[Onkel Neal]

https://www.propublica.org/article/p...ontent=feature

“I know they’re actively stopping people. Maybe I shouldn’t carry this gun today because I don’t want to get caught.”

This approach didn’t necessarily require steep sentences for being caught with an illegal gun. In the phrasing of the late criminologist Mark Kleiman, the key to deterrence was that punishment be swift and certain, not that it be severe.

It doesn't make sense to me, if you have laws against illegal guns, enforce them fully. It's not a housekeeping action, it's crime prevention.

The decline in violent crime in Philadelphia was not nearly as attention-getting as those in New York City and Los Angeles, but it was impressive in its own right. Between 1990 and 2007, Philadelphia averaged 382 homicides per year. Beginning in 2008 the numbers dropped steadily, and in 2013 and 2014, the city registered fewer than 250 killings each year. The decline coincided with a notable upgrade of the city’s prospects: the rejuvenation of Center City, the resumption of population growth. “I believe that there are some people probably still alive today because of many of the things we did back in those days,” said Michael Nutter, who served as mayor from 2008 to 2016.

In 2007, Philadelphia elected Nutter, a technocratic Black Democrat who put public safety at the heart of his campaign. “I talked about violence and talked about crime. And I talked about how it was ripping out the heart and soul of the city of Philadelphia,” he said in an interview for this article. “Too many people were dying in our city.”

The department adopted another approach in those years, too: the stop-and-frisk tactic most closely associated with New York City. In 2009, the year after Nutter and Ramsey took charge, the number of pedestrian stops by police nearly doubled from where it had been in 2007, to more than 250,000. Nutter said the goal was straightforward. “What I wanted was a change in behavior by folks who might normally carry a gun,” he said. “It’s a very simple theory: You can’t shoot somebody if you don’t have your gun.” Nutter said he wanted habitual gun carriers to think, before they left the house, “I know they’re actively stopping people. Maybe I shouldn’t carry this gun today because I don’t want to get caught.”

This approach didn’t necessarily require steep sentences for being caught with an illegal gun. In the phrasing of the late criminologist Mark Kleiman, the key to deterrence was that punishment be swift and certain, not that it be severe.

But not everyone was persuaded by Nutter’s justification of stop-and-frisk. In 2010, a team of civil rights lawyers brought a lawsuit against the police department, alleging that officers were disproportionately stopping Black and Latino residents. A year later, the department agreed to a consent decree requiring that officers make stops only when they have reasonable suspicion that a suspect is armed, dangerous and engaged in criminal conduct, and that the stops not be based on race or ethnicity.

Even as the police became more restrained in their stops, the city’s homicide tally fell to levels not seen in decades. The decrease mirrored what was happening nationally. Notably, the national decline had continued through the Great Recession, confounding the notion that violent crime was driven by economic distress.

During this period, the city experienced another major shift in leadership. In early 2017, the city’s district attorney, Seth Williams, was indicted on federal corruption charges. (He later pleaded guilty to bribery and served almost three years in prison.)

Among those running to replace him was an unlikely contender: civil rights attorney Larry Krasner, who had made his name bringing countless cases against the police department. Krasner ran on a revolutionary platform, pledging to overhaul from within a local criminal justice system that had left Philadelphia with some of the highest incarceration rates in the country. “Justice makes you safer,” Krasner said in announcing his campaign. “How do we achieve that? Well, number one, we have to decarcerate. We have to get people out of jail.”

Oh lord.