Finalist: Staff of The Philadelphia Inquirer

Gun violence has been concentrated in just a handful of neighborhoods and several dozen blocks, leaving behind a breathtaking level of fear and trauma among a fraction of residents.

By Chris Palmer, Dylan Purcell, Anna Orso, John Duchneskie, and Jessica Griffin

One in an occasional series, “Under Fire,” about Philadelphia’s unchecked gun violence.

Pamela Owensby woke up every day for three years fearing her son would be shot.

Her 23-year-old, Sircarr Johnson Jr., had opened a clothing store on West Philadelphia’s 60th Street in 2018. Because of ongoing violence in the neighborhood, she became licensed to carry a gun and accompanied him at closing time. This spring, she even researched life insurance for each of her four sons — the youngest of whom is 9.

But before she could fill out the paperwork, Johnson was killed in front of his store.

In the middle of a July 4 cookout, gunmen jumped out of a car and pumped bullets into the crowd — a crime police believe was part of an ongoing conflict between rival neighborhood groups. Four people were struck, including Johnson, who was shot in the torso.

He died within minutes.

“I just knew they were gonna take my baby,” Owensby said.

The notion that a parent could feel a sense of inevitability when their child was killed is inconceivable in many parts of the country.

But in Philadelphia, the epidemic of gun violence has been intensely concentrated in just a handful of neighborhoods and several dozen blocks — like the one where Johnson was killed, according to an Inquirer analysis. These shootings have left behind a breathtaking level of fear and trauma among a fraction of the city’s residents, nearly all of whom are Black and brown.

As unchecked gun violence has reached unprecedented heights this year, it has continued to disproportionately batter these same communities, where residents also endure higher poverty levels, lower life expectancy, and more blighted housing, the analysis shows.

One startling example: There are 57 city blocks where 10 or more people have been shot since 2015.

The poverty rate around those blocks is nearly double the city’s average.

The rates of vacant housing on these blocks is three times the city’s average.

And on these blocks, people are expected to die at least three years earlier than the state’s average life expectancy. In one part of Strawberry Mansion, people were expected to live 14 years less than the state average.

The overlap of so many of these injustices in communities of color has roots dating back generations. Nearly all of the neighborhoods in Philadelphia suffering from perpetual violence and other structural disadvantages were redlined starting in the mid-1930s as part of a federal mortgage program, which effectively provided a map for banks to deny conventional loans because of race or ethnicity. Researchers say there is a correlation between the explicitly racist program and the ongoing gunfire today.

Of the 57 city blocks where 10 or more people have been shot since 2015, 53 were in communities the federal government deemed undesirable on redlining maps created decades ago.

Kensington contains by far the largest share of these hard-hit streets, including some of the poorest census tracts in the nation. For decades the community has housed open-air drug markets and the violent turf battles that accompany them.

The intersection at Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, long a bustling hub of the drug trade, shows what can happen when these disadvantages collide. More than half of the residents there live in poverty. Drug users arrive by bus or train, and some people in addiction sleep in nearby encampments.

Since the start of 2015, the analysis shows, 295 people have been shot within a five-minute walk of that corner.

Analyzing the thousands of shootings shows unmistakable concentrations in North and West Philadelphia and provides new insight and precision on where violence routinely happens and where it doesn’t.

The vast majority of the city’s developed blocks with housing — more than three-quarters of them — haven’t experienced a single shooting since 2015. Entire swaths of Center City, Northeast Philadelphia, Chestnut Hill and Roxborough, far whiter and wealthier than the rest of the city, have not seen a shooting for years.

Neighborhoods like Graduate Hospital, Fishtown, and University City — where years of reinvestment have ushered in more wealth and opportunity — are just a few minutes’ drive from shooting hot spots. But they rarely experience gun violence.

Those who live near perpetual violence live an entirely different reality.

Although police and law enforcement estimate that only a small percentage of the population commits a vast majority of the city’s shootings, many residents have been forced to learn the macabre rituals that accompany them: washing blood off the sidewalk or repairing bullet holes on a parked car. Burying children in pint-size caskets, and praying over neighbors shot in the street. Some have collections of dozens of funeral cards, each representing a friend or relative who was killed.

And many know the pain of losing several friends or family members. Johnson’s father, Sircarr Johnson Sr., was 5 when he watched his own father be gunned down in their home. And when bullets began flying at the July 4 cookout on 60th Street, the elder Johnson had to cradle his dying son in his arms until a friend raced him to the hospital.

Experts say the effect of this repeated exposure to gun violence is clear: It leads to more violence. One study, published in June, said children exposed to shootings were more likely to be arrested later for a weapons crime. Others have shown that young people living among community violence are more likely to exhibit anger, anxiety, or hypersensitivity to perceived threats — all of which can grow deadly with guns in the mix.

In Philadelphia’s disadvantaged neighborhoods, many young Black men say they carry guns for protection — aware of the recurrent gunfire, mistrustful of authorities’ ability to stop it, and desensitized to its traumatic effects.

Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration said it is allocating $22 million in new grants to grassroots organizations, many of which work with those young men. The dollars are part of a package of new investments in community-focused resources to combat violence, some of which is aimed at addressing long-standing inequities.

Police officials also said their patrol strategy is based in large part on data showing where violence has occurred. Starting in 2019, commanders have been instructed to focus their resources on those areas, known internally as “pinpoint zones,” and officers are sometimes stationed 24 hours a day at specific intersections.

Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said there are 45 such zones across the city. And though the Police Department declined to share their boundaries, Outlaw said each zone has its own challenges: Some have long-running conflicts between old neighborhood crews, while others may be suffering from new and unpredictable cycles of retaliation fueled by social media. Some are hot spots for dealing drugs, like heroin.

Outlaw did say police have seen promising returns with the strategy, citing a 14% downturn in shooting victims within those zones in 2021 compared with last year — even as gunfire has been rising citywide. But she acknowledged that strategy may be little solace to residents living in fear.

“This is not normal,” Outlaw said. “We cannot accept this as normal.”

Three days after the July 4 shooting, Owensby and dozens of others stood on 60th Street where her son had lived and operated his store, Premiére Bande. Flanked by a half-dozen private security guards with assault-style rifles, they released balloons in memory of him and 21-year-old Salahaldin Mahmoud, who also died in the hail of bullets.

As the sun started to set, candle wax melted onto the sidewalk and a handful of friends lingered, telling stories of Johnson and Mahmoud. Johnson, extroverted and fiery, was passionate about every activity he tried, and doted on his fiancee and 10-month-old daughter. Mahmoud was low-key, but he was comical and ambitious. He’d just started a towing business.

The friends also shared scattered memories from that night — of diving behind cars to avoid the gunfire or watching a wounded loved one take their final breaths.

Darkness fell, and their conversation was interrupted. Police cruisers, sirens wailing, were flying north to 54th and Race Streets, just a few blocks away.

Three more people had been shot.

Long-standing disinvestment

On some of the blocks where gunshots are heard with striking regularity, residents are clear-eyed about the interplay among violence, race, and poverty.

Shirley Kitchen Rogers, a 66-year-old retired teacher, has owned a home on the same block in Southwest Philadelphia since 1983. She said the last year and a half has been “constant chaos.”

Neighbors have complained that drug dealers operate openly, and Rogers avoids one end of her block altogether. A crumbling, abandoned home this summer had a bull’s-eye target spray-painted on it. Eight people have been shot on her block over the last 18 months.

On May 26, shortly after 5 p.m., Rogers heard gunshots and opened her front door to see a man bleeding in the street. Her first thought: “Oh, my. Not again.”

She stood in the doorway and prayed. Police took the 23-year-old to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead minutes later.

The violence on the block this year has been heartbreaking, Rogers said, pointing to a funeral card tucked in an armoire for a 17-year-old who was killed in March at a recreation center two blocks away.

But the truth is it has never been easy to live on the 6000 block of Reinhard Street.

“Sometimes it’s like, we know. What else is new?” she said. “In the poorest neighborhoods, the people-of-color neighborhoods, we have the least resources, the most crime, the most violence.”

In the area surrounding the block, Black residents make up 80% of the population, and the median household income is less than $23,000 a year, census figures show.

The block is also a case study: Economic conditions set generations ago, some experts say, may have had ripple effects that beget gun violence today.

The area where Rogers lives, like many in Philadelphia, was part of a zone that was redlined starting in the 1930s. Under the New Deal, the government-sponsored Homeowners’ Loan Corporation developed color-coded maps of American cities to show lending institutions which areas appraisers believed posed credit risks. Some communities were designated hazardous (red) or declining (yellow) because residents were Black, Jewish, or immigrants.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made it illegal for lenders to deny the sale, rental, or financing of real estate based on race. But Sara Jacoby, a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing whose research shows a correlation between redlining and modern-day violence in Philadelphia, said discrimination persisted over time, “so what you have is long-standing lack of investment and long-standing isolation of very specific places within a city.”

The economic and racial segregation that resulted are among the “structural and policy reasons for a deep, deep concentration of gun violence,” said Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy.

“This wasn’t just some natural evolution. It’s all connected to public policy,” he said. “Look at these maps over a very long period of time. They’re not that different. And there’s a reason for that.”

‘No one has got to live like this’

Another block that was in a redlined community is the 4700 block of Griscom Street, in Frankford, where Javese Phelps-Washington has lived since 1996.

She knew several young men who were slain not far from her front door. She also knows the pain of losing a loved one to gun violence: Her son, Christopher Spence — a former standout football player at Frankford High School — was shot dead in 2011 during an argument at a nearby bar.

