Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.

When the Centers for Disease Control finally changed their recommendations for mandatory mask wearing on May 13th, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) quickly went along with it. The Kroger Company KR: (%) did not. Kroger had previously announced, on March 4th, that it would continue to require masks of all employees and customers in the Lone Star State when Governor Greg Abbott (R-TX) announced the end to his states mask mandate, beginning March 10th.

Well, Kroger must’ve heard from its customers, because, after announcing that masks would still be required in their stores following the CDC’s changes, six days later, they changed their minds. I would like to think my couple of tweets, which included Kroger as an addressee, that I was taking my business to Meijer’s instead, contributed to their change of mind.

I may still take my business to Meijer’s. Kroger is more convenient to us, by about four miles, but still . . . .However, fear still rules the day in some people. The Philadelphia Inquirer published an OpEd piece by Cameron Adamez, the front-end manager at South Philly Food Co-op, and Mr Adamez wants everybody to keep wearing masks.

With the recent CDC policy changes, public expectations around health during the pandemic are changing. The city has lived more than a year with masks in public and the populace is beset with pandemic fatigue. Now, in many cases, the people are ditching their masks. Generally, that’s a good thing — a sign that we are in the clear. But there are some instances where, regardless of vaccine status, people should keep masks on for the safety of others.

Essential workers like grocery store employees are still at risk and their safety needs to be considered. Stores like Aldi, Trader Joe’s, and Sam’s Club almost immediately dropped their masking requirements for customers. This is a mistake. Grocery stores should consider the safety of their workers and keep masking requirements in place for customers and employees.

If people like Mr Adamez are concerned that their safety might be jeopardized by people not wearing masks, they are completely free to continue to wear their own. He stated, “It is not always possible for workers to avoid contagion entirely,” and this is true, but it is true concerning every communicable disease. His argument would be just as valid if someone entered the store with chicken pox, which is at its most contagious phase a couple of days before the blisters appear. Measles, rubella and rubeola, are also highly contagious, and spread by airborne droplets.

“There is no way to quickly verify if a customer is vaccinated,” he wrote, and that’s true enough. Any store which is going to ask to see your vaccination papers before allowing you to enter is a store which will quickly lose most people’s business. Mr Adamez apparently knows this, and said, “Requiring anyone in a store to wear a mask is a much more reasonable request.”

But is it reasonable? What Mr Adamez is asking is for other people to protect his health. Is it not his responsibility to protect his own health?

In the end, his article is driven by fear, and fear was what the government used to get so many Americans to comply with restrictions on their individual, constitutional rights. For some, that fear will be a long time subsiding. Frank Herbert wrote, in Dune, that “Fear is the mind-killer, fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.” Mr Adamez, who stated that he was fully vaccinated, has expressed his fear, though he couched it in terms of being concerned for the health of other people.

To me, it’s very simple: if you see someone without a mask, and you are afraid that he might not be vaccinated, and you are afraid you might catch the virus from him, then stay away from him. That is your right. What is not your right is to try to impose responsibilities on him due to your own fears.

There’s that McClatchy policy again! Despite having recently published several mugshots of white suspects, the Herald-Leader declined to do so in this case.

We have made much about the McClatchy mugshot policy, and the uneven application of it by the Lexington Herald-Leader. The McClatchy policy became known in August of 2020, which was well after this story from the Lexington newspaper:

3 gunshot victims. 2 robberies. 1 dead. Lexington detective describes violent night

By Morgan Eads | January 9, 2020 | 1:40 PM EST | Updated: January 10, 2020 | 9:01 AM EST

The case against a man facing multiple charges in shootings that killed one person and injured two others in Lexington was sent Thursday to a Fayette County grand jury after a detective testified about details of the investigation.

Jo’Qwan Anthony Edwards Jackson. Fayette County Detention Center. Click to enlarge.

Jo’Qwan Anthony Edwards Jackson, 19, is charged with murder in the Dec. 10 death of 23-year-old Damontrial D. Fulgham, according to police and court records. Jackson is also charged with first-degree robbery, first-degree assault, evidence tampering and receiving stolen property in connection with the Osage Court shooting that killed Fulgham, according to court records.

John George Boulder IV Fayette County Detention Center. Click to enlarge.

Also on Thursday, Lexington police announced that a third person was charged in the case. John George Boulder IV, 20, was charged with murder, first-degree assault, first-degree robbery and tampering with evidence, according to police. A juvenile is also facing charges in the case, but their name has not been released because of their age.Boulder was already being held in the Fayette County jail on unrelated charges, according to police.

At least it seems as though the Herald-Leader was publishing mugshots of arrestees prior to the issuance of the McClatchy policy. But that was then, and this is now:

Police: Teenager charged with murder, assault in separate Lexington shootings

By Jeremy Chisenhall | June 1, 2021 | 12:15 PM EDT

A Lexington 18-year-old has been arrested and charged with murder in a 2019 homicide case that now has four defendants, according to Lexington police.

Andre Tennial Hilliard, 18, was charged with murder in the death of Damontrial Daquan Fulgham, 23. Fulgham was killed on Dec. 10, 2019, during a shooting on Osage Court, according to police and jail records. Hilliard is one of four charged with murder in the homicide, according to court records. The others are John Boulder IV, Jo’Qwan Jackson and Javari Butler.

Hilliard was also charged with assault, two counts of robbery, evidence tampering and being a minor in possession of a handgun, according to jail records.

Some of the charges stemmed from a separate shooting in 2019 in the 900 block of Red Mile Road, police said. Hilliard is accused of shooting a 17-year-old the night before the homicide, causing the teenager to suffer a non-life-threatening injury.

So, not a good guy, it would seem. But, in keeping with the McClatchy policy, the Herald-Leader did not publish his mugshot, despite having published several recently, all of white criminal suspects. A Google search failed to turn up a mugshot of Mr Hilliard, though there is a good chance that one of the local television stations will do so later today. I’m betting that when the mugshot does turn up in public, we will see that Mr Hilliard is black. After all, his (alleged) fellow suspects are black, and the victim, Damontrial Daquan Fulgham, was also black. However, Mr Hilliard was a juvenile, 17 years old, at the time of the offense. The Herald-Leader article does not say whether Mr Hilliard was charged as an adult.

Andre Tennial Hilliard, Fayette County Detention Center.

Update! 10: 01 PM EDT

As I had guessed, Mr Hilliard’s mugshot was released; I saw the mugshot on the 5:30 PM EDT news on Channel 18, WLEX-TV, and this one was copied from WKYT-TV, Channel 27. To no one’s surprise, Mr Hilliard appears to be black. A quick return to the Herald-Leader’s original shows that Mr Hilliard’s mugshot was not added to their story.

At least thus far, the newspaper has adhered to McClatchy Company policy. But you can bet your last can of Mountain Dew that I will be checking the newspaper, every day, to see if the next person arrested for some crime big enough to warrant a story has his mugshot published.

We told you so! The Washington Post is shocked, shocked! that a city which is trying to cut back on the police is seeing a massive increase in violent crime

It seems that even The Washington Post is fed up with Antifa, at least now that Donald Trump is no longer President.

Anarchists and an increase in violent crime hijack Portland’s social justice movement

By Scott Wilson | May 31, 2021 | 6:00 AM EDT

PORTLAND, Ore. — The church, on the edge of this city, was built to hold thousands, and on this drizzly day the pews of Mannahouse were filled with hundreds of mourners, scattered throughout the broad, high-ceilinged chamber to comply with pandemic rules.

Nearly all of them were Black.

They had gathered to memorialize Jalon Yoakum, 33, whose body lay in a clear casket at the front of the stage. The wounds on his face had been brushed over; a blue suit and white open-collar shirt hid the rest of the scars from the daylight gunshots that killed him in a pizza restaurant parking lot this month.

Portland is a White city, overwhelmingly so — African Americans account for just 6 percent of the population. But it is Black people such as Yoakum, an aspiring union electrician, who are dying at near-historic rates and filling churches with grief.

Why is anybody surprised? Conservatives told you what would happen! When you promote lawlessness, is it any surprise that you get lawlessness? When you allow the anarchists free run of your city for three months, can you really be surprised if anarchy continues?

On May 12, Yoakum, a father of two young boys, became the city’s 30th homicide victim this year. That is five times the number recorded during the same period in 2020, a frightening pace that could see more slayings here by the end of the year than in the past four decades.

This was not how the year following George Floyd’s murder was supposed to end, not with Bishop Garry Tyson, of the General Baptist Convention of the Northwest, telling mourners that “Jalon didn’t die. He was killed. His life was taken.”

