The Philadelphia Inquirer has a decent piece of data journalism on the shocking number of homicides in our city in 2021. Here are some numbers:

• 557 homicides as of Wednesday, December 29, so we will probably add a few more by midnight on New Year’s Eve.
• This eclipses the previous record of 500 in 1990. The period 1989-1997 consistently had over 400 homicides per year. We have now had two years in a row in the 500+ range (499 in 2020). During the 2009-2019 decade, the range was 246-356.
• Guns were the cause of death in 89% of homicides. Nationwide, this number is around 75%.
• Of the 557, 111 (20%) were considered retaliatory, 166 (30%) were drug related, and 42 (8%) were domestic violence related. It is not entirely clear to me if these percentages overlap or not – hence my giving this article a grade of only “decent”.
• 8 of the 10 most populous cities in the U.S. recorded more homicides as of December 29, 2021 than they did in 2019. New York City has had 479 murders this year and Chicago “nearly 800”. The article doesn’t normalize these by population for us but I can do that.
  • Philadelphia: 557 homicides / 1.579 million people = 352 per million
  • New York City: 479 homicides / 8.419 million people = 57 per million
  • Chicago: ~800 / 2.71 million people = 295 per million

Philadelphia Inquirer, to go from decent to good, just put these numbers in a nice table or bullet list for us and normalize by population. Bonus points for some kind of bar chart of “tree map” that makes it crystal clear what the categories are and whether any overlap. “Communities of color” are mentioned but there are no numbers on the breakdown of victims or perpetrators by race or by age (they do mention that the number of female victims has increased, although victims remain overwhelmingly male).

So despite the eye-popping numbers in Chicago, Philadelphia is a bit worse although the two are similar. New York is doing much better.

There is a lot of hand wringing over the causes of violence. It is crystal clear though that plentiful guns make disputes and arguments much more deadly than they otherwise might be. Beyond that, we know the pandemic resulted in a large population of teenage boys out of school for a year and a half. We know the pandemic led to an increase in the unemployment rate.

Those are some facts. Now to speculate. The unemployment rate measures the formal economy, but we know that people who are unemployed in the formal economy are not necessarily economically idle. We can speculate that more people, particularly young men, became involved in the drug economy during the pandemic. Mix together young men, drugs, cash, guns, and a culture that leads to cycles of retaliation and revenge, and it is easy to picture a feedback loop that could get out of control.

It’s interesting that many categories of crime are down. This is at least partly because the police are not pursuing nonviolent crimes as much, particularly drug use and drug possession. Many people are drawing a link between decreased enforcement and increased homicides. “Homicide” and “crime” are often used interchangeably in the media, but this is wrong. Homicides are a tiny fraction of crime as a whole, and crime as a whole is down. Reduced enforcement could easily be a reason that crime as a whole is down.

How would you break the homicide loop? Media coverage focuses on guns, and reducing the number of guns might help, but that is very hard to do in our “exceptional” country. Legalizing drugs would take away the profits and economic incentive to traffic drugs and deal drugs, reduce the amount of cash changing hands, and very likely reduce the level of violence caused by drug dealers defending themselves from each other. Assuming this is what touches off many of the retaliation cycles, those should also decrease. Drug addiction might or might not increase, I am not sure, but that could be treated as the medical/behavioral problem it is. The violence on our city streets (not to mention horrific violence to get drugs across our international borders) is just not an acceptable price to pay to reduce the social problems caused by drug use, if the prohibition and law enforcement strategy was even working, which it is clearly not.

So longer term, after legalizing drugs, logical strategies would be an actual public health care system able to help people with addiction, and education and training of young men so they have economic opportunities in the formal economy. Our political system has repeatedly failed to provide these things, partly because rural politicians and voters have disproportionate political power and like to believe poverty, drugs, and violence affect only the mythical “inner city”.