Murder Town USA (aka Wilmington, Delaware)

The first thing that happens when I arrive at the Wilmington, Delaware, train station is that the newsstand cashier hands me counterfeit money as change when I buy an umbrella. Next, I walk outside and look for Sergeant Andrea Janvier. She’s just over five feet tall, weighs about 100 pounds and has 18 years on the force, including 13 undercover in the drug unit. This fall she became Wilmington’s public information officer, which means it’s now her job to be nice to journalists like me. When I get into her cherry-red police car and tell her the location for an interview I have later that day, she lowers her Ray-Ban aviators, looks me in the eye and says, “I wouldn’t go to that block without a gun.”

During my four days in Wilmington last month, there were four shootings, allinvolving male victims between 17 and 19. None occurred while I was driving around with Janvier, 41, or when I did a ride-along with two cops. But as Janvier texted me the morning after I went home, “I just left a homicide scene, wouldn’t it figure!” A few hours later, another text: “And a shooting just came in on Hilltop. It’s usually always busy, it was just slow when you were here.”

This is not unusual for a place that’s routinely called one of the most dangerous small cities in America. This year, there have been 27 homicides in Wilmington, tying its record 27 murders in 2010, and 135 people have been shot. Twenty-two of them died. With a population of just over 71,000, Wilmington had a violent-crime rate of 1,625 per 100,000 people last year, according to the FBI’s 2013 Uniform Crime Report (that crime rate measures murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault). The national average was 368 per 100,000 people. Wilmington ranks third for violence among 450 cities of comparable size, behind the Michigan towns of Saginaw and Flint, according to a Wilmington News Journal report. For a city mired in violence, the most stunning fact of all may be that Wilmington just got its first homicide unit.

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