Violent crime is down in Phila.

In January, Mayor Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey set a goal to reduce last year's total of 392 murders by a quarter, to 294 in 2008.

The city's 294th homicide of this year, however, was recorded 71/2 weeks before its end - about 2:30 p.m. Sunday, when Mariela Mendoza Duran, 21, of New York state, was gunned down while visiting a relative in a West Oak Lane grocery. A store employee was charged yesterday with her death.

Police Department statistics show that although homicides and violent crime are down in Philadelphia this year, the decline has not kept pace with Nutter and Ramsey's targets. Homicides are down about 15 percent, not the hoped-for 25 percent, and violent crime, which Nutter had aimed to reduce by 20 percent, is down only about 4 percent.

"I didn't think we'd have any miracles," Ramsey said in an interview.

Ramsey, a former Washington chief of police, said the Nutter administration set "stretch goals" aimed at pushing the department because the city's homicide rate last year was among the highest in the nation. As of 11:59 p.m. Sunday, the city had recorded 295 homicides for the year (there was another killing Sunday night). That is 53 fewer than at the same time last year.

"I think being down 53 for the year this late in the year is significant," Ramsey said. "That's a huge drop."

Nutter spokesman Doug Oliver said in an e-mail message that the city was pleased with the reduction and disappointed with not meeting its ambitious goals.

"We are pleased at the 15 percent reduction in the homicide rate, but we have always understood that even one homicide is one too many," Oliver wrote. "Yes, we had a violent weekend and, yes, every homicide reduces the likelihood of achieving the 25 percent reduction we were looking for. But it does not reduce our resolve to keep working towards our ambitious goals."

With the economy worsening, and city budget cuts threatening police overtime shifts that paid for targeted enforcement tactics over the summer, some experts say Philadelphia will be hard-pressed to keep pushing down crime rates.

"I think this is the cloud before the crime storm," said Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston who has noted some property-crime increases nationwide. "It's predictable that property crimes and violent offenses will rise as the economy worsens."

Indeed, though violent crime was down, Philadelphia has recorded a 2 percent increase in property crime this year, including a 16 percent increase in residential burglaries - 1,100 more Philadelphia houses have been broken into this year than during the first 10 months of last year.

Ramsey said the increase in property crime was only partly tied to economic distress. He said police had arrested few formerly law-abiding citizens who had turned to crime to survive tough economic times. Rather, he said, most thefts and burglaries are committed by career criminals.

Because jails are overcrowded, he said, many thieves and burglars are released on bail, only to offend again.

"We have burglars with 20, 30 prior arrests," he said. "They're going to continue to do it unless they're locked up."

But some of the burglaries appear to be linked to larger economic conditions. Many were committed on unoccupied dwellings whose metal plumbing fixtures were removed to cash in on the high price of scrap copper.

The worldwide economic downturn has left the city collecting less in taxes and has forced the mayor to seek cuts in spending, including in the 6,700-member Police Department, which has a budget this year of $563 million.

Nutter has asked the department to reduce its $72.7 million overtime budget by $8 million, about 11 percent.

Ramsey said the budget reductions would have an impact.

"We'll try to use overtime as judiciously as we can and see where we wind up as a result of that," he said.

Lawrence W. Sherman, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, said that crime trends are influenced by many causes and that patterns are not reversed quickly.

"The causes of crime in Philadelphia are very deeply rooted and will take some time to fix," said Sherman, who expressed hope that President-elect Barack Obama's administration would boost founding for after-school programs that keep youths off the streets.

Though the city has recorded 10 percent fewer shootings this year and overall violent crime is down, some types of violence are increasing.

The city recorded a 9 percent increase in rapes and a 2 percent increase in aggravated assaults not involving firearms, according to the Police Department's preliminary crime statistics.