None of this was supposed to happen. But I noted, on Twitter, the last sentence from a Philadelphia Inquirer article:

Since 2015, nearly 8,500 shootings have been recorded in Philadelphia, but only 21% have resulted in a someone being charged.

When the police aren’t respected, when the public do not help the cops catch the bad guys, why should the bad guys be deterred from trying to kill people? In foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, if you shoot someone, you have four chances out of five that you’ll never get caught!

The nightly confrontations with police and federal agents deployed here by President Donald Trump have been replaced by a kind of generational hopelessness, a tenuous sense of security across an under-policed city and a return to an old-school style of gun violence reminiscent of a tit-for-tat cycle of deadly reprisals, almost always among young men of color. Through April, the police reported 348 shootings, more than double those recorded over the first four months of last year.

And the first four months of 2020 were significantly higher than the first four months of 2019. 2020 saw 891 shootings in very liberal Portland, more than 2¼ times as many as the 389 in 2019.

When even The Washington Post says that a city is “under-policed,” you know it’s bad.

Our Democrat-controlled cities have been trying to placate the mob, and their citizens are paying the price . . . in blood.

Also in the Post:

Amid surge in violent crime, Atlanta’s wealthiest neighborhood ponders new city

By Tim Craig | May 31, 2021 | 9:00 AM EDT

ATLANTA — Just a few days after Beth Weaver moved from the suburbs to a new townhouse in this city’s wealthy Buckhead district, she began to worry that she had made a mistake.

One night she sat on her balcony and watched a thief rifle through her BMW. A few weeks later, someone broke into her family’s truck. In November, there was a shootout on her narrow street lined with townhouses that start at a half-million dollars.

“They would come through here on a bicycle and just start picking up packages and right out of your garage in broad daylight,” said Weaver, who lives in the area’s Broadview Place neighborhood.

“You did not feel safe,” said Weaver, whose neighbors have installed a network of surveillance cameras and are pushing city leaders to allow them to gate their development.

That feeling of not being safe has persisted as crime in the city has skyrocketed — the result, some say, of the pandemic and the civil unrest that followed the killing of George Floyd last summer. Some residents and business leaders in this affluent, predominantly White enclave north of downtown think they have a solution: They want Buckhead to become its own municipality.

There’s more at the original, but it’s unsurprising: the black population of Atlanta are upset that their mostly white, more affluent residents want to leave the disaster that the poorer neighborhoods have become, and the municipal government policies which have allowed it.

“It makes me angry because the crime they are seeing in Buckhead is the same crime we on the Southside have been dealing with for years,” said Stephanie Flowers, chair of Atlanta Neighborhood Planning Unit V, which oversees a group of neighborhood associations in predominantly Black neighborhoods southwest of downtown.

“We on the Southside, because of our demographics. We can’t pay our way out” of Atlanta, Flowers said. “This is just a way to separate the haves from the have-nots.”

In other words, Miss Flowers wants other neighborhoods to suffer what her neighborhoods have, rather than try to fix the problems in their own neighborhoods!

Crime exists because neighborhoods tolerate it. When someone gets shot, there are almost always other people who know who did it, or at least have valuable clues that they can give the police. When the neighborhood don’t help the police, they enable the criminals, and it’s not much of a surprise that they wind up with more criminals.

The Post continued to tell its readers that Buckhead was one of Atlanta’s safest communities, but now the crime wave has spread there. Is it any surprise that residents are alarmed and want to do something about it?

Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat, of course, pushed the same types of policies that other liberal municipal government leaders have done: keep more low-level offenders out of jail and the elimination of cash bail for “minor” crimes.

Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R-New York City) led the way in the 1990s, not by being nice, but by being tough on crime. He didn’t look the other way on ‘minor’ offenses, but had the NYPD aggressively go after the ‘squeegee boys‘ and the lower level wannabe thugs before they became big time criminals. Some might have been scared straight, and some might simply have been in jail when they would otherwise have been out committing more crimes, but crime dropped rapidly in New York City under Mr Giuliani’s ‘broken windows‘ policing. ‘Broken windows’ worked, but the left still didn’t like it, didn’t like that poor, wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly boys had criminal records.

