Police crackdown on, uh, murder

Yesterday, police commissioner Sylvester Johnson announced his plan to rid the city of crime, or at least cut down on all the murders. As usual, the four points of this major plan seem like a good idea, but the one maybe could have been done before (emphasis mine):

• More aggressive serving of outstanding warrants.

• Detectives will actually be out on the street patrolling after major crimes.
• More manpower on duty into the wee hours of the morning.
• And a major crackdown on curfews for minors on warrants.

Okay. I don’t know much about police work. But cops don’t patrol around the area after a crime was committed? Doesn’t that make sense? Are cops legitimately too busy? Seriously, I have no idea. But it seems (to me) that this plan probably should have been put into action, oh, say, sometime before the 370+ murders so far this year? Just a thought.

Sylvester Johnson Outlines Plan to Combat Crime [6 ABC]

America’s Next Great City, indeed

At this point in the year — with less than two weeks to go until 2006! — there have been 371 murders in the city, the most since 1997. (The most murders were in 1990, when there were 525.)

Anyway, the Philadelphia police commissioner, Sylvester Johnson, has some words about the rising murder rate:

“But I think there are a lot of social issues as well. If you go from January of 2000, we have over 1,800 killings. But they seem to forget there are 2,100 drug overdoses, another 1,400 suicides. There are so many social issues involved in this.”

But, you know, condos and shit.

Philadelphia’s Top Cop Cites Many Causes for Rising Murder Rate [KYW 1060]