Perhaps as a result, Phelps-Washington — a 55-year-old Streets Department employee known as “Aunt Vez” to her neighbors — tries to engage with young men in the area, many of whom she believes need something as simple as encouragement, support, and hope. So many of those susceptible to violence, she said, are presented with so few opportunities in life, they grow up believing gun violence is inescapable.

“There is a better way,” she tries to tell them.

It doesn’t always work.

A few years ago, she was counseling a 27-year-old man who spent time on the block, and she kept trying to tell him to leave the city and its violence behind. He left for a few months, she said, but eventually came back to the corner.

On Jan. 1, 2020 — his birthday — he was shot dead during a street fight. And he became yet another victim on a block where 14 people have been shot since 2015, five of them fatally — one of five blocks citywide to record that many gun homicides.

For three decades, Phelps-Washington has saved the cards from funerals she’s attended to memorialize family and friends. The cards rest in a black-and-white striped box that sits on a high-top table in her living room.

While searching through the box recently, she counted 69 cards commemorating people who have been killed over the last 30 years.

“Mentally, I’m drained. Emotionally, I’m broken,” Phelps-Washington said. She continues to try to help people, but added: “No one has got to live like this. There’s got to be more.”

In West Philadelphia, Sircarr Johnson Jr. had been trying to find more. His grandfather was killed at age 23, and he watched his own dad at times get wrapped up in the streets.

As a teenager, he started designing clothing in his great-grandfather’s basement, working through the night pressing vinyl onto shirts and ripping jeans by hand. Piles of orders started to overwhelm the living room.

In 2018, he opened his clothing store along 60th Street, a once-thriving commercial corridor that had experienced decades of disinvestment. He was aware of violence in the area, his mother said, but “he didn’t have fear, because he knew he was a good kid.”

Things were looking up. The store was popular, and Johnson’s father had gotten on a straighter path. He and his son became best friends. On Father’s Day this year, Johnson texted his dad: “Thank you for being the person you are. Love you and continue to grow.”

Two weeks later, he was gone.

‘Tragic but not unexpected’

Johnson and Mahmoud were two of seven people shot in the span of three hours on July 4 — in just one police district.

Capt. Matt Gillespie, who heads the 18th District, which stretches from Cobbs Creek to University City, said the volume of shootings over the last year and a half “is like something I’ve never seen before.”

He said his officers are trying to both respond to and prevent shootings in real time, adjusting their deployment based on whether there’s a potential for retaliation.

A district analyst examines where shootings, armed robberies, and illegal gun arrests are taking place, Gillespie said, and then officers are stationed accordingly. But he said it’s not a perfect science: “When you have something like six shootings in three hours, your head’s spinning.”

Citywide, Outlaw said the department uses internal intelligence reports to help guide how and where to supplement patrol efforts in the pinpoint zones. Narcotics teams will be sent to areas with suspected drug activity, she said, while patrol officers might be assigned to monitor specific corners or corridors depending on what detectives probing homicides or shootings learn during their investigations.

Outlaw has repeatedly urged residents to speak with officers and provide information that might help those proactive efforts, joining what she said should be a collective effort to confront gunfire.

Still, residents expect police to be a leading force in making them safe. While Outlaw was doing a walking tour of a pinpoint zone in North Philadelphia last month, a woman driving by recognized her and pulled over to talk.

“It’s really crazy out here,” the woman told the commissioner. “You’ve gotta save these babies.”

Philadelphia is on pace to set a record for annual homicides, and more than 1,600 people have been shot in 2021, nearly double the rate of just four years ago.

Other places across the country have also seen a surge since the beginning of the pandemic. And shootings in other cities have also traditionally been concentrated in neighborhoods lacking well-funded schools, job opportunities, and other public resources.

Explanations for the recent uptick have varied, but many criminologists believe the pandemic made existing structural inequities worse. Unemployment in Pennsylvania hit its highest rate in at least four decades. Schools shut their doors, and in-person programs for teenagers halted, leaving some young people in disadvantaged communities even more isolated. Criminal courthouses were largely closed, while probation services were significantly disrupted.

And the stress caused by COVID-19 persisted through one of the largest protest movements in American history — one that forced a reckoning over racism and the role of law enforcement in society. Police, meanwhile, began retiring in record numbers, and Outlaw has conceded that morale among the rank-and-file had plunged.

Amid all of this social upheaval, guns flew off Pennsylvania store shelves at an unprecedented pace.

Against that backdrop, the city’s government and criminal justice leaders, including Kenney and District Attorney Larry Krasner, continued to feud publicly, blaming each other for the spike in shootings.

Closer to the street, police have continued to raise alarm about an ongoing issue: beefs between rival groups that increasingly play out on social media.

Investigators believe that type of group conflict led to the July 4 killing of Johnson and Mahmoud on 60th Street.

Homicide Capt. Jason Smith said four gunmen, part of a neighborhood group, drove to the block party outside Johnson’s store looking for someone in a rival faction who’d posted on social media from the celebration.

By the time the shooters arrived, Smith said, their purported target — whom Smith declined to identify — had left.

The gunmen opened fire anyway, and at least four people in the crowd fired back.

Johnson and Mahmoud were killed in the gunfire. Detectives do not believe either was an intended target, Smith said. No one has been arrested, he said, and no suspects have been identified.

Police are investigating that shooting as one of more than 40 incidents in a cycle of retaliation between rival crews that has spanned at least two years.

Smith said ballistics evidence has been key in linking some cases. One of the guns used in the July 4 shootout on 60th Street was used just days later — during the shooting on 54th Street that broke up the memorial for Johnson and Mahmoud, according to Smith.

State Sen. Sharif Street described the gun violence as a “vicious cycle” of which he knows the consequences all too well. Mahmoud was his wife’s cousin and like a nephew.

Street said for his family, it was “tragic but not unexpected that we would be here at some point.”

The son of a former mayor, Street explained that he grew up in North Philadelphia and was 12 the first time he saw someone get shot. In just the last five years, his teenage son lost a football teammate, his daughter lost her boyfriend and a classmate, and half of his legislative staff lost family members to gun violence.

Street said that without massive new investments to fix structural inequities — and stricter gun laws — many more families will end up like his.

“If we don’t do anything,” he said, “then we’re all playing a game of Russian roulette with our families. It’s not a question of ‘whether.’ It’s just a question of ‘when’ it’ll hit close to home.”

A concentration in Kensington

If anywhere embodies the pronounced structural disadvantages that can help fuel repeated gun violence in Philadelphia, it’s Kensington.

A century ago, the community was one of the country’s biggest manufacturing hubs. But in recent decades, it has become notorious for housing open-air drug markets that attract users from all over the East Coast. Law enforcement officials believe dealers sell heroin, crack, and other drugs on more than 80 corners in the neighborhood. Some generate tens of millions of dollars in annual sales.

In that setting, gun violence has become alarmingly common.

More than 1,000 people have been shot in Kensington’s 2.4 square miles since 2015, a rate of gunfire that is nearly seven times higher than the rest of the city.

Of the 57 blocks with the highest concentration of violence, nearly half are in the neighborhood.

And in a triangle of narrow streets encompassing just a tenth of a square mile near McPherson Square, in the heart of the neighborhood, 189 people have been shot since 2015 — by far the highest rate of shootings per square mile in the city.

Linda Mottolo has spent 32 years in her house nearby, the 1800 block of Hart Lane. Seventeen people have been shot there since 2015.

Mottolo has witnessed the aftermath of some shootings, and a stray bullet recently ripped through her front screen door. She sometimes feels hopeless about the situation around her home, and said she calls the police so frequently they view her as a nuisance. She hasn’t connected with many neighbors to fight the issue; the house next door to hers is abandoned. And she sometimes tries to address dealers or drug users, but typically only if they are near her house.

She raised four children in the neighborhood, and, despite its challenges, says she doesn’t want to leave. It’s home. But she said it can feel isolating not knowing where to turn.

“Who do I blame?” she asked. “Why aren’t they fighting for us?”

Aanjhrue, a 21-year-old who lives on a nearby block and who asked to be identified only by his first name, is familiar with the sound of bullets outside his door. He recalled watching TV with his niece when they heard shots and reflexively ducked to the ground.

But they ducked for only a moment, he said, before returning to watch their show.

“It’s sad how numb you become to hearing gunshots,” he said.

Mottolo and Aanjhrue attend church at Rock Ministries, which sits on Kensington Avenue and teaches young people boxing in a community based on faith.

The pastor, Buddy Osborn, is intent on creating a welcoming and safe environment. Boxing classes are free, young people cannot swear inside, and “the Rock,” as it’s known, has church employees who live in the neighborhood.

In a community where some may see despair, Osborn said he sees hope — an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of young people who might otherwise grow up with unaddressed trauma.

“We don’t run from it,” Osborn said. “When people have been through tragedy, the greatest thing you can do is listen.”

Still, Osborn is not naive to the challenges of operating in the city’s most violent neighborhood. During a prayer meeting once, he said, he heard the pop, pop, pop of a gun outside. He later learned a man had been shot nearby in both eyes.

And in the last eight months alone, three people have been shot just outside the ministry on the 2700 block of Kensington Avenue, the block that the Rock calls home.

Fleeting progress

Mayor Kenney has said he has “no greater priority” than reducing violence, touting that his administration is steering $155 million toward an array of non-policing services to address the crisis — from funding recreation centers to jobs programs and the city’s Office of Violence Prevention.

City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart recently released a report concluding that just 21% of that money would go toward intervention efforts that are most likely to show results within one to three years.

