MADELEINE BRAND, host:
This is DAY TO DAY. I'm Madeleine Brand.
ALEX CHADWICK, host:
I'm Alex Chadwick.
In Philadelphia today, congratulations to the new mayor-elect, Michael Nutter. At a victory rally last night, he said he's going to declare a crime crisis in the city.
Mayor MICHAEL NUTTER (Democrat, Philadelphia): Together we can lower the crime rate in this great city. Together we can clean up the city, our city hall, and clean up our neighborhoods.
BRAND: Philadelphia has the highest homicide rate of any big city. Experts blame the easy availability of guns and a thriving drug trade.
From member station WHYY, Joel Rose reports.
JOEL ROSE: Saleem remembers the first time he got high. It was also the day he graduated from high school in North Philadelphia. He smoked wet, marijuana laced with PCP. Before long, Saleem says he was selling it too. He says the job wasn't hard for him to pick up.
SALEEM: Coming up, my mom smoked crack and sold drugs. The first person I've seen hustling was my mom, and I learned from there.
ROSE: Saleem doesn't want us to use his real name. He's tall and skinny and looks young for 27. Saleem says he made enough money selling drugs to buy some clothes and take care of his little sister, although he definitely wasn't getting rich.
SALEEM: I hustled to get high. For me it seemed like it was a lot of money at the time. You know, a thousand dollars here, 5,000 there; I mean a couple of stacks in your pocket, looked like, you know, it was a lot. It's not enough money in the game, you know, for me, to risk getting killed over.
ROSE: Philadelphia had more than 400 murders last year, the most here in a decade, and it's on the same pace again this year. A CNN report recently dubbed the city Kill-adelphia.
(Soundbite of CNN)
Unidentified Man (Reporter): Chances are, someone on these streets tonight will die.
ROSE: According to police, clashes between drug dealers account for a relatively small percentage of murders. Police say more than half of homicides start out as arguments before they escalate into shooting.
But Rutgers University criminologist Patrick Carr says that's only part of the story.
Dr. PATRICK CARR (Rutgers University): When you have this entrenched drug trade, most of these guys are armed. So if I'm having an argument with you on the corner, and I have a nine millimeter under the wheel rim of a car next to me and I just get pissed off at you, it's easy for me to pull that gun out and shoot you.
ROSE: Carr and I are driving through North Philadelphia, where the empty lots and crumbling brick row houses go on for miles. Philadelphia is the poorest big city in the country. More than a quarter of city residents live below the poverty line.
Dr. CARR: Take a look around us here. You have corner stores and you have empty warehouses, and that's it. There is no other economic base here.
ROSE: The thriving drug economy in the city is nothing new, says Carr. But what does seem to be different is that there are more guns on the street than before and more people who are willing to use them.
Mr. NATE GREEN: Guns are so easy to get.
ROSE: Nate Green is a former drug dealer. He was in and out of jail in New Jersey for 11 years during the 1980s and early '90s.
Mr. GREEN: We didn't use guns. When we was hustling, the gun was the last thing you brought out, and it was only brought out if somebody brought it out on you. The whole game has changed.
ROSE: And many local residents are fed up.
Alicia Hayes(ph) lives across the street from North Philly's McPherson Square, also known as Needle Park, for used hypodermic needles that turn up every morning.
Ms. ALICIA HAYES: The only time that cops come around and do something is when somebody dies, and they stay outside for maybe like a couple of days or a week or so, and then they go back to the same routine. But they don't do anything about it.
ROSE: Do you think they can?
Ms. HAYES: Yeah, they can. They just don't want to. When they see older kids or younger kids grinding on the streets, selling drugs, they don't do anything. They know what they're doing. They're not dumb.
ROSE: But police say it's not that simple.
Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson says cops can't just arrest their way out of the murder problem.
Mr. SYLVESTER JOHNSON (Commissioner, Philadelphia Police): Our jails are full. People say we are soft on crime, you should do this, you should do that. We're locking people up. The problem is that we're locking the same people.
ROSE: Drug offenders end up back on the corner because it's harder to get a job once you have a criminal record. In a sense, Saleem is lucky because he doesn't have any convictions on his record. He says he's been off drugs since March.
SALEEM: There's nothing like being clean. I mean there's nothing like it. You know, you're not that person that when people see you, they running the other way. You know, I should be dead for the stuff that I did. I should be dead.
ROSE: For now, Saleem is working at a fast food restaurant downtown. He seems happy to leave the corners to someone else.
For NPR News, I'm Joel Rose in Philadelphia. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.