That’s the title of Newsweek’s article looking at the crime problem in Wilmington. I thought that this article mostly tried to leverage off of articles like this one, that rank the safety of small cities using FBI crime stats and articles from the News Journal also reporting on Wilmington’s crime issues. The author mentions a “tale of two cities” quality to the city (that’s true) but doesn’t really do this theme justice, which might have told us more about the problem. And if you google “Murdertown”, you see places like Flint, MI, Chicago, IL, various towns in Texas and Youngstown, OH, tagged with it, so the title to this article is even a little worn. Still:
This year, there have been 27 homicides in Wilmington, tying its record 27 murders in 2010, and 135 people have been shot. Twenty-two of them died. With a population of just over 71,000, Wilmington had a violent-crime rate of 1,625 per 100,000 people last year, according to the FBI’s 2013 Uniform Crime Report (that crime rate measures murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault). The national average was 368 per 100,000 people. Wilmington ranks third for violence among 450 cities of comparable size, behind the Michigan towns of Saginaw and Flint, according to a Wilmington News Journal report.
The stats are bad, but if the number of murders could be cut by one third or so, Wilmington would fall right off of those top 10 lists. The city would be a little safer for the folks who live in the neighborhoods where the guns seem drawn all of the time, but would the problem be resolved? Probably not, because:
When you ask people in Wilmington about the root causes of the city’s crime epidemic, their answers read like the devil’s Christmas list: poverty, racism, lack of economic opportunities, drug and alcohol abuse, gun violence, high dropout rates, teenage pregnancy, stressed families and more.
None of these things gets fixed overnight, not even in four years. But these things have been true in Wilmington for a long time, and this article (and the NJ article covering the article) misses an opportunity to look at how one small city, in one small state had been trying to tackle these issues. Certainly, opportunities for accountability are missed across the board (including the NJ): reporting on efforts to fix root causes; how the multiple new WPD deployments work or not; progress towards the Mayor’s “two years and you wouldn’t recognize the city” inauguration promise; reporting on what city council is doing to address the crime issues, and so on.
In spite of promises made by this Admininstration, the city’s violence persists and seems to increase in some areas. Even the WPD gets why this can be so hard — the silence of communities:
“It’s a rare thing to have someone actually stand up in the middle of the block and tell us, ‘This is what happened. This is who did it.’ Because they live there,” says Geiser. “When we leave, there’s no telling what’s gonna happen. Their house will get shot up, egged, vandalized.”
There’s a vocal effort to vilify people who have to live with the folks terrorizing their communities for not speaking up. Which is an easy thing to do from communities where the criminal terrorists don’t live. But the key point here is that the folks trying to keep their heads down know who is regularly in their neighborhood — and it isn’t the police. *This* is why so very many of us have been advocating for more community policing (like the kind implemented on Market St and the Riverfront). Because when residents understand that the WPD is always there — on every shift — it gets easier to trust that talking won’t put your own family and home at risk. There is no doubt that communities need to cooperate in the removal of the criminal terrorists in their midst. But there won’t be more cooperation until the police make themselves a more persistent and more trustworthy presence in the neighborhoods. That is supposed to be the goal of community policing and somehow this is good enough for Market St, but not for the neighborhoods surrounding Market St. Many Wilmington residents have been calling for this — even before anyone knew about not having a Homicide Unit — and yet this continues to be ignored.
The other thing that gets ignored is that dealing with “broken windows” is one method for reducing the chaos of neighborhoods where the criminal terrorists do their business. L&I enforcing code for trash, building upkeep sends the message to landlords that they can’t just extract money out of neighborhoods. Getting the AGs office to fully implement a Crime Free Rental Housing program raises awareness among landlords, tenants, neighbors and provides a marketing tool for landlords who struggle to get better tenants.
Last and not least are the many groups of people in Wilmington who are working hard to make it a great place to be. These groups are largely ignored by the City (and City Council), yet the biggest thing that the city could do would be to become a more reliable partner for their work.
And for all of the ideas out there, what is missing from this equation is bold and effective leadership. Leadership that will ask for help, that will change when needed, who will demand much better from city departments and who will challenge city council to rise to the occasion. Mayor Williams sold himself as someone who got how the WPD needed to work and who got what was needed to reduce the city’s crime problem. Clearly that was incorrect. Places like Philly, Camden and Baltimore have seen reductions in crime over the past year or more. None of those places will say they’ve done enough (and both Philly and Baltimore have the “two cities” problem too) and none of these places will say that it was easy. But there was leadership in those cities who insisted on real change, real accomplishments — not the usual belligerence and a spectacularly misguided attempt to compare Wilmington’s murder rate to larger cities. The Mayor might be appalled by the Newsweek article, but I don’t think that he knows just how appalled Wilmingtonians are by his performance as Mayor.
EDIT: For those who haven’t heard the promises, here is a piece of the Mayor’s confidence in effectively managing the violence problem and his assertion that if he couldn’t get it done, he didn’t deserve to be Mayor anymore.