But administration officials say they’re playing both a short and long game. In addition to the antiviolence programming, Kenney has pointed to the work of committees established last year that are examining how to repair generations-old racial and economic inequities. The initial work has focused on matters ranging from police reform to Black entrepreneurship.

Krasner said his office’s focus on curbing mass incarceration could improve inequities stemming from joblessness, wealth, and the amount of single-parent households, shifts he contends “would actually result in a chronically violent and chronically poor city becoming less violent.”

He also pointed to investments his office is making in community organizations using money seized through civil asset forfeiture. The office has distributed more than half a million dollars this year.

In many of the neighborhoods most affected by violence, it’s the longtime residents, business owners, clergy, and other community leaders who are the most consistent forces trying to stop shootings.

In West Philadelphia, there’s Siddiq Moore, who in 2017 opened a water ice store on the 200 block of South 60th Street. He’s a native of the corridor and knew violence was endemic, but he wanted to help.

So he painted the building’s exterior bright yellow and started playing calming, smooth jazz from outdoor speakers through the day. He hosts events for families and children, and gives out free water ice to neighbors having a bad day. He installed a floodlight to shine over the corner at night, and put a sign in the window that reads: “our community matters.”

“It’s bigger than water ice,” Moore said. “If you want to begin to change the mind-set and get people to believe ‘our community matters,’ you want them to subconsciously see it, and then they start having a different outlook on things.”

His efforts coincided with other improvements along 60th Street. Developers rehabbed about 40 properties, repairing vacant ones and constructing new commercial space with the goal of reducing blight.

Then, there was a shift. After several years during which there was a shooting every few months around 60th and Walnut Streets, the pace of shootings slowed in 2019 and 2020, the latter one of the most violent years in Philadelphia history.

The progress proved fleeting.

A block north of Moore’s shop is Premiére Bande, where Johnson planned a July 4 party — open to all — to celebrate the store’s three-year anniversary.

“4th of July Anniversary cookout!!!” he wrote on Instagram at 2:30 that afternoon. “Everything free, starts at 6 p.m.”

By 11:09 p.m., he and Mahmoud were dead.

Johnson Sr. called Owensby in South Carolina, where she was visiting family, to tell her their son had been killed. She secured the last seat on a flight home the next morning.

Today, Owensby lives in Olney but said she hopes to move out of Philadelphia altogether. She said it’s the only way to protect her 9-year-old, Sakai, who is now without the older brother he saw as a hero.

“I can’t stay,” she said. “I can’t bring another child up to the point where I have to fear for their life.”

In the spirit of transparency and to serve the public good, The Inquirer is sharing the dataset we built to report this story as a resource for researchers, public officials, activists, and those addressing the city’s gun violence crisis.

About the dataset: We started with the more than 10,500 shooting incidents, from September 2015 to September 2021, provided by the City of Philadelphia on OpenDataPhilly.org. We excluded police shootings and added 33 gun homicides that we obtained from the police department’s homicide data, but were missing from OpenDataPhilly. For locations, we cleaned up addresses with misspellings or other errors. That information can be seen in Column N. Using these addresses, we identified blocks where at least five people had been shot over this time.

Note: Some blocks with the large numbers of reported shootings are adjacent to city hospitals. It was unclear if all these victims were shot on those blocks or were coded there by police to note that the hospital had received patients from unknown shooting locations. Police may have removed or added incidents to its shootings data after our dataset was compiled. We cannot guarantee the complete accuracy of each of the shooting incidents provided by the city. — Dylan Purcell

Jarell Jackson and Shahjahan McCaskill were killed over a feud they weren't even involved in. It reflects a trend of shootings being fueled by — and increasingly chronicled on — social media.

By Mike Newall, Chris Palmer, and Dylan Purcell

One in an occasional series, “Under Fire,” about Philadelphia’s unchecked gun violence.

As they drove back toward their childhood homes in West Philadelphia, Jarell Jackson and Shahjahan McCaskill kept talking about the beach.

Friends since preschool, the 26-year-olds had just returned from a Caribbean vacation. Hang gliding. Jet skiing. A mountain hike, delayed by Jackson’s refusal to dust up his sneakers.

The trip was a last-minute idea as the weather chilled. Jackson and McCaskill were the only ones of their friends who could make it. It became a chance for them to take a break from lives they’d built that stretched far beyond their childhood neighborhood. Lives that were now helping to lift up others as well.

After tossing his luggage inside his mother’s house, Jackson offered to give McCaskill a ride home. As he readied to pull out of a spot at 57th and Locust Streets, a Black SUV cruised past — and pulled a sudden U-turn.

Within seconds, Jackson and McCaskill’s world exploded in gunfire and glass.

Jackson’s mother raced to the car. Keep breathing, she implored. Twenty minutes later at the hospital, they were pronounced dead.

Police say Jackson — a Jefferson health technician who mentored troubled teens — and McCaskill — a cancer survivor and small-business owner — were killed by three neighborhood teens who fired two dozen shots in a botched attempt to retaliate against members of a rival group over an earlier homicide.

Instead, the teens, ages 15 to 18, happened upon Jackson and McCaskill.

“We absolutely believe they had nothing to do with that conflict,” said Chesley Lightsey, homicide chief in the District Attorney’s Office. “They were targeted because of the neighborhood they live in. As a citizen of Philadelphia, I find this completely devastating.”

Rising violence

The October double homicide came amid a historic surge in Philadelphia’s chronic gun violence — a spike that has only worsened in 2021. Moreover, it reflected an escalation of the sort of gang-motivated shootings that are now being fueled by — and increasingly chronicled on — social media, especially Instagram.

In recent weeks, several new arrests have offered a window into that type of violence.

Beginning in late February, police arrested three teens who they believe fired the bullets that killed Jackson and McCaskill. And a 15-year-old has been charged for being the getaway driver.

Several of the teens had boasted on Instagram about their affiliation with the “Northsiders” — a loosely affiliated West Philadelphia street crew from the north side of Market Street. They disrespected their rivals, the “Southsiders.” And according to court documents, one of the shooters posted a celebratory picture — like the other posts, now deleted — from the getaway car about a half hour after the killings.

Their arrests came as the District Attorney’s Office unveiled a grand jury presentment against four West Philadelphia men charged in seven shootings over two years that left nine people wounded. The crimes — including firing a wayward shot that struck an 8-year-old boy in the mouth — occurred in the same neighborhood where Jackson and McCaskill were killed.

The suspects in those cases also boasted about their crimes on Instagram, prosecutors said. And the driving force of the bloodshed had been taunts and threats on social media between loosely-affiliated crews: Northside and Southside, but also Hilltop, Fixers, and others.

The cases captured just a glimpse of the unchecked violence that holds pockets of West Philadelphia in its grip. Of the 2,200 people shot in the city west of the Schuylkill since 2015, an Inquirer analysis of police data and court records shows suspected shooters have only been charged in about 450 of those incidents.

This void of justice echoes a trend The Inquirer found citywide: Just over 20% of the city’s 8,500 shootings since 2015 have led to charges, while gun violence has been on a troubling, years-long surge.

In West Philadelphia, that escalating pace is worse than the rest of the city. While shootings in other neighborhoods were up about 70% between 2015 and 2020, the number of people shot in West Philly last year — 567 — marks a 95% increase over the number of people shot there in 2015.

Already this year nearly 100 people have been shot in West Philly, ranging in age from 13 to 58. The victims have been killed or wounded on basketball courts, at rec centers, and on city streets.

Suspected shooters have only been charged in five of those incidents, The Inquirer found.

Jackson and McCaskill’s mothers said their sons had built successful lives for themselves, and tried to help others do the same.

“He knew that just because he grew up around here, he didn’t have to make that his life — his story,” said Jackson’s mother, Monique Jackson.

McCaskill’s mother, Najila McCaskill, said: “Those boys that pulled the trigger, they would’ve taken them under their wings and guided them.”

Old feuds, new pressure

Court documents in the case provide an unsettling glimpse into the online feuds that are claiming the lives of young people in the city.

In the hours before Jackson and McCaskill were killed, the documents say, the alleged shooters — Kaseem Bullock, 17, Sleaheim Sutton, 18, and Andre Bowie, 17 — posted online about their affiliation with Northside.

Members of that group, centered on 62nd and Market Streets, have been in a violent conflict with Southside for decades, said Capt. Matthew Gillespie, commanding officer of the 18th District in West Philadelphia. Since 2015, he said, his officers have connected 10 killings, and at least a dozen more shootings, to the fighting between the groups.

“The reasons for the homicides are as immature as the ages of the kids involved,” Gillespie said. “Younger members don’t know the origins of original beefs. We talk to them and let them know there’s other options.”

Feuds and slights once reserved for the street corner are now playing out almost in real-time in self-made music videos and social media posts — creating an immediate, permanent, public challenge to act.

“You hear these types of [insults] in your respective neighborhood, but now it’s just visible to the world,” said Chance Lee, director of intelligence at the District Attorney’s Office. “It’s recognition — the more people that have seen this, the more people that have viewed that I’ve done this, it’s better for me and my group credibility in the neighborhood.”

In neighborhoods like West Philadelphia, where young people of color have long felt isolated by society — denied resources and opportunity and targeted by aggressive policing — that pressure can feel more “like pressure to survive,” advocates say.

“You got kids forced to make decisions, and they don’t feel like they have the police to protect them, so they protect themselves,” said Joshua Glenn, co-director of Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project, an organization that works with young people under 18 who are being tried as adults.

The Rev. Mark Tyler, pastor of Mother Bethel A.M.E Church, said to fully understand how these online feuds escalate to violence, you have to understand the legacy of decades of injustice.

