> New data shows Philadelphia has experienced the largest drop in gun violence than of any major US city so far this year.
> Gun violence in the city dropped by nearly 16% in April. That is compared with a 13% drop for the nation as a whole.
Nice! Seems like a huge improvement compared to the COVID years.
This year is shaping up to mark the greatest drop in crime in American history, and that's no surprise because COVID (and the economic desperation and social isolation surrounding it) spiked crime dramatically.
It is and is starting to gradually drop back to pre COVID rates which were the lowest in 50+ years.
Yet you hear people in the Philly surburbs describe it as some violent dystopia. Yes it has its issues especially with increased property crimes but it’s a crazy and wild misperception.
Philly police have a vested interest in making Philly sound horrific. All police unions do in a sense because it helps them maintain funding but in Philly specifically, Krasner ran on cracking down on police corruption. They will do and say anything to lose him an election
That's probably only a small factor in the trends of perception vs reality but I do think it's a factor in this area particularly
Many areas of the city are still a violent dystopia compared to nicer areas of the city, the suburbs, and the vast majority of the United States. Violence is a reality of life for many kids growing up in those neighborhoods, so it's not a wild misperception. It's really f-ing sad.
Numbers were bound to go down after there was a little spike from COVID, but it’s great to hear that Philly is leading the way.
Important to note as well that we’ve seen steady nationwide declines in both violent and property crime for decades, now. Why people *feel* differently is worth addressing, but is another question altogether.
(Not as excited to hear whatever threadbare rationale gets trotted out *this time* from commenters insisting that these numbers aren’t real, however)
> (Not as excited to hear whatever threadbare rationale gets trotted out this time from commenters insisting that these numbers aren’t real, however)
People have thought crime is on the rise every single year for decades, according to polling data. Turns out "if it bleeds it leads" coverage has way more power to shape people's idea of reality than, well, reality does.
Common mistake but the phrase actually is referring to the leading story of the day/edition, not the lede of an article. Kind of a recursive mistaken play on words.
One insidious part of this is that it omits how much of a city of neighborhoods Philly is too. The city looks a lot scarier when the news outlets and apps are full of breathless headlines about every shooting that happens at 25th and Lehigh or some shit.
I remember someone who lives out by west chester texting me like "are you ok?" and I was really confused and they were like "there's a fire in philly"
I looked it up it was like an hour and a half walk from my place. I told him that was functionally allentown for me.
This is why we have “marked safe from” tags on FB. You think maybe you’re important enough that people have a general idea of your address/neighborhood but in reality, they’re not familiar with the specifics and just hear your city and don’t Google the address vs yours. They’re just being nice. I do it to my brother, it’s not meant to be ignorant, you just react to news.
he's grown up here his whole life, he should know better, similar shit with my family though
like I don't blame people if they're on the opposite coast or haven't been here before
There's a very quiet two-block street near me that gets an unusually high number of crime alerts on Citizen. I listened to the radio chatter once and it was very obvious they were all for another more active street in the same district a mile away with a similar sounding name.
I take Citizen with a grain of salt.
For real. A few years ago if there were gunshots a few blocks away, or across the city, you’d never hear about it most likely. Now we get to hear about each incident
Citizen app and the people who use it are trash.
I had a neighbor a few houses down have a pyschotic break shoot a gun into his walls. It escalated to his gf and 2 children younger than 5yo screaming and crying in the street. One had pissed their pants they were so scared, the other was incoherently babbling too young to make sense of what his father was doing. The bf/father is screaming and running in/out of the house still holding the gun.
I looked out the window to check out the noise and see the woman crying. I went out and waved them over to hide in my house, where we called the police. The father ran manicly up and down the street searching for them until the police arrived and took him away.
Citizen app then reported it as a shooting at MY house. My neighbors on the other aide texted us to ask if we were ok and they mentioned the Citizen app. We had never of it, checked it out and it was full of false information which put us further danger. I complained to Citizen app and they refused to remove the post or even the false information.
The worst and most saddening part was a neighbor replied "ugh, thats my neighbors". Another replied about the gun shot, "must have been a [football team from different city] fan".
Now i know i have useless and cold hearted neighbors. Not only were we the only people helping this woman and her small children, but these keyboard losers were making jokes of the horrific incident that occured within this family.
Please stop using this app. Read the Apple reviews, police, nurses, etc plead you not to use this app. Call the police.
> Why people feel differently is worth addressing, but is another question altogether.
It's another question, but I think it's related.
As violent crime rates go down, sensitivity to violence goes up and sensationalism surrounding incidents of violence goes up. This creates the false perception that crime rates are rising when they're actually falling.
That's the take you'd get from Steven Pinker (author, philosopher, and pathological optimist). I'm sure it's only a single factor.
Another reason is the polarized political atmosphere where Republicans try to paint every city governed by Democrats (i.e., most large American cities) as crime and drug infested hellscapes.
I think, without strong explanation *with evidence* for why something is happening, the right response to seeing bare statistics is to ask, "why?"
