Violent Crime

Women's rights in Texas took a giant leap forward Tuesday when the state executed Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman so honored by the Lone Star State since the Civil War. It was a stern announcement by Gov. George Bush (the Younger) that Texas would no longer lag in the race for gender equality. From now on, Texas women could expect the equal treatment on Death Row that has eluded them in the workplace. Women's rights aside, however, one could hardly have chosen a better case to illuminate both sides of the capital punishment issue.

A city whose goal is to sparkle brightly as one of the nation's top urban areas must control the violence within that threatens residents' safety. That's not happening in Philadelphia. FBI statistics show that as of last week, the city had 803 shooting victims this year. That's way up from the 697 shooting victims during the same period last year. As of Monday, there had been 166 murders. At that pace, Philadelphia could reach last year's 380 homicides, which was the most murders since 1997.

A MONTH before he turned 17, Anthony Alston finally bonded with the father who had abandoned him. Together, they burst into a popular Chestnut Hill bar on Dec. 29 and within seconds, police say, turned it into a shooting gallery. Anthony Alston was gripping a rifle, court records say, and his father, Leo Alston, who has an extensive rap sheet, and a third man pointed handguns at the petrified crowd. Before they grabbed the cash register inside Towey's Tavern on Germantown Avenue, they allegedly shot three people without any warning or provocation, critically wounding two of them.

Violent crime by teenagers dropped for the second straight year, the Justice Department said yesterday. While the rates for 1996 remain substantially higher than a decade ago, Attorney General Janet Reno said she saw the news as a sign that efforts to stem juvenile violence are working. "This drop, I think, is real now," she said. "I don't think we can talk about it as a blip. " The Justice Department said the rate of violent teen crime declined 9.2 percent from 1995 figures, following a 2.9 percent drop the year before.

In a reverse of a two-year trend, the FBI reported yesterday that violent and property crimes declined in 2007 from the previous year nationwide as well as in Philadelphia. The bad news: Even though Philadelphia's violent crime and homicide rates went down last year, the city still ranks last in those categories among the nation's 10 largest jurisdictions. "We have a long way to go," Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said yesterday, noting that decreases in crime rates that began before his arrival in January had continued to hold true.

Mayor Street's much-heralded $35 million Safe Streets program has been credited for a 13 percent drop in crime citywide. For many of Philadelphia's poorest - and perhaps most neglected - neighborhoods, the year-old program has paid off: Crime has dropped significantly. To gauge the program's effect, The Inquirer analyzed violent crime separately from property crime. The district-by-district analysis showed that property crime fell everywhere and that violent crime plummeted in Philadelphia's most troubled neighborhoods.

Police said an innocent bystander was one of two people shot this weekend in an area of town known for drug activity. The bystander, a 43-year-old man, was shot in the face on the 300 block of West Chestnut Street after a 26-year-old man on the same block was shot in the head. Both shootings occurred shortly before 2 a.m. Saturday, police said. Police here would not reveal the shooting victims' identities. Both men were taken to Crozer-Chester Medical Center. Police said the older man was in stable condition.

When the city's Highway Patrol unit was organized roughly 50 years ago, it replaced a disbanded crime-fighting squad with a name from earlier in the century that conjures up images of speeding roadsters carrying heavily armed gunmen - Motor Bandit Patrol. The police commissioner in those days ordered a simple mission for his new car/motorcycle force, whose members wore distinctive gray uniforms, motorcycle boots, and crushed hats: Suppress crime! "Shotgun squads were assigned from this unit on a saturation basis in areas of high crime incidence between the hours of 6 p.m. and 3 a.m.," states a Philadelphia Police annual report from 1956.

A 25-year-old man who had been living in a makeshift tent near the King of Prussia mall has been charged with raping a Tredyffrin woman while holding a knife to her throat, police said. Joseph Thomas, formerly of Texas, is charged with seven counts of rape and related offenses. He did not post $100,000 cash bail and was being held in Chester County Prison. A criminal complaint filed in District Court here states that Thomas raped the victim, 32, seven times in the bedroom of her apartment in Sugartown Mews, off Lancaster Avenue in Tredyffrin.

Americans may be as frightened as we've ever been, at least in peacetime. Plane crashes, environmental dangers, the seemingly endless discovery of new carcinogens, and, of course, violent crime: Of course we're frightened. And yet, as two people tried to tell us this week, we sometimes seem most frightened of things that pose the least danger for us. We are remarkably like primitives, looking to incantations and human sacrifice to save us from things that are the equivalent of tidal waves and volcanos - awful when they happen but, statistically, at least, not much of a threat to any one of us. John Stossel confronted the issue directly in his ABC-TV special, "Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?"