“What we’re seeing is what despair looks like, what hopelessness looks like,” he said. “And that’s what rage is — hopelessness and despair turned outward on other people.”

Rage can quickly turn deadly in a city awash in guns.

The three alleged shooters of Jackson and McCaskill had each been arrested as minors for carrying firearms, according to police records.

Attorneys representing the teens in the murders declined to comment.

After a 2018 gun arrest, when he was 15, Bullock was placed under electronic supervision, the records show. He was placed in a program where probation officers intensely monitor young people likely to become repeat offenders.

Bullock’s father, Paul Bullock, said in a brief telephone interview that his son had been struggling with his mental health, but he did not want to comment further.

Sutton had also been under electronic supervision for a time, the records show. His supervision ended two weeks before Jackson and McCaskill were slain.

Bowie — arrested twice on firearm charges in 2020 — absconded from St. Gabriel’s Hall, a residential care home for troubled youth in Audubon, just two weeks before the killings. He turned himself in after the murders.

‘Give them little keys’

Jackson and McCaskill were like brothers, their families said. Inseparable. See one, see the other. They never judged those that chose the corner lifestyles they avoided. They just wanted a different way.

After graduating from Bloomsburg University with a psychology degree in 2017, Jackson got a job as a mental health technician at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Camden. He was assigned to the adolescent psychiatric ward, counseling young people battling depression and homicidal and suicidal thoughts.

Outgoing and upbeat, he made his motto his favorite Tupac quote — the same one he had scrawled across his graduation cap: Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?

“That was his thing, that no matter your background — how rough and uneven and lopsided it could be — you could still grow from it,” said Jackson’s shift partner, Justin Wilkins, 25. “His key goal was to give them little keys and coping skills and positive affirmations — to let them know the storm doesn’t last forever. He was the definition of a true genuine person.”

Jackson had requested paperwork from a tuition assistance program at the hospital so he could begin the process of starting his master’s degree and saving for a house. He didn’t want to leave his neighborhood. He felt safe. He wanted to help.

“He told me there was nowhere else he would rather live,” said his coworker Janae Felton. “He was adamant about staying there.”

McCaskill had studied finance at Wayne State University in Michigan for three years, when he felt a lump in his neck in 2017. Cancer had spread to his lymph nodes.

After grueling treatments, he came home to West Philly to recover, and in time doctors told him his cancer had gone into remission.

He waited tables at TGIFriday’s and took night classes at Villanova. Soon, he started a commercial cleaning business, where he often hired younger people who needed a leg up.

He channeled his creativity into soulful rap songs he recorded under the name Shah Slater, and into Facebook posts on Black history and the Black Lives Matter movement.

“He was at a point in his life where he was happy and making moves and excited to see what the future held,” said his friend Hannah Bachir.

He lamented the violence tearing at his neighborhood.

“Pray for my city,” he had posted, just days before his death.

The night he and Jackson were killed, police say the teens fired round after round directly into the car — 24 shots in all.

Family members untucked Jackson’s tall frame from the driver’s seat, and loaded him into the back of a cop car that sped him to the hospital.

A neighbor drove McCaskill in the back of his truck.

When their mothers reached the emergency room, doctors told them the unimaginable: They had lost both of them.

Jackson said she wakes up every morning to the memory of her son and his best friend shot and bleeding.

McCaskill said her son and his friend still had so much they wanted to accomplish.

“I feel sometimes,” she said, “like he is going to walk in the door.”

Staff writer Chris A. Williams contributed to this article.

Police are on pace to make 3,000 arrests this year for carrying a gun illegally, a record, but the people charged are less likely to be convicted.

By Chris Palmer, Dylan Purcell, Mike Newall, and Mensah M. Dean

As Philadelphia’s gun violence has surged to unprecedented heights, two troubling trends have quietly kept building:

Thousands more people are being arrested for carrying guns illegally. But their chances of being convicted in court have fallen by nearly a quarter.

That conundrum now drives a debate between the Philadelphia Police Department and the District Attorney’s Office about how to stem the flow of illegal guns on city streets — and ultimately, how to slow possible violence by those who wield them.

In 2021, police are making arrests for carrying an illegal gun on a pace nearly three times that of 2017, according to an Inquirer analysis of police data and eight years of court dockets.

If the current pace continues, police will make more than 3,000 arrests this year for illegal gun possession — by far the most on record.

Meanwhile, people accused of illegally carrying guns have seen their chances of getting convicted in court plunge from 63% in 2017 to 49% two years later.

Put plainly, people accused of carrying illegal guns in recent years have had better than a coin flip’s chance of beating their case in court.

The Inquirer analysis looked at cases where the most serious crime was a Violation of the Uniform Firearms Act (VUFA), nonviolent offenses that can range from carrying an unlicensed weapon, a misdemeanor, to being barred from possessing a firearm due to a previous conviction, a felony that can lead to years in prison.

Police have long considered VUFA arrests essential to reducing crime because they take weapons out of the hands of people who later might use them.

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said Philadelphia’s criminal justice system has become a “revolving door” for repeat gun offenders — leaving more of them on the street with their weapons, with little reason to fear the consequences of being caught.

Although she declined to single out District Attorney Larry Krasner, her top partner in Philadelphia law enforcement, Outlaw echoed a point that the Inquirer analysis revealed — that conviction rates for being caught with an illegal gun dropped after Krasner was sworn into office in January 2018.

“If there’s nothing to deter folks, if there’s no consequence where people believe, ‘If I do this, this is going to happen,’ [then] there’s no incentive to not carry a gun illegally, quite frankly,” the commissioner said.

Krasner attributes the drop in convictions in part to police submitting weaker evidence or more cases being tossed out by judges because witnesses didn’t show up in court.

In the years since the Philadelphia Police Department settled a civil rights lawsuit over unconstitutional pedestrian stop-and-frisks, officers have also been presenting more cases of guns they found during car stops, Krasner said. Those cases can be difficult to prosecute if multiple people were in the car and each disclaims ownership of the weapon, he said.

Despite the drop in convictions for the nonviolent VUFA charges, most people arrested solely for gun possession have not been rearrested for new gun crimes, he contended. He is more concerned with swiftly and fairly convicting the people who actually use those guns to kill or wound others.

Amid the record rise in shootings, the vast majority of them unsolved, “we are dealing essentially with a form of triage, and we have to be sensible about what we prioritize,” he said.

Krasner, in the midst of a contested reelection race, said the city’s focus instead should be on other issues — the long-standing structural problems that drive people toward picking up a gun, such as underfunded schools, government neglect of impoverished neighborhoods, and a bloated justice system that has targeted poor and Black and brown residents.

“If we’re all going to focus on the questionable notion that everybody who possesses a gun is spending their time looking at data on what conviction rates are, then we’re going to miss any solution that’s actually going to be real and effective,” the district attorney said. “Yes, enforcement is a small part of the story. The big part of the story is not that. The big part of the story is this city’s chronic failure to invest in prevention that the community is crying out for. That is where we have to go.”

The existence of such a public debate is striking in a city awash in guns. And it’s the latest example of persistent tensions between Krasner, swept into office as a reformer, and other criminal justice stakeholders — including the mayor, his former managing director, two of his police commissioners, and many rank-and-file officers, some of whom have recently become more vocal on the issue.

While the district attorney and the police commissioner agree that drastic, coordinated efforts must take place to check Philadelphia’s soaring gun violence, they have publicly aired their fundamental differences over how to deal with nonviolent gun-possession violations.

(At a hearing Tuesday soon after this article was published online, city councilmembers questioned Krasner about its findings. The DA defended his office’s handling of homicide and shooting cases but acknowledged: “We are not happy with the conviction rate for possession of guns.” In response to a question, he promised to provide gun crime data to councilmembers who wanted to better understand the issue.)

Mayor Jim Kenney’s views are in sharp contrast to Krasner’s. Kenney said the plunging conviction rate for gun possession is making Philadelphia less safe — and fuels violence that overwhelmingly claims the lives of young people of color.

“My frustration is the loss of the energy and the promise of almost an entire generation of young Black men,” Kenney said in a recent interview. “I get up every morning, I reach into my side table and I pull up my phone and I see the [shooting] numbers for the day, it’s heart-wrenching.”

‘I’d rather throw a bullet than catch a bullet’

The Inquirer’s data analysis, which focused solely on cases in which illegal gun possession was the most serious charge, showed that most people arrested for gun possession have not been rearrested for new crimes so far.

Of the 1,400 people accused of illegally carrying a firearm in 2018, for instance, 19% have been arrested since for another crime, according to the analysis of court data, through mid-March. And only 2.5% were later charged in a murder, attempted murder, or aggravated assault.

Still, that conclusion tells only part of the story. Because four out of five shootings in Philadelphia do not result in charges, Inquirer data show, it’s impossible to know with certainty who committed the crimes, their backgrounds, and whether they had a previous nonviolent gun offense. This makes it difficult to determine how much violence could have been prevented by more successful prosecutions of nonviolent gun possession.

Krasner’s office said it has seen little evidence that those accused of carrying guns illegally are responsible for driving the violence, as the huge uptick in gun arrests since last year has done nothing to slow the current torrent of gun violence.

He agrees with many antiviolence activists who say any plan to stem the illegal use of guns by young people must center on providing resources and support to those who may be tempted to do so.

Advocates like Reuben Jones, executive director of Frontline Dads, a mentoring organization, see reasons behind the rise: As shootings surge in neighborhoods where residents have long felt targeted — not protected — by police, young people don’t feel safe, and would rather risk getting caught with an unlicensed or illegal gun than getting shot or killed.