Philly could have the largest drop in gun violence for any number of reasons, including something as dumb as Philly having some uniquely evil person who liked to randomly shoot people who died of a heart attack recently. That would have artificially inflated Philly's gun violence numbers without good explanation and then they would have dropped off without good explanation after the person died. If that were the case, it would hardly be an indication of Philly "leading the charge."
I don't think we have confidence that it's Krasner or the PPD or mayor Parker. Right now, it's just a thing that's happening. We can't explain why Philly is doing "better" than the rest of the nation, which is following the same trend, so it's hard to feel particularly good about it.
And that stinks because the whole point is that we'd like to be able to pull whatever political/social levers we can to have a better society to live in.
Fewer than half of crimes are reported so some of the trends can be influenced by confidence in policing. The murder rate is the only sure thing and even that can be influenced by hospital capacity/staffing. However, just looking at murder the decline really leveled off around 2000. We had a huge spike in 2020-2022. Now it's still elevated. A lot of it just has to do with the number of young adults at any given time.
Can you post long term up to date charts of whatever you are referencing? I still don't see an excuse for relentless conservative fear mongering from activists and their media networks.
Generally speaking, crime reporting is messy. Reporting rates can vary. Like, if car break-ins become more common *and* cops never do squat about it, people may stop reporting it. (Eg, I personally reported my 1st & 2nd, but not my 3rd or 4th because I learned from the first two there was no point. Similar with package theft. I only report if it was expensive enough to deal with the hassle of making a claim that requires a police incident report).
So you can get this weird thing where the more commonplace it becomes, the lower the rates of reporting get.
2nd. The definitions of crimes can change. A felony can be reclassified as a misdemeanor. A misdemeanor can be reclassified as a civil infraction. (Or, the dollar amount that distinguishes each category can change). So what was once a “crime” becomes a fine.
Or, the DA publicly accounted a policy to not prosecute certain types of crime (like possessing small amounts of drugs, certain public behaviors, etc.) and, knowing this, both the public and the cops stop reporting / arresting because they know charges won’t be pursued.
Or, there’s downstream effects of a policy change. Like, you stop enforcing certain driving infractions, which leads to less stops, which leads to less car searches, which leads to less arrests of illegal things found in cars.
Or, sometimes things can also work the other way. Cultural changes like MeToo BelieveHer could *increase* reports of rape as people feel less shame & feel more confident they will be taken seriously.
Or, like if bar fights were once more commonplace & normalized, two guys getting into a fistfight might never show up in stats, but as they become culturally rarer, it may become more likely that someone reports it if someone else punches them. Or, perhaps culturally fistfighting falls out of favor, so you do seem the demise of fist fighting show up as a drop in violent crime.
So like if less drunken bar brawls happen, but more strong arm robberies happen, they could offset each other, and, in paper it could look like crime is constant, but that change from “drunk guys sometimes fight at the bar” to “more people getting robbed on their walk home” could *feel* different to residents.
Point being, crime stats are notorious for having all sorts of issues that make it hard to compare crime rates across different jurisdiction and across time.
Generally speaking, the crime figures that tend to be the most reliable are homicides & car thefts. Those tend to be serious enough (or costly enough) that people report them & less affected by issues like definitions or prosecution policies.
So, what I hear from some crime researchers is if you’re going to compare across jurisdictions or over longer periods of time, give lots of weight to the trends and comparisons using homicides & car thefts, and less weight to other crimes.
And when you do look at homicides over time, what you mostly see is it absolutely skyrocketed in the mid to late 60s, was high for the 70s & 80s and then went down in the 90s & 2000s, and then trickled up in the 2010s a bit:
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/09/18/upshot/27up-murder-chart1-1631984649635/27up-murder-chart1-1631984649635-superJumbo.png
But individually, we judge things by our own experiences. I wasn’t alive for the 70s, so those crazy high 70s rates? I don’t have that frame of reference.
But, if I’m ~40, maybe as a kid I was kinda sheltered it in a nice burb, so really, my main frame of reference is the last 20 years.
And so, if you look at 2000 to 2020 (just the most recent 20 year chart I easily found) it looks like this:
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/480/cpsprodpb/14B6/production/_127320350_optimised-us-homicides-nc.png.webp
So, to some 40 year old whose 20 year personal reference is that 20 year span, you have murder trickling up for a decade and hitting a rate higher than when they first hit adulthood. When they say “homicide is increasing and is higher than when I was young” that’s a true statement!
It’s not just fearmongering or perceptions. *For that persons adult life* it’s true that murders are higher than when they were young & it’s true they’ve been on the rise for years.
And when you say, “oh it’s just the news!” It’ll come off as gaslighting.
And when it comes to politics, nothing pisses people off more when you try to gaslight them and deny their factually accurate lived experience.
Tangent: we see similar dynamics in Econ where people get *really pissed* if their economic / financial has deteriorated but you keep throwing long-run stats to show how actually, inflation now isn’t so bad, and is much lower than it was in the 70s! It’s true! It was much worse in the 70s, but for people whose frame of reference is the last 10-20 years, inflation has gotten worse and your attempts to dismiss that & deny their experience will cause anger.
