Many Philadelphians don’t feel safe. That joins with high taxes and poor schools to form an unholy trinity of frustrations that has long plagued city residents and, sometimes, clinched their decisions to move out.

The city has long accepted more than 100,000 serious crimes a year as a fixture of its landscape - though now that police policies of falsifying crime statistics have been documented, it’s hard to know precisely what the crime rate was during the last decade.

What’s certain is that, through most of the 1990s, at least one person was murdered in the city per day. Years into a war on drugs that began after crack cocaine began to destroy inner-city neighborhoods, the city police count more than 4,500 known drug-dealing locations in Philadelphia, about a third of them outdoor bazaars. Illegal gun sales flourish around the city.

The city’s prisons were for years so crowded that a federal judge told the city is should release some people awaiting trial, rather than have them sit in prisons she said violated their rights. That "prison cap" order was relieved in 1995, but the same judge recently warned the city it better build a new prison quickly or the cap could return.

The city’s court system, with its elected judges, pleases almost no one. Some find the courts far too lenient. Others find them too harsh and dismissive of constitutional rights.

And the city’s police force has a long history of corruption and clashes with minority communities that produce frequent claims of brutality. Even its defenders, who call that history largely a concoction of antagonistic media, would like to see officers more fit, better trained and better equipped. Some feel efforts to boost the ranks of minority officers have so lowered recruiting standards that policing has suffered.

And, as many have complained, even if you wanted to forget these problems for a day, the local media - with their incessant, sensational crime reports - won’t let you.

In a poll done by the Annenberg Public Policy Center last December, crime was the issue most often cited as the top problem facing the city. Yet citizen comments at forums in January and February struck notes of hope. Thanks in part to new and popular Police Commissioner John Timoney, safety was described as an issue finally being taken seriously and addressed.

But it remains an issue far from resolved. It remains one of the Philadelphia’s biggest challenges, simply put as: