Philadelphia Inquirer
Wednesday, May 13, 1998

The city gets good news on murder rates

No one is sure why, but killings were down in the first four months of the year.

By Craig R. McCoy, Clea Benson and Thomas J. Gibbons Jr.,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS
Inquirer staff writer Michael Matza contributed to this article. Computer analysis was done by graphic artist Matthew Ericson.

Correction:

It could be smarter policing. It could be a strong economy. It could be a crackdown on gun traffickers.

Whatever the cause, the trend is clear: Philadelphia's homicide rate fell sharply in the first four months of this year.

The 26 percent decline suggests that the city could be on the verge of the kind of steep decline in murder witnessed in New York, Boston and some other cities, police and criminologists said yesterday.

From Jan. 1 to April 30, 103 people were killed in Philadelphia, compared with 139 during the same period last year.

The four-month count is the lowest in the city for that period since 1987, before the appearance of crack cocaine and an associated surge in drug-related killings.

``We do not think this is an accident,'' said Police Commissioner John F. Timoney, who succeeded Richard Neal in March. ``We think this is the result of designed strategies. We're heading in the right direction.''

An Inquirer analysis of homicide data going back to 1976 shows that the proportion of killings committed in the first four months of each year is remarkably consistent. On average, slightly less than a third of the total death tally occurs between New Year's Day and the end of April.

If that trends holds true in 1998, the city's homicide total for the year would be 321, the Inquirer analysis found, the lowest figure since 1985, when there were 271 slayings.

Philadelphia's murder rate has stayed level in recent years, even as crime overall has dropped. There were 409 murders last year, 420 in 1996 and 433 the year before.

In one sign of the downturn in violent deaths, Philadelphia went through 12 days in late April and early May without a reported homicide. There had not been a comparable killing-free stretch for at least 10 years.

The next-longest streak on record was eight days, in 1988.

Police Inspector Jerrold G. Kane, who has more than 25 years of experience investigating killings in Philadelphia, noticed the decline when his private method of keeping track of the yearly death toll stopped working.

Ordinarily, Kane, head of the Homicide Division, measures murder by keeping track of the running count of days in the year. If it's the 125th day, Kane said, Philadelphia usually has at least 125 homicides.

For the last decade, the system worked like clockwork, he said. A year has 365 days; Philadelphia has had at least 400 murders a year since 1989.

But this year, the murder rate has not kept pace. By April 30, the 120th day, there had been 103 killings.

``There's definitely going to be a reduction'' in the year-end total for 1998, Kane said.

While some cautioned that the pace of killings could pick up later, Rendell administration officials and social scientists said the figures reflected a city finally getting its act together in the fight against murder.

For the last year, police have been more aggressive about arresting people for illegal possession of firearms and confiscating their weapons. Federal agents have been tracing guns used in crimes to their original point of sale to arrest gun traffickers. Family Court officials are ordering counseling for teenage gun offenders in hopes of weaning them from a life of violence.

Homicide detectives have also made a concentrated effort to curb homicides in three of the city's most crime-ridden neighborhoods - Fairhill, Kensington and the Parkside section of West Philadelphia.

So far this year, murders in the East Detective Division, which includes Fairhill and Kensington, have dropped to 27 from 42 during the same period in 1997.

``It's clear from what we've studied in other cities that strategic, coordinated approaches are the most successful,'' said Recreation Commissioner Michael DiBerardinis, who heads the city's new Handgun Reduction Task Force. ``Every day we are getting better at both. So it is no longer a single unit doing a single thing, or many units doing things separately in an unorchestrated fashion.''

That view was endorsed by criminologist John DiLulio, a professor at Princeton University and coauthor of Body Count: Moral Poverty and How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs.

In an analysis of homicide trends in Philadelphia provided to The Inquirer, DiLulio said the drop in homicides in New York, Boston ``and now in Philadelphia'' was due to a ``scissors approach'' to cutting killing.

``One blade is law enforcement,'' he wrote. ``The other blade is community-based outreach.''

In Philadelphia of late, DiLulio said, ``key decision-makers have been simultaneously sharpening both blades and thereby effectuating significant cuts in crime.''

He said the city had ``a real shot'' at sustaining a drop in violence ``mainly because so many from so many different key positions are on the same page of the book.''

Despite the statistics, C. William Schwab, a nationally known researcher on violence and head of trauma care at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, said the HUP emergency room - the city's second busiest for gunshot wounds - had seen no decline in killing.

``We have a death from a gunshot wound to the chest on Sunday. We had a death last night from a gunshot wound to the abdomen,'' Schwab said. ``There has been no let-up in West Philadelphia.''

He added: ``This first little blip means nothing to me. I would not give people false hope.''

One factor in homicide that has not changed, despite the four-month decline, is the use of firearms.

Of those slain so far in 1998, eight in 10 died at the point of a gun. That is about the same proportion as in past years, and is the highest rate of gun use in homicides among the nation's top 10 cities.

Nor are young people avoiding early death at a greater rate. Four in 10 victims this year were teenagers or in their early 20s, the same proportion as in recent years.

But policing does seem to be making a difference.

An Inquirer analysis of homicide this year and last shows that the biggest drops in the Jan. 1-April 30 period were in Fairhill, Kensington and Parkside, three neighborhoods targeted by police.

The decline in the Fairhill and Kensington area may reflect the arrest in February of Elias Pagan, 24, the alleged leader of a drug ring that police say was responsible for at least four murders last year in a battle to control Fairhill crack corners. Pagan has been charged with four killings.

``Getting him off the street helped to save additional victims in '98,'' said Capt. James Brady of the Homicide Division.

These factors may also play a role:

Gun seizures are up. Police seized 809 handguns, shotguns and rifles in arrests in the first quarter of 1998, up from 714 in the same period last year, says the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Medical care of gunshot victims may be winning the war against higher-powered guns. The most recent figures show that 22 percent of gunshot victims died in city emergency rooms in the last quarter of 1997, compared with 24 percent a year earlier. These figures are from the Pennsylvania Trauma Systems Foundation, which oversees the city's eight leading trauma centers.

The city's economy has been strong. Philadelphia saw a slight increase in jobs in 1997 after many years of erosion in employment. Crimes, including murder, are closely linked to the economy, rising during bad times.

Across the nation, murder rates have been falling in many major cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Boston. At the same time, they have increased in such cities as Baltimore and Miami.

DiBerardinis, the Philadelphia recreation commissioner, said the drop in homicide in Philadelphia comes as city officials gear up to attack the problem on new fronts.

The city is readying a massive public-relations campaign aimed at teenagers, with the slogan ``What are you shooting for?'' And more than $20 million in foundation money will soon be spent on anti-violence initiatives.