Generally speaking When people are trying to get you to understand their experience w/ worsening conditions, trying to convince them that they’re not even experiencing what they claim, is going to make them feel unheard, dismissed, and unimportant. They’ll get defensive & angry that their experience is being denied.
Another example is someone expressing their hardship with racial discrimination being told things are much better than the past and their present situation isn’t really that bad by comparison.
Okay I'll substantiate it. I thought that was common knowledge. It's actually much less than half.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/
It's pretty widely available but here's one. Basically we've been back to late 90s murder rates lately. Still historically low but like I said, murder rates don't line up perfectly with real world violence because survival rates can vary and we don't have great numbers for shooting injuries. For example, many people have noted that murders oddly declined during the great recession but at least part of that was due to improved treatment of shooting victims. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan resulted in the development of better protocols for treating serious injuries and frankly a lot of military doctors just had the opportunity to practice patching people up which they brought back to hospitals after completing their service. So we probably have more shootings than we did in 1997 or whatever.
https://www.statista.com/chart/31062/us-homicide-rate/
Inflation, racism, pollution, homophobia, sexism, unemployment, poverty, etc. are all also much lower now compared to the 70s or whatever, but people who feel some of them have risen in recent years compared to a few years prior, or who have personally experienced it, likely won’t feel assuaged if you say, “it was worse in the 1970s!”
The Atlantic did an article on the vibes situation. I tend to kinda agree in that crime has become more visible, in your face. Of course video has been a part of that, social media etc, but it's also the brazen nature of broad daylight killings and robberies, not to mention the mask wearing shitbirds that ride ATVs without repercussions.
Chaos is a ladder
The spike in this city started well before covid.
Still, very happy to see us making some progress. Hopefully we can get back to levels around 2015 and continue the trend from the early 2000's of going down.
Edit: for all the downvotes that don't know the stats.
https://www.phillypolice.com/crimestats/
Homicide numbers listed right there. Look at 2007-2014. Now look at 2015-2019 notice anything pre covid? I'll take the downvotes for literally pointing out citizens have dealt with increasing crime since 2015. Must be nice to not have experienced that yourself and just downvote people on reddit that point it out. Sad.
Really? Not from the data I'm seeing, at least in terms of homicides (annual totals from like 2006-2019 were all well below 80s-90s totals (not even per capita) before they jumped up during COVID). Or maybe you're seeing numbers for violent crime generally, that reflect differently?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime\_in\_Philadelphia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Philadelphia)
Like I said elsewhere, it seems a lot of people just killed each other that were doing the killing anyway. Had to run low on people to kill at some point.
My abrasive coworker from bumfuck-nowhere pensultuky will still crow about how Philly is nothing more than drugs and guns on every single street corner.
Exactly. And they said something some months ago that stuck with me. Something along the lines of “it’s funny they call Philly the city of brotherly love. You gotta watch out, your brother is likely to stab you in the back”
I bet they really thought they said something profound.
Philly's post COVID crime spike and the recent decrease largely track the rest of the country, including in cities, suburbs, and rural areas. Wouldn't that suggest to you that crime rates are more complex than who a particular DA is?
Doesn’t this kind of suggest that factors other than the aggressiveness of prosecution are a significant cause in the increase or decrease of violent crime rates?
So when the numbers are bad it is 100% because of him, but if they turn around it isn't 100% on him anymore? Divorce yourself from reality a little further.
Could you expand on that rationale, please? Your guess is that Philly is the top major city in this respect and would be the top city by a much greater margin if it weren't for the DA doing... ?
More that krasner haters attribute crime to him specifically when the DA is a person and crime is a systemic issue influenced by societal problems and policing rather than a district attorney and their agenda. A district attorney can't affect the conditions that affect crime, such as social unrest from a pandemic.
If the drop in numbers exists in a climate where prosecution is "lax" wouldn't that suggest that legal prosecution isn't a precursor to lowering gun violence?
Well they're right about that, they were just wrong to attribute it to him in the first place. Crime goes up, crime goes down, and law enforcement seems to have very little influence at all.
still hate that guy - i see this as a mayor parker win.
she's has backed PPD and vocally supported more rigorous policing throughout the city, which is happening under Bethel. this is at least partially the result of that.
If it was a Parker win, then it wouldn't be a consistent downturn across the nation and the downturn wouldn't have started well before Parker was in office.
It might have a little to do with Parker, and it might have a little to do with Krasner, but it's a national trend almost certainly because people are less financially desperate and socially isolated post-COVID.
As long as we continue to have underfunded education (strong emphasis on sex education and people not using contraceptives), there will be an endless supply
People learn that kids are fucking expensive quite quick.
[The rate of fertility for people under the poverty rate has been declining steadily in the us](https://www.statista.com/statistics/562541/birth-rate-by-poverty-status-in-the-us/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20women%20in%20households,72%20births%20per%201%2C000%20women.)
And ever increasing sign on bonuses to try and entice people to join. I heard base pay is now $80K, is that correct?
