While the mayor and police commissioner continue to tell us that the rising homicide rate is a "national problem" and play the "it's happening everywhere, so don't blame us" game, maybe they should take a look at what's going on right next store in Delaware County.
I just found this article which tells us that the County Delaware had a 43% decline in its murder rate in 2006. Perhaps we have something to learn from our neighbors to the west.
Comments (4)
I can't believe a newspaper article just referred to the number of homicides in the city of Chester as its "murder rate." In order for it to be a "rate," it needs to be the number per population (murders per 100k or murders per 1k, usually), which makes it somewhat possible to make an apples-to-apples comparison between crime in more than one city (for instance, there were 406 murders in Philadelphia last year, but the rate per 100k population was probably somewhere between 27 and 28).
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January 20, 2007 6:47 PM
Yikes. If my math is correct (100,000 divided by Chester's Population of 37,017 then multiply that by the number of murders), they have a "murder rate" of 48.6 murders per 100,000 people. Maybe we shouldn't be looking to them as the example.
The whole county, on the other hand, had a murder rate of 4.5 per 100,000 people.
Posted by Dan | January 22, 2007 9:56 AM
Chester's definitely in pretty bad shape. However, you do need to keep in mind that Philadelphia's a much larger city with a wider variety of neighborhoods. If you take individual neighborhoods within Philadelphia, you'll find that some have rates at least as high as Chester's. These, presumeably, are the areas that would be targetted under the "state of emergency" portion of Michael Nutter's crime plan.
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January 22, 2007 11:07 AM
The "murder is up everywhere" excuse is lame and it doesnt take into account that many cities have rates far lower than ours. Yes, NYC's rate increased last year but its still FAR lower than ours. Street doesnt mention this when he says "its happening everywhere so I shouldnt be blamed".
Posted by sj | January 22, 2007 11:42 AM