300 people have been killed in Philly homicides already this year
Few other years in recent memory come close to rivaling the city’s current level of gun violence.
Three hundred people have been killed in homicides in Philadelphia in fewer than 200 days this year, according to police — a grim tally that has been fueled by an alarmingly violent July, during which 43 people have died in just 2½ weeks.
Police said the year’s 300th killing occurred just before 10 p.m. Monday in West Philadelphia, when 18-year-old Lameer Boyd was fatally shot while standing on the 500 block of South 52nd Street. Investigators recovered more than 50 rounds at the scene from three guns, said Chief Inspector Frank Vanore, and detectives were seeking video and other evidence to learn more about the crime. No one was arrested.
The killing meant the city has reached 300 annual homicides at a rate surpassed only by last year, when the troubling milestone was reached on July 16. By the end of 2021, police said 562 people had been slain in homicides, the highest total in at least half a century.
Few other years in recent memory come close to rivaling the city’s current level of gun violence; as recently as 2017, the city recorded fewer than 300 homicides for the entire year.
The trend has gotten worse this month, police say. Vanore said the number of killings recorded in July — barely halfway over — is already the third-highest tally for any month this year.
In addition, more than 1,000 people have been wounded in shootings in 2022, police say, slightly higher than through the same date last year.
Mayor Jim Kenney on Tuesday called the ongoing surge in violence “devastating,” saying there are too many guns on the streets and blaming firearms manufacturers and state legislators for opposing attempts by the city to enact local gun laws. About 90% of this year’s homicides have been committed with firearms, police statistics show.
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“Until we address the availability and ease of access to firearms,” Kenney said during a virtual news conference, “we will always be fighting an uphill battle.”
Carl Day, pastor of the Culture Changing Christians church in North Philadelphia and founder of a mentoring and job training program for young adult and teen males, said separately that as tragic as the murder milestone is, community members — not just public officials — must take the initiative to steer young people away from committing crimes of violence.
“We’re in dire need of a serious cultural reset,” said Day, “because, frankly, policies and policymakers and police alone ain’t going to fix this problem.”
Chantay Love, meanwhile, of the EMIR Healing Center, an antiviolence nonprofit, said she spent Tuesday morning speaking with other advocates about how this year’s level of violence needs to serve as a reminder that all city entities — community activists, elected officials, religious and business leaders — must continue working with urgency on solutions to a traumatic and acute crisis.
“Let’s all work together, collectively, because this is a moral issue that we need to fix, and we need that [effort] from everybody,” Love said.
Several recent crimes have shown the unsettling and, at times, unpredictable nature of the current violence epidemic. Last week, a 14-year-old boy allegedly shot a 19-year-old on a Center City subway platform in the middle of the afternoon; a 21-year-old was charged with killing three men in apparently random, ambush-style shootings in West Oak Lane; and police said several teens fatally beat a 73-year-old man with a traffic cone in North Philadelphia in June.
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Vanore said investigators were not yet sure why shooters fired at Boyd, the teen killed in West Philadelphia on Monday. Police have cited arguments as the most frequent motive in homicides this year, but the clearance rate — the percentage of cases considered solved — was about 44%, statistics show, and police had listed the motive as “undetermined” in nearly half of this year’s 300 killings.
Kenney said the city’s violence “pains us all,” though he also said at the news conference that he had not met with any relatives of any victims of this year’s homicides. His office later sought to amend that admission by saying the mayor had met “with several mothers of children who were killed in the city” this year through a city-run antiviolence initiative.
Although gun violence has long plagued Philadelphia, shootings began to reach unprecedented heights in mid-2020. And in October of that year, police said 66 people were killed in homicides, the deadliest month many police officials could remember.
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This July could rival that tally. Still, Kenney and police officials said they were “utilizing all the resources available” in an attempt to stem the violence.
“There is not a single issue that is more important to this department than the safety of those who live, work, and visit the city of Philadelphia,” said Deputy Commissioner Joel Dales.
Roz Pichardo, who founded Operation Save Our City after the murders of her boyfriend in 1994 and her brother in 2012, said confronting the violence will take more than just police.
Those connected to violence, she said, “need to be met exactly where they are, on the corner where they are standing. They need role models and jobs. It’s easier said than done, but just getting more men who look like them giving them advice and telling them that they don’t want to go down that road, is important.”
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Radee Hammett, the founder of the Reawakening Agency, a West Philadelphia-based nonprofit that helps formerly incarcerated people find jobs, said there is no quick fix to the city’s gun violence problem, since many young men from neighborhoods lacking jobs and opportunities are “scared for their lives,” and view carrying guns as routine — if not necessary.
Still, Hammett said: “I know a change can happen if people just take the time out to help those who want to be helped. We can’t be scared to help them.”