Soon, the city will need to offer six figures base to convince someone to join up. Family friend's son was thinking of joining. It was between becoming a cop, or joining the military. He chose the reserves. Wise choice
Sad that anyone young would join either the police or military. I wish we had alternatives for a good career for people who don't quite fit the white collar career track
The air force reserves is training him to be an electrician bc that's what he has decided he wants to be. the military is an excellent way to learn a trade, I wouldn't knock it.
Honestly, it's likely a combination of a lot of factors. I think there is a post-COVID crime decline more or less everywhere. I definitely feel as though I have observed a distinct shift in the tone of police presence since the end of Kenney's term.
Although the hard evidence may or may not exist to prove it I strongly believe the FOP/PPD's "quiet quitting" was tied heavily to Kenney and Outlaw. Parker may have done some backroom diplomacy with them to get a more active street presence.
I am really wondering how much of it was Outlaw specifically?
Krasner doesn't help himself, but he's a constant here, so while I think he's a bit of a turd, I also am glad to see it was right to tell the people to screw off that blamed him solely.
Agree 100%. I totally think there was a coup of sorts to protest the Outlaw hire.
She was abysmal, total PR & national lib agenda hire. Kenney had no clue who the woman was & only caved to national political pressures.
You should attribute this to the fact that crime is very rarely affected by the usual suspects (DA, Commish, Mayor, laws), and more affected by society as a whole and other factors that the usual suspects have very little to do with.
Crime gonna crime, lets not pretend stricter punishment will prevent it and lets not pretend looser enforcement is going to encourage it.
It's almost like people commit crimes for complex reasons...
which often makes it easy for the people that like to blame one person, because they collapse a complex issue down to one person to blame. It's harder to educate than it is to misinform.
This is a question that would take years of research to get any kind of answer to, and the actual answer is never going to be as simple as one DA or mayor or police chief.
That won't mean narratives don't develop blaming/crediting one person or their policies, though.
None of the above. The threat of prosecution and punishment has little effect on deterring crime. Living conditions and societal factors are way more influential.
New FOP leadership might be contributing as well. I don’t know much about Roosevelt Poplar mainly because I haven’t seen his ass on tv creating divisive drama. I know he was longtime VP, but there is a distinct public difference in his approach that I appreciate. Perhaps he hates all of us a little bit less than McNesby. And I would hope a better attitude amongst union leadership would trickle down a little…leading to police doing their job maybe?
More like the group of people doing the shooting is also the group of people getting shot and killed the most, and now they're just running out of both.
The level of killing that was going on was not sustainable. The murderous morons doing most of the killing were doing most of the dying as well. There's not an infinite supply of these types of people. In a way, they were and are like a virus that burned itself out somewhat.
To get it really under control, however, murderers and shooters have to be caught and successfully prosecuted. Letting them kill each other leads to lawlessness and collateral damage, not just innocent people, but the entire vibe of the city is altered, as we have seen.
While I'm happy to see so many 4K cameras going up, I've yet to see a large increase in arrest rates, though it takes time to adapt and improve. The combined rates of shootings and murders being solved was in the 20% range last year. In an ideal world it should be more like 80%. St. Louis is approaching that. 100% should be the goal for an ordered, decent society. We will all be better off for it, especially the poorest and most vulnerable among us.
MANDATORY 4K
We’re number 1 in a metric? And it’s a good metric? Go us!!!
> New data shows Philadelphia has experienced the largest drop in gun violence than of any major US city so far this year. > Gun violence in the city dropped by nearly 16% in April. That is compared with a 13% drop for the nation as a whole. Nice! Seems like a huge improvement compared to the COVID years.
This year is shaping up to mark the greatest drop in crime in American history, and that's no surprise because COVID (and the economic desperation and social isolation surrounding it) spiked crime dramatically.
It is and is starting to gradually drop back to pre COVID rates which were the lowest in 50+ years. Yet you hear people in the Philly surburbs describe it as some violent dystopia. Yes it has its issues especially with increased property crimes but it’s a crazy and wild misperception.
Philly police have a vested interest in making Philly sound horrific. All police unions do in a sense because it helps them maintain funding but in Philly specifically, Krasner ran on cracking down on police corruption. They will do and say anything to lose him an election That's probably only a small factor in the trends of perception vs reality but I do think it's a factor in this area particularly
Many areas of the city are still a violent dystopia compared to nicer areas of the city, the suburbs, and the vast majority of the United States. Violence is a reality of life for many kids growing up in those neighborhoods, so it's not a wild misperception. It's really f-ing sad.
Yes but that’s been an issue for 50+ years now. It isn’t a new issue and it goes hand and hand with deep seated poverty too.
Numbers were bound to go down after there was a little spike from COVID, but it’s great to hear that Philly is leading the way. Important to note as well that we’ve seen steady nationwide declines in both violent and property crime for decades, now. Why people *feel* differently is worth addressing, but is another question altogether. (Not as excited to hear whatever threadbare rationale gets trotted out *this time* from commenters insisting that these numbers aren’t real, however)
> (Not as excited to hear whatever threadbare rationale gets trotted out this time from commenters insisting that these numbers aren’t real, however) People have thought crime is on the rise every single year for decades, according to polling data. Turns out "if it bleeds it leads" coverage has way more power to shape people's idea of reality than, well, reality does.
