This is the 36th time I’ve used KIlladelphia as an article title. That, in itself, should tell you how bad the situation is.
What makes you think that it mattered? This was a planned assassination, and they were going to carry it out, period.
The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics database does not update the current year until normal business hours, and with Monday being a holiday, that means Tuesday morning. The last update had 194 homicides as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, May 26th, and Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News has tweeted that there have been 13 homicides since the weekend began. Being the math genius that I am, I can add 194 + 13 and get a total of 207.
The previous years’ numbers do update automatically, telling us that through May 29, 2021, there had been 212 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love.
So, let’s do the math. 207 homicides in 149 days yields an average of 1.39 per day. Just using that number, multiplied by 365, we get an ‘anticipated’ total of 507 homicides for the year.
But that’s not how I do things, because the warm months are just beginning, and homicides spike during the warm months. Instead, I divide the current 207 by the 212 homicides as of the same day last year, and get 0.9764. Multiplying 562, the number of murders in 2021, by 0.9764 gives me an estimated 549 homicides for the year.
Even the lower number of 507 would be solidly in second place all time.
In 2013, Mayor Michael Nutter, Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, and (later convicted himself) District Attorney Seth Williams helped lead the city down to 246 homicides. Using the 1.39 homicides per day figure, Philadelphia is on track to tie that the 2013 total in just four weeks, before the year is even half over.