When you remark upon what is truly a miraculous turnaround in Philadelphia’s violent crime landscape — a record 562 souls lost in 2021, down to a 60-year-low of 222 last year and plummeting still — you tend to get back that old Philly shrug. That’s just part of a national trend, some say; murder and mayhem, after all, are down in cities nationwide since the pandemic made everyone lose their minds.
Listen to the audio edition here:
Or you might hear some experts sheepishly admit that no one really knows how the trends of urban public safety work, that it is essentially a contagion immune to antidote. Or you might get the occasional headline, as we’ve recently seen, detailing how one nonprofit — the NOMO Foundation — allegedly misappropriated millions in City money meant for gun violence intervention. (Making matters worse, even after NOMO’s transgressions came to light, there was the NOMO executive director inexplicably flanking Mayor Parker at her snow response press conference on February 21.)
The latter is a worthy story, no doubt, but also falls into the broader category of covering the plane crash while countless plane landings go unremarked upon. Fact is, when it comes to the scourge of gun violence, Philly has been sticking the landing the last two years and ought to be a rejoinder to any doubt that cities can manage themselves out of public safety crises. Here, mayoral leadership, smart policing, innovative policymaking, cross-department cooperation, and civic and business community investment have all come together to write a new chapter in public safety — even if you’re not sensing it yet. Research, after all, shows that feeling safe lags behind actual safety — a phenomenon referred to in the literature as “perception bias.”…