Murder rates are spiking in medium-sized cities. Where's the outcry?

Philadelphia.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

This past weekend, with still more than a month to go in 2021, Philadelphia surpassed 500 homicides in a single year, a grim record set in 1990. Just a few days later, the number of murders has already climbed to 506.

You may have heard that talk about a national crime wave is overblown. This is true. Not all crime is surging. It's mostly violent crime, and especially homicide, the most violent of all, that is way up. And not everywhere. The murder rate in New York City over the past couple of years has been somewhat higher than in the recent past, for example, but it's nowhere near the stratospheric heights it reached in the early 1990s.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.