Whatever Happened to Murdertown?

I posed a question in the panhandling thread asking if anyone could figure out why Mike Purzycki gets virtually no positive press for the receding Wilmington murder rate. I flashed back to my summer of substitute teaching when nobody raised a hand.

There’s a reason I asked the question in a thread about panhandlers. I’ll spell it out for you: As a narrative, “murder rate under control” is about as exciting as a John Carney speech. Where’s the conflict? Where’s the satisfying resolution? Where’s the “wow” factor? Sad to say, that has more bearing on what gets reported than any public interest. Even a panhandler crackdown has more drama. Crime sells newspapers; getting it under control does not.

It might be worth more coverage if the murder rate had been dramatically lowered, but that’s not the case. As best I can tell there have been 18 murders this year, vs. numbers in the high 20s for several years previous. That’s not great, but it’s enough to drop Wilmington from outlier status to the broad middle of the pack.

I’m too lazy to look it up, but I remember saying back when Mayor Jim Baker was ignoring the situation that if we had 10 fewer murders per year the problem — or at least the endless media flogging of the problem — would disappear. And so it has. After eight years of spilling enough ink to float the Kalmar Nyckel over the city’s per-capita standing among other U.S. localities, it’s been pretty much crickets over the murder rate dropping back to “normal.”

None of this is meant to absolve Purzycki running the city by, of and for the moneyed and corporate classes, or to diminish the problems of the homeless panhandlers being scapegoated here. Still, it’s worth mentioning that Baker claimed the city’s gun violence wouldn’t go away until its underlying problems were addressed. Those problems remain mostly unaddressed, yet the murder rate is down, which shows that Baker, and Dennis Williams after him, always misunderstood the problem.

It wasn’t about curing the violence in Wilmington. It was about managing the condition. They didn’t have to prevent all the murders to make the problem go away — just one per month. Wilmington is still someplace to be a body, it’s just not Murdertown anymore.