Lives Under Fire
A look at Philly’s gun violence crisis through the eyes of those experiencing it.
By Anna Orso, Chris Palmer, Dylan Purcell, and Dain Saint
Portraits by Jessica Griffin
April 21, 2022
Philadelphia’s surge in gun violence has continued unabated in 2022, with bullets leaving people wounded or dead in numbers that rival last year’s grim record. In just 15 weeks this year, 125 people have been fatally shot, and an additional 506 wounded, including women and children struck by stray bullets, teenagers killed walking home from school, and a disproportionate number of young men gunned down across the city.
Officials and experts caution that pinpointing why shootings are spiking dramatically may take years to sort out. But clearly, some contributing factors are new — such as skyrocketing gun sales, and ongoing social and political unrest — while others, including concentrated poverty and a dysfunctional law enforcement system, are longstanding.
Behind the numbers, countless lives are upended. Parents weep over their children’s bodies, young men are forced to spend their lives in wheelchairs, residents worry for their safety, and leaders say they’re fatigued by the relentlessness of the gunfire.
There remain open questions about how to stem the violence. A first step is understanding what drives it, how the city responds, and who is most harmed.
Shootings drove record homicide numbers.
For the last two years, Philadelphia has seen rates of gun violence rivaled only by the early 1990s amid the crack cocaine epidemic.
Homicides had been rising in Philadelphia since 2016, when 277 people were killed.
Then in spring 2020, the killings increased sharply.
Other cities, including Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, and Dallas, experienced increases, too.
But in Philadelphia, homicides rose to their highest level on record.
Beyond homicides, thousands more people have also been wounded in shootings.
2,331 people were shot in Philadelphia in 2021.
The overwhelming majority (over 92%) were Black or Hispanic.
Most victims are male, although more women have been shot recently.
One in five victims didn’t survive.
Bryant and Cindy Heard’s son, Bryant Heard II, was fatally shot last April near their home in Logan.
The younger Heard had been driving on the 1200 block of Wagner Avenue when his car was struck by another car speeding in a different direction. According to police, that driver’s brother — who lived nearby, but whom Heard didn’t know — saw the accident, then ran toward Heard’s car and fired the bullets that killed him.
In the aftermath, said the elder Bryant Heard: “I don’t trust nobody anymore.”
Cindy Heard, who works for the Police Department, used to take fingerprints from homicide victims in the morgue. But she asked to be transferred to another job.
“I just don't want to do that for a living,” she said. “It brings back too many memories.”
Michael Fornwald, 39, was shot on Sept. 14, 2020 in South Philadelphia. He was struck seven times from behind, allegedly by a man he had an argument with years ago. He was in a medically induced coma for a week and awoke to a life as a paraplegic.
"I have nerve damage, so they can't tell me if I will or won't walk again,” he said. “I’m dealing with it as if I’ll be in this chair forever. That way, I'm not disappointed. I'm preparing my life going forward as someone who is in a wheelchair.”
The problem ties to decades-long inequities.
The shootings crisis is propelled by a variety of factors including poverty, drugs, systemic racism, easy access to guns, and a lack of trust in policing.
Last year, The Inquirer mapped 57 blocks where 10 or more people have been shot since 2015. District Attorney Larry Krasner said the findings are influencing his office’s efforts to provide targeted community resources, and City Council is scheduled to hold hearings about crime reduction on those blocks.
Almost all of them are in neighborhoods that suffered disinvestment dating back more than 80 years. Here’s how:
In the mid-1930s, the federal government oversaw a mortgage program that color-coded neighborhoods as “Hazardous” or “Definitely Declining” based on desirability, and neighborhoods could be downgraded based on the racial makeup of the residents.
It effectively provided a map for banks to deny conventional loans because of race or ethnicity, a policy that experts say led to disinvestment and poverty in many Black and Latino neighborhoods. The practice became known as “redlining.” Eight decades later, in these neighborhoods, over 20% of residents live in poverty.
Many of these same neighborhoods in Philadelphia are home to blocks with devastating levels of gun violence. There are at least 57 blocks where 10 or more people have been shot since 2015.
And 53 of them are in areas deemed undesirable on redlining maps.
Erica Harris, an emergency physician at Einstein Medical Center in North Philadelphia, frequently treats gunshot victims. Harris is also the medical director of the Trauma Intervention Program.
“We’re seeing younger victims and we’re seeing more female victims, and it feels kind of like we can’t get a break. And I don't just mean the health-care workers here. I mean this community.”
Jalisa Love’s 7-year-old daughter, Honesty, was injured in September when at least three men drove down her Kensington block shooting at each other from cars. Honesty was grazed in the face by a bullet and then struck by one of the cars. She was hospitalized and survived. But today she and the rest of her family struggle with the trauma that remains.
