Karen Heller: Philadelphia's murder rate is a deadly, costly epidemic

The new year began with a bang. Actually, several bangs, five that proved fatal. Plus, for good measure, a stabbing.

The last killing was unusual in that it didn't involve a gun, and that the victim was a 77-year-old man trying to break up an argument. Even so, it was typical in that the grievance was ancient and petty, beginning a decade ago over that most tribal of presumed possessions, South Philadelphia parking spaces.

There were 324 homicides in the city last year (eight produced by Kermit Gosnell's House of Horrors), the most in three years. Philadelphia also experienced the highest murder rate of the nation's 10 largest cities, according to the Philadelphia Daily News, 20.7 per 100,000 residents. By comparison, New York City's rate was 6.1, less than a third. What can we learn from New York?

Following this dismal year and holiday weekend, Mayor Nutter was sworn in Monday to his second term. Gone were the audacious, some might argue absurd, promises he made four years ago with his "new beginning." Back then, he hoped to slash the homicide rate from 30 percent to 50 percent in five years (no), halve the student dropout rate (nope), and double the number of four-year college degrees awarded to Philadelphians (uh, no).

This time, Nutter was wiser, more restrained, almost resigned to the city's woes. His address was not so much a new beginning as a call to try to right these wrongs.

"We will not leave anyone behind," Nutter said. His speech focused almost exclusively on rising crime and failing schools, the millstones around the city's neck in the drowning sea of its 25 percent poverty rate. Not that the 25 percent above that is doing much better. As Nutter said last week, "These issues are holding the city back."

At his inauguration, Nutter addressed the "epidemic not sufficiently talked about, much less tackled," of African American men killing each other.

Last year, 85 percent of the city's homicide victims were African American, almost all of them male. Four of five killers were African American males, demographically indistinguishable from their victims.

Guns were inevitably involved - four out of five times. "Here in Pennsylvania, we have no shortage of guns, and no shortage of people who are willing to use guns," Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey has said. "It's higher here than Chicago, Washington."