Jones said: “When young people don’t feel valued, respected, trusted, or connected to the city’s mainstream, they create their own struggle, their own path to survival.”

Kevin Gold, 35, founder of the All the Kings Men mentoring program for males at the district’s Building 21 high school, said he believes many of those who arm themselves on city streets do so as “a response to what they have been presented in life.”

“I refuse to believe that people involved in that lifestyle actually want to be,” said Gold, director of student support at the West Oak Lane public school.

Of the nearly 200 young men he has mentored since 2009, just one has been shot (and survived), and none has been arrested for carrying a gun, he said. “But I will say, all of them are exposed to opportunities to have access to guns and access to that lifestyle.”

Stefan Shaw, 19, who graduated in 2019 from Building 21 and is still being mentored by Gold, echoed his sentiment.

“It’s really hard to grow up in Philadelphia, especially a boy, and not experience some type of gun violence,” said Shaw, who left Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania and is now a car salesman in Frankford.

“You can gather a room full of 100 boys my age and I’d bet they’d all raise their hands if you asked if they’ve been around a gun or seen gun violence, or somebody they know died from gun violence,” Shaw said.

Gold said many Black and brown young men in Philadelphia believe the police are not able to protect them, or not interested in doing so. As a result, these young men — including those who are otherwise law-abiding — are arming themselves.

Shaw and his friend Shyheem Boyd, 20, who is also a mentee of Gold’s, each said they plan to buy a gun legally when they are 21. (In Philadelphia, adults 21 or older can get a license to carry a concealed weapon outside their home if they pass a criminal background check and meet other requirements.)

“I’ll say it like this: I’d rather throw a bullet than catch a bullet,” Shaw said.

Upon reflection, Boyd said: “I’m not gonna lie. I’ll probably get one before I turn 21. There’s a lot of stuff that can happen in a year.”

Outlaw and her team strongly support mentoring, intervention, and more community resources. But she contended that the “vast majority” of the people police have been catching with firearms are either linked to the city’s gun violence or are at risk of becoming ensnared in it — especially as trivial conflicts, such as Instagram feuds, have been leading to violence.

“We’re not talking about somebody that made a mistake, somebody that was carrying for protection and they didn’t have their license,” Outlaw said. “We’re talking about people who know full well you’re not supposed to have it.”

West Philly cops grow frustrated

Police are encountering these illegal guns on the street every night.

So far this year, the department has recorded 32 days of 10 or more gun arrests, compared with just two days over the same time last year.

In the Southwest Philadelphia police division, the radio crackles with reports of gun arrests at a dizzying clip. Officers there have arrested more illegal gun suspects than anywhere else in the city: 638 people last year, and on pace to double that in 2021.

Shootings there have doubled since 2017.

Inspector Derrick Wood, commanding officer of Southwest Division, attributes some of the spike in VUFA arrests to what he describes as a growing lack of fear among people carrying guns due to dropping conviction rates and lower bails set by bail commissioners.

“What I see is that the city and the criminal justice system do not take illegally carrying firearms seriously,” Wood said. “There’s been an explosion of gun violence in the last three years, and there’s more than one reason — but I think one reason is we don’t take it seriously.”

An Inquirer review of 2019 gun arrests from the 18th Police District, in Wood’s Southwest Division, showed that of the 82 people whose cases were resolved as of January 2021, more than half, 53%, had their charges withdrawn or dismissed.

Wood and some of his officers contend that amid this reality, they are encountering the same suspects over and over again. Fed up, they began posting photos on social media of confiscated firearms and calling for stricter consequences for carrying them.

“They know there’s no consequences for carrying a gun in Philly. It’s zero to none,” he said. “I don’t care what kind of programs you come up with, what kind of money you put in prevention — if people are not held accountable, then people are going to keep carrying guns.”

He added: “I’m not worried about hurting people’s feelings anymore,” without specifying names. “We’ve got to do something different. We can’t keep doing the same thing.”

While not responding directly to Wood, Krasner said he believed that some cops, frustrated by the increasing violence — anger he shares — may be focusing on the surge in gun-possession cases to shift the narrative away from the department’s low clearance rate for shootings and homicides.

“What I hear more and more is ‘Let me tell you how many guns we got off the street this week, let me redefine the issue,’” Krasner said.

He credited officers with doing their best to follow orders, seize illegal firearms when they find them, and collect evidence they think is strong enough to sustain a prosecution.

Still, he added: “I think it’s always a good thing to get guns off the street. But it is not the primary job of police to harvest guns. It is the primary job of police to arrest people with solid evidence that can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.”

‘He didn’t deserve to go out like that’

Sometimes those accused of gun possession go on to become suspects in violent crimes.

The Inquirer found 17 instances in which someone charged with a VUFA case in 2018 was later charged with homicide, murder, or attempted murder.

One of them was Sabir Bunch, who has been charged with fatally shooting Sean Gunther, an expectant father, outside a barbershop in Tioga in December 2019.

Bunch had beaten a gun-possession case in court the year before, according to 2018 court records. The reasons were not clear because court documents in the case are no longer public.

Gunther’s relatives are now left to wonder why that prosecution failed, and whether anything more could have been done to prevent Bunch — who has several other gun charges on his record — from allegedly squeezing the trigger.

Bunch “should not have been on the street,” said Gunther’s cousin, Gloria Easley, 41, who said many residents do not feel that public officials are doing enough to help neighborhoods suffering from crime or violence.

Gunther’s sister, Rayna Gunther, said that her brother had lived a life on the street and served time but that he remained committed to his family and had provided hospice care for their father.

“He had been through a lot,” she said, “but he didn’t deserve to go out like that.”

Seeking solutions

Why has the rate of convictions for gun possession fallen during Krasner’s first term?

Besides blaming the difficulty of proving gun possession in car-stop cases with multiple occupants, his office offered the findings of a study of 221 VUFA cases that failed in court, both before and after Krasner took office.

One in 10 dismissed under Krasner failed because the police witness didn’t show up at initial hearings, they said, and about one in three were dismissed because civilian witnesses failed to appear in court, requiring the judge to throw out those cases or prosecutors to withdraw them. Together, these two reasons account for close to half of his office’s losing gun-possession cases.

These problems existed long before Krasner took office, and yet none seemed to prohibit his predecessors from securing a higher conviction rate.

Krasner did not say what might have changed. But he added that it would be a “logical consequence” to have a lower conviction rate “if the context is: You used to have a smaller number of cases with stronger evidence, and now you have a bigger number of cases with weaker evidence.”

Krasner has built his administration on the idea that fewer people belong in jail — that he was sworn in to help unravel decades of misguided policy devastating communities of color and fueling more crime.

But the explosion of gun arrests presents a new test for the reform-driven DA. Due to the court system’s slowdown during the pandemic, The Inquirer’s analysis shows that as many as 3,500 gun cases remain pending in court, even as dozens of new arrests are being recorded each week.

If his office were to convict 49% of those 3,500 people — its current rate — Krasner would face the possibility of significantly swelling the city’s jail population.

“This is an issue someone in my office raised with me,” Krasner said. “Are we going to replace a war on drugs with a war on guns, and are we going to use that as an excuse for mass incarceration?”

For her part, Outlaw said it’s time to move past philosophical disagreements — and toward consistent, fair consequences for carrying or using a gun.

She and Krasner say their offices have been collaborating more in recent months to review gun cases shortly after arrest and ensure they can stand up in court.

The need could not be more apparent. Even in the midst of a pandemic, Outlaw and the mayor said slowing the pace of gunfire is the city’s most urgent challenge.

“The numbers,” Outlaw said, “speak for themselves.”

Staff reporter Chris A. Williams contributed to this article.

The reasons young men give for illegally carrying guns includes showing off and protecting their safety.

By Mensah M. Dean

One in an occasional series, “Under Fire,” about Philadelphia’s unchecked gun violence.

Marvel Thornton-Cruz first carried a gun on the street at age 14.

“I was young,” said Thornton-Cruz, now 28. “I just wanted to be cool. Pretty much most of my family was in the street.”

By his mid-20s, Thornton-Cruz had been arrested and jailed several times, the last for drugs and for shooting someone, for which he served just over three years. He was paroled in December.

Thornton-Cruz grew up and still lives in the Eastwick section of Southwest Philadelphia. He said he has lost count of the friends and acquaintances who’ve been gunned down along the way. Three of his brothers have been fatally shot — the first his 17-year-old brother when Thornton-Cruz was 14, about the time he started carrying a gun.

Each death rocked him but didn’t overwhelm him, he said. “At the end of the day, I know they’re in a better place,” he said.

The Inquirer interviewed community organizers, academics, and more than two dozen young men impacted by gun violence in Philadelphia, most of whom didn’t want to be quoted. The on-the-record accounts paint a portrait of a city where guns are an everyday fact of life in many areas, with the reasons young men carry them including showing off, personal protection, and retaliation.

Thornton-Cruz, however, said he has not rearmed himself since being paroled, and is trying to stay on the right side of the law by working as a landscaper for the city-funded Same Day Pay program, which specializes in hiring ex-offenders.

That puts him outside the norm where he’s from, Thornton-Cruz said, as he puffed on a cigarette during a break at a Southwest lot where he was working with his boss, Greg Thompson, to set up chairs and tables for a candidates’ forum.

“Southwest is full of violence and guns. It’s not one person you’re gonna come across that don’t own a gun. Especially if he’s in the streets,” said the father of two. He said he has no hope that gun violence will abate and the streets will become safer anytime soon.