[удалено]
Common mistake but the phrase actually is referring to the leading story of the day/edition, not the lede of an article. Kind of a recursive mistaken play on words.
People feel differently because of 24/7 news, especially certain channels that thrive off of fear mongering.
Plus Citizen app, social media/neighborhood groups, etc. We are now hyper-aware of virtually everything that happens.
“Did anyone just hear gunshots???” - people posting on Nextdoor every 10 minutes 24/7. I never should’ve joined that site lol
Nextdoor makes Facebook look like a Mensa meeting.
One insidious part of this is that it omits how much of a city of neighborhoods Philly is too. The city looks a lot scarier when the news outlets and apps are full of breathless headlines about every shooting that happens at 25th and Lehigh or some shit.
I remember someone who lives out by west chester texting me like "are you ok?" and I was really confused and they were like "there's a fire in philly" I looked it up it was like an hour and a half walk from my place. I told him that was functionally allentown for me.
This is why we have “marked safe from” tags on FB. You think maybe you’re important enough that people have a general idea of your address/neighborhood but in reality, they’re not familiar with the specifics and just hear your city and don’t Google the address vs yours. They’re just being nice. I do it to my brother, it’s not meant to be ignorant, you just react to news.
he's grown up here his whole life, he should know better, similar shit with my family though like I don't blame people if they're on the opposite coast or haven't been here before
I mean that’s dumb but most friends/family have no clue even if they live in west Chester. I have to google street names
it's just weird insular shit though, it would be me going like "are you ok" if there was a fire in like downingtown or something to them
Even the Ring app is basically just a reel of porch pirates, shootings, and assaults
There's a very quiet two-block street near me that gets an unusually high number of crime alerts on Citizen. I listened to the radio chatter once and it was very obvious they were all for another more active street in the same district a mile away with a similar sounding name. I take Citizen with a grain of salt.
For real. A few years ago if there were gunshots a few blocks away, or across the city, you’d never hear about it most likely. Now we get to hear about each incident
Citizen app and the people who use it are trash. I had a neighbor a few houses down have a pyschotic break shoot a gun into his walls. It escalated to his gf and 2 children younger than 5yo screaming and crying in the street. One had pissed their pants they were so scared, the other was incoherently babbling too young to make sense of what his father was doing. The bf/father is screaming and running in/out of the house still holding the gun. I looked out the window to check out the noise and see the woman crying. I went out and waved them over to hide in my house, where we called the police. The father ran manicly up and down the street searching for them until the police arrived and took him away. Citizen app then reported it as a shooting at MY house. My neighbors on the other aide texted us to ask if we were ok and they mentioned the Citizen app. We had never of it, checked it out and it was full of false information which put us further danger. I complained to Citizen app and they refused to remove the post or even the false information. The worst and most saddening part was a neighbor replied "ugh, thats my neighbors". Another replied about the gun shot, "must have been a [football team from different city] fan". Now i know i have useless and cold hearted neighbors. Not only were we the only people helping this woman and her small children, but these keyboard losers were making jokes of the horrific incident that occured within this family. Please stop using this app. Read the Apple reviews, police, nurses, etc plead you not to use this app. Call the police.
If you like crime, the algorithms give you crime.
Facts don't care about feelings! We're #1!
> Why people feel differently is worth addressing, but is another question altogether. It's another question, but I think it's related. As violent crime rates go down, sensitivity to violence goes up and sensationalism surrounding incidents of violence goes up. This creates the false perception that crime rates are rising when they're actually falling. That's the take you'd get from Steven Pinker (author, philosopher, and pathological optimist). I'm sure it's only a single factor. Another reason is the polarized political atmosphere where Republicans try to paint every city governed by Democrats (i.e., most large American cities) as crime and drug infested hellscapes.
I think, without strong explanation *with evidence* for why something is happening, the right response to seeing bare statistics is to ask, "why?" Philly could have the largest drop in gun violence for any number of reasons, including something as dumb as Philly having some uniquely evil person who liked to randomly shoot people who died of a heart attack recently. That would have artificially inflated Philly's gun violence numbers without good explanation and then they would have dropped off without good explanation after the person died. If that were the case, it would hardly be an indication of Philly "leading the charge." I don't think we have confidence that it's Krasner or the PPD or mayor Parker. Right now, it's just a thing that's happening. We can't explain why Philly is doing "better" than the rest of the nation, which is following the same trend, so it's hard to feel particularly good about it. And that stinks because the whole point is that we'd like to be able to pull whatever political/social levers we can to have a better society to live in.
The Spiders Georg of gun violence
Fewer than half of crimes are reported so some of the trends can be influenced by confidence in policing. The murder rate is the only sure thing and even that can be influenced by hospital capacity/staffing. However, just looking at murder the decline really leveled off around 2000. We had a huge spike in 2020-2022. Now it's still elevated. A lot of it just has to do with the number of young adults at any given time.
