On streets of Philadelphia, crime is back

PHILADELPHIA, Feb 1 (Reuters) On a cold January evening in southwest Philadelphia, a police patrol responds to the latest shooting in a neighborhood that is deadly even by the standards of America's most dangerous big city.

A man in his early 20s jabbers into a cell phone about someone who just shot him in the backside. Several police officers surround him, trying to get a description of the assailant, who fled perhaps five minutes earlier.

At the scene of the shooting a couple of hundred yards (metres) away, police find bullet holes in a wall. A woman emerges from a nearby row home and says she heard three shots. She shakes her head in shock at the latest violence in her neighborhood -- the city's 12th Police District -- where 39 people were murdered last year, the most of any district in the city.

Violent crime in America is on the rise again after a decade of decline. FBI figures for the first half of 2006 showed the number of violent crimes up 3.7 per cent compared with a 17.6 perc ent drop from 1996 to 2005. In 2005, murders rose 4.8 per cent to almost 17,000, the highest level since 1998 and the biggest increase in 15 years.

In Philadelphia, homicides rose 7 per cent to a nine-year high of 406 last year, giving it the highest murder rate per 100,000 people among America's 10 biggest cities, according to a survey of police departments by the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper, which keeps runs a tally.

Philadelphia, with a population of about 1.5 million, also has the highest poverty rate -- 25 per cent -- among those cities.

The deadly cocktail of poverty and violence mirrors that of some other major US cities such as Houston and San Antonio, where poverty rates are similar and homicides registered double-digit increases last year. New York City, which has a poverty rate of 19 per cent, recorded a 9 per cent increase in homicides last year, although its murder rate is a quarter of Philadelphia's.

In southwest Philadelphia, violence and poverty go hand in hand.

In three local zip codes covered by a recent City of Philadelphia survey, at least 15 percent of adults are unemployed, almost a third of high school students don't graduate, and around four in ten meet federal poverty standards. Many poverty indicators in the neighborhood, where 78 per cent of residents are black, exceed those for the city as a whole.

POVERTY, DRUGS AND GUNS For police officer Gretchen Flanagan, who has been patrolling the 12th District for nine years, the soaring murder rate is the result of poverty, drugs, guns and the decline of a sense of community that once encouraged local people to cooperate with police but has now been undermined by fear of retribution against anyone suspected of helping them.

There are some 38,000 gun licenses issued by the City of Philadelphia but many illegal guns are on the street, partly thanks to ''straw purchasers'' who buy multiple guns on behalf of people -- such as those with a criminal record -- who are not legally permitted to own them.

Pennsylvania lawmakers, many from the state's rural hinterland, won't allow cities to make their own gun laws and last year defeated a plan to limit handgun sales to one per person per month statewide.

''Pennsylvania legislators can be blamed for a large share of the homicide rate in Philadelphia,'' said Professor Lawrence Sherman, director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania.

On the streets, Flanagan, 31, and her partner Tramaine Montague, 25, do what they can to nurture good relations with a community that is increasingly hostile to the police. As darkness falls, they pull up outside a corner convenience store where three black boys in baggy jeans and baseball caps are hanging out.

''Come on guys, roll off the corner,'' Flanagan says in a firm but friendly tone, enforcing the district's new policy of cracking down on minor infractions like loitering in an effort to prevent more serious crimes like drug dealing that are more likely to occur when people are allowed to gather in a public place. The boys move on.

Later the same night, the mood sours when Montague handcuffs a driver who gets belligerent after being found with a suspended license. While the car is stopped in the man's neighborhood, his mother shows up and begins abusing the police.

''He ain't one of those drug dealers you ought to be stopping,'' she yells. She accuses the police of detaining him because he's black, until a passer-by points out that one of the officers, Montague, is also black.

The officers remain calm, and treat the driver with as much respect as they can muster but they are under no illusions that their world is tough and getting tougher.

''Things have gotten much more violent,'' said Flanagan. ''Every year, it seems to get a lot worse.'' REUTERS SI ND0922