Philadelphia wants to replicate record drop in shootings

 Mensah M. Dean writing for The Trace:

Last year, Philadelphia’s record-breaking decline in shootings outpaced that of every other large U.S. city. That progress hasn’t slowed down violence prevention groups like Men Who Care of Germantown, Inc., whose volunteers are still making their rounds.

“It hasn’t slowed down for us,” said Executive Director Joe Budd. “We still go to the street corners because the guys are still hanging on the corners. We still go and have conversations with them and bring resources to those guys to get them working and productive.”

Five days a week, volunteers stop by schools. Off campus, they regularly canvass their community, chatting up young people at rec centers and on street corners, Budd said. It’s a long-term approach designed to continue the city’s historic streak of decreasing violent crime. 

“We’re prevention. We’re engaging them where they are, building relationships and bringing resources to prevent them from even thinking about picking up a gun,” said Budd. “I don’t think we can slow down, because you don’t want the numbers to rise.”

Philadelphians, from City Hall to the communities plagued by the most gun violence, concur that even on the heels of a 24.5 percent drop in shootings last year, anti-violence intervention and prevention work must not slow down. Many believe that the drop, which went beyond undoing a COVID-era spike in violence, can be explained by across-the-board collaboration among city government agencies — like the city Police Department and other law enforcement partners — and grassroots community organizations, like Men Who Care of Germantown.

Those on the frontlines of violence reduction interviewed by The Trace said that in addition to continued collaboration, key to driving down shootings this year will be keeping community organizations funded and working on stopping violence before it starts.

Their observations come amid the Trump’s administration’s decision to freeze billions of dollars in grants to local governments and slash more than $800 million in funding to organizations working to combat violence, drug abuse, and other social ills. 

“We definitely need a sustainability plan which means continuous and more funding. The organizations that are doing the work need to be able to sustain these programs,” said Angenique Howard, executive director of Unique Dreams, which runs an evening resource center that attracts an average of 35 to 40 youth a day in the city’s Frankford section. “It’s one thing to have it year-to-year. But we need some sort of concrete contract.”

Fewer shots fired

Mayor Cherelle Parker has ramped up community policing since taking office in January 2024, city officials have noted, which means that more officers are walking beats from the troubled streets of Kensington to east Market Street in the heart of Center City. At the same time, the city spent $25 million last year to fund dozens of grassroots community groups’ crime prevention initiatives.   

Violent crime since then has dropped significantly. Philadelphia ended 2025 with 222 homicides, a 17.5 percent decline compared to 2024 and the fewest since 1966, according to the Philadelphia Police Department. Philly saw 24.5 percent fewer shootings from 2024. There were 13.1 percent fewer shooting victims, 20.24 percent fewer robberies with guns, and 12.85 percent fewer aggravated assaults with guns.

So far, that trend is continuing into 2026. Through January 25, there were fewer homicides than at the same time last year. There were nine homicides, down from 13 at the same time last year. There had been 37 slayings on this date in 2021, the year the city recorded the most killings in its history, the data shows.

While a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts late last year lauded the city’s progress, it also acknowledged that parts of Philadelphia remain persistently violent. An analysis from The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub reached the same conclusion. 

“The greatest number of gun violence victimization occurred in North, West, and Southwest Philadelphia, areas which also have the lowest median household income, lowest quality of life indicators, and highest concentration of vacant land and buildings,” the report from Pew Charitable Trusts said. “So, while homicides are down citywide, men of color and residents in disadvantaged neighborhoods continue to face an outsized risk of violence.” 

Budd said such realities drive his organization to foster relationships with young people. 

“Our motto is, ‘Catch ‘em before the streets catch ‘em,’” he said. “If they’re in our path we can follow them, conceivably, from third grade to college. Once we build those relationships we can change their mindsets about gun violence and about how to deal with any type of issues that come up surrounding violence and conflict resolution. Those are the types of things we try to do to keep them from picking up a gun.”

Mark Wainwright, founder and CEO of It Takes a Village to Feed One Child, said addressing basic human needs — including making sure young people in low-income, high-crime areas have enough to eat — is part of the solution. His nonprofit, which he founded in 2017, is funded by the federal and state government. It Takes a Village provided more than 250,000 meals a month at over 100 community centers last year. He projects that it will provide more than 350,000 meals a month at 150 centers this year. 

“When children have proper nutrition their motor skills are better, their social and development stills are better,” Wainright said. “They are more positive in the community, and holistically, they want to do better.”

Word of the year: Collaboration  

During her State of the City address in late December, Parker seized on the Pew report’s findings that the city had the largest drop in homicides compared to 20 other cities.