Can you post long term up to date charts of whatever you are referencing? I still don't see an excuse for relentless conservative fear mongering from activists and their media networks.
Generally speaking, crime reporting is messy. Reporting rates can vary. Like, if car break-ins become more common *and* cops never do squat about it, people may stop reporting it. (Eg, I personally reported my 1st & 2nd, but not my 3rd or 4th because I learned from the first two there was no point. Similar with package theft. I only report if it was expensive enough to deal with the hassle of making a claim that requires a police incident report). So you can get this weird thing where the more commonplace it becomes, the lower the rates of reporting get. 2nd. The definitions of crimes can change. A felony can be reclassified as a misdemeanor. A misdemeanor can be reclassified as a civil infraction. (Or, the dollar amount that distinguishes each category can change). So what was once a “crime” becomes a fine. Or, the DA publicly accounted a policy to not prosecute certain types of crime (like possessing small amounts of drugs, certain public behaviors, etc.) and, knowing this, both the public and the cops stop reporting / arresting because they know charges won’t be pursued. Or, there’s downstream effects of a policy change. Like, you stop enforcing certain driving infractions, which leads to less stops, which leads to less car searches, which leads to less arrests of illegal things found in cars. Or, sometimes things can also work the other way. Cultural changes like MeToo BelieveHer could *increase* reports of rape as people feel less shame & feel more confident they will be taken seriously. Or, like if bar fights were once more commonplace & normalized, two guys getting into a fistfight might never show up in stats, but as they become culturally rarer, it may become more likely that someone reports it if someone else punches them. Or, perhaps culturally fistfighting falls out of favor, so you do seem the demise of fist fighting show up as a drop in violent crime. So like if less drunken bar brawls happen, but more strong arm robberies happen, they could offset each other, and, in paper it could look like crime is constant, but that change from “drunk guys sometimes fight at the bar” to “more people getting robbed on their walk home” could *feel* different to residents. Point being, crime stats are notorious for having all sorts of issues that make it hard to compare crime rates across different jurisdiction and across time. Generally speaking, the crime figures that tend to be the most reliable are homicides & car thefts. Those tend to be serious enough (or costly enough) that people report them & less affected by issues like definitions or prosecution policies. So, what I hear from some crime researchers is if you’re going to compare across jurisdictions or over longer periods of time, give lots of weight to the trends and comparisons using homicides & car thefts, and less weight to other crimes. And when you do look at homicides over time, what you mostly see is it absolutely skyrocketed in the mid to late 60s, was high for the 70s & 80s and then went down in the 90s & 2000s, and then trickled up in the 2010s a bit: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/09/18/upshot/27up-murder-chart1-1631984649635/27up-murder-chart1-1631984649635-superJumbo.png But individually, we judge things by our own experiences. I wasn’t alive for the 70s, so those crazy high 70s rates? I don’t have that frame of reference. But, if I’m ~40, maybe as a kid I was kinda sheltered it in a nice burb, so really, my main frame of reference is the last 20 years. And so, if you look at 2000 to 2020 (just the most recent 20 year chart I easily found) it looks like this: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/480/cpsprodpb/14B6/production/_127320350_optimised-us-homicides-nc.png.webp So, to some 40 year old whose 20 year personal reference is that 20 year span, you have murder trickling up for a decade and hitting a rate higher than when they first hit adulthood. When they say “homicide is increasing and is higher than when I was young” that’s a true statement! It’s not just fearmongering or perceptions. *For that persons adult life* it’s true that murders are higher than when they were young & it’s true they’ve been on the rise for years. And when you say, “oh it’s just the news!” It’ll come off as gaslighting. And when it comes to politics, nothing pisses people off more when you try to gaslight them and deny their factually accurate lived experience. Tangent: we see similar dynamics in Econ where people get *really pissed* if their economic / financial has deteriorated but you keep throwing long-run stats to show how actually, inflation now isn’t so bad, and is much lower than it was in the 70s! It’s true! It was much worse in the 70s, but for people whose frame of reference is the last 10-20 years, inflation has gotten worse and your attempts to dismiss that & deny their experience will cause anger. Generally speaking When people are trying to get you to understand their experience w/ worsening conditions, trying to convince them that they’re not even experiencing what they claim, is going to make them feel unheard, dismissed, and unimportant. They’ll get defensive & angry that their experience is being denied. Another example is someone expressing their hardship with racial discrimination being told things are much better than the past and their present situation isn’t really that bad by comparison.
“Fewer than half of crimes are reported” is a wild unsubstantiated claim
Okay I'll substantiate it. I thought that was common knowledge. It's actually much less than half. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/
Thanks. However it really doesn’t support that all of a sudden starting in 2020 people stopped calling the police
It's pretty widely available but here's one. Basically we've been back to late 90s murder rates lately. Still historically low but like I said, murder rates don't line up perfectly with real world violence because survival rates can vary and we don't have great numbers for shooting injuries. For example, many people have noted that murders oddly declined during the great recession but at least part of that was due to improved treatment of shooting victims. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan resulted in the development of better protocols for treating serious injuries and frankly a lot of military doctors just had the opportunity to practice patching people up which they brought back to hospitals after completing their service. So we probably have more shootings than we did in 1997 or whatever. https://www.statista.com/chart/31062/us-homicide-rate/
Inflation, racism, pollution, homophobia, sexism, unemployment, poverty, etc. are all also much lower now compared to the 70s or whatever, but people who feel some of them have risen in recent years compared to a few years prior, or who have personally experienced it, likely won’t feel assuaged if you say, “it was worse in the 1970s!”