“These boys out here protecting themselves,” he said, pointing to a key reason many young men have guns.

Those who do carry a gun illegally in Philadelphia currently face a greater risk of getting arrested. Thousands more people are being arrested — three times the pace of 2017 — but their chances of being convicted in court have fallen by nearly a quarter, according to an Inquirer analysis.

For those who do take their chances, Thornton-Cruz offered another motivation, one that had nothing to do with protection. “You got some people out here with guns that’s just carrying it for the show, carrying it to try to impress people and show off.

“You see these celebrities. We’re imitating off of what we see. We see Lil Wayne, we see NBA YoungBoy, we see DaBaby, we see Meek Mill portraying guns in their videos. What you think these young boys gonna do?”

Referring to young men in his circumstances, he noted: “Somebody’s gonna die every day from gun violence, because this is how our mind is registered. We don’t know no other way out. We have no structure.”

Thornton-Cruz has reasons for his pessimism.

Since 2015, more than 10,000 people have been shot in Philadelphia. Three out of four have been Black males, according to City of Philadelphia data analyzed by The Inquirer.

The median age for shooting victims is 26. More than 80% of homicide victims in Philadelphia last year were Black men, according to the data. The vast majority died from gunfire.

Black men and teens, ages 15 to 34, composed just 2% of the nation’s population but were fatalities in 37% of all gun homicides in 2019, a death rate 20 times higher than that of comparable white males, CDC data show.

“There is a great deal of hopelessness, and most of all fear,” said community activist Thompson, Thornton-Cruz’s boss. “These guys who are carrying these guns are walking around acting tough. But most of them are very afraid that their lives are going to be taken. And that is what is motivating them to take up arms against each other.”

‘Now we’re just killing each other’

Kyle Williams is just 14, but he is already keenly aware of the fragility of life growing up in West Philadelphia.

“You could get shot just walking down the street for anything. Somebody could just walk up to you and shoot you for no apparent reason. That’s why people carry guns,” said Williams, a Discovery Charter School student.

“I’m from a lit neighborhood,” he said, shrugging. “We got beef with the 8th and the 3rd,” he said, referring to 58th and 53rd Streets. “A lot of people really want to kill me.”

Although he does not have a gun, he said, he’s not opposed to getting one. You must be 21 to carry a weapon in Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, you also must obtain a license to carry a firearm, whether concealed or open carry.

Even so, he explained, “You can’t settle beefs. They don’t stop. I just stay away from it. As long as you don’t touch me, I don’t have to do something.”

Even if someone isn’t part of a crew and steers clear of street beefs, that sometimes is not enough protection from Philadelphia’s unchecked gun violence.

That’s the case with Dajuan Williams, a Northeast High School teen, who was 14 in September 2019 when he attended a peace rally with staff and fellow students of New Options More Opportunities (NOMO), a North Philadelphia-based youth mentoring organization. Some in the group then moved on to Marcus Foster Memorial Stadium on Straub Street between Germantown Avenue and 16th Street to watch a football game between Simon Gratz High School and Imhotep Institute Charter High School.

While waiting in line to buy his game ticket, Dajuan, who had never had trouble with the law or anyone else, heard the crackle of gunfire. He dropped his phone.

“As I go to pick my phone up I see my shoe, and blood is coming. So that’s when I started to feel real weak in my foot, and the next thing you know, I take my shoe off and my foot is drenched in blood.”

Dajuan, who is now 16, has no clue who shot him in the foot nor why the gunman opened fire. The inexplicable nature of the shooting, like so many others, is a hallmark of the city’s gun-violence surge, he and others have observed.

“I never thought that I would be shot, but then again, I live in Philadelphia, so anything can happen. A lot of people die every day. So, I’m thankful I was shot where I was shot instead of somewhere else on my body,” he said.

“Whether you’re five months or 50, they don’t care who they shooting. They don’t care why they shooting. They just shooting ‘em,” added Dajuan, who said friends ages 16 and 17 were killed by city gunfire between 2018 and 2020. One in cross fire, the other stemming from an argument, he said.

Like the victims in most of the city’s shootings, the vast majority of the shooters are also Black men and teenage boys.

Keith Boyd, 16, a Simon Gratz High School student, said he shares a West Oak Lane home with his mother and a relative who was shot in the leg about five years ago and who regularly arms himself with a gun when he heads out the door.

“I’ve seen the gun before. It’s a pistol. I don’t think nothing of it. It’s normal,” said Boyd of the relative’s weapon. He, nevertheless, says he won’t buy a gun until he can do so legally. He has strong feelings about the city’s gun violence.

“I think it’s kind of sad and disappointing to see lives wasted, and a bit ironic because Black people have always been defending our civil rights going back in the Sixties,” he said. “Now we’re just killing each other and the white folks don’t have to do it for us.”

Daniel Hayes, 33, used to spend his time selling crack cocaine, starting at the age of 12, robbing people and gunning for street rivals, he said. His crimes put him in state and federal prison for nine years. In his most serious case, he and an accomplice pleaded guilty to shooting two drug rivals, both of whom survived.

“I shot people, robbed people, hurt people,” he admitted.

Now on parole until 2033, he said his business ventures keep him from thinking about returning to street life. He sells custom T-shirts he designs and facilitates what he calls “Bloom Talk,” nightly discussions on entrepreneurship, networking, and street crime on his Instagram page, CEO_Bloom_LLC. With themes like “Shoot cameras, not guns,” Bloom Talk typically attracts more than 100 mostly teens and young adults, he said.

He gives a grab bag of reasons as to why gun violence is increasing in some of the city’s Black neighborhoods, including the shooters’ impulsiveness, pride, jealousy, drug-hazed minds, poor upbringing, and desire for revenge.

“Pulling a trigger is easy … It wasn’t hard for me and it ain’t hard for them,” he said. “I tell the younger guys, basically, before you pull that trigger go lock yourself in the bathroom for 23 hours and see if you can bear it,” he said. “In prison, I seen young guys hang themselves.”

Thompson, 60, the director of Philadelphia Peaceful Surrender, which helps fugitives turn themselves in to police, also works with Kingdom Care Reentry Network and Don’t Fall Down in the Hood, two programs with goals of keeping teens out of prison.

He said he has never seen gun violence in Philadelphia so deadly.

“We’ve never seen it so bad where the shooter isn’t really concerned with finding the actual target, they’re just concerned with inflicting pain and carnage on the other side,” he said.

“We’re losing a sense of respect for human life, period. If the kids are outside, if the women are outside, it does not matter now. We’re going to let the bullets fly. We are living in dangerous times.”

‘What we will and won’t stand for’

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said when the department identifies people who it believes are at risk of being shooters, or being shot, it sends their names to the city’s Office of Violence Prevention.

This effort is part of the city’s Roadmap to Safer Communities plan. It’s built on the assertion by city officials that a small number of individuals contribute to most of the gun crimes in so-called hot spot neighborhoods — 2% of known individuals accounting for 80% of the gun violence.

In passing along the names, Outlaw said, “We say, ‘Look, there needs to be some form of disruption here … Whatever you do to intervene — whether it’s through services, pulling what levers that exist, speaking with their families, jobs, or whatever it is that would connect with this very demographic that we’re talking about — please do that.’ ”

This program is part of Mayor Jim Kenney’s updated Roadmap to Safer Communities, which includes more funding for the city’s five-year safety plan and for expanded summer services for youth. The plan states: “Structural racism and inequality are at the root of gun violence. Unemployment, poverty, under-resourced schools, and lack of educational attainment remain drivers of violence.”

Outlaw, the first Black woman to lead Philadelphia’s police force, said she believes progress is being made at reaching armed men and boys. “I am starting to see communities galvanized and recognize that this is far more than just a police problem, this is far more than just a city problem, quite frankly,” she said. “Communities are stepping up and taking their neighborhoods back, they’re taking their blocks back. They’re being far more vocal.”

Pastor Carl Day, of the Culture Changing Christians church, with locations in North Philadelphia and Montclair, N.J., said the nature of the city’s gun violence, so often fueled by retaliation and rage, is such that police cannot be expected to stop much of it, but merely respond to the aftermath.

“We as a community have to hold each other accountable. We have to be more vocal about what we will and won’t stand for in our communities, and we as Black men in Philadelphia need to support our communities by standing for civility and peace.”

Kyle McLemore, youth mentor and job development coordinator for NOMO, the North Philly youth mentoring program, shares Day’s belief that payback motivates many slayings.

“A lot of these things first started through robberies, they started through little beefs about this or that,” he said. “But now, once one gets killed, his friends feel they got to kill the other guy’s friends. So a lot of this violence is being fueled by vendettas that came out of materialism.”

In the glut of shootings, some make headlines for the audaciousness of the gunmen’s brutality and proficiency.

Ameen Hurst, 16, was arrested in May and charged with four killings since December, including those of two men killed in a quadruple shooting in March in Overbrook Park, and the March death of Rodney Hargrove, 20, gunned down near the front gates of the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility. Hargrove had just been released on bail. Hurst’s motives have not been made public by law enforcement officials.

In June 2020, Steven Williams, 26, was charged with killing four men between September 2018 to May 2019. Williams, according to prosecutors, allegedly was a well-paid hit man.

Such unbridled crime is why many of his friends arm themselves, said Santino Fanelli, 15, a Swenson Arts and Technology 10th grader from Point Breeze.

He said some of his friends have bought guns online using the Tor browser, which allows users to search the web anonymously. “I seen people flash guns, and shoot them, too. I never got robbed, but I know people who have got robbed,” said Fanelli, who added that he will wait until he is 21 to buy a gun legally.