“None of this is happening by accident,” Parker told an enthusiastic audience at Temple University. “Yes, we’re laser-focused on our comprehensive public safety strategy. … But it’s coupled with close and daily collaboration between our Philadelphia Police Department, our Office of Public Safety, and our community-based partners.”

Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said in an interview that officers also recognize and appreciate community-driven work toward safety.

“Order maintenance is one of the biggest things that reduces crime. That’s when the community keeps things in order, they make sure things are being done effectively. They make sure that the block is being kept safe,” he said. “Sometimes, we don’t give the community enough credit.”

A five-year strategic plan, which is scheduled to be revealed in several weeks, will provide further guidance on community partnerships, he said. The last time the department had a similar report was in 1986, he added. “We’re at a great place right now, we have the wind at our back, and we’re going to keep pushing.”

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner had a similar theory about the cause of Philly’s progress.

“It’s because of good coaches, it’s because of good clergy, it’s because of good neighbors, it’s because of good mentors, it is because of good community-based organizations, and it is because of people in government who actually invest in human beings,” he said at a recent news conference.

Krasner noted that police are making more arrests, thanks in part to technological advances including cameras, license plate readers, and cellphone geolocation. The falling number of open shooting cases has allowed police detectives to spend more time on fewer cases, resulting in stronger cases, he said.

Budd, whose group has worked with Krasner’s office over the years, said he’s set a goal to spend more time this year helping other violence prevention groups establish themselves.

“If they want to mirror our program, we’re open to showing people how to do what we do,” he said. “There’s about 22 schools in the Northwest, and there’s no way we can service all of those schools.”

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Federal government usurps state authority in violation of the 10th Amendment

On Jan. 12, one particularly crucial case was filed by the state of Minnesota and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, arguing that the federal Metro Surge operation—deploying thousands of ICE and other federal agents to the Twin Cities—violates the 10th Amendment, writes IIya Somin at Lawfare. That amendment states that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” In a series of decisions supported primarily by conservative justices, such as Printz v. United States (1997) (written by conservative icon Justice Antonin Scalia), the Supreme Court has held that the federal government cannot “commandeer” state and local officials to do the federal government’s bidding, or to help enforce federal laws.

Control over state and local government personnel is one of the powers reserved to the states by the 10th Amendment. In addition, as legal scholar Michael Rappaport has shown, the original meaning of the Constitution indicates that such control is a basic element of the sovereignty inherent in being a state in the first place.

Minnesota and the two Twin Cities are among the jurisdictions that have “sanctuary policies” restricting state and local law enforcement assistance to federal immigration enforcement operations. Sanctuary jurisdictions have, for good reason, concluded that their law enforcement resources are better used to combat violent and property crime, rather than helping deport undocumented immigrants. As Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey puts it, “The job of our police is to keep people safe, not enforce fed immigration laws. I want them preventing homicides, not hunting down a working dad who contributes to [Minneapolis] & is from Ecuador.” The latter actually have much lower crime rates than native-born citizens, and many of those the administration seeks to deport have no criminal records at all. Local and state participation in deportation efforts also makes it more difficult to combat crime by poisoning relations between law enforcement agencies and minority communities.

Part of the purpose of the federal “surge” is to coerce Minnesota jurisdictions into giving up their sanctuary policies and using their resources to assist federal deportation efforts. As federal District Judge Katherine Menendez noted in a hearing in the case on Jan. 26, Trump administration officials have repeatedly indicated that this is one of their objectives. Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested as much in a Jan. 24 letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. A Jan. 16 White House statement explicitly indicates that Minnesota’s “sanctuary defiance” is “responsibl[e] for the enhanced enforcement operations in Minnesota.” A recent statement by Trump “border czar” Tom Homan indicates that the administration will not withdraw immigration enforcement officers from Minnesota unless state and local governments curb sanctuary policies and extend “cooperation” to federal immigration enforcers.

In addition, Bondi’s letter demands access to Minnesota’s voter rolls, linking those to the surge. That demand constitutes additional intrusion onto state autonomy in violation of the 10th Amendment. The Elections Clause of the Constitution explicitly gives states primary control over elections. While Congress can enact legislation imposing restrictions on state autonomy, no such legislation authorizes Bondi’s demands here, and courts have repeatedly rejected the administration’s demands for voter data from state governments, which one recent ruling described as “unprecedented and illegal.” With the notable exception of Homan’s comments, these and other statements fall short of demanding an explicit quid pro quo. But they provide strong evidence that the operations in Minnesota are intended to coerce the state into surrendering its autonomy on immigration and other issues.

