On the door into the Uceta Mini Market in North Philadelphia, a sign warns shoppers, “No Weapons Allowed.”
Inside, the message on a sign sandwiched between cigarette ads is even more blunt: “Stop. Shooting. People.”
The market sits at Stillman and Somerset streets, just steps from the scenes of two recent gun slayings that remain unsolved. But in the store, where you can buy everything from milk to motor oil, the signs are an ignored, endured part of everyday existence – just like the homicides themselves.
This is among the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods, where violence is as ingrained as the futility many feel that it will ever abate.
“I know a lot of people who got killed, maybe 10, I don’t know how many,” Marcus Henry, 29, said yesterday as he got his morning coffee.
Murders are up again this year in Philadelphia, and the city still has the highesthomicide rate of the nation’s 10 most populous cities, according to stats provided by each city’s police department. At the same time, fewer murders are getting solved.
With a few days left in the year, the city’s homicide tally stood at 324 Wednesday, including the eight victims allegedly killed in previous years by West Philly abortionist Kermit Gosnell. Last year, 306 people were killed, and the year before, 302.
But despite the jump in homicides this year, city officials prefer to focus on the past. When they compare numbers, they go back to 2007, when murders in Philly were at the five-year high of 392. Looking at it that way, they get a 17 percent decrease in the murder rate from 2007 to 2011.
Police spokesman Lt. Raymond Evers said the department compares this year’s tally with 2007′s to see long-range trends. “It’s hard to get a trend between two years,” he said.
But John Coleman, shopping at the Uceta market yesterday, wasn’t buying the spin.
“They lyin’,” said Coleman, 25.
via | philly.com
via | philly.com