By Elizabeth Fiedler, WHYY News
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Violent crime is down citywide.  That’s according to statistics released by city officials yesterday, which show a 15% drop in homicides in 2008.  The city’s top cop says the numbers [...]

Not too many leftover since I’ve actually had a pretty productive blogging day but here goes:
Philebrity has video of a report by CBS 3 about a roving gang of teen girls that has been jumping young women - college students and young professionals - and robbing them.   The latest occured at 15th and Bainbridge, an [...]

By Elizabeth Fiedler, WHYY News
Click below to listen to this story or use this link to download
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Despite a difficult year, Philadelphia police have delivered on Mayor Michael Nutter’s promise to cut homicides.  Although the year also had a force mourning the deaths of four officers, the Police Department managed [...]

From Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane:
Hour 1
CHARLES RAMSEY talks about his first year as Philadelphia Police Commissioner. We discuss budget cuts, the city’s crime rates, and how the department is coping with the loss of recently slain officers. Ramsey was chief of the Metropolitan Police Deparment of the District of Columbia from 1998-2006. Before that, [...]

 By Tom Ferrick
 After a few weeks of getting beat up over city budget cuts that target libraries, fire stations and pools, the Nutter administration has finally gotten its mantra down.
What people must realize, Mayor Nutter has said, is that many of these facilities and services were created for a city of 2 million.  Today, we [...]

by Shannon Curley

Philadelphia has closed more than half of its curfew centers in a move that officials say is not related to the $450+ million projected budget gap Mayor Michael Nutter announced in September. The closings went largely unnoticed. We only discovered this after after initiating a follow up to our earlier story on the [...]

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by Mumia Abu-Jamal’s lawyers seeking a new trial. Abu-Jamal was convicted in 1981 in the shooting death of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. This leaves a federal appeals court ruling upholding Abu-Jamal’s murder conviction in place, but ordering a new sentencing hearing.
Officer Daniel Faulkner was shot to [...]

by Shannon Curley
Yesterday a state court knocked down one of two strategies the City of Philadelphia is using to pass its own gun laws.  The ruling does not directly affect the three recently passed gun laws. The laws require gun owners to report lost or stolen firearms, make it illegal to have a handgun for [...]

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter said Daniel Giddings, the man who shot and killed Philadelphia police officer Patrick McDonald on Tuesday shouldn’t have been on the street. Speaking yesterday on Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane, Nutter said “I want to know everything about him (Giddings) and why he was even on the streets in the first [...]

How can the crime rate be lower when things seem out of control on the streets of Philadelphia? That’s what’s been going through my mind lately, especially after yesterday’s shooting death of a Philadelphia Police officer. But if you check the police website you’ll see that the homicide rate is down 20% over this time [...]