(Bloomberg Opinion) -- “It wasn't meant for them.”
Yanae Petty, a 17-year-old high school student in Philadelphia, used variations of that phrase several times when we talked in February about gun violence in her hometown. There was the time she was out with friends after having gotten pizza, “and then somebody just started shooting.” The gunfire “wasn't meant for me,” Petty said. “I was in the midst of it, but nobody got hit. He was shooting everywhere else.” Another time, she said, she was in a car with friends and shots were fired. Her friends were frightened and angry, but “it wasn't meant for them.” Then there was the time Petty witnessed not the shooting but the bloody aftermath. “I think he died,” she said.
It wasn't meant for them is how Petty distinguishes the deliberate shootings of children in Philadelphia, those rooted in vengeance or some other motive, from shootings that happen willy nilly, simply because a major city is so saturated with firearms, and the guns are so readily accessible to minors, that they go off here and there for reasons that no one, least of all the adolescent targets, can understand.
In 2021, Philadelphia hit records for fatal criminal shooting victims (498) and non-fatal criminal shooting victims (1,834), eclipsing its crack-fueled tallies of the 1990s. However, the city's soaring gun violence was not accompanied by sharp rises in other kinds of violent crime. In fact, rapes and assaults that didn't involve guns declined slightly last year. Gun violence is on a trajectory all its own.
“It ain't just raining, it's a monsoon out here,” said Reuben Jones, who runs Frontline Dads, an anti-violence group in the city. “We find both perpetrators and victims are getting younger and younger because of the proliferation of guns.” Earlier this year, Philadelphia police shot dead a 12-year-old boy. They said he shot first.
For Philadelphia teenagers, Jones said, “it's easier to get a gun than to get cigarettes.” In a comment reminiscent of the early 1990s, one longtime activist told me that she's heard kids can rent a gun at a barber shop. A veteran emergency-room doctor in a West Philadelphia trauma center told me that the gun violence that used to punctuate Friday and Saturday night shifts is now an all-day-every-day norm.
Philadelphia, said City Council Member Curtis Jones, Jr., “is suffering from an unrelenting crisis of senseless gun violence in our communities.”
It's a longstanding cliché to speak of concentrations of urban violence as “war zones.” But in Pennsylvania's largest city, at least one war may be over. The campaign to flood American streets with guns appears to have triumphed. In Philadelphia, guns rule. In the most violent neighborhoods of the city, you can't get away from them no matter how you try.
***
More than 12.9 million guns were legally sold or transferred in Pennsylvania between 1999 and 2020, or more than 1,600 per day. That's sufficient to arm every human, babies included, in the state. Yet that tally is still nowhere near a full accounting.
The accumulation of arms accelerated during the pandemic. In Philadelphia, handgun sales more than doubled from 2017 to 2020, from 10,736 to 25,841. In the state, fewer than 400,000 guns were sold in 2000; in 2020, more than 1 million were.
Those figures, of course, do not include thousands of unregistered firearm sales, nor do they factor in the thousands of unsecured guns that are stolen in the region each year, or the untraceable ghost guns manufactured privately, without serial numbers, from kits. The flood of guns has not only swamped activists trying to stem the red tide of violence. City authorities, too, have begun to question whether they have the resources necessary to curtail pervasive illegal gun possession.
In January, the city released a comprehensive review in which several municipal agencies used state and city data to analyze 100 recent shootings in Philadelphia. In the section of the report authored by the city district attorney's office, the report characterizes the number of guns, locally and nationally, as “overwhelming.”
Surveying the sea of firearms, the D.A.'s office concludes: “Because of the ease in accessing guns and the relative threat that some feel if they do not carry a gun, we do not believe that arresting people and convicting them for illegal gun possession is a viable strategy to reduce shootings.”
The D.A.'s office is tacitly validating a colloquial expression: Better judged by 12 than carried by six. (A trial for illegal gun possession is preferable to a funeral.) The D.A.'s office favors increased efforts to arrest and convict shooters, including better protection for witnesses, over more chasing after illegal guns.
