I asked people along Broad Street about the election. One thing is on their minds.

On Monday — a bright, sunny day — I made my way down Broad Street from Olney to the sports stadiums, asking random people what they thought about the upcoming election.

The first person I spoke with was Khalil Husam, 67. Above the din of construction going on overhead at Broad and Olney across from the SEPTA transportation center in the city’s Logan neighborhood, he told me that gun violence is depriving him of one of his favorite pastimes. “We can’t even go to the playground anymore to play basketball. I go to 10th and Olney every Sunday to play basketball with the older guys,” he said. But now that he’s seeing “young kids are shooting at people out in the street that’s 13, 14, 15 years old,” he is not sure it’s safe.

He intends to vote, he told me. “We need somebody to come in here who’s really going to step up and try to stop the killing.”

I heard similar laments from other prospective voters about the upcoming election. No matter which side of town I was on, almost everyone told me the biggest issue facing the city that’s on their minds leading up to the primary is gun violence.

Indeed, I started the day just blocks away from East Germantown, where later that same day, one canvasser killed another while they were working on behalf of a progressive political group.

Public safety has gotten to be such a concern for city residents that, in some cases, it may have diverted attention from the upcoming election.

Many of the Philadelphians I spoke with on my daylong journey struggled to recall the names of the candidates and asked me about the date of the primary. (It’s Tuesday, May 16.) From my conversations with them, it was clear that they are far less animated about who’s who in local politics than issues such as wearing black ski masks, which have been implicated in numerous incidents.

People are “robbing stores and robbing people at gunpoint with these masks on,” said Husam, who had just escorted his stepdaughter onto her bus to Central High School when I approached him Monday morning.

Their frustration was palpable.

They are desperate for change, but cynical that the ongoing gun crisis will improve anytime soon, regardless of which candidates win on Tuesday. May, a 74-year-old voter who declined to give her last name, was at Broad and Erie when she told me, “There’s too much shooting and that’s not going to stop.” Still, she said, “I might as well go ahead and vote.”

The Mathematics, Civics, and Sciences Charter School, which enrolls students in first through 12th grades, sits across the street from the School District Headquarters on Broad near Spring Garden. There, shortly after 3 p.m., I watched the charter founder and chief administrative officer Veronica Joyner direct students in navy blue and white uniforms as they streamed along the sidewalk at dismissal time.

“Let’s keep it moving. Come here. What are you doing that I always tell you not to do? You don’t put any hands on anybody,” called out Joyner. “Apologize to him. We don’t treat each other that way.”

Last month, she had to comfort grieving students following the slaying of Salaah Fleming, 14, of North Philadelphia. An eighth grader at the school, he was killed in a shooting in Crescentville that left three teens dead; an 11th grader at Mathematics Charter was also hospitalized. Mathematics Charter has had to hire four additional counselors in addition to the two already on staff to console its pupils.

Joyner told The Inquirer recently that the school has “two typed pages of students that have lost either mother, father, brothers, sisters” to gun violence. Even though gun violence has been a topic at many of the mayoral forums that have taken place leading up to the election, “none of them are really talking about it” in a way that makes a difference to the teachers, parents, and kids who deal with the effects of it every day, she told me.

Nearby, retiree Chuck Hughes, 79, was enjoying a leisurely afternoon stroll with his dog around the 600 block of North Broad Street. As he stood under the shade of a tree, he told me that public safety is his number one issue. But unlike many others, he had an additional concern: the proliferation of motorcycles that go up and down the busy artery. It’s an issue that he said he hasn’t heard much about from any of the candidates.

“Any time it’s sunny out, they’re out,” said Hughes, who said he always votes during elections. “Last night, there were five of them going right down this sidewalk ... I think that somebody’s going to get hurt or they’re going to get hurt.”

Gun violence is an intractable issue, but over and over, the people I spoke with said something needed to be done to reduce the number of weapons on the street. South Philly resident Ronald Zartman, 87, was waiting at a bus stop near Washington Avenue and soaking up the afternoon sunshine when we started talking about the way things used to be in Philadelphia, before gun violence became ubiquitous.

“We have to get rid of all these guns,” he told me. ”When I was a kid, the people didn’t have the guns. They had them for hunting but that was out in the country. The city people didn’t have all of these guns.”

But despite the overwhelming concern about crime I heard from almost everyone I spoke with, that concern didn’t always translate to action.

Toward the end of the day, I decided to cycle back north. I ended up in the parking lot of Sullivan Progress Plaza near Temple’s main campus, founded by the late Rev. Leon Sullivan, a civil rights icon who fought apartheid in South Africa and encouraged Black economic development. I had walked up on two men chatting animatedly as they sipped cold drinks and were crossing the lot. They told me they were plumbers who worked nearby. As we chatted, I was disappointed to learn that neither has any intention of voting during the next election or any other.

“Each time I voted, I look and see what has changed for my people. Nothing,” said Steven Lloyd, 41, of West Philadelphia. “We’re always in the same predicament. So what’s the point?”