Violent Crime

Violent crime went down 3 percent overall in Philadelphia last year, but results varied significantly among the 23 police districts. The Ninth District, including the western part of Center City and Fairmount, reported the greatest reduction: 27 percent. The 16th District, in West Philadelphia, and the Fifth District, in Manayunk and Roxborough, reported decreases of 15 percent or more. The Third District, in South Philadelphia and southeastern Center City, and the Seventh District, in the Northeast, reported the largest increases in violent crime: 12 percent.

While wearing a locator bracelet as a condition of his parole, Burlington City resident Ronald "Bang Boy" Kinston allegedly ran a gun- and heroin-distribution ring as a leader of the Bounty Hunter Bloods gang. He was arrested in August when authorities discovered in a car four semiautomatic handguns that were being delivered to him from North Carolina. Law-enforcement officials say they then seized more than 300 "decks" of heroin, distribution paraphernalia, cash, and hollow-point ammunition from Kinston's house.

The dealer and his lookout were peddling crack on a Camden side street. It was midnight in Whitman Park, a desperate neighborhood in a desperate city. An undercover officer made a buy. Camden Police Lt. Greg Carlin's radio crackled: "Move in, move in. " When the unmarked cars raced up, the dealer, a big guy in black, froze in the headlights. His lookout took off. Carlin hit the gas down a one-way. Other officers ran after the lookout, darting across an intersection. Carlin and another officer bore down on the fleeing suspect, tackling him before he made it into a patchwork of yards.

The sun was going down two evenings ago as Art Benica described to a gathering how a young woman was slain last year while working as a night clerk at a motel in Virginia Beach, Va. He told how the woman had screamed, begging two robbers not to hurt her. He told how the two thugs took $230 from the cash register and then discussed who would kill her. The woman killed by a shot to the back of the head was Benica's sister-in- law, Julia Benica....

Mary Previte gets angry when she thinks about it. "I watched this little 14-year-old charged with murder bobbing for apples with the other juveniles," said Previte, superintendent of the Camden County Youth Center in Blackwood. "He slurped up the activities like a 9-year-old, as though he had never done anything like this before. "I watched him bob nine times to compete with the other kids, and I watched him compete so hard at musical chairs. I said to myself, 'Who did this to this child?

Several of you have ambitious, long-term plans to address the root causes of violent crime, which citizens cite as the top issue of this campaign. But tell us what you'd do in your first year as mayor to make sure there is less violent crime in Philadelphia in 2008 than in 2007. Bob Brady Cutting crime in Philadelphia will be my top priority as mayor. During my first term, I will put 1,000 additional police, parole and parent truancy officers on the streets. I will work with the Philadelphia police, who have endorsed me, to put more officers in the neighborhoods and reengage neighborhood policing.

There was a time - say, three years ago - when Philadelphia was "Killadelphia," and many people seemed to think the city was about as safe a place to walk around as a lion's den at feeding time. While acknowledging that the city is still far from a utopia, Mayor Nutter, Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey and other officials joined yesterday to laud a 10 percent across-the-board drop in violent crime in 2009. Oversized color charts, situated inside North Philadelphia's 22nd District's roll-call room, bore the fruits of a year of progress: Homicides fell 8.4 percent, from 333 in 2008 to 305 last year; aggravated assaults fell 10.2 percent from 9,350 to 8,398; rapes dropped 13.2 percent, from 1,105 to 957, and robberies were down 6.5 percent, 9,343 to 8,738.

Some Oxford Circle residents were told this week that help exists if one of their worst fears is realized - if they become victims of violent crime. Officer Kevin Corr, victims assistance officer for the Second District of the Philadelphia Police Department, Harbison Avenue and Levick Streets, spoke to residents at the Oxford Circle Civic Association Tuesday night about help available to victims. Corr told those at the sparsely attended meeting that if they were injured or suffered other losses as a result of violent crime, they could be compensated.

Violent crime is up nearly 17 percent in Delaware County, but the number of reported burglaries and drunken-driving offenses has dropped, authorities said. The number of reported crimes in the county was down 6 percent from 50,054 cases in 1986 to 47,166 cases last year, according to the 1987 Uniform Crime Report released by the Pennsylvania State Police. Reported rape cases in the county rose 19 percent, from 131 in 1986 to 156 last year, the report states. Joyce Dale, executive director of Delaware County Women Against Rape, said the figures reported in the Uniform Crime Report are far lower than the number of new victims who contacted the agency.

MARK SINGEL PARTY: Democratic AGE:40 HOME: Johnstown CURRENT JOB: Lieutenant governor POLITICAL EXPERIENCE: Six years in state Senate OTHER JOBS: Ran two Congressional offices in Washington in the 1970s CLAIM TO FAME: Got to fill in when Gov. Casey was out sick FAMILY: Wife and three young children CRIME Basic Philosophy: Crack down on violent crime, but remember that it's just one symptom of a...

