Vehicle deaths are mostly innocent people going about their day as pedestrians, cyclists, or motorists.

Homicide victims are, mostly, people "in the game" doing stuff they should not be doing.

As long as you're not regularly getting into arguments at 2AM with impulsive armed 20 year olds on the street, you are far more likely to be killed by a negligent driver.

Well, I guess it's all solved and we have nothing to worry about then?

Sorry, but I remember that bill, it was yet another attempt at "getting tough on crime". I suppose it may have helped some crimes in some places, but really, by the time someone is "caught" and charged with federal crimes, it's too late. They've already done incalculable damage to the fabric of civilized society with all the crimes for which they've NOT been caught nor charged for.

The fact is crime goes up and down. Law enforcement and the courts can only do so much.

>Once you start actually locking murderers and shooters up em masse, the violent crimes will go down. It's not a huge swath of people who commit such crimes, it's a few thousands out of 1.6 million

It's understandable that folks would think that, but crime has been around a LONG TIME and NO ONE has actually figured out how to solve it. It is NOT "simple". There is nothing simple about dealing with crime.

In particular, the "focus on violent offenders" idea has been tried ad nauseum, over and over again in the US and internationally. It never worked. Why? Because for every violent offender you take off the street, there's another one will take their place and "graduate" into violent crime after YEARS of having practiced petty nuisance crimes that never merited attention because everyone is so focused on thug vs thug murdering. And you know what? Locking people up doesn't deter others from whatever is attracting them to commit crimes. The people who do these things DO NOT think like you do.

Vine and Broad.

Was this a road-rage incident?

The reason I ask is that I go down Broad and cross Vine a few times a week as pedestrian and MORE TIMES THAN NOT, there's some kind of near-accident or incident at that intersection.

Basically, many cars going Eastbound on Vine and turning North onto Broad seem to think it's OK to do so from the MIDDLE LANE across the path of other cars which may be continuing on Vine. This happens every. single. time.

It's not politically incorrect to say. Gentrification is good. I've seen it work in Baltimore in the early naughts and I've seen it work here in Philly.

The problems we're dealing with go back 40-50 years. White flight took the rug out from many neighborhoods by removing the tax base and leaving behind only the people who could not afford to move. Of course the problems from that accumulated and showed up as decaying neighborhoods, failing schools, and all kinds of problems.

Gentrification, in a way, REPLACES the people who left during white flight. It's very much a way to restore economic balance to a community. Can it go too far? Yes, but we're a long way from reaching NYC levels of gentrification. We need more educated people, more wealth, and less dysfunction.

What can be done depends a lot on the nature of the disruptive behavior.

Someone having a mental episode or a drug addict is a very different situation from hyperaggressive teens or a domestic dispute or brazen would-be muggers or perverts.

Generally speaking, you don't want to physically interpose yourself when the problem is a group of teens who are acting out aggressively or when there's some kind of heated domestic situation. The aggression can very quickly get focused onto bystanders who are attempting to get involved in those cases.