D.A. spokesperson Jane Roh pointed out that the city has joined a lawsuit against the state to enable it to enact more stringent gun regulations. “We very much believe that the proliferation of guns is the No. 1 reason for the current spike in violence,” she told me. But with so many shootings unsolved, the D.A.'s office does not view gun possession cases as top priorities.
Under former Mayor Michael Nutter, who served from 2008 to 2016, Philadelphia police used a broad stop-and-frisk program to take illegal guns off the street. “What I wanted was a change in behavior by folks who might normally carry a gun,” Nutter told ProPublica's Alec MacGillis in 2021. “It's a very simple theory: You can't shoot somebody if you don't have your gun.”
The Philadelphia Police Department still insists on arresting those who illegally possess a gun. But even the police seem to have gone wobbly. In its section of the 100 shootings report, the police department notes that “addressing the supply-side of guns has limited impact,” in part because so many guns are already in circulation. “Attempts to limit the future supply of guns now will not impact the current gun violence crisis,” it says.
In a country with weak federal laws and increasingly freakish state laws, the D.A.'s office says “it's impossible to know exactly how many guns are in a community and who is in possession of them.” In Philadelphia, the problem is not just that authorities don't know who has a gun until the shooting starts. In the vast majority of cases, they don't know who fired the shots even long after the victims' bodies are cold.
Of every 100 shootings that happened in 2021, 83 went unsolved by police, noted Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner in January. “I cannot prosecute a case when no shooter has been identified and no shooter can be arrested.”
The clearance rate of shooting crimes in Philadelphia — the percentage of shooting cases closed by police — is abysmal. Of 11,306 Philadelphia shootings since 2015, 8,918 did not result in an arrest. If the victim is a Black male, and most are, there is scant likelihood of an arrest.
And as the volume of gun violence in the city rises, the chance that a given shooter will be punished decreases. “One trend that we noticed was that the arrest rate tends to increase as shootings decrease; as shootings increase, the arrest rate decreases,” the D.A.'s office notes in the report. “This suggests that the police have observable resource constraints that prevent them from solving more shootings as more shootings occur.”
Because so many Philadelphians now carry guns, out of fear of other Philadelphians carrying guns, the D.A.'s office says data shows that the relationship between illegal possession and subsequent gun crime is tenuous:
Our efforts must be focused on preventing shootings and holding people who commit shootings accountable, and we should not accept arrests for gun possession as a substitute. … As part of our role in the 100 Shooting Review Committee, we identify a need to more intensely focus law enforcement efforts on accurately identifying and removing shooters from the streets, and conclude that the current intense focus on illegal gun possession without a license is having no effect on the gun violence crisis and distracts from successfully investigating shootings.
The police department acknowledges that it's overmatched, lacking the resources necessary to perform all its duties. But, again, it takes a different tack:
The number of homicides, shootings, and [firearm] arrests track alongside each other, suggesting that more guns on the street mean more shooting victims; this in turn lowers the clearance rate of shootings due to strained resources. Clearing shooting cases certainly should be focused on; but there should also be an equal focus on addressing illegal guns on the street, as carrying an illegal firearm is a precursor to using it to commit a crime.
Guns are the obvious and necessary predicate to gun crimes. As a research report on Baltimore violence from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health states: “Baltimore's high rate of gun violence has many root causes, but an important cause is the illegal possession of firearms, especially among persons with a history of violence.” Yet when gun violence has gotten so bad that emergency rooms are overwhelmed and “Better judged by 12 than carried by six” is a common creed, perhaps gun policies aren't enough to confront the crisis.
***
Yanae Petty was an exception among the four teenagers I spoke with in Philadelphia. Not because of her experience with gun violence — that was a common denominator — but because she seemed less shell-shocked by it. When she's not talking about murders attempted or realized, Petty is a boisterous, effervescent teenager with an easy charm. She laughs readily and dotes on her new infant. (She lives with an aunt who works nights and looks after the child while Petty goes to school.)
