Everyone is armed and the shooting increases

PHILADELPHIA – The 300th murder of the year took the life of Lameer Boyd, an 18-year-old father-to-be who was shot on a West Philadelphia sidewalk one July night.

In the following days, a grandmother was shot in the neck in Mill Creek, a popular singer was killed outside her home in South Philadelphia, and a 26-year-old was shot in an argument outside a restaurant in East Tioga. .

On August 2, a Tuesday evening, a car pulled up to a barbecue outside on the porch in northeastern Philadelphia.

Someone in the car opened fire, killing a 29-year-old woman.

With his death, the 322th of the year, the number of murders in Philadelphia was well on its way to becoming the highest in the police recordssurpassing the sad goal set last year.

More than 1,400 people have been killed in the city so far in 2022, hundreds of them to death, more than in the much larger cities of New York or Los Angeles.

For the past two years, alarm bells have been sounding about gun violence across the country, but Philadelphia is one of the few major cities in America where it really is. bad as always.

The crisis is all the more heartbreaking for being so concentrated in some neighborhoods in northern and western Philadelphia, places that decades ago were left behind by red clauses and other forms of discrimination and are now among the poorest areas of the city. . the poorest in the country.

Big city

Violence has erupted at times in other areas of Philadelphia, including a mass shooting in June in a busy street of bars and restaurants.

But much of the shooting took place in dilapidated row houses, vacant lots and porches with iron cages.

The city government has implemented a range of efforts to address the crisis, including grants to community groups, anti-violence intervention programs and curfew anticipated.

But on a crucial question, there seem to be no ready answers: what to do with all weapons.

“Everyone is armed,” said Jonathan Wilson, director of the Fathership Foundation, a nonprofit organization in southwestern Philadelphia that helped conduct a multi-city survey of young people’s attitudes towards parenthood culture.

“No one is without a gun in these zip codes, because they have always been dangerous.”

In a recent press conference, Mayor Jim Kenney complained that the authorities “continue to take guns off the streets and at the same time replace them almost immediately.”

In fact, the problem is more serious than that, according to a city report earlier this year.

For every illegal weapon seized by police in Philadelphia between 1999 and 2019, about one was legally bought or sold. three more gunsand that was before a recent boom in gun ownership.

In Philadelphia over the past two years, as throughout the country, the pace of legal arms sales has increased, nearly doubling during the pandemic years.

The number of firearms licenses issued in the city jumped to over 52,000 in 2021, from around 7,400 in 2020.

Neither of these figures includes the seemingly thriving market for illegal weapons.

Over the past two years, reports of stolen weapons have skyrocketed, major arms trafficking channels have been uncovered and, according to police, many more weapons have been found that have been illegally converted into fully automatic weapons.

The city is suing the pro-gun state legislature for preventing its authority from enacting local gun laws. strict, such as reporting requirements for lost or stolen firearms.

And Philadelphia officials have publicly quarreled among themselves over the enforcement of accounting laws.

In July, after two police officers were shot dead during a 4th of July celebration, some city council executives even suggested reverting to a police tactic that many people had considered the shame of an era. previous one: stop and record.

“There are many citizens on the streets of the city of Philadelphia who say:

‘When will we consider constitutional and active stop-and-frisk?’ “

Darrell L. Clarke, chairman of the board, said at a news conference.

“Those are conversations that people need to have.”

Given a consensus decree requiring monitoring of police stops, as well as opposition from other city leaders and the paucity of evidence that the practice ever worked, the old days of stop-and-frisk, when police led thousands of street searches that overwhelmingly targeted black Philadelphia, are unlikely to return.

But addressing the subject revealed the depth of official exasperation.

Part of the frustration has been directed at District Attorney Larry Krasner, whose approach to criminal justice has sparked criticism from the mayor, anger from the police union, and a threat of impeachment from Republican state lawmakers.

Krasner, one of the country’s most progressive prosecutors, has long argued that focusing primarily on arresting and incarcerating people caught with firearms without permission is not only ineffective, but counterproductiveBecause it diverts police energy and resources from solving violent crimes and alienates the people investigators need as sources and witnesses.

“You can make a huge number of arrests for weapons and you don’t see reductions significant in the shots, “he said.

There have been no arrests in three-quarters of the fatal shootings last year, according to statistics provided by Krasner’s office, although arrests for illegal weapons hit record highs.

Only a small fraction of those arrested for carrying weapons without permission are actually leading the violence, Krasner said.

He insisted that the city had to focus on people who had already shown be dangerous and investing in advanced forensic technology to clear up the hundreds of unsolved shootings.

“What’s your theory, that instead of aggressively chasing people who actually shoot guns,” Krasner asked, “we should take 100 people and put them in jail, because one of them could shoot someone?”

Some city officials, including the police chief, see things differently.

“I think there are some philosophical differences between us,” said Police Commissioner Danielle M. Outlaw.

He said he advocated a “both and not one of” approach. one or the other”.

This year, the police created a special unit dedicated to investigating non-fatal shootings, with four dozen investigators and other officers working on cases throughout the city.

But the commissioner insisted that the police were also committed to cracking down on illegal possession of weapons.

“There must be impact for those who carry and use these weapons illegally, ”Outlaw said.

“If I go out and get this gun, knowing nothing will happen to me, why should that stop me from doing anything else illegally with a gun?”

For those who experience the crisis every day, these questions are visceral.

Marguerite Ruff is a special education class assistant at an elementary school in Philadelphia.

On a Saturday morning seven years ago, his youngest son, Justin, 23, was shot dead in the street.

There should be tougher penalties for the illegal carrying of weapons, Ruff said recently.

But he added that it probably wouldn’t make any difference.

“They think they get away with it because they’re young,” he said.

A few years ago, “a thinking person” didn’t carry a gun on the streets of Philadelphia, Ruff said, “but now you can’t even leave the house, you can’t drive, you can’t drive to the corner.”

He doesn’t like that so many people carry guns, he said, but “in a way, I can understand.”

At the North Philadelphia headquarters of NOMO, a nonprofit organization for the city’s at-risk youth, a few dozen young boys and girls, ages 11 to 17, had gathered on a hot summer afternoon.

Rickey Duncan, the organization’s executive director, asked in a show of hands:

How many felt in danger every day?

A large majority raised their hand.

How many would feel safer with a gun?

The answer was almost the same.

How many knew how to get a gun with just one phone call?

The response was almost unanimous.

A young man explained it this way:

If you are arrested, you may still see your family in prison. Not so if I were died.

Duncan had called this man, a 21-year-old contestant on the show who didn’t want his name published for his safety, and asked him to tell his story.

Several years ago, the young man said, he bought a 9mm pistol from an acquaintance for several hundred dollars, only to have another friend catch him, shoot him, and take it away.

That friend was later accused of shooting two people to death. That’s how it is these days, he said.

“We still want to do better,” he said.

“But there are many things in between.”

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