The first came just 19 days into the year. The victim: a teenager, shot dead on the front porch of a home at 16th and Park, just across a church.

By midyear the count was up to six, among them: Ronald McGruder was shot multiple times in the head along Hanover Street in the early morning hours of May 30. Two other city residents were killed in July - one in Hall Manor, the other on South 18th Street.

By the time Maurice Geter Jr., a 21-year-old former Bishop McDevitt football player, was shot dead two weeks ago, Harrisburg had seen 14 homicides. Sunday's fatal shooting of a 23-year-old man brought the city's homicide tally to 16. Xavier A. Williams was on the way home from a corner store at 4:30 p.m. when he was gunned down at the intersection of Kittatinny and Nectarine streets.

Long assigned the hyperbolic moniker of being an unsafe city, Harrisburg in 2014 contended yet again with the troubling perception that its streets were unsafe and violent.

With just a few weeks left in the year, the city will likely equal or surpass its count of 17 homicides last year, a figure that ranked Harrisburg the 25th most dangerous city in the nation - surpassing Baltimore and Philadelphia.

To the consternation of others, plenty of people who live and work in Harrisburg argue that the grim outlook is merely a perception problem. Harrisburg has crime, they argue, but the hype blows things out of proportion.

"It's a misnomer to say there are safe neighborhoods," said the Rev. Belita Mitchell, of Harrisburg's First Church of the Brethren. "I would rather promote the idea that there are no such things as safe neighborhoods. Crime and evil are prevalent and highly mobile. The attitude about Harrisburg and particularly the inner city are shaped by misconceived notions that probably have basis in certain kinds of prejudice against people of color and people who have lower socio-economics."

Mitchell, a social activist with Heeding God's Call, said violent crimes across the tri-county area seldom garner the attention bestowed on incidents in Harrisburg.

"You have armed robberies, banks being robbed, homes being vandalized and people shot and killed, many by neighbors or people close to them but because it happens in places others than Harrisburg, it doesn't seem to draw the same attention because if the perpetrators are not people of color, it doesn't seem to warrant the same kind of fear," Mitchell said.

Crime numbers have gone down

Indeed, crimes of poverty have long plagued Harrisburg - as with most urban centers - but in 2014, the violence took on a different nuance.

Amid the preponderance of crime incidents that happened between individuals who knew each other, Harrisburg in 2014 contended with violent crime that seemed to be totally random. In the span of a few weeks beginning in October, police responded to the sexual assault of a 14-year-old student on her way to school in the morning, the attempted armed robbery of two legislators, and the seemingly random stabbing of a 41-year-old West Shore man. With little if any leads, police know this much: Richard McQuown had been out with friends along Restaurant Row the evening before a jogger found him underneath the Walnut Street Bridge near-death from stabbing wounds. He died later in hospital.

Reports like these are the reason Meleeka Bazemore uprooted her family from Harrisburg and moved to Highspire.

"I was raised in this environment," Basemore said. "I didn't want this for my kids. I didn't want to raise kids in this poverty and this environment. I had to break the cycle."

The crime rate in Harrisburg, in fact, is actually down from what it was in recent decades.

Dauphin County District Attorney Ed Marsico, for instance, points out that when compared to the crime numbers of the 1980s and 1990s, Harrisburg is a far safer city these days. Marsico recalls annual murder tallies in the 40s back in the 1970s.

"I think it's a perception that's been on and off as long as I can remember," Marsico said. "I think there will always be people that think like that about Harrisburg. If they lived in the suburb of another city, they would probably think the same thing."

The numbers might be down, but they remain sobering: Harrisburg has the highest per capita crime rate in Pennsylvania. Almost 40 percent of the reported crime in Dauphin County occurs within the city's limits. City residents have a 1-in-68 chance of being a victim of violent crime compared to the average state resident, who has a 1-in-287 chance, according to Marsico's office.

Still, the majority of crime that occurs in Harrisburg involve individuals who know each other, said Sgt. Gabriel Olivera, of the Harrisburg Police Department.

"An individual coming into the city for legal purposes - it's very rare for them to become a victim of a crime here," he said.

Mitchell, of Heeding God's Call, makes the point that thousands of people live and work in the city and do so without encountering crime. Mitchell counts herself among those people.

"There are many days when I'm in the church until 9 or after and sometimes, there is no one else in the building," said Mitchell, who made it clear she lives in Mechanicsburg. "I don't feel afraid. I think everybody needs to have a level of self awareness, so before I step out the door, I look out the window to see if anyone is approaching. Not because I'm afraid someone might be standing ready to accost me or hurt me. I would do the same thing in a similar setting on the West Shore."

A 20-year veteran of the force, Olivera said public relations helps to fuel the wrong perception. Harrisburg's police force, he said, gives regional media more access to crime information than any other police department.