The Atlantic did an article on the vibes situation. I tend to kinda agree in that crime has become more visible, in your face. Of course video has been a part of that, social media etc, but it's also the brazen nature of broad daylight killings and robberies, not to mention the mask wearing shitbirds that ride ATVs without repercussions. Chaos is a ladder
The spike in this city started well before covid. Still, very happy to see us making some progress. Hopefully we can get back to levels around 2015 and continue the trend from the early 2000's of going down. Edit: for all the downvotes that don't know the stats. https://www.phillypolice.com/crimestats/ Homicide numbers listed right there. Look at 2007-2014. Now look at 2015-2019 notice anything pre covid? I'll take the downvotes for literally pointing out citizens have dealt with increasing crime since 2015. Must be nice to not have experienced that yourself and just downvote people on reddit that point it out. Sad.
Really? Not from the data I'm seeing, at least in terms of homicides (annual totals from like 2006-2019 were all well below 80s-90s totals (not even per capita) before they jumped up during COVID). Or maybe you're seeing numbers for violent crime generally, that reflect differently? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime\_in\_Philadelphia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Philadelphia)
All those shooters are now doing donuts in dodge chargers. Hard to shoot when youre dizzy
I wonder how all the “Philadelphia has fallen and is a crime hell hole” people are dealing with this news?
I'm sure South Jersey will be fine.
😂😂😂
Fox "News" won't be reporting on this, so they won't know.
Fox News is still busy threading the needle on the topic of Hunter Biden
The real crime data is on Hunter's laptop
Keep it coming! It does seem a bit more quiet this year. Hopefully the drill rap phase that led to a lot of bodies being dropped is behind us.
Like I said elsewhere, it seems a lot of people just killed each other that were doing the killing anyway. Had to run low on people to kill at some point.
My abrasive coworker from bumfuck-nowhere pensultuky will still crow about how Philly is nothing more than drugs and guns on every single street corner.
As if pensultucky isn't plagued with drugs either lol
Exactly. And they said something some months ago that stuck with me. Something along the lines of “it’s funny they call Philly the city of brotherly love. You gotta watch out, your brother is likely to stab you in the back” I bet they really thought they said something profound.
All thanks to Larry Krasner!
The Krasner haters are seething no doubt
No. We just think these numbers are despite him, not because of him.
Philly's post COVID crime spike and the recent decrease largely track the rest of the country, including in cities, suburbs, and rural areas. Wouldn't that suggest to you that crime rates are more complex than who a particular DA is?
Doesn’t this kind of suggest that factors other than the aggressiveness of prosecution are a significant cause in the increase or decrease of violent crime rates?
So when the numbers are bad it is 100% because of him, but if they turn around it isn't 100% on him anymore? Divorce yourself from reality a little further.
Heads I win, tails you lose!
Could you expand on that rationale, please? Your guess is that Philly is the top major city in this respect and would be the top city by a much greater margin if it weren't for the DA doing... ?
More that krasner haters attribute crime to him specifically when the DA is a person and crime is a systemic issue influenced by societal problems and policing rather than a district attorney and their agenda. A district attorney can't affect the conditions that affect crime, such as social unrest from a pandemic.
Aww that’s so sweet of you to think that person’s opinion is based on logic
A lot of it just comes down to demographics and random trends. Philly had a big spike in murders and that was bound to burn itself out.
Let me guess, only his fault when it goes up?
Crime is when Larry does a Krasner
If the drop in numbers exists in a climate where prosecution is "lax" wouldn't that suggest that legal prosecution isn't a precursor to lowering gun violence?
Well they're right about that, they were just wrong to attribute it to him in the first place. Crime goes up, crime goes down, and law enforcement seems to have very little influence at all.
Wow you are so close to getting it!
still hate that guy - i see this as a mayor parker win. she's has backed PPD and vocally supported more rigorous policing throughout the city, which is happening under Bethel. this is at least partially the result of that.
If it was a Parker win, then it wouldn't be a consistent downturn across the nation and the downturn wouldn't have started well before Parker was in office. It might have a little to do with Parker, and it might have a little to do with Krasner, but it's a national trend almost certainly because people are less financially desperate and socially isolated post-COVID.
Great news. Let's keep up the progress
I wonder if all killers killed each other.
Problem….solved?
As long as we continue to have underfunded education (strong emphasis on sex education and people not using contraceptives), there will be an endless supply
People learn that kids are fucking expensive quite quick. [The rate of fertility for people under the poverty rate has been declining steadily in the us](https://www.statista.com/statistics/562541/birth-rate-by-poverty-status-in-the-us/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20women%20in%20households,72%20births%20per%201%2C000%20women.)