I had met Petty and the others at the headquarters of Yeah Philly, Youth Empowerment for Advancement Hangout, located at a house in West Philadelphia where young adults come for social services. One of those services is a safe environment shared with peers who are also navigating between the poles of violence and neglect that govern their hours. Some come to Yeah Philly daily.
Cofounder Kendra van de Water is a veteran of the U.S. Department of Justice who left Washington in frustration. “The national stuff was just too far removed for me,” she said. She and a partner started Yeah Philly in a rec center “from nothing,” she said. After receiving a grant from the city's Department of Public Health, Yeah Philly increased its training in conflict resolution and peer mediation. It tries to help young people create a framework for solving problems without resorting to violence.
When I spoke to van de Water it was about 8 o'clock at night, and a dozen or so kids, seemingly all Black, were still hanging out at the house. Van de Water's mother, a volunteer, had arrived. I didn't get the impression that van de Water's day would be ending soon.
In my interviews at Yeah Philly, the teens used language — “cycle of trauma” was a recurring example — that they had acquired at Yeah Philly. “When we met a lot of them, the language wasn't there,” van de Water said. “They couldn't identify emotions. It was just, ‘I'm mad or sad.' But we talk about that a lot, in terms of our histories and what we've been through, but also how do we process it? How do we heal from it? How do we support each other as we go through it?”
“Uneasy Peace,” a 2018 book by Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey, recounts what life was like in parts of Philadelphia during the violent crime wave of the 1990s — the high-water mark for homicide that the city has just surpassed.
Children living within this social world were forced to adapt its code, adopting informal rules of behavior that allowed them to avoid constant victimization yet maintain status on the street. A smaller segment of young people gave into the “code of the street” entirely, spending their lives in a continuous campaign for status, which was earned through force.
Racism, unemployment and social dysfunction were all prevalent in 1990s Philadelphia, as they are today. “But the dominant feature of public life in Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods was neither homelessness nor drug abuse nor prostitution,” Sharkey writes, “it was violence.”
In his research, Sharkey has found that direct experience with violence, or even proximity to it, consumes so much mental energy that students who've been exposed to it underperform on cognitive tests. “To put this impact in perspective,” he writes, “it was as if the children who were assessed right after a local homicide had missed the previous two years of schooling and regressed back to their level of cognitive performance from years earlier.”
When I interviewed 18-year-old Jahmir Diggs at Yeah Philly, he was lounging on a bean-bag chair on the far side of the room, scrolling through his phone. But since he had volunteered to talk, I persisted.
Diggs lives with his grandmother but referred to Yeah Philly as “basically a second home to me.” He said he hopes to leave Philadelphia.
To where?
“Maybe North Carolina.”
For college?
“Maybe.”
When I asked what Diggs wanted out of his life, he said, “I just want to enjoy it while I can.” I asked what he meant by that. “Everybody has their day to go,” he replied.
I asked why, at 18, he was preoccupied with survival. “Shootings,” he said. Had he seen friends shot? “Somebody tried to shoot me,” he said. “Some girl got me shot at.” I asked Diggs where the shooting took place. “Do I have to answer that, sir?” he asked.
After a few more dodges, Diggs issued a brief, staccato description of his life. “Um, how do I put this?” he said. “I done been through hell and back in this city. Hell and back. I don't like it. I get treated bad. I've been jumped all my life in the city. Almost died. Four times. Literally seen death. Four times everything went black, woke up in the hospital. Got stabbed in my chest, got guns pulled down on me twice. Got shot at once. So yeah, I just want to move.”
***
Philadelphia is a poor city. Close to one quarter of the city's population lives in poverty. The school system underperforms. The police department fails at basic tasks. The pervasiveness of guns makes every other problem dramatically worse. So does Covid-19.