"Why does it appear Harrisburg is more violent?" Olivera said. "Who do you have the least problem getting information from when it comes to crime?"

Difficult to erase the fear

Negotiating Harrisburg is no different than negotiating any other urban center, said Judd Goodman, proprietor of The Federal Taphouse, a restaurant on Second Street.

"There are areas you just don't walk alone in any city," Goodman said. "The improvement district and perimeter are safe. You have to be reasonable walking alone along Riverfront, down dark alleys and dark parking lots, just like in any metropolitan area."

Harrisburg business proprietors, he said, battle what he calls a common perception - that a restaurant, bar or shopping center that has its own parking lot offers a safer experience for patrons.

"It's different if you have to park on the fourth floor of a garage and walk four blocks to your destination," Goodman said. "There is a different type of perception. People have that comfort when they can see the door they are walking into. That's the challenge.

Business proprietors might succeed in creating safety zones for their patrons - but they can do little to counter one certainty: the fear factor.

The fact is homicides, sexual assaults and other violent crimes fuel fear in people who live, work or play in that location, explains Shaun Gabbidon, a distinguished professor of criminal justice at Penn State Harrisburg.

Even if one made the case that 17 murders a year was not an excessive number for a city the size of Harrisburg (Gabbidon, for the record, characterizes it as high), the attention those murders get invariably fuel fear in people.

"The reality is the more we emphasize it, the more people are going to be fearful of coming into the city," Gabbidon said. "Whether the city is safe or not or people feel safe, that's a question for people who live in the city. Perception and reality sometimes do not match up in terms of whether a city is safe and people feel safe."

A former Baltimore resident, Gabbidon said Harrisburg's murder rate pales in comparison to his former city's murder rate of 300 - but at the personal level, the numbers register the same among those who live in cities.

"Harrisburg has all things that major cities have but on a smaller scale," Gabbidon said. "That doesn't mean the problems aren't as real for the people who live here as for the people in Baltimore. It's the same, just on a smaller scale in terms of magnitude."

Take Harrisburg resident Rosaura Figueroa-Gonzalez: She said she keeps a sharp eye on her surroundings during her short walk from her bus stop to her home in the Hoover Homes housing complex, its boundaries rimmed with makeshift memorials to recent murder victims.

Figueroa-Gonzalez said she mostly stays in her home and demands the same of her teen daughter.

"It's really not safe," she said. "You really have to be careful. You see drugs, crime ... at night you hear shots."

Absentee landlords add to problem

To be sure, the Allison Hill resident isn't representative of the entire city, but her outlook, no doubt, offers a conundrum of sorts.

"Both my children were born in Harrisburg. I'm raising a family in this city," said state Rep. Patty Kim, who represents Harrisburg. "Obviously, if I thought the city was dangerous, I wouldn't be here. But I'm not going to sugar coat it and say we don't have a crime problem. We do have a crime problem."

Olivera said that it's unfair to compare Harrisburg to its adjoining West Shore and East Shore communities. For starters, Harrisburg - with 50,000 residents in its 11 square miles - has a higher population density than any adjoining community.

"In a suburban area you may have 100 people in a neighborhood," Olivera said. "You come into city, and you may have 700 to 800 people in same amount of area."

Olivera said absentee landlords play a critical role in the city's crime rate. Homeowners who live in their properties tend to care about their homes and their neighborhoods. Absentee landlords have a greater tendency to care only about the rent - not the property or neighborhood.

"When you have start having that, you have more decay in a neighborhood. You have someone who doesn't have vested interest in a neighborhood and it begins to show," Olivera said.

In fact, compared to other urban centers, Harrisburg has limited gang violence, Olivera said. Crime attributed to "gang style" perpetrators typically consist of groups of young men and women who know each other and commit crimes together, he explained.

The four young city people arrested in connection to the attack on the state legislators, for example, are not believed to be part of a large gang, but a small group of individuals who know each other. The four also have been linked to a rash of car break-ins near the Capitol in the days before the attack on the legislators.

Harrisburg police, like so many urban departments across the country, continue to throw money, attention and effort at crime prevention. But for now, it's too premature to determine if such recently unveiled initiatives as surveillance cameras and mobile street crimes units have deterred crime or increase public confidence.

Mitchell, of Heeding God's Call, worries things are only going to get worse - given, she said, the widening gap between the haves and the have nots and the increasing sense of hopelessness among the latter group.

"It doesn't make it right but it is reality," she said. "And if we are not able to name it, how can we begin to respond to it and try to create positive alternatives to what is happening? Dr. Martin Luther King told us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, but how are we going to do that when we don't have any shoes?

"Everybody believes we live in a country where you can pursue liberty and happiness, but there's some barriers that have been thrown up. What are you going to do? You lash out, you become angry, you become hopeless."