It was no surprise that six more murders occurred in the City of Brotherly Love over the weekend, including Friday. Since the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is not updated on Saturday or Sunday, we don’t get Friday’s ‘official’ numbers until Monday morning, though this tweet let me know earlier that the carnage was on.
Well, it was 10:45 AM EDT on Monday morning as I began, and as always, I checked our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, the 17th largest in terms of circulation, The Philadelphia Inquirer, to check their coverage.
4-year-old shot in Olney barbershop
The child was struck by a single round following an argument. He is currently hospitalized and in stable condition.
by Ryan W Briggs | Sunday, August 28, 2022
A 4-year-old was wounded by gunfire following an altercation at a barbershop in the city’s Olney section — the latest of nearly 150 minors shot in Philadelphia this year.
The boy — whom police are not identifying because of his age — was with his father getting a haircut at a barbershop on the 5000 block of Rising Sun Avenue on Sunday afternoon. About 5:15 p.m., police say, they believe another patron got involved in an unrelated argument, pulled a gun, and opened fire inside the tiny salon.
Police say the boy was struck once in the right shoulder. Medics took the boy to nearby Einstein Medical Center, and he was then transferred to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and placed in stable condition.
No weapon was recovered and no arrests had been made. Police are now reviewing surveillance footage.
There’s more at the original, but it’s a story about a young boy shot, but not killed. It was also the only story on either the Inquirer’s website main page or specific crime page I could find on any of the weekend shootings. Oh, there was a week-old story about 2 killed, 1 shot in Midtown neighborhood, from Atlanta, Georgia, and Oklahoma sheriff deputy serving eviction papers shot, killed, along with several other, older stories, but not one single word about the six Philadelphians who spilled out their life’s blood on the city’s mean streets.
I’ll be blunt here: none of the six slain could have been non-Hispanic whites, because, as we noted on Saturday, the newspaper which publisher Elizabeth Hughes vowed to make “an antiracist news organization” provides plenty of coverage when white guys get killed, but mostly ignores homicides when the victims are black, because to cover that would reinforce stereotypes that blacks are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime.
Of course, readers already know that, and mostly assume that both victims and perpetrators of murder in Philly are black, unless told otherwise. There really are no secrets being kept here.
However, while the Philadelphia Police Department report six killed, the city’s shooting victims database tells me that nine people were shot to death over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, August 26th through 28th. The nine fatal shootings,[1]The embedded link will take you to the city’s original. However, the city’s chart is formatted horribly, so I downloaded it and pasted it into a Microsoft Excel file, hid some columns and … Continue reading highlighted in yellow, include seven black males and two Hispanic white males.
It is possible that three of those killed were shot in self-defense, or some other justifiable situation, which could explain the discrepancy between the database and the Police Department’s numbers.
The Editorial Board of the Inquirer likes to blame a lack of gun control laws for the increased killings:
Lawmakers in Philadelphia have long tried to pass gun safety measures, only to get rebuffed by state courts and the recalcitrant Republican-controlled legislature in Harrisburg. Just last week, a majority-Republican panel of the Pennsylvania appeals court rejected Philadelphia’s latest attempt to overturn the state law that prevents the city from enacting its own gun regulations.
Mayor Jim Kenney rightly said the city would appeal the wrongheaded decision to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
There we have the Editorial Board telling us that Philadelphia is under the same gun control laws as the rest of Pennsylvania.
In 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.
Here’s how the actual numbers work out: there were 510 homicides among 11,398,903 Pennsylvanians not living in Philadelphia, for a homicide rate of 4.474 per 100,000 population, while there were 499 murders among 1,603,797 Philadelphians, which works out to a homicide rate of 31.114 per 100,000. If the gun laws are the problem, why aren’t the homicide rates for Philly and the rest of the Commonwealth fairly similar?[2]Even as late as the end of August, I have been unable to find the ‘official’ statistics for the number of homicides statewide for 2021. With 562 murders in Philly in 2021, I’m sure … Continue reading
Yeah, I know: math has now been deemed racist by some on the left, but numbers are numbers, and the math is really pretty simple. The problem is not the gun laws; the problem is something specific to Philadelphia and our other large, urban areas.
References
↑1 | The embedded link will take you to the city’s original. However, the city’s chart is formatted horribly, so I downloaded it and pasted it into a Microsoft Excel file, hid some columns and moved others, so the reader could see the data in an easier to read format. |
---|---|
↑2 | Even as late as the end of August, I have been unable to find the ‘official’ statistics for the number of homicides statewide for 2021. With 562 murders in Philly in 2021, I’m sure the statistical disparities would be even worse, but I cannot work with numbers I do not have available. |
Pingback: Jim Kenney: The Buck Doesn’t Stop Here! – THE FIRST STREET JOURNAL.
Pingback: Killadelphia – THE FIRST STREET JOURNAL.