Crime
Like many American cities, Philadelphia saw a gradual yet pronounced rise in crime in the years following World War II. Murders peaked at 503 in 1990 for a rate of 31.5 per 100,000, and they averaged around 400 a year for most of the nineties. In 2002 the murder count hit a low of 288, but by 2006 the annual total had surged to 406. Out of the ten most populous cities in the United States in 2006, Philadelphia had the highest homicide rate at 28 per 100,000 people.
According to statistics from 2004, there were 5,513.5 crimes per 100,000 people in Philadelphia. In 2005, going by these statistics, Philadelphia was ranked by Morgan Quitno as the sixth-most dangerous American city with a population of over 500,000 out of a total of 32 such cities. Among its neighboring Mid-Atlantic cities in the same population group, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. were ranked second- and third- most dangerous cities in the United States, respectively, and Camden, New Jersey across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, was ranked as the most dangerous city in the United States.
Recently, statistics released in 2006 named Camden the fifth-most dangerous city in the country, representing an improvement from its 2004 ranking. Philadelphia now ranked 29th. However, Philadelphia experienced its highest murder rate in over a decade in 2006, with 406 murders in the city.
(Source: Wikipedia.org)
