The WordPress software I use for The First Street Journal assigns numbers to posts with the same name; the system tells me that this is the 34th post entitled “Killadelphia”. That says something right there!
Robert Stacy McCain wrote too quickly:
The homicide total so far this year is 180 in “Killadelphia,” meaning that the city’s averaging about one homicide a day, but nobody seems to consider this an emergency, and Congress is sending billions to Ukraine.
If only it was just one homicide per day! The 180 murdered number was for Thursday, May 19th, the date for which that 180 total is accurate — the Philly Police do not update their statistics on Saturday or Sunday — was the 139th day of the year, meaning that the City of Brotherly Love is killing the brothers at the rate of 1.295 per day!
But, come Monday morning, and we get the update: there have now been 186 souls who have been sent early to their eternal rewards on Philly’s mean streets as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, May 22nd, upping that average to 1.310 per day. As of right now, the statistics project 520 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love for 2022.[1]Methodology: I have taken the number of homicides on this date in 2022 and divided that by the number of homicides on the same date in 2021, then multiplied that number by 562, the number of … Continue reading
As of the same date, 807 people had been shot in the city. Maybe the gang bangers had actually killed 180 people, but they tried to kill at least 807!
As of May 18th, ‘only’ 160 out of 180 homicides was committed by firearm; on the same day Philly reported 802 shootings, down from 807 on the same date in 2021. While homicides were down by 9.91%, shootings were down only 0.62%. Translation: the thugs are shooting at each other at about the same rate, but they have become poorer shots, killing only 19.95% of their intended victims.
Actually, it’s even lower than that, since we have no statistics on how many people were shot at, but missed completely.
Interestingly enough, The Philadelphia Inquirer actually reported on the weekend’s bloodletting, in a story which was linked on the main page of the newspaper’s website, which was yet another surprise to me!
Six homicides and Penn’s Landing triple shooting cap an extremely violent Philly weekend
Gunfire pierced victims in every corner of the city, leaving eight people wounded and four dead during a weekend of record-breaking hot temperatures in Philadelphia.
by Samantha Melamed | Sunday, May 22, 2022
A weekend of sweltering record-high temperatures in Philadelphia was marked by a rash of violence, including six homicides and a Saturday evening shooting at Penn’s Landing that left three 14-year-olds injured.
The gun violence occurred across the city, from South Philadelphia to Lawncrest, and brought Philadelphia’s death toll to more than 180 for the year. That figure was tracking behind the record pace of killings in 2021. The pace in 2022, however, is 50% above the year-to-date average of homicides for the last decade.
Just before 11 p.m. Saturday, a 32-year-old man was shot repeatedly in an alley behind the 7200 block of North 20th Street in Logan. At 1:40 a.m. Sunday, a 23-year-old man was shot in the head in Lawncrest. A third man, believed to be about 30, was shot near 21st and Diamond Streets in North Philadelphia at 4 a.m. At 6 a.m., a 52-year-old man was shot twice in the chest on the street in Franklinville. The fifth victim, a 29-year-old man, was shot multiple times by four assailants on Sunday afternoon, in a house on the 4900 block of Aspen Street in West Philadelphia’s Mill Creek section. And, a man described by police as late teens to early 20s died after being shot in the head on the street around 5 p.m. Sunday in Ogonotz.
Of course, the Inquirer censors the politically incorrect part of the news. When reporter Samantha Melamed wrote, “a 29-year-old man, was shot multiple times by four assailants on Sunday afternoon,” the Philadelphia Police reported that he was shot by “4 unknown black males“. When she reported that “a 32-year-old man was shot repeatedly in an alley behind the 7200 block of North 20th Street,” the PPD reported that he was a “32-year-old black male.” If you follow that link to Steve Keeley’s Tweet you’ll see four Philly Police reports reproduced, and all of them identify the victims by race, three black males and one Hispanic male.
It is no longer enough to not be racist; you must now be anti-racist!
Anti-racism encompasses a range of ideas and political actions which are meant to counter racial prejudice, systemic racism, and the oppression of specific racial groups. Anti-racism is usually structured around conscious efforts and deliberate actions which are intended to provide equal opportunities for all people on both an individual and a systemic level. As a philosophy, it can be engaged in by the acknowledgment of personal privileges, confronting acts as well as systems of racial discrimination, and/or working to change personal racial biases. Major contemporary anti-racism efforts include Black Lives Matter organizing and workplace antiracism.
Publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes’ declaration that the Inquirer would be an “anti-racist news organization” means that news which could “perpetuat(e) stereotypes about who commits crime in our community” — quote taken from the Sacramento Bee but could have come from any number of newspapers — must be soft-peddled if not outright suppressed. I can’t blame Miss Melamed for the way she wrote the story; she was acting under orders!
But the real numbers are stark. As we previously reported, there had been 775 shootings in Philadelphia as of May 15th, according to the city’s shootings database. Over the next week, through May 22nd there have been another 58 shootings. In a city which is 38.3% non-Hispanic black, 52 of those shooting victims, 89.66%, were non-Hispanic black. Four of the victims (6.90%) were listed as Hispanic white, one non-Hispanic white (1.72%), and one Asian (1.72%). Of those 58 shooting victims, 10 black, and one Hispanic white victim died.
There’s something important here that many have missed. According to the Philadelphia Shootings Dashboard, which was updated only through Thursday, May 19th, there had been 807 shootings in the city, compared to 816 on the same date last year. That’s a 1.10% reduction. There have been 186 homicides so far, down from 201, which is a 7.46% reduction. The bad guys of Philadelphia are shooting each other at almost the same rate as last year, have been attempting to kill each other at nearly the same rate, but just haven’t been as accurate as in 2021: 19.82% of 2022 shootings have been fatal so far this year, compared to 21.36% in 2021. In some morbid math, had the gang bangers been as effective as last year, there would have been 12 more homicides, which would put the city only three (1.49%) behind 2021’s numbers.
The editors of the Inquirer have been perfectly willing to tell us that “The percentage of Black and Hispanic Philadelphians who feel unsafe in their neighborhood is double the percentage of white Philadelphians,” which means that they know the aggregate numbers, but are editorially unwilling to tell city residents in specific cases who was killed, because that would be horribly, horribly politically incorrect.
Of course, Philadelphians actually know the numbers, or at least have a good feel for what they are; that’s why “Black and Hispanic” residents are so much more concerned about public safety in the city, and that’s why white residents have far fewer concerns; after all, this stuff isn’t going on in Rittenhouse Square or Chestnut Hill. Even in lower-income Bustleton, roughly 87% white, worries are lower.
But Strawberry Mansion, or the ironically named Tioga-Nicetown? Those are the combat zones, those neighborhoods are the killing fields, and everybody familiar with Philly knows it. The Inquirer might as well do something really radical and report all of the news.
References
↑1 | Methodology: I have taken the number of homicides on this date in 2022 and divided that by the number of homicides on the same date in 2021, then multiplied that number by 562, the number of homicides in 2021. I do this to account for the fact that homicides tend to increase as the weather warms up, and this approximates the trend as the year progresses. Other methods of doing this could be used. If I simply multiplied the current daily homicide number by 365, it would result in an anticipated homicide number of 478, but that doesn’t take into account the effects of warmer weather, nor does it seem anywhere like a reasonable number the way the trends are moving. |
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