Pew has a nice “state of the city” report, including interesting crime statistics over multiple decades. One thing that is clear is that homicide and overall crime do not move in tandem, although the media tends to use the terms interchangeably. While homicide is way up, and homicide is the most horrible crime because, well, people don’t come back from being dead, “major crime” and “violent crime” are still low by historical standards, and this has happened as the jail population has decreased significantly.

A couple other things I found interesting, though far from uplifting:

• Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh all have higher homicide rates on a population basis. I think these stats are at the municipal level. New York and Los Angeles are notably absent from these lists – maybe they were not included as “peer cities”?
• Drug overdose deaths in our city are at a historic high at around 1200 people per year. This has been going on since at least 2017 so we can’t just blame the pandemic. And this is more than double than horrific homicide total (which doesn’t make either one better, it makes both added together worse. And this article doesn’t cover suicide.)
• Of the major cities presented, only Baltimore has a worse drug overdose toll than Philadelphia on a population basis though. It might be a bit misleading though because the statistics are for the county that includes the major city, and some counties are going to include (economically if not racially segregated) suburban areas while others do not.
• The racial composition of Philadelphia (the municipality) has changed significantly over the last 30 years. In 1990, it was about half white, 40% black, 10% hispanic/Asian/other. In 2020, it is still about 40% black, but only 35% white and 25% hispanic/Asian/other. I do wonder though if changes in how people have reported being white, Hispanic, mixed race, or combinations of these over time have something to do with these changes.

Pew does a good job of reporting stats on a population-normalized basis, which the press does not do. I would like to see a bit more and a bit clearer reporting on metro areas vs. municipalities, and putting the latter in the context of the former. I don’t fund county-level data helpful at all when comparing across metropolitan and state lines. It would be particularly useful to understand how regional poverty is concentrated (or not) within the largest political jurisdiction of a metro area, and how that plays into these statistics. In other words, a metro area as a whole may not be poor or have low tax revenues compared to peer metro areas, but the central municipality where economic and cultural activity are concentrated (at least historically) may have its hands tied by a narrow tax base and high expenses (underfunded pensions for example) that make providing quality services to its poor and working classes difficult. Although this conundrum might have a fairly obvious logical solution of sharing resources across the metro area, it is politically intractable. I don’t have great solutions to offer other than my half-joking one of metro areas applying for statehood.