“I think the pandemic had a lot to do with it,” said Reuben Jones. “I just think that folks were stir crazy from being in quarantine for so long.” Compounding matters, he said, some people used the extra money they got from unemployment checks during the pandemic to purchase firearms.
“Another thing is, there's so few people on the street, people are desperate — they're finding targets wherever they can,” Jones said. (Some research suggests that being in a public space significantly increased the likelihood of being robbed or assaulted in 2020.)
According to the police department, half of the shootings analyzed in the 100 shootings report were motivated by “arguments.” (Only 18% were drug-related.) “Some people who don't have good conflict resolution skills or who can't monitor their behaviors, they react in an extreme way when they are confronted with conflict,” Jones said. “The average person wouldn't pull out a gun because you got into an argument in the bar. Right? Or because you got into a minor fender bender or because someone looked at your girlfriend or because your favorite team lost a game.”
In many ways, the disorganized nature of the violence makes it harder to address. According to research by Patrick Sharkey and a colleague, local groups like Frontline Dads and Yeah Philly, which strive to bring order to chaos, are vital. Sharkey attributes part of the decline of U.S. violence beginning in the mid-1990s to the proliferation of such groups.
In a given city with 100,000 people, we found that every new organization formed to confront violence and build stronger neighborhoods led to about a 1 percent drop in violent crime and murder. On the basis of these results, which provide the strongest evidence to date of the causal impact of local nonprofits, we concluded that the explosion of community organizations that took place in the 1990s likely played a substantial role in explaining the decline in violence.
But underfunded neighborhood groups, which succeed on the basis of extraordinary commitment from extraordinary individuals, offer limited remedy to hundreds of thousands of needy people struggling with failing public services and infrastructure.
Like Kendra van de Water, Reuben Jones seems to operate with a high level of stress. When I met him, he was seated in a plastic chair at a small card table that held his keys, laptop, phone and a yellow note pad. Surrounded by supplies for a food bank that he helps to run — cereal, sweet corn, freezers stuffed with fish and chicken — he sucked on candy almost nonstop. Later, when we visited his group's new storefront community center in North Philadelphia, he consumed Tootsie Rolls all the way there and back. At one point he mentioned that he has “health issues.”
Jones is 57, with a master's degree and a patient demeanor. Both were hard won. He went to state prison at age 22 for robbery and aggravated assault. He exited 15 years later. He still expresses guilt for having disappointed his father, a truck driver who died before Jones was finally released. Unable to leave prison, Jones missed the funeral.
For Jones, the resurgence of gun violence in Philadelphia is not shocking. While gun suicides are disproportionately among older White men, homicides are disproportionately among young Black men. An analysis of 2019 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Black men and boys ages 15 to 34 were 2% of the general population but 37% of firearm homicide victims. In poor neighborhoods of Philadelphia, staying alive is a burden of Black youth.
“If 500 giraffes were killed in the Serengeti, PETA or somebody would be like, ‘Yo, we need a UN resolution,'” he said. “If 500 LGBT people or 500 Jewish people or 500 Native American people or 500, you know, White people or 500 persons with disabilities — if 500 little people were murdered in a year, that would raise some eyebrows. But because it's 500 Black men, not so much.”
Jones speaks in terms of investment and return. “How much is a Black life worth?” he asked. Kendra van de Water sounds similar themes. When I asked how she had created an oasis in the midst of violence and disorder, she was quick to point out that the kids at Yeah Philly are much like others in the city. “All of these kids carry guns,” she said. Perhaps I silently betrayed some unease upon hearing that, because she repeated herself: “They carry guns.”
Yet the kids don't carry guns into Yeah Philly. Van de Water explained why: “I am not worried about people shooting this place up, because that is the relationship that we built with people,” she said. “And I think if we focus more on the people, the guns would change.”
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Francis Wilkinson writes about U.S. politics and domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously executive editor of the Week, a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.
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