The Minnesota case is not exactly analogous to previous anti-commandeering rulings by federal courts. But that is in part because it represents an even more blatant violation of the 10th Amendment. In Printz and other cases, such as New York v. United States (1992) and Murphy v. NCAA, the Supreme Court struck down congressional legislation requiring states to help enforce various types of federal laws, or to enact legislation of their own. In a series of decisions during the first Trump administration, and continuing in the second, numerous lower federal courts ruled that the president cannot order states to aid in immigration enforcement actions, and cannot withhold federal funds from sanctuary jurisdictions in cases where doing so would be “coercive” or Congress had not authorized immigration-related conditions on recipients.

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No firing squad for the state of Indiana

 A bill that would have authorized a firing squad to carry out the death penalty in Indiana failed to pass out of the House this week, reported WFYI. 

Democrats and Republicans joined together to oppose the legislation. 

Lawmakers in the House and Senate have introduced bills allowing the death penalty to be carried out by firing squad, in part because of the difficulty of obtaining the drug the state currently uses - pentobarbital. It is also expensive and has a limited shelf life.

Some states have moved to allow death by firing squads, including South Carolina, but those executions haven’t been without problems. Last year, a man executed by firing squad may have suffered before dying after the shooters missed his heart. 

“Just because lethal injection has been problematic doesn't mean Indiana or any other state is going to perform flawlessly when it comes to things like firing squad,” said Robert Dunham, Director of the Death Penalty Policy Project. 

Dunham has been watching as the bill moved through the legislature and even came to testify against the Senate version of the measure.

“One of the questions you have to ask before Indiana talks about changing its method of carrying out executions is whether Indiana should be carrying on executions at all,” Dunham said. 

Lawmakers appear to be asking the same question. 

Rep. Matt Pierce (D-Bloomington) said he opposes the death penalty altogether - not just the manner in which it is carried out. 

“Do we really think that the government and our criminal justice system is infallible?” Pierce asked. “That we can actually perform an execution and not risk killing an innocent person?”

Lawmakers' concerns with the death penalty took center stage throughout Wednesday's session. Another bill makes changes to evaluations of whether the defendant in a death penalty case has an intellectual disability. That bill passed shortly before the firing squad bill failed.

Speaking on the intellectual disability bill, Rep. Robert Morris (R-Fort Wayne), said he was happy with the work done by author Rep. Garrett Bascom (R-Lawrenceburg) on the issue. 

“I look forward to continued discussion with him to actually abolish the death penalty as a whole,” Morris said. 

Lawmakers had added provisions to the bill around media representation at executions and a requirement that a licensed psychologist would need to be in attendance to provide mental health services for executioners with any issues related to their participation. 

Representative Jim Lucas (R-Seymour) seemed frustrated that many lawmakers rose to voice their opposition, not just to the bill, but to the death penalty altogether. 

“I respect and truly appreciate everyone’s passion and emotion on this issue. But the actual issue is not the death penalty,” he said. “That’s been decided, over 200 years ago.”

The bill failed by not having a constitutional majority, which means it could come up for a vote again before Monday’s deadline. 

 A Senate version of the bill is effectively dead. 

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Surprise: Two years after Louisiana lawmakers voted for longer sentences prison costs surge

Two years after Gov. Jeff Landry and state lawmakers voted to ensure people convicted of crimes serve more of their prison sentences, the governor’s staff says state incarceration expenses are surging. reported the Louisiana Illuminator.

Landry’s team presented a budget proposal Friday that includes an $82 million year-over-year increase in state funding for its corrections system, which pays for nine prisons as well as the parole and probation system. State spending on Louisiana State Penitentiary, the maximum security prison in Angola, would go up at least $17.5 million alone, according to Landry’s budget presentation.

The change equates to an 11% hike from current state funding in the corrections budget and would bring yearly state general funding spent on those services from $716.5 million to $798.2 million starting July 1.

Gary Westcott, secretary of the Department of Public Safety and Corrections, said some of the increase can be attributed to criminal sentencing changes Landry and the Louisiana Legislature have imposed.

At the beginning of his term in 2024, the governor called a special session for lawmakers to enact tough-on-crime legislation aimed at making sure people with criminal convictions spend more time in state prisons. One measure more than doubled the minimum amount of time people were required to stay incarcerated from 35% to 85% of their full prison sentence.

