Philly police have been making increasingly more arrests, especially for illegal guns. And then those cases get withdrawn and diverted. This is a way more complex issue than just being able to blame any particular group or single policy anywhere. Especially because the variables are all interrelated and often bidirectional/cyclical.

Example: the numbers of shootings and gunpoint robberies start going up in a particular neighborhood because of a week of nice warm weather (or just at random/coincidence), so people living in that neighborhood feel scared and avoid reporting incidents to the police, even more so than usual —> police aren’t getting tips, so their arrests are down, therefore they aren’t taking people in or recovering illegal guns as quickly, and armed people committing violent crimes stay on the street longer, and thus commit more crime, before finally getting arrested.

It’s very “chicken or the egg.” The community, the police, and the DA’s Office are all bound up together in handling these things. Even pure perfection in 2 out of the 3 will still lead to poor results if something is off with the other, and unfortunately, there are often cyclical effects in which issues with one entity impede another, which in turn worsens the first one, etc.