Six people, ranging from 14 to 27 years old, are being treated in a Philadelphia hospital after being shot, police said.
A 911 call came in on the evening of Oct. 13 reporting “gunshots and several victims,” Philadelphia police said.
“At 8th Street and Clearfield Street on the highway at approximately 5:24 p.m., E-911 received a call for gunshots and several victims shot on the highway,” Philadelphia police said in an emailed statement, adding that there are “currently 6 victims at Temple University Hospital.”
Four of the victims are in stable condition, Philadelphia police said.
A 21-year-old man was shot once in the left shoulder and is in stable condition. A 22-year-old man was shot once in the chest and is also stable.
A 14-year-old boy shot once in the right hand, is now stable and a 27-year-old man was shot once in the right hip and once in the right foot and is now also stable.
Two 20-year-old men were shot but their condition is unknown, police said.
An arrest has not yet been made and a weapon hasn’t been recovered, police said.
Acting Philadelphia Police Commissioner Christine Coulter said the only witnesses police currently had were the victims.
Facts About Crime in the United States
Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).
The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.
The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.
The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.
While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.
NTD staff and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
