2,240 people shot, nearly 500 killed in 2020
PHILADELPHIA — For just the second time in its history, Philadelphia’s annual homicide total threatened in 2020 to reach 500, another grim marker in a year where the city has been wracked by the coronavirus pandemic, economic strife and social unrest over racial inequity.
The number of people killed last year — 499 as of late Thursday — was 40% higher than last year, and more than in all of 2013 and 2014 combined. The only time more people were slain in the city was in 1990, when police reported 500 homicides as violence surged alongside an intensifying crack-cocaine epidemic.
The spike in shootings was even more pronounced. More than 2,240 people were shot in 2020, 40% more than police have ever recorded. Those statistics only date to 2007, when the department began keeping track of shooting victims separately from the broader category of assaults involving a gun.
As in most years, the vast majority of victims were young, Black men — many from impoverished neighborhoods lacking resources and long afflicted by gun violence. But shots also killed and wounded children playing on the street. A pregnant womanwashit by a stray bullet — forcing the early delivery of her baby. Some gunmen fired indiscriminately into block parties. A witness was shot dead near City Hall in what police believe was a targeted hit for his testimony in a murder trial.
Still, the city’s crime picture continued to show uneven and unusual signs: As homicides and shootings soared, overall violent crime — which also includes rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults — remained near decadeslong lows, while overall property crime was also lower than in 2019.
In interviews, city officials including Mayor Jim Kenney, police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw and District Attorney Larry Krasner said they believed a combination of factors unique to 2020 contributed to the spike in gun violence.
They pointed to a pandemic increasing stress and desperation for people in already-struggling neighborhoods; officers being pulled away from their regular neighborhood patrols to help monitor protests and respond to pockets of social unrest; COVID exposures forcing further staffing adjustments; and a series of trust-shattering episodes by officers — including use of tear gas and rubber bullets during protests in June — that may have further eroded law enforcement legitimacy in a city that has long struggled with the issue.
Many city services that function as checks against gun violence — or at least alternatives to the street — were also significantly disrupted this year: Criminal courts were all but shut down for months; the probation and parole systems struggled to operate regularly; schools and recreation centers closed; and many jobs disappeared as programs and businesses shuttered.
“It’s been a rough year,” Kenney said.
Police also point to the proliferation of guns on the street. They logged more than 2,300 arrests for illegal firearm possession this year, double the total from 2015.
State police, meanwhile, said the city’s jails. the state conducted nearly 1 Outlaw and Kenney denied million background checks that officers intentionally pulled through November for legal fireback in response to challenging arms purchases, 56% more than circumstances, but Outlaw did last year’s total. It’s not clear how say that morale has plummeted many were in Philadelphia; a among rank-and-file officers countywide breakdown for 2020 — not only because they had to was unavailable. continue difficult and sometimes
Other forms of routine policdangerous work in the face of a ing in the city were affected in deadly disease, but also because 2020. Total arrests fell by more manyhave perceived widespread than a third compared with last calls for systemic reform as critiyear, according to data from the cism of their service on the force. district attorney’s office, with “Those of us who are doing drug arrests cut nearly in half, the job, we’re human beings too. and arrests for violent crimes And I think it would be foolish down 20%. to even believe that that doesn’t
Some of that is likely due to have an impact on howmotivated policy shifts Outlaw temporaryou are,” Outlaw said in an interily implemented, in which offiview Tuesday. “We come and cers were told not to immediately we do our jobs, absolutely. But apprehend suspects in minor or is everyone going to continue to drug-related offenses in a bid to go above and beyond, knowing avoid potentially spreading the that we’re under so much scrucoronavirus in the community or tiny right now? We don’t know at what point a mistake becomes a misstep, or something that can get punished.”
A national problem
Philadelphia is far from alone in experiencing a homicide spike this year. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington are among the urban centers recording a surge in violence.
The Council on Criminal Justice, a Washington research group, found that homicides in 21 American cities were up 32% between March and October compared with last year. And some analysts believe 2020 could record the largest singleyear increase in murders in the United States.
Criminologists generally believe that the pandemic — which has disproportionately impacted communities of color — has intensified existing structural factors that lead to violence, such as concentrated poverty, while also disrupting law enforcement and social services designed to respond to crime.
Thomas Abt, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, said that the national homicide spike hit its peak in June and July — after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd and protesters across the country demonstrated against police brutality.
A similar and widespread homicide spike occurred after Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. One theory at the time, known as “the Ferguson effect” — widely debated and controversial — was that police across the country, in the face of protests and criticism, had grown wary or even defiant about being proactive in trying to prevent crime.
Another theory, regarding residents’ confidence in police after high-profile killings, has also since garnered attention, Abt said.
“There’s good research that suggests when there’s a highly publicized killing like the one that we saw, it exacerbates mistrust in poor communities of color, which leads some to withdraw from law enforcement, even to take the law into their own hands,” Abt said.
Sustained local violence
Like other cities, Philadelphia’s violence crisis truly took off at the beginning of June — immediately following three days of widespread unrest over Floyd’s death.
Before June, the city had not recorded more than 180 shooting victims in a month in at least 13 years.
But from June through November, at least 200 people were shot every month, police statistics show — an average of nearly eight people per day.
The violence accelerated in neighborhoods that have long grappled with gun violence, such as Kensington, West Philadelphia, Nicetown and North Philadelphia.
Krasner said summer could have been the moment when the near-total shutdown of social services and alternatives to gun violence collided with warmer weather and other traditional drivers of violence, such as long-simmering feuds — suddenly allowed to play out on streets where witnesses, like everyone else, stayed homein the pandemic lockdown.