NEW YORK Mayor Michael Bloomberg took a shot at the New York Times on Thursday and threw Philadelphia under the bus in the process. Responding to an editorial in the Times that called Philadelphia's court-ordered stop-and-frisk policy more enlightened than the Big Apple's, Bloomberg fired back. "Why would any rational person want to trade what we have here for the situation in Philadelphia?" Bloomberg told New York TV station NY1. "More murders? Higher crime?" Bloomberg pointed out that after Philadelphia was sued by the American Civil Liberties Union and entered into a consent degree to make changes to the stop-and-frisk policy, murders and other violent crime went up. "Now, Philadelphia is a great city, but it has the highest murder rate of any of the 10 largest cities in the country, and the number of murders is going up," he said.

It occurred in front of a stone twin along a tranquil street with the pastoral name Parkview Road, but this was not a typical suburban crime. A 25-year-old man was ambushed shortly after midnight by someone who lay in wait in the bushes, shot him seven times, and left him to fight for his life. His 4-year-old daughter and her mother were in the house at the time. Then again, it happened in Upper Darby Township, Delaware County, which is no typical suburb, and in the view of its sometimes controversial police chief, Michael Chitwood, not a suburb at all. "Upper Darby really is a city," said Chitwood, who oversees the $24 million annual police budget in a township of 82,000-plus people.

Brandishing a .45-caliber automatic, the 6-foot-1 figure raced at full gallop away from pursuing police officers, crisscrossing the maze of trolley tracks at the 69th Street Terminal. Hours later, not far away, a would-be stickup man died in a Wild West-style shootout. Just another quiet night on the edge of Philadelphia in Upper Darby Township. Crime is down nationwide, according to various analysts, but as a Brookings Institution study has noted, border towns have not enjoyed the same level of pacification as their big-city neighbors.

Higher bail for gun-related offenses has led to a slight spike in Philadelphia's prison population in recent months, officials told City Council Wednesday. Louis Giorla, commissioner of prisons said the population has increased 4 percent from 7,935 last fiscal year to 8,253 this year. That includes a 22 percent increase, about 200 people, who could not make bail for violent gun offenses. "What we're seeing is a shift in those - the more violent, repeat offenders who were out on the streets, making bail and perhaps dodging the system are now being confined," Giorla told Council during yesterday's budget hearing, adding that bail for gun-related cases is higher.

Numbers produce an image of a city's place in time. For Philadelphia in 2012, the picture is of a city in transition on a number of fronts. There are familiar problems and one promising demographic trend. In the last year, unemployment in the city was down, but job creation slowed from the year before. Residential building permits were up, but home sales dropped a sixth straight time. Violent crime fell overall, while the homicide total increased for the second year in a row. One positive sign for the city's future, as reported in a new statistical analysis by Pew's Philadelphia Research Initiative, is that the number of young adults in Philadelphia has risen substantially in recent years.

CAIRO - Egypt's top prosecutor charged nine senior police officers Thursday with assisting a murderous mob of soccer fans who killed 74 rival supporters last month after a match in the Mediterranean city of Port Said. Many accuse police of looking the other way while violent crime has spiked in the year since Hosni Mubarak's ouster in an uprising. But the charges in the Port Said riot went a step further, alleging that police actually aided the perpetrators of the world's worst soccer-related disaster in 15 years.

A NEW POLL HOLDS good news and bad news for Mayor Nutter and Philadelphia in his second term. The Pew Charitable Trusts poll released yesterday showed that the approval rating for Nutter's job performance is on the rise, even as residents express growing concerns about crime, education and the economy. Nutter's approval rating increased to 60 percent, up from 52 percent in a Pew poll last year. That was helped by a 10-percentage-point increase in his approval rating among African-Americans, with whom his numbers have previously been less than stellar.

MAYOR NUTTER has a lot to worry about, but nothing is more immediately pressing than the disturbing rise in homicides in the city. As of yesterday, 32 people had been murdered; that number is higher than the 29 homicides on the same date in 2007, the last year of the Street administration. Nutter announced last week a number of measures to combat violent crime, including increasing bounties for criminals -up to $20,000 for information leading to the arrestsand convictions in homicide cases, and $500 for the arrest and conviction of anyone carrying an illegal gun. We want to feel assured by these efforts, and indeed, taken individually, the program's elements make sense.

This year began bloody and deadly, 20 murders by Martin Luther King Day, only 16 days into 2012. Along with improving education, crime reduction is one of Mayor Nutter's core missions for his second term. "When those spikes hit, we're going to acknowledge, 'Yep, we have a problem.' We're not going to walk away from the people. We can't be dissuaded that when crime spikes it will remain that way," said Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Everett Gillison, Nutter's point man on crime.

A 23-year-old Temple University graduate, hailing a cab after leaving a bar with friends, is beaten to death in Old City. Three teenagers are killed as a man fires directly into a car in Juniata Park. A hockey fan from New Jersey is pummeled until he lies unconscious outside Geno's cheesesteak restaurant in South Philadelphia. What, if anything, do these events - all in the new year - say about war and peace in Philadelphia? Who, if anyone, can make sense of such utterly senseless violence?