Papers, please
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/na...rime_plan.html
Nutter calls on Ramsey to develop crime plan
Declaring an emergency, the mayor fulfilled a vow. The commissioner will "step it up a notch."
By Andrew Maykuth
Inquirer Staff Writer
Mayor Nutter set an ambitious target in aiming to reduce the city's homicide rate by 30 percent to 50 percent in the next few years.
Last year's tally of 392 homicides translates into a rate of about 27 per 100,000 residents. A 50 percent reduction would amount to fewer than 14 homicides per 100,000 residents. The last time the city had a rate that low was in 1969.
However, a 30 percent reduction, to 18.9 homicides per 100,000 residents, would match the level of just six years ago, in 2002, when there were 288 murders in Philadelphia.
"Anything is doable, but it's going to take the collective efforts of a lot of people to make it happen," Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said yesterday before he was sworn into office. "It doesn't happen overnight."
Over the nine years that Ramsey was police chief in Washington, the homicide rate in that city fell by 49 percent. But it is difficult to compare Philadelphia to Washington.
As much as Philadelphians lament the high homicide rate here, Washingtonians were more than twice as likely to be killed in the years before Ramsey took over as Philadelphians were in this city's most murderous year, 1990. Washington's much-improved murder rate in 2006 was still deadlier than Philadelphia's of the same year, when 406 people were killed.
"We got numbers down in D.C., but it really takes a strong, sustained effort," Ramsey said yesterday. "You have to be relentless when you go after people who are causing harm in the community."
Nutter, fulfilling a campaign promise, declared a crime emergency yesterday with his first executive order. The order gave police no additional powers but required Ramsey to devise a crime-fighting plan by Jan. 30.
Ramsey said the citizenry was likely to immediately see more aggressive action, including "enhanced patrols" and increased stop-and-frisk actions against those suspected of carrying illegal weapons.
"We're going to step it up a notch and really focus our resources as smartly as we can, so that we take advantage of what we have available to us right now," Ramsey said. "We don't have the luxury of waiting a year or two until we hire more cops or get them equipment. We have to hit the ground running."
He said the department would be instructed to make a greater effort to reach out to the public - so-called community policing. "One of the things I need to do is to definitely settle things down so we don't have officers flying all over the districts answering calls for service," he said. "They've got to become familiar with communities, and that's going to be a very important cornerstone of our strategy."
Ramsey, who has spent more than a month familiarizing himself with the city Police Department, was cautious about going into more specifics until he submitted his report to Nutter.
"I don't know the broad range of strategies that have been tried here before," he said. "So I don't know if I'd be saying something that has already been done or is currently being done.
"Let me just say this - we'll tailor it to fit Philadelphia. Philadelphia is not Washington, D.C, it's not Chicago, it's not New York. Philadelphia is unique in its own ways. And we have to tailor our strategy to fit in with Philadelphia to be effective in every single neighborhood."