun violence,” but, as Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas noted last December, even her paper doesn’t really care:

The last time we published the names of those lost to gun violence, in early July, nearly 200 people had been fatally shot in the city.

Just weeks before the end of 2020, that number doubled. More than 400 people gunned down.

By the time you read this, there will only be more.

Even in a “normal” year, most of their stories would never be told.

At best they’d be reduced to a handful of lines in a media alert:

“A 21-year-old Black male was shot one time in the head. He was transported to Temple University Hospital and was pronounced at 8:12 p.m. The scene is being held, no weapon recovered and no arrest.”

That’s it. An entire life ending in a paragraph that may never make the daily newspaper.

Actually, the paper would never say, “A 21-year-old Black male was shot one time in the head,” but just a 21-year-old male. To identify the victims as black or white or Hispanic would, over time, report what everybody already knows: in a city that’s only 38.3% non-Hispanic black, black victims, primarily black male victims, will make up the vast majority of homicide victims in the city. Given that publisher Elizabeth Hughes has vowed to make the paper “an anti-racist news organization,” well, they can’t have the paper, as the Sacramento Bee once put it, “perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.”

As always, I run the numbers: 397 homicides ÷ 266 days elapsed in the year = 1.492 homicides per day, x 365 = 544.76 murders projected for the year.

We had previously reported that the homicide rate in Philly had slowed down, from mid-July through August, but it seems to have picked right back up again.