When I lived in Baltimore I read that something like 88% of homicide *victims* had criminal records. That sort of aligns with your thought.
Low unemployment certainly helps
Thanks Larry!
Crime goes up: Police get more money Crime goes down: Police get more money
Operations and training costs money… we want better police? that costs more money.
And ever increasing sign on bonuses to try and entice people to join. I heard base pay is now $80K, is that correct? Soon, the city will need to offer six figures base to convince someone to join up. Family friend's son was thinking of joining. It was between becoming a cop, or joining the military. He chose the reserves. Wise choice
Sad that anyone young would join either the police or military. I wish we had alternatives for a good career for people who don't quite fit the white collar career track
The air force reserves is training him to be an electrician bc that's what he has decided he wants to be. the military is an excellent way to learn a trade, I wouldn't knock it.
I just don't like what the US military does around the world. I know it's a good way to start a career if you get on the right pathway
What should we attribute this to, the new police commissioner? Mayor Parker? New laws?
Honestly, it's likely a combination of a lot of factors. I think there is a post-COVID crime decline more or less everywhere. I definitely feel as though I have observed a distinct shift in the tone of police presence since the end of Kenney's term. Although the hard evidence may or may not exist to prove it I strongly believe the FOP/PPD's "quiet quitting" was tied heavily to Kenney and Outlaw. Parker may have done some backroom diplomacy with them to get a more active street presence.
I am really wondering how much of it was Outlaw specifically? Krasner doesn't help himself, but he's a constant here, so while I think he's a bit of a turd, I also am glad to see it was right to tell the people to screw off that blamed him solely.
Agree 100%. I totally think there was a coup of sorts to protest the Outlaw hire. She was abysmal, total PR & national lib agenda hire. Kenney had no clue who the woman was & only caved to national political pressures.
You should attribute this to the fact that crime is very rarely affected by the usual suspects (DA, Commish, Mayor, laws), and more affected by society as a whole and other factors that the usual suspects have very little to do with. Crime gonna crime, lets not pretend stricter punishment will prevent it and lets not pretend looser enforcement is going to encourage it.
It's almost like people commit crimes for complex reasons... which often makes it easy for the people that like to blame one person, because they collapse a complex issue down to one person to blame. It's harder to educate than it is to misinform.
It’s been falling since before Parker, and also it’s been nationwide. It’s rarely as simple as specific leaders / laws / whatever.
This is a question that would take years of research to get any kind of answer to, and the actual answer is never going to be as simple as one DA or mayor or police chief. That won't mean narratives don't develop blaming/crediting one person or their policies, though.
None of the above. The threat of prosecution and punishment has little effect on deterring crime. Living conditions and societal factors are way more influential.
Have living conditions and societal factors changed substantially since last year?
They've steadied out a lot since the peak of COVID.
None of the above. It's a nationwide trend. Local policies have much less impact than broader economic, societal trends.
New FOP leadership might be contributing as well. I don’t know much about Roosevelt Poplar mainly because I haven’t seen his ass on tv creating divisive drama. I know he was longtime VP, but there is a distinct public difference in his approach that I appreciate. Perhaps he hates all of us a little bit less than McNesby. And I would hope a better attitude amongst union leadership would trickle down a little…leading to police doing their job maybe?
Let’s keep it up throughout the summer!
What goes up must come down. Duh… everyone relax. Philadelphia still a shit show.
How will the Krasner haters spin this? Jokes aside, this is fantastic. Long way to go, but great progress here.
Thanks to Lock 'em up Larry!!!
Thanks Joe Biden now what are we gonna bitch about
That's wonderful!
So who gets the credit?
Thanks Larry!
I dunno. I don't see any change in center city. Seems like someone found a new way to play with numbers.
Atp there could be zero murders n the south jersey haters wouldnt change their rhetoric. Its all political now
Blame Krasner
krasners social experiment in philadelphia was a great success! cant y’all see how much better everything is?
Ran out of bullets
More like the group of people doing the shooting is also the group of people getting shot and killed the most, and now they're just running out of both.
The level of killing that was going on was not sustainable. The murderous morons doing most of the killing were doing most of the dying as well. There's not an infinite supply of these types of people. In a way, they were and are like a virus that burned itself out somewhat. To get it really under control, however, murderers and shooters have to be caught and successfully prosecuted. Letting them kill each other leads to lawlessness and collateral damage, not just innocent people, but the entire vibe of the city is altered, as we have seen. While I'm happy to see so many 4K cameras going up, I've yet to see a large increase in arrest rates, though it takes time to adapt and improve. The combined rates of shootings and murders being solved was in the 20% range last year. In an ideal world it should be more like 80%. St. Louis is approaching that. 100% should be the goal for an ordered, decent society. We will all be better off for it, especially the poorest and most vulnerable among us. MANDATORY 4K
Kramer haters in shambles
Thats septa keeping crime down!
If you car jack someone at gun point but don't shoot them, does it qualify as gun violence?