Philadelphia Weekly

Bonnie Stratton's order from JC Penney arrived in the mail a few weeks before Christmas. The box contained seat covers for her mother and underwear for her son, as well as curtains for herself. As she rifled through the package, she discovered another item-black ankle-high boots with 2-inch heels.

Stratton was confused because she hadn't ordered shoes, and there was no mention of them on the itemized receipt.

The shoes were a size 8. They fit perfectly.

Then Stratton realized what happened.

"Seamus sent these to me," she said, referring to her deceased boyfriend, Seamus O'Neill. "It's like a miracle. Seamus got me shoes for Christmas."

O'Neill, a longtime bartender at Port Richmond's My Blue Heaven, was murdered on Jan. 3, 2008. The 60-year-old was beaten to death with a baseball bat, wrapped in a plastic tarp and left in the basement of McWhitey's, another bar nearby.

Stratton and O'Neill's brother discovered the body the next day.

"I can hardly get up in the morning now," says Stratton, who also tends bar at My Blue Heaven. "He was my soulmate." The couple had been together for 10 years.

Four days after the murder, Michael Nutter gave an inspiring inauguration speech, in which he vowed to reduce the city's homicide rate 30 to 50 percent over the next three to five years.

Once in office, the new mayor declared a crime emergency, giving Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey and his staff three weeks to devise a plan of action to curb the violence that ended 1,523 lives during the previous four years.

Ramsey's plan--which revolved around putting more officers on the street and capturing people with outstanding warrants--sought to reduce homicides by 25 percent.

If the latest crime statistics are a harbinger of things to come, Philadelphians can breathe a sigh of relief; violent crime in the city was down last year, though the reduction in homicides fell short of Ramsey's goal. In 2008, 332 people were murdered, a 15 percent decrease from 2007's 392.

"While we've had some success, our homicides are still way too high," says Deputy Commissioner Richard Ross, who oversees field operations for the police department.

The department flooded the streets with 200 additional uniformed cops, including an entire police academy class of 90 new officers. The rookies spent the summer walking beats in high-crime neighborhoods.

As a sign of commitment and solidarity, the commissioner and other top brass donned uniforms rather than suits, and were assigned shifts on the beat.

"Everything revolves around patrol," says Ross. "When everyone sees that patrol is truly the backbone and it's not just rhetoric, then I think it goes a long way."

According to Ross, one of the solutions to the crime crisis is removing the perpetrators from the streets, a process that helps save lives and eliminate the potential for retaliation. Police made arrests on more than 75 percent of 2008's homicides, whereas the clearance rate for 2007 was around 58 percent.

None of these crime-fighting tactics--targeting historically violent areas and flooding the streets with police--are new, but Ross believes that applying all the strategies at once has had an impact.