• Gun violence has afflicted Philadelphians for decades. Between 2015 and 2018, the number of shootings were fairly consistent with previous years, but started creeping up.

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• Then in 2019, gun violence soared. As the pandemic took hold the next year, shootings in the city reached unprecedented levels.

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• But in the last year, shootings fell as dramatically as they had spiked. And it’s not clear why.

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After three straight years of record-setting gun violence, shootings in Philadelphia so far this year have plummeted to levels that rival the lowest pace in nearly two decades, according to an Inquirer analysis of police statistics.

What stands out is not only the stark drop in gunfire compared with last year, the analysis shows, but also that it has plunged to a level not seen since 2015 — and remained that way, week after week.

For example: Fewer than 100 people have been shot in each of the last seven months, the first time that’s happened in a decade, and just the third time the city has seen such a stretch since 2007.

The number of victims so far in 2024 is about half of the total at the height of the pandemic.

And the drop has been seen citywide: Only one of the city’s 21 police districts has recorded year-over-year increase in shootings, the analysis shows. In some of the most historically violent districts — particularly in Kensington and parts of North Philadelphia — the rate of gun violence has been cut nearly in half.

The only modern precedent for such a sudden change in Philadelphia’s level of gun violence is the spring of 2020, when the record-setting surge of shootings began. Still, that spike came after gunfire had been gradually increasing for several years.

The current drop-off has come even as the city continues to face some of the same challenges it did during the height of the violence crisis: Police staffing remains low, as do overall arrests; gun sales have remained high; and the city’s poverty levels remain among the nation’s worst.

Some key stakeholders, including Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel and District Attorney Larry Krasner, said in recent interviews that even they aren’t certain what’s driving the decrease. While they believe that law enforcement has been taking effective steps to address the issue — modifying patrol assignments, arresting suspected shooters at a higher rate, and collaborating effectively across agencies — they said some of the answers could remain difficult to pinpoint for some time.

The search for answers is further complicated by the impact of the pandemic, they added, during which broad swaths of public life — such as in-person jobs and schooling and other community activities, all of which can act as deterrents to crime — were shut down or disrupted.

“Some of it we may never be able to put a handle on,” Bethel said.

They also noted that Philadelphia may again be part of a national trend. Just as homicides spiked across the country during the pandemic, killings fell by about 13% nationwide last year, one of the largest annual declines on record. And through the first three months of 2024, murders nationally dropped by 26% more, according to recently released FBI data, a pace that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland called “historic.”

One recent study, by the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said the decline in Philadelphia’s rate of gun violence so far this year has been the most significant drop of any large city in the country. Other cities with comparable declines were Detroit, Washington, Baltimore, and Milwaukee, the study said.

To be clear, a drop in violence to begin a calendar year does not mean that the lower pace will hold. Shootings in Philadelphia have traditionally spiked in the summer, when the weather gets warmer and more people are outdoors. And 2015 provides a cautionary roadmap: After averaging about 2.3 shooting victims per day through April of that year, the analysis shows, the pace of gun violence over the next eight months was nearly twice as high.

A decline also does not mean the issue has been solved. The city is still on pace to see more than 1,000 people shot in 2024.

The trauma and sheer loss of life over the last several years, meanwhile, will likely be felt for decades. More than 10,400 people have been shot since 2019, and 2,200 have been killed. Children have been forced to grow up without mothers or fathers, parents mourn for their sons and daughters, and survivors have been paralyzed and forever scarred.

Even as a feeling of cautious optimism begins to spread across the city, for many families, the damage is done.

Tammy Cross-Hayward’s life has waned ever since the night her 21-year-old son, Jordan Marquise Hayward, was shot and killed in West Philadelphia on May 1, 2023. She rarely eats. She seldom leaves home. She cannot sleep through the night and finds herself scribbling streams of consciousness into her journal just to ease her mind.

“I’m just stuck,” she said. “I felt like God hates me. Why me?”

Shootings in Kensington are historically low

While shootings have dropped citywide, the decline in violence in Kensington — long one of the most violent places in the city — has been particularly striking.

Shootings in the 24th and 25th police districts, which encompass much of the neighborhood, are down from a combined nine victims a week in 2021 and 2022 — when shootings peaked — to about 3 a week this year.

