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While rates of violent crime, including murder, have been steadily declining in the United Stateas over the past ten to fifteen, the city of Philadelphia, Pa., remains a particularly dangerous place.
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According to data from its own police department, Philadelphia has the highest murder rate of the nation's ten largest cities – by a wide margin.
In 2011, on a per-capita basis, Philadelphia recorded 20.7 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. The next bloodiest city, Chicago, came in at 15.7, followed by Dallas at 10.9.
In contrast, the murder rates in New York City is 6.1, and 7.8 in Los Angeles.
Local media in Philadelphia reported that 324 people were murdered so far this year, up from 306 in 2010 and 302 the year before.
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Although the number of murder victims is down from the peak of more than 500 in 1990, the rising magnitude of bloodshed have many people in the city concerned.
(However, Philadelphia police officials are quick to point out that three U.S. cities not among the ten largest – Detroit, New Orleans and St. Louis – have even higher murder rates than the City of Brotherly Love.)
Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey told local media the obvious.
“This is a city that's got a history of violence unfortunately," he said. “We’ve got a lot of very violent people out there on the streets that need to be taken off the streets, or they will kill again.”
Interestingly, other formerly murder-prone cities, like New York City and Washington D.C., are enjoying historic lows in killings.
Indeed, it is a mystery why the bloodshed is so high in Philadelphia – 50 percent more than in Chicago, and double the murder rate of Dallas.
Philadelphia has the same problems as other cities of its size – massive poverty, thriving drug trade, collapsed manufacturing base, racial tensions, etc. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Philadelphia County’s jobless rate stood at 10.9 percent as of September 2011 – high, but not significantly higher than unemployment in most other large cities.
So, why would Philadelphia's story be so much worse than other similarly troubled metropolises?
A closer examination of Philadelphia's murder data indicates that the killings overwhelmingly involve its black population. Philadelphia police data revealed that in the first half of 2011 an astounding 84 percent of homicide victims were black (as were virtually all of their killers). In 2010, 79.1 percent of murder victims were black.
This proportion has remained steady over the past few years. From 2007-2010, about 79 percent of murder victims in Philadelphia were black. (These figures apparently include Hispanics of African descent, since Philadelphia police do not classify Spanish-speaking people as a separate racial classification).
However, blacks only account for about 43 percent of the city's population (as of 2010).