Me? I look at John “Jordan” Lewis, a young punk in Philadelphia. He was arrested on small-time drug charges, and then-District Attorney Lynne Abraham treated him leniently. Mr Lewis never went to jail, and he spent his time knocking over small businesses for money to buy drugs. On Hallowe’en of 2007, Mr Jordan was robbing the Dunkin’ Donuts store on the corner of 66th Avenue and Broad Street, the second time he’d hit the place, when Philadelphia Police Officer Charles Cassidy, 54, walked in, checking on a store which had been previously robbed. Mr Jordan spun and fired a shot into Officer Cassidy’s head; the officer died the following day.

Had Miss Abraham treated Mr Jordan seriously during his initial drug charges, he could have been in jail on that fateful day in 2007. Yeah, he’d have a record, a misdemeanor record, and he probably wouldn’t have liked jail, but he’d have been out of jail a long time ago, with at least a chance to straighten out his life.

Instead, he languishes on death row in Pennsylvania, and even if he is never executed — in Pennsylvania, he almost certainly never will be — he’s going to spend the rest of his miserable life in prison. Did Miss Abraham really do Mr Jordan any favor by not treating him harshly for his earlier offenses?

The way to fight crime is to fight crime, to fight all crime, and to lock up the small time wannabes before they become big-time thugs. Some might reform, some might just get scared straight, and some will still be behind bars at times when they would otherwise be out committing more crimes.

“America’s Mayor” showed us the way, but today’s left don’t like it. They think that being nice to bad guys will make them see the way of goodness and light.

Well, we’ve tried that, and stupid governments in Minneapolis, in Portland, in Philadelphia and Atlanta, are seeing the results, as the results spill out blood in the streets.

And there they go again! The Lexington Herald-Leader publishes another photo of a white criminal suspect

It might not be quite as egregious as some others, because the man has some notoriety due to having been pardoned on a murder conviction, but there’s still the McClatchy Company’s policy on mugshots:

Publishing mugshots of arrestees has been shown to have lasting effects on both the people photographed and marginalized communities. The permanence of the internet can mean those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever. Beyond the personal impact, inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness. In fact, some police departments have started moving away from taking/releasing mugshots as a routine part of their procedures.

To address these concerns, McClatchy will not publish crime mugshots — online, or in print, from any newsroom or content-producing team — unless approved by an editor. To be clear, this means that in addition to photos accompanying text stories, McClatchy will not publish “Most wanted” or “Mugshot galleries” in slide-show, video or print.

Any exception to this policy must be approved by an editor. Editors considering an exception should ask:

  • Is there an urgent threat to the community?
  • Is this person a public official or the suspect in a hate crime?
  • Is this a serial killer suspect or a high-profile crime?

If an exception is made, editors will need to take an additional step with the Pub Center to confirm publication by making a note in the ‘package notes‘ field in Sluglife.

As I have previously stated, despite several Google searches, using various permutations, I have not been able to find this policy in written form. I found this tweet:

and a photograph I have previously used from another tweet, along with the Sacramento Bee’s precursor article.

So, here’s the story:

Kentucky man pardoned by Matt Bevin for 2014 homicide is back in jail, held for Feds

By John Cheves | May 31, 2021 | 12:33 PM | Updated 1:30 PM EDT

Patrick Baker, left, who was pardoned by Gov. Matt Bevin in 2019 after a reckless homicide conviction, was back in jail on Monday on an unspecified federal charge. Photo by Marcus Dorsey, Lexington Herald-Leader. Click to enlarge.

Federal authorities have jailed a Kentucky man who received one of former Gov. Matt Bevin’s controversial pardons in December 2019.

Patrick Brian Baker, 43, was convicted of reckless homicide in the death of Donald Mills during a Knox County home invasion in 2014. However, Baker maintained his innocence and blamed law enforcement for overlooking an alternative suspect in the case. In his pardon, Bevin described the evidence against Baker as “sketchy at best.”

Baker had served two years of a 19-year sentence when Bevin set him free.

Baker’s brother and sister-in-law held a political fundraiser in 2018 that raised $21,500 for Bevin, according to the Kentucky Registry for Election Finance. The couple donated $4,000 to Bevin.

Baker, who now has a Frankfort address, was held in the Laurel County Detention Center on Monday as a federal prisoner, according to the jail’s website. Jail officials would not identify the criminal charge that Baker faced; they referred media calls to the U.S. Marshal’s office. But federal offices were closed Monday for Memorial Day.

