PHILADELPHIA — The 300th homicide of the year claimed the life of Lamier Boyd, an 18-year-old father-to-be who was gunned down one July night on a sidewalk in West Philadelphia. In the following days, a grandmother was shot in the neck in Mill Creek, a popular singer was killed outside his home in South Philadelphia, and a 26-year-old man was shot during an argument outside a restaurant in East Tioga.
On August 2, Tuesday evening, a car pulled up on a front porch cookout in Northeast Philadelphia. Someone in the car opened fire, killing a 29-year-old woman.
With her death, the 322nd of the year, Philadelphia’s homicide toll was on pace to become the highest on police records, passing the grim milestone set last year. So far in 2022, more than 1,400 people in the city have been shot, hundreds of them fatally, a higher number than in much larger cities like New York or Los Angeles. The last two years have seen alarm bells ringing across the country about gun violence, but Philadelphia is one of the few major American cities where it’s truly as bad as it’s ever been.
The crisis is all the more painful because it has been so concentrated in certain neighborhoods in North and West Philadelphia, places that were abandoned decades ago by gentrification and other forms of discrimination and are now among the poorest parts of what is often called the poorest big city in the country. Violence has occasionally erupted in other areas of Philadelphia, including a mass shooting in June on a street crowded with bars and restaurants. But most of the gunfire echoed along blocks of rundown houses, vacant lots and iron-caged front porches.
The city government has launched a number of efforts to address the crisis, including grants to community groups, violence intervention programs and earlier curfews. But one important question seems to have no ready answers: what to do with all the guns.
“Everybody’s armed,” said Jonathan Wilson, director of the Fathership Foundation, a Southwest Philadelphia nonprofit that is helping to conduct a cross-city survey of young people’s attitudes about gun culture. “No one is without a gun in these zip codes because they’ve always been dangerous.”
At a recent press conference, Mayor Jim Kenney complained that authorities “continue to take guns off the street and they are simultaneously being replaced almost immediately.” In fact, the problem is more drastic than that, according to a city report earlier this year. For every illegal gun confiscated by Philadelphia police between 1999 and 2019, about three more were bought or sold legally — and that was before the recent boom in gun ownership.
In Philadelphia over the past two years, as well as across the country, the rate of legal gun sales has increased, roughly doubling during the pandemic years. The number of firearms permits issued in the city jumped to more than 52,000 in 2021 from about 7,400 in 2020.
None of these figures include the apparently thriving illegal arms market. In the past two years, reports of stolen guns have increased, major gun-trafficking channels have been uncovered and, according to police, many more guns have been found that have been illegally converted into fully automatic weapons.
Gun Violence and Gun Control in America
The city is suing the gun-friendly state legislature for preempting its authority to enact stricter local gun laws, such as reporting requirements for lost or stolen guns. And Philadelphia officials have publicly quarreled with each other over enforcing the laws on the books. In July, after two police officers were shot at a Fourth of July celebration, some City Council leaders even suggested a return to a policing tactic many had seen as shameful from an earlier era: stop and frisk.
“There are a lot of citizens on the streets of the city of Philadelphia talking about, ‘When are we going to look at stop and frisk in a constitutional and proactive way?'” Darrell L. Clark, the council’s president, said at a news conference. “These are conversations people need to have.”
Given a consent decree requiring monitoring of police stops, as well as opposition from other city leaders and a dearth of evidence that the practice ever worked, the old days of stop-and-frisk, when police conducted thousands of street searches that overwhelmingly targeted black Philadelphians, are unlikely to return. But broaching the subject at all revealed the depth of official irritation.
Some of the frustration has been directed at District Attorney Larry Krasner, whose approach to criminal justice has drawn criticism from the mayor, anger from the police union and threats of impeachment from Republican state lawmakers.
Mr. Krasner, one of the nation’s most prominent progressive prosecutors, has long argued that placing a primary focus on arresting and incarcerating people caught carrying firearms without a permit is not only ineffective but counterproductive because it diverts police energy and resources from solving serious crimes and alienates people whom investigators need as sources and witnesses.
“You can make a huge number of gun arrests and you don’t see a significant reduction in shootings,” he said in an interview.
There were no arrests in three-quarters of fatal shootings last year, according to statistics provided by Mr. Krasner’s office, even as arrests for illegal weapons jumped to record levels.
Only a small percentage of the people who are arrested for carrying guns without permits are actually the ones who instigate the violence, Mr. Krasner said. He insisted the city should focus instead on people who have already proven themselves to be dangerous and invest in advanced forensic technology to clean up the hundreds of unsolved shootings.
“What’s their theory — that instead of vigorously prosecuting the people who actually fire the gun,” Mr. Krasner asked, “that we should take 100 people and put them in jail because one of them might shoot somebody?”
Some city officials, including the police chief, see things differently.
“I think there are some philosophical differences between us,” Police Commissioner Daniel M. Outlaw said in an interview. She said she advocates a “both, not either-or” approach. Earlier this year, police created a special unit dedicated to investigating nonfatal shootings, with four dozen detectives and other officers working on cases across the city. But the commissioner insisted the police were equally committed to tackling illegal gun possession.
“There must be consequences for those who carry and use these weapons illegally,” Ms Outlaw said. “If I go out and get this gun knowing that nothing is going to happen to me, why would that stop me from doing anything else illegal with a gun?”
For those who live in crisis every day, these questions are visceral.
Marguerite Roof is a special education classroom assistant at an elementary school in Philadelphia. On a Saturday morning seven years ago, her youngest son, 23-year-old Justin, was gunned down in the street.
There should be tougher penalties for illegally carrying guns, Ms. Ruff said in a recent interview. But she added that it probably won’t matter. “They think they can get away with it because they’re young,” she said.
A few years ago, a “thinking person” wouldn’t carry a gun on the streets of Philadelphia, Ms. Ruff said, “but now you can’t even leave your house, you can’t go to your car, you can” not drive to the corner. She said she doesn’t like that so many people carry guns, but “in a way I can understand it.”
At the North Philadelphia headquarters of NOMO, a nonprofit organization for the city’s at-risk youth, several dozen young people — boys and girls, ages 11 to 17 — had gathered on a sweltering summer afternoon. Ricky Duncan, CEO of the organization, asked for a show of hands: How many feel threatened every day? A large majority raised their hands. How many would feel safer with a gun? The answer was pretty much the same.
How many knew how to get a gun with one phone call? The response was almost unanimous.
One young man explained it this way: If you get arrested, you can still see your family in prison. It wasn’t if you were dead.
Mr. Duncan called that man, a 21-year-old program participant who did not want his name published for his own safety, and asked him to tell his story.
A few years ago, the young man said he bought a 9mm handgun from an acquaintance for several hundred dollars, only to have another friend pick it up, shoot it and drive off with it. That friend was later accused of shooting two people. That’s how it is these days, he said.
“We still want to do better,” he said. “But there’s a lot in the way.”
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