Another law change now limits people from having their prison stay fully reduced for the time they spend sitting in jail before they are convicted or plead guilty. Additionally, Landry and lawmakers abolished almost all access to parole and the number of people being released via parole has dropped to its lowest level in 20 years, according to ProPublica.

Critics of the new sentencing process expected it to increase the state’s prison population, which appears to be happening. Since Landry has taken office, the number of state inmates in Louisiana has grown by approximately 2,000 people to 30,100 overall, according to statistics on the corrections department’s website.

Angola’s prison population has gone up 426 people since 2024, according to the prison system. It now stands at 4,258, not including those being held in the federal immigration detention camp opened on the prison’s grounds last year.

The $17.5 million increase Landry has proposed for Angola’s budget next year includes a planned expansion separate from the immigration detainee camp. The governor wants to put 688 more state inmates on the sprawling 18,000-acre campus following the rehabilitation of older buildings on the grounds. The extra prisoners will require Angola to hire 150 more staff members.

In an interview, Westcott said many of the 688 additional people at Angola are expected to already be part of the state inmate population. They would normally be held as state prisoners in local jails, but those facilities are becoming overcrowded following Landry’s sentencing changes. Sheriffs are asking for state inmates to be moved from parish lockups into state facilities because they lack space to house them, Westcott said.

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While Trump hinted at an ICE de-escalation, federal agents were told they have broader power to arrest without a warrant

Amid tensions over President Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota and beyond, federal agents were told this week that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times.

The change expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.

The shift comes as the administration has deployed thousands of masked immigration agents into cities nationwide. A week before the memo, it came to light that Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of the agency, had issued guidance in May saying agents could enter homes with only an administrative warrant, not a judicial one. And the day before the memo, Mr. Trump said he would “de-escalate a little bit” in Minneapolis, after agents fatally shot two people in the crackdown there.

The memo, addressed to all ICE personnel and signed on Wednesday by Mr. Lyons, centers on a federal law that empowers agents to make warrantless arrests of people they believe are undocumented immigrants, if they are “likely to escape” before an arrest warrant can be obtained.

ICE has long interpreted that standard to mean situations in which agents believe someone is a “flight risk,” and unlikely to comply with future immigration obligations like appearing for hearings, according to the memo. But Mr. Lyons criticized that construction as “unreasoned” and “incorrect,” changing the agency’s interpretation of it to instead mean situations in which agents believe someone is unlikely to remain at the scene.

“An alien is ‘likely to escape’ if an immigration officer determines he or she is unlikely to be located at the scene of the encounter or another clearly identifiable location once an administrative warrant is obtained,” Mr. Lyons wrote.

The Times shared a description of the memo’s contents with several former senior ICE officials from the Biden administration. Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior adviser at ICE, called the new definition “an extremely broad interpretation of the term ‘escape.’”

“It would cover essentially anyone they want to arrest without a warrant, making the general premise of ever getting a warrant pointless,” she added.

Mr. Lyons’s memo explicitly portrays the revised interpretation of “likely to escape” as a change from how ICE had “previously applied the phrase.” But Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, said that “this is not new.”

“This is simply a reminder to officers,” she wrote in a statement, to keep “detailed records on their arrests.”

The Trump administration has pushed ICE to significantly increase arrests per day as part of its mass deportation campaign. The agency has carried out more indiscriminate sweeps — like rounding up people in Home Depot parking lots looking for work — rather than targeted operations in which agents set out, warrant in hand, to arrest specific people.

Such roundup operations could still involve administrative warrants if supervisors on the scene quickly fill out the paperwork, known as a Form I-200. The change lowers the standard for arrests even without a supervisor’s approval.

Mr. Lyons’s memo lists factors agents can consider when deciding whether the standard has been met, including whether someone obeys commands or tries to evade them; has access to a car or other means to leave; has identification or work authorization documents agents suspect are fraudulent; or provides “unverifiable or suspected false information.”

The memo tells agents who make warrantless arrests to fill out a form afterward that documents the factors they considered in determining that someone was “likely to escape.” That includes situations in which agents set out to arrest a particular person and then take others in the vicinity into custody. Mr. Lyons called that group “collateral aliens.”

“If an immigration officer encounters and arrests multiple collateral aliens, his or her analysis as to the likelihood of escape must be specific to each alien arrested,” the memo said. “That one collateral alien is likely to escape does not necessarily mean another collateral alien is also likely to escape.”

But this kind of assessment requirement only goes so far: The memo stresses that “particular factors may be common to multiple aliens arrested at the same time.”