Still, he said the city should think twice before trying to disarm young men who illegally possess guns. It’s a question of survival for many, he said.

“Don’t take them away, because people need them. It’s two sides to a story, to a coin. It depends where you’re from. They are not bad to me because I live with them,” he said of his armed friends. “They are not criminals. They might be to you.”

‘A difficult conversation’

This spring, professors and specially trained students from four historically Black universities began interviewing Black males between the ages of 15 to 24 who have gun possession histories.

The researchers will probe to learn what influenced them to carry and use guns, with the end goal being to gather research and documentation that can be used to support communities and law enforcement to prevent and fight crime, said Dr. Johnny Rice II, a Coppin State University assistant professor of criminal justice, who is heading the research project at the Baltimore school.

CORRECTION: This story originally used the wrong photo for assistant professor Johnny Rice II.

“I think this research is very significant because we’re not making assumptions, but we’re actually speaking to Black men that are most affected by this violence,” he said. “Some of them may be victims of this violence. Some of them may be perpetrators of this violence. Some of them may be from both categories.”

The two-year study, funded by a $1 million grant from the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, also includes research teams from Delaware State University in Dover, Jackson State University in Mississippi, and Texas Southern University in Houston.

The research follows more than a century of academic and governmental studies that attempted to understand the nexus between poverty, racism and violence in Black America — from W.E.B. Du Bois’ seminal 1899 “Philadelphia Negro” study, to the 1968 Kerner Commission report ordered by President Lyndon B. Johnson. That report concluded that poverty and institutional racism were driving inner-city violence, creating a nation “moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”

Rice, a Baltimore native, said it has been well documented that some Black men who act out violently in their own communities do so when they feel a lack of respect — respect they’ve already been denied in the larger community.

Because he and his fellow researchers are coming from historically Black institutions, he hopes they will gain greater trust from their study subjects that leads to a deeper understanding about their plights.

“We should do everything we can as a society to provide an off-ramp or a pathway to change to those young Black men who want to change,” Rice said.

“The tough question for the Black community,” Rice posed, is: What to do with the young men who are capable of change but reject the pathway?

“That’s where we’re going to have to have a difficult conversation as a community, because they’re the ones who are destroying the community.”

Staff writer Dylan Purcell contributed to this article.

Even in a city that has long been plagued by violence, the epidemic of gun crime has hit a level unmatched in recent memory — a pace that began last summer and has persisted since.

By Chris Palmer, Dylan Purcell, and Anna Orso

One in the series “Under Fire,” about Philadelphia’s recent unchecked gun violence.

Philadelphia this past week surpassed another bleak milestone of bloodshed, as 10,000 people have now been killed or wounded in shootings in the city since 2015, the year police began routinely posting gun-violence statistics online.

The mark was eclipsed during a week in which the city’s shootings crisis continued at an unrelenting pace. In the first eight days of July, 77 people were struck by gunfire, including a 63-year-old woman injured in a double shooting in Kensington, a 30-year-old man killed in a quintuple shooting in East Mount Airy, and a 16-year-old fatally shot in a North Philadelphia homicide that also left a 15-year-old wounded.

Even in a city that has for decades been plagued by violence, the epidemic of gun crime has hit a new level unmatched in recent memory — a pace that began last summer and has been unsettlingly persistent in the months since.

One example: Just past the midway point of 2021, only one day has passed without someone getting shot. But there have been 30 days in which 10 or more people have been killed or wounded by bullets — an occurrence that was a relative rarity as recently as two years ago.

The sustained surge has overwhelmingly hurt Black and brown communities and is evident by nearly any metric. The city’s midyear homicide total in 2021 — the vast majority of which were gun killings — was the highest in at least 60 years.

City leaders — including Mayor Jim Kenney, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, and District Attorney Larry Krasner — have each repeatedly blamed the spike on structural factors exacerbated by the pandemic, including Philadelphia’s high levels of poverty, underfunded schools, and joblessness and underemployment. City health officials released data last week showing a “strong relationship” between zip codes with high levels of gun violence and chronic unemployment.

Criminologists also point out that homicides and shootings have surged across the country over the last year, a volatile time marked by COVID-19 lockdowns, an economic crisis, a national racial reckoning, and an accompanying debate over law enforcement’s role in society — all as gun sales skyrocketed nationwide. In Pennsylvania, state police reported an unprecedented volume of background checks for firearms purchases over the last year: nearly 1.5 million in total.

David Abrams, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who tracks crime statistics, said it is “really tough to disentangle” all the possible factors — especially because at the same time other types of offenses, such as robberies and assaults, decreased in many cities, including Philadelphia.

“Shootings and homicides took a different pattern from most other types of crime in mid-2020, and that to me is a big, big challenge here,” he said.

Kenney said during a virtual briefing Wednesday that he hoped the city would benefit from a fuller resumption of services as the pandemic wanes. He also has high hopes for non-policing antiviolence initiatives funded in the city’s new budget, including $20 million in grants for community organizations, and a strategy called Group Violence Intervention, which aims to engage with potential shooters and victims by offering access to social services. He said that initiative “can interact more freely now that the pandemic is subsiding.”

David Muhammad, executive director of the nonprofit National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, said he believed the sudden shutdown of such intensive, in-person violence interruption efforts in cities last year due to COVID-19 was among the biggest factors contributing to the surge of shootings nationwide.

Still, the mayor said that even though the worst effects of the pandemic may be in the rearview mirror, the trauma and fallout “are still with us, and probably going to be with us for another five, seven, 10 years.”

Ongoing pain

Oddess Blocker, 47, is familiar with lingering trauma.

Her son, Albert Thomas Lee Jr., 27 — known to his family and friends as Albe — was fatally shot last year in Point Breeze, caught in the crossfire of an ongoing neighborhood conflict she said he had nothing to do with.

A 2016 graduate of Kutztown University, Lee worked at Edible Arrangements for years, his mother said, and had recently joined the local electricians’ union. Despite Lee’s growing up in a neighborhood — like so many in Philadelphia — where generations-old group rivalries have led to retaliatory shootings, Blocker said her son had worked hard to choose a different path.

“He was the kid that went to college, went to work every day,” she said. “He always went left when everybody else went right.”

On July 5, 2020 — two days after a 24-year-old man was fatally shot on the 2400 block of Oakford Street — law enforcement sources believe gunmen seeking revenge went to 17th and Wharton Streets and opened fire. Lee was there and was struck several times. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Another man was struck in the back but survived.

In the year since, Blocker has sought to find ways to remain positive. But the loss of her son is still deeply painful — especially because no one has been charged with his killing.

“I just want justice for my son,” she said. “I don’t want him to be just another Black man that was murdered, because he was so much more than that.”

Even those families who have had some semblance of justice are left with overwhelming grief.

Teharra Tate, 41, lost her 17-year-old son, Tyshiem Chainey, on March 26, 2017, when he was shot several times on a residential block in Cobbs Creek. Days later, police arrested 17-year-old Ma-King Stewart, who had mutual friends with Chainey.

Police said Stewart went on a days-long robbery rampage before killing Chainey. He pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to at least 20 years behind bars.

But there’s little satisfaction for Tate and her five children, who find themselves missing their son and brother on holidays and birthdays, or crying together when one of them has a dream about “Shiem.” They’re reminded of him when they go by John Bartram High School, where he attended, or when they see a Five Guys burger joint, where he’d held an after-school job.

For Tate, the relentlessness of gun violence in the city has made it hard to take time to grieve for her son, killed two months before his 18th birthday. In the four years since his death, more loved ones — a nephew, a friend’s son, a neighbor — have been fatally shot.

“It’s ongoing every day,” she said. “When do you have time?”

Unequal impact

Lee and Chainey were like so many of the city’s gun-violence victims: young Black men from neighborhoods long deprived of services and opportunity.

Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males.

And though those under 18 have generally made up a small share of the victims, the number of youths killed or wounded has risen sharply in the last two years. Through Thursday, 21 of them have been fatally shot in the city in 2021 — more than the annual total in five of the last six years.

The 10,000 incidents were the result of criminal activity — such as homicides, aggravated assaults, and robberies — and generally do not include accidents, suicides, or shootings by police.

The data do not identify victims or say where they’re from. But the locations of the shootings show just how concentrated they’ve been in pockets of Kensington, North Philadelphia, and West Philadelphia — communities that for decades have suffered from a lack of quality schools, job opportunities, and systemic disinvestment.

Erica Atwood, director of the city’s Office of Policy and Strategic Initiatives for Criminal Justice and Public Safety, said that gun violence is a symptom of those conditions, and that the city must address them both in the immediate and the long term. The Kenney administration has touted what it’s called $68 million in antiviolence funding for a wide array of initiatives, including jobs programs, libraries, and violence-interruption strategies.

“Until we are willing to play the long and short game around the issue of gun violence,” Atwood said, “we’re going to continue in this cycle.”

Police, meanwhile, have continued to contend that gun violence has spiked because would-be gunmen are not being held accountable, a barely veiled critique of the city’s courts and Krasner, the reform-oriented top prosecutor.

But Krasner has defended his office’s record and said data show many of the types of cases cited routinely by police are gun-possession cases without proven links to shooting incidents.

Accountability for actual gunmen has also been consistently low because of the Police Department’s foundering clearance rate. As The Inquirer reported in 2020, police over the previous five years had charged suspects in only 21% of the city’s shootings.

City Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, whose West Philadelphia district is among the hardest hit by gun violence, said she agrees with Kenney and Atwood that diverting resources toward improving economic conditions is a necessary step in reimagining public safety. But she doesn’t believe the mayor’s administration is taking an “emergency approach” to preventing violence this summer.

Conflict mediators should be “flooding” hard-hit neighborhoods and hospital trauma centers, she said, and recreation centers should be open 24 hours a day and staffed with social support personnel. Instead, some aren’t fully staffed yet, and a third of city pools — disproportionately in poorer neighborhoods — don’t have enough employees and remain closed.

“We need people who have credibility in our community and with young people to mentor young people and to get between some of these conflicts,” said Gauthier. “That is an effective violence-interruption strategy. There are people who can bring calm to our neighborhoods in a way that, frankly, police don’t.”

A surge in new gun owners and a spike in gun thefts from cars are contributing to the city's gun violence crisis, police and experts say.

By Mensah M. Dean and Dylan Purcell

One in an occasional series, Under Fire, about Philadelphia’s unchecked gun violence.

When Maurice Quinn went into a corner store in Germantown to use the ATM machine, he got into an argument with an employee and spotted a gun behind the counter. He tried to grab it but failed, according to police and court accounts of the 2019 crime.

Later that day, Quinn returned to RD Grocery with two armed accomplices, who trained their black handguns on the staffer and the owner. “Take everything: the gun and the cash,” one accomplice ordered, according to police reports.

They left with $100 from the register and, much more valuable, a 9mm Glock 26 semiautomatic pistol loaded with eight rounds.

And in that moment, another weapon entered Philadelphia’s surging tide of stolen guns, one that has risen in the last two years to an unprecedented high water mark.

Reports of stolen guns reached a new peak this year, with 1,388 to date, police records show. That is 11% higher than last year, 38% higher than in 2019, and the highest tally since 2011, the first year figures were available.

At the same time, Philadelphia has recorded more homicides this year than ever before — 545 — the vast majority of them caused by gunfire. In all, nearly 4,500 people have been injured by gun violence since 2020. The medical trauma and emotional toll on their family and friends fuel an immeasurable public health crisis.

The city’s vexing gun violence crisis is taking place alongside several overlapping trends:

More people with guns

The pace of people purchasing legal guns in Philadelphia has soared, with many of them first-time owners.

Experts say the legal purchase of guns swelled following a turbulent 2020, led in part by the uncertainty of the pandemic and unrest following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Across the country, many people turned to gun purchases at record-setting levels last year — an estimated 23 million guns were sold, up about 9 million from the year before and far more than was projected, according to Small Arms Analytics, which tracks gun sales.

In Philadelphia, handguns sales more than doubled from 2019 to 2020, and statewide sales spiked 66%. Overall, State Police say about 1.5 million people in Pennsylvania are permitted to carry a firearm, about 1-in-7 Pennsylvanians 21 and older.

The swelling ranks of gun owners over the last two years has likely made the stolen gun problem worse, said Daniel Semenza, a Rutgers-Camden University criminal justice professor who coauthored a study this year that examined how the availability of guns impacted the homicide rates in 226 cities for years 2017 to 2019.

“There are more guns in stock in the community as a whole,” he said. “There’s a greater likelihood that at least some of those guns are going to be informally traded, or gifted, or handed off between family members, and some of those could end up in the hands of people who use them for violent means.

“The thing that really correlates with gun homicide rates is the access to stolen guns,” he said. “It trumps any kind of effect that the number of firearm dealers and general legal access has in a city, and it’s particularly important in cities that have poorer socioeconomic status.”

More guns stolen from cars

Most guns reported stolen in Philadelphia in 2021 are the result of thefts from individuals, rather than burglaries or thefts from businesses.

What’s changed significantly: Although car break-ins in Philadelphia have stayed flat for years, car break-ins that yield guns have shot up 37% this year, according to police data.

The rise in new gun owners and gun thefts from vehicles may be related.

According to Brendan O’Malley, chief deputy attorney general with the Attorney General’s Office’s gun task force, the influx of first-time gun owners means fewer may be familiar with best practices for storing guns securely.

“In the heat of the pandemic and the heat of the civil unrest,” he said, “not storing them safely was causing them problems.”

With any increase in gun sales, you are going to see an increase in stolen guns, he said.

Inspector Frank Vanore of the Philadelphia Police Department warned: “Keeping guns in the car is a definite no-no. No matter what the situation is, it’s never safe to leave a gun in the car.”

It can lead to traumatic consequences. While walking to SEPTA’s Fern Rock Transportation Center, a 33-year-old woman was struck by a bullet from a gun that had been stolen from a car.

“I just parked my car to get on the train and I was getting my phone out of my bag to put my ear buds in. Then I heard the pop, pop, pop and my arm was burning. I laid on the ground and just stayed there,” the woman told police about the shooting two years ago.

Contacted at her home last week, the woman said she didn’t know who shot her, and slowly shook her head. The shooting was in the past and she just didn’t want to talk about it, she said, before closing the door.

The man accused of shooting her is Lammar Clanton, 28, a felon barred from owning a gun, who was charged with possessing a stolen semiautomatic handgun linked to the crime scene by ballistics evidence. Police believe that Clanton and another gunman, who eluded capture, were firing at each other when the woman was shot. When police searched Clanton’s home, 31 packets of heroin were found, according to a search affidavit filed in court.

The Philadelphia Training Academy, in the 800 block of Ellsworth Street in South Philly, not only sells guns but also has 18,000 members who have access to a shooting range. The academy also operates a training program for armed security guards, said Jim Smith, the manager.

“We’re probably one of the busier stores,” Smith said recently. Still, Smith said his store takes steps to prevent guns being stolen from his store by only allowing the potential buyer to enter the store, requiring multiple forms of identification, and barring others from coming in. “We go above and beyond,” he said.

As for new owners not safely storing their weapons and leading to thefts, Smith said he has no comment because he doesn’t have access to stolen gun data. “If somebody reports a gun stolen and they call us, not that we blow it off but our immediate answer to them is to contact the authorities and call the police.”

Gun thefts soar but not all are reported or are false

Criminals are stealing more guns than ever from their owners, but the reported number for 2021 — a record 1,388 — likely undercounts the measure of the problem. Not everyone reports the theft of a gun to police, as required by a city code that is tangled in legal controversy.

Tucked into this rise in reported gun thefts is another troubling issue, O’Malley said: fraud. Not every gun reported stolen is actually a stolen gun, he said, a contention echoed by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office. Instead, “straw purchasers” — people over 21 without a criminal conviction and eligible to buy guns — report to police, as a cover, that the guns they bought were stolen, then illegally transfer or sell those new guns to others who cannot legally possess them.

Some of those guns are obtained by people who may want them only for protection but can’t pass a background check to get a gun legally. Krasner has said he’s sympathetic to people who fall into this category, but that the fraudulent paperwork hinders arrests if the straw purchase shows up later at a crime scene.

Vanore said as of last month there were 52 open investigations of suspected straw purchases since 2020. Of those, 13 have resulted in arrests, he said.

An extreme example of alleged straw purchasing is the case of Tyrone Monroe Patterson, 22, a security guard at Jefferson Hospital who was arrested Dec. 1 and charged with selling three guns to three different men, all barred by law from buying the weapons themselves, according to the affidavit of probable cause for his arrest.

Patterson legally bought the three guns at American Arms & Ammunition on Bethlehem Pike, Colmar, Pa., then sold them to the three men, who have since been arrested.

Krasner said the record sale of guns during the pandemic gave rise to Patterson and other straw purchasers who, as with stolen guns, put illegal weapons into the community. “One of the things [the pandemic] did is enable somebody like Patterson, who didn’t have a felony conviction, who is a lawful purchaser — this is a guy who’s got a job. He’s walking around the street, you might think this guy is Joe Citizen. Well, there’s a lot of Joe Citizens out there who can walk into a gun shop … and then they put them on the street in ways that are incredibly damaging to society.”

Police are making more gun-related arrests

At the same time, police are charging more people with illegally carrying guns. In Philadelphia, you must be 21 to own or carry a weapon and not have any disqualifying offenses. Otherwise you can be charged with Violation of the Uniform Firearms Act. Police say this charge is a proxy for the potential of more gun violence and helps take more guns off the streets. The 2,255 people arrested for illegally possessing a firearm this year is a 46% jump over 2019.

In addition, as of last week, the department has confiscated 5,540 crime guns in 2021, surpassing last year’s tally by 11%, Vanore said.

“Some of these stolen guns that I’m talking about are being taken from cars, they’re being straw purchased and being dealt in illegal ways out to people who shouldn’t have them in their hands,” he said.

Another lethal passage

At another grocery store in another Philadelphia neighborhood, another stolen gun joined the rising tide of illegal weapons tormenting the city.

The owner of Sanz Grocery store on Middleton Street in West Oak Lane locked up his business for the night and headed to his car. From behind, in the dark, he heard footsteps.

When the owner turned around, a stranger fired a gun, striking him in the left hand.

Get on the ground, the gunman ordered, then rifled through his pockets, and stole a black-and-silver 9mm semiautomatic handgun, valued at $310.

As in the case of the armed robbery inside RD Grocery in Germantown, the gunman, only 16, was eventually apprehended and convicted. Ziear “Little Zah” Duncan was sentenced to 25 to 50 years in state prison for the 2018 armed robbery and theft, and for an unrelated third-degree murder. Maurice Quinn got 10 years for the Germantown store robbery.

Not long after being robbed of money and their guns, the owners of the two stores each sold his business.

“My life is more important than money,” the owner of Sanz told The Inquirer.