"Some nights she’ll be up during the night like, 'Mommy, I can't sleep, I'm having nightmares.' After it happened, she was so scared, thinking they were going to kill her. I just tell her 'you were at the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn't your fault.'"
Law enforcement has failed to stem the tide.
Among the most concerning issues is how few shootings in Philadelphia ever get solved, much less result in conviction, creating a void of justice for victims.
An Inquirer analysis showed that just 21% of the 8,500 shootings in which people had been wounded or killed from 2015 to 2020 led to charges against a suspected shooter.
The District Attorney’s Office published similar findings in a 2021 report to City Council: Between 2015 and last year, the arrest rate in both fatal and nonfatal shootings never exceeded 38%.
Both fatal and nonfatal shootings have climbed over the years. They got even worse during the pandemic.
At the same time, the number of arrests made in shooting cases has dropped. The pandemic made things worse, with arrest rates falling to 14% of nonfatal shootings in 2021, down from 21% in 2019.
This means that during the city’s record-breaking shootings toll last year, just one in seven nonfatal shootings led to an arrest. The rest remain unsolved.
Capt. John Walker commands the Police Department’s new nonfatal shooting unit, launched earlier this year to centralize investigations of all shootings in which a victim survives. Walker said the unit has two broad goals: to increase the share of cases that end in an arrest, and to try to help connect victims with support services, such as counseling or jobs programs.
“One is to increase the clearance rate — that’s a critical part of it,” Walker said. “But it’s also to help more victims in a new way, which builds trust and legitimacy.”
Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said she’s been pleased with the initial results from that unit, known as the Shooting Investigations Group. She credited it with “making some really strong” arrests, saying: “They’re doing some really, really good work.”
The unit’s year-to-date clearance rate is 29.8%, nearly the 30% goal she previously targeted.
So what now?
Beyond policing, city officials have pledged to increase spending on anti-violence strategies such as jobs programs, after-school activities, and grants to community-based organizations.
Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration and City Council last year set aside $155 million of its $5 billion budget to fund those programs. This year, Kenney proposed $184 million, an 18.5% increase.
Some of the new funds would expand programs to identify the people most likely to shoot or be shot so they can be offered services. And $2 million would go to a pilot program modeled after READI Chicago, which provides support and jobs to men at risk of experiencing violence.
But some councilmembers say the plan lacked urgency and is not an adequate response to the crisis.
Other elected officials leveled similar criticism last year. The city controller found that most of the city’s antiviolence money went to long-term intervention efforts. A West Philadelphia councilmember began a public campaign in 2020 to push Kenney to declare a citywide state of emergency — to no avail. And some leaders of grassroots organizations said the money took far too long to flow or criticized the city’s programming as unfocused.
In the meantime, hundreds more were shot, and many of their families left behind.
Jondhi Harrell, a community advocate, said the city’s efforts to address the violence must include more input from, and support of, people with deep roots in their neighborhoods. Young men need jobs, mentoring, and trauma counseling, he said — and people with credibility on the streets, including those who have been incarcerated, are best positioned to hear their concerns and connect them with the right services.
“It has to be people embedded in the neighborhoods,” Harrell said. “We have to create programs that speak to young people, that speak their language, in a real way that says: ‘I care.’”
Lendale Rogers, whose 15-year-old daughter, Simone-Monea Rogers, was fatally shot in August while she was playing basketball at the Jerome Brown playground in North Philadelphia. The killing remains unsolved.
“I’ve never seen violence like this before in my life. It’s hard to grieve when all this stuff is going on. It’s like recycled trauma.”
With gun violence remaining alarmingly high this year, here are some resources for those affected by gun violence.
One in an occasional series about Philadelphia’s unchecked gun violence.
The data behind this story
The numbers for the graphics came from a range of sources:
Comparative shooting rates of cities: U.S. Census; U.S. Department of Justice Uniform Crime Reporting system; police departments of the named cities
Demographics of Philadelphia shooting victims: Philadelphia Police Department.
Philadelphia map of economic factors: Philadelphia Police Department.; U.S. Census Bureau; Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections; University of Richmond
Decline in clearance rates: Philadelphia District Attorney; 100 Shooting Review Committee Report
Staff Contributors
- Reporting: Dylan Purcell, Chris Palmer, Anna Orso
- Photography: Jessica Griffin
- Design and Development: Dain Saint
- Editing: James Neff, Nancy Phillips
- Photo Editing: Rachel Molenda
- Print Graphics: John Duchneskie
- Copy Editing: Brian Leighton
- Print Design: Sterling Chen