During the first Trump administration, a class-action lawsuit claimed that agents had been illegally profiling in traffic stops as a pretext for warrantless arrests. In 2022, the Biden administration agreed to a settlement that included a three-year nationwide policy. Plaintiffs last year accused the second Trump administration of violating the agreement, prompting litigation.

The policy standard in the 2022 settlement included factors that resembled Mr. Lyons’s list. But it also included “ties to the community (such as a family, home or employment) or lack thereof, or other specific circumstances that weigh in favor or against a reasonable belief that the subject is likely to abscond.”

But Mr. Lyons’s memo noted that when agents encounter people they suspect are in the country illegally, the agents are not likely to be able to know much about them. “This on-the-spot determination as to the likelihood of escape is often made with limited information about the subject’s identity, background or place of residence and no corroboration of any self-serving statements made by the subject,” he wrote.

Scott Shuchart, a former head of policy at ICE during the Biden administration, said the memo would open the door to more frequent warrantless arrests.

“This memo bends over backwards to say that ICE agents have nothing but green lights to make an arrest without even a supervisor’s approval,” he said. The memo, he warned, said that “even that supervisor’s note can almost always be sidestepped so long as the officer can say anything remotely plausible about the person being arrested possibly leaving the area.”

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No death penalty for Mangione

A Manhattan federal judge ruled that prosecutors would not be able to seek the death penalty at the trial of Luigi Mangione, the 27-year-old man accused of assassinating UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive in 2024.

The judge, Margaret Garnett of Federal District Court, said the case would still proceed to trial on other counts, which carry a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole, in the killing of the executive, Brian Thompson.

Judge Garnett said in her opinion that two stalking charges against Mr. Mangione, one of which carried a maximum sentence of death, did not meet the legal definition of a crime of violence, and had to be dismissed.

“Consequently," the judge wrote, “the chief practical effect of the legal infirmities” of the two counts and the court’s decision that they must be dismissed “is solely to foreclose the death penalty as an available punishment.”

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Former Illinois deputy sentenced to 20 years for killing woman who called 911

A former Illinois sheriff’s deputy was sentenced to 20 years in prison for fatally shooting Sonya Massey, a Black woman who had dialed 911 to report a possible prowler outside her Springfield home, reported The Associated Press.

Sean Grayson, who is white, was convicted in October of second-degree murder in a police brutality case that prompted protests over systemic racism and led to a U.S. Department of Justice inquiry. Grayson, 31, testified at trial that he feared Massey was about to scald him with a pot of steaming hot water that she had removed from the stove.

Grayson, who has been incarcerated since he was charged, received the maximum possible sentence.

He apologized in court, saying he wished he could bring Massey back and spare her family the pain he caused. His attorney sought a sentence of six years, noting that Grayson has late stage colon cancer that has spread to his liver and lungs.

“I made a lot of mistakes that night. There were points when I should’ve acted, and I didn’t. I froze,” Grayson said. “I made terrible decisions that night. I’m sorry.”

‘It rocked the country’

Massey’s parents and two teenage children, who lobbied for the maximum sentence, said their lives had changed dramatically since her death. Her children said they had to grow up without a mother, while Massey’s mother said she lived in fear.

“I cry every day,” Massey’s mother, Donna Massey, said.

“I’m afraid to call the police in fear that I might end up like Sonya,” she told the court.

State’s Attorney John Milhiser argued that Massey would still be alive if someone else from the sheriff’s department had responded to her 911 call.

“Sonya Massey’s death rocked her family, but it rocked the community, it rocked the country,” State’s Attorney John Milhiser said. “We have to do whatever we can to ensure it never happens again.”

The family reacted with a loud cheer — “Yes!” — after Judge Ryan Cadagin read the sentence. He admonished them for the outburst.

“Twenty years is not enough, but they did what they could do,” Massey’s 16-year-old daughter Summer told reporters after the hearing.

With a day shaved off his sentence for every day of good behavior, plus credit for nearly 19 months already spent behind bars, Grayson could be released in just under 8 1/2 years.

The day of the shooting

In the early morning hours of July 6, 2024, Massey — a 36-year-old single mother who struggled with mental health issues — summoned emergency responders because she feared there was a prowler outside her Springfield home.

According to body camera footage, Grayson and sheriff’s Deputy Dawson Farley, who was not charged, searched outside Massey’s home before meeting her at her door. Massey appeared confused and repeatedly said, “Please, God.”

The deputies entered her house, Grayson noticed the pot on the stove and ordered Farley to move it. Instead, Massey went to the stove, retrieved the pot and teased Grayson for moving away from “the hot, steaming water.”

From this moment, the exchange quickly escalated.

Massey said: “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”

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