That low level of gunfire is virtually unprecedented in recent history for the neighborhood, where drug dealers competing for turf have long brought violence to the area’s sprawling open-air drug market. Numerous studies in recent years have found that the blocks near McPherson Square have had not only the highest rates of gun violence in the city, but also the highest concentration of shootings in the entire country.

The Police Department recently said it will deploy dozens of additional officers to the neighborhood as it begins to more strictly enforce drug laws there. Mayor Cherelle L. Parker has made addressing the challenges in Kensington — which go beyond gun violence to include homelessness, drug use, and public health — a central pillar of her new administration.

Still, Krasner, for one, said he is uncertain how or why shootings have fallen so dramatically in Kensington this year — particularly because many aspects of the Parker administration’s tough-on-crime approach for the area have yet to be put into practice.

“Things we might do in the future haven’t happened yet,” he said. “And therefore I think it bears a closer look.”

Some city residents, meanwhile, sense the shift. Shannon Farrell-Patkis, president of the Harrowgate Civic Association, said she finally believes that she can sit outside her house again without fear of being caught in the crossfire.

Her sons, aged 10 and 15, both have autism and are non-verbal, she said. When shootings have erupted in the past, they’d freeze, she said, and didn’t understand that they needed to run and hit the ground.

When violence was at its peak, she said, she kept them mostly indoors. Now they’re spending more time in the fresh air.

”I’m sitting on my porch with my kids again,” she said. “I don’t have as much anxiety about it. It’s been nice.”

Other metrics have barely budged

The decline of gun violence in Kensington is just one part of a broader puzzle. Officials say they’re similarly stumped that many of the metrics that rose as gun violence spiked have not changed significantly amid the decline.

Police staffing is perhaps the clearest example. The department began losing officers during the pandemic, and some officials — including former Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw — said that made it harder to address crime and bring shootings under control.

But staffing remains a significant issue even as the number of shootings has plunged. The department said it has about 5,100 sworn officers on the payroll — 1,200 short of its authorized number.

Gun sales were also frequently mentioned amid the pandemic as an accelerant of violence, with background checks for potential purchases spiking to unprecedented levels in 2020.

But such checks remain high, according to state police data. And the guns that were purchased during the pandemic are almost certainly still in circulation, making it unclear how or why gunfire has fallen if the arsenal of potential weaponry remains so large.

“That’s a hard one to put a handle on,” said Bethel.

Arrests present another unusual pattern. While violence was at record heights, arrests dipped to the lowest in at least a decade, according to data published by the district attorney’s office.

But even as the pendulum swings toward less violence, apprehensions have remained generally flat. The pace of arrests has ticked up slightly this year, the data show, but the number of people taken into custody in 2024 — about 11,000 — remains generally on-par with the pace during the violence crisis, and is about 40% lower than in pre-pandemic years.

Two categories that have shown some improvement are arrests for homicides and shootings. Krasner credited advances in technology — including more use of cellphone records and surveillance video — and in-depth investigations targeting groups accused of multiple acts of violence.

And he and Bethel said the lower pace of violence this year has given investigators more time to focus on a smaller number of cases, rather than juggling caseloads that previously seemed to grow by the hour.

“It gives them time,” Bethel said.

The pain for victims hasn’t changed

Still, for all the progress at the start of this year, the pain for those affected by gun violence remains constant.

Tammy Cross-Hayward, for one, said she will never forget when doctors told her that her son Jordan was brain dead and wouldn’t survive after being shot.

Last May, the 21-year-old — who’d recently finished up the final credits for his high school diploma and was working at an Amazon warehouse — was walking with two friends on the 200 block of North Robinson Street in West Philadelphia when he was shot and killed.

According to police, another man on the block saw them and asked, “Where y’all from?”

Jordan and his friends ignored the question and kept walking, but the man, whom police have not identified, pulled out a gun and started shooting, police said. Jordan was struck once in the head.

After Cross-Hayward was told her son wouldn’t survive, she decided to donate his kidneys, saving the lives of two women, aged 30 and 60.

She wrote to them recently and told them about Jordan — how he loved to drink water and chew mint gum, and how he’d hoped to become a firefighter so that he could have a stable job to help take care of his mother.

“They have a piece of my son,” she said. “He’s helping them and I’m grateful for that.”

It’s some of the only comfort she feels these days. She prays every day that her son’s killers are brought to justice. She calls and emails detectives hoping for updates.

She imagines a day where no other family has to feel the pain she lives everyday.