There’s more at the original, but Mr Baker, having been pardoned by former Governor Bevin, is not a convicted criminal. He is in jail right now, which means that he is not an “urgent threat to the community, nor is he a public official, nor the suspect in a hate crime, nor a suspected serial killer, nor the suspect in a high-profile crime.

So, why did the Herald-Leader choose to publish his photograph?

Remember: under the McClatchy policy, the article reporter does not have the discretion to publish a ‘mugshot,’ though it could be argued that this particular photo isn’t a police mugshot. Rather, an editor has to give his approval, and that means:

  • Peter Baniak, Executive Editor and General Manager;
  • Deedra Lawhead, Deputy Editor, Digital;
  • Brian Simms, Deputy Editor, Presentation:, or
  • John Stamper, Deputy Editor, Accountability

So, who approved the publication, and why? None of the listed reasons editors should consider in taking the decision to publish have been met. The only unusual circumstance is former Governor Bevin’s pardon of Mr Baker, but that isn’t among the criteria specified by McClatchy. Attempting to embarrass Mr Bevin is something that would be high on the list of the newspaper’s priorities, but that isn’t a reason to publish Mr Baker’s photo.

One of us suspects that the photo was published because Mr Baker is white, and that it would not have been published were he not white. Perhaps the Herald-Leader could give us a different reason?

Is it possible to support the Palestinians and not be anti-Semitic? Perhaps, but I've yet to see it done

I have said it before: it is philosophically possible to be opposed to Israeli foreign policy and not be anti-Semitic, but it is a trick I have never seen accomplished. But, let’s be honest: most of the pro-Palestinian agitators don’t even try anymore. Mia Khalifa, a Lebanese-born former porn actress tweeted:

You can see the actual tweet if you follow the link; what is presented here is a screen capture of it, because it’s very possible that the lovely Miss Khalifa will delete it.

Why? As the New York Post noted:

one of the bottles with Khalifa bore the date 1943 and contained champagne produced in Nazi-occupied France.

“Owning the Jewish state by proudly drinking wine from Vichy France,” one user wrote. “About right, yes.”

The Post noted that drinking that wine in Gaza is illegal.

Why do the left support the Palestinians, and the Arabs in general? The Advocate is a very leftist homosexual rights publication, but even they can’t stomach the idea of “Queers for Palestine”:

Queers for Palestine?

By James Kirchick | January 28, 2009 | 12:00 AM EST

Of all the slogans chanted and displayed at anti-Israel rallies over the past month, surely “Queers for Palestine” ranks as the most oxymoronic. It is the motto of the San Francisco–based Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT), a group advocating financial divestment from the Jewish State. QUIT contends that Zionism is racism, regularly demonstrates at gay pride marches, organizes with far-right Muslim organizations, and successfully lobbied the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission to boycott the 2006 World Pride Conference due to its location that year in Jerusalem.

Mr Kirchick, the author, used the wrong word: it isn’t “oxymoronic” but just plain moronic. Any liberal who supports the Palestinians is just plain stupid.

What makes QUIT oxymoronic is that their affinity for Palestine isn’t reciprocated. There may be queers for Palestine, but Palestine certainly isn’t for queers, either in the livable or empathetic sense. Like all Islamic polities, the Palestinian Authority systematically harasses gay people. Under the cloak of rooting out Israeli “collaborators,” P.A. officials extort, imprison, and torture gays. But Palestinian oppression of homosexuality isn’t merely a matter of state policy, it’s one firmly rooted in Palestinian society, where hatred of gays surpasses even that of Jews. Last October, a gay Palestinian man with an Israeli lover petitioned Israel’s high court of justice for asylum, claiming that his family threatened to kill him if he did not “reform.” He’s one of the few lucky Palestinians to be able to challenge his plight.

And that’s only in the relatively benign West Bank. The Gaza Strip, which has stagnated under the heel of Hamas’s Islamofascist rule since 2007, is an even more dangerous place for gays, “a minority of perverts and the mentally and morally sick,” in the words of a senior Hamas leader. As in Iran, Hamas’s patron and the chief sponsor of international terrorism, even the mere suspicion of homosexuality will get one killed in Gaza, being hurled from the roof of a tall building the method of choice.

Virtually none of the current political left’s opinions fare very well in the Muslim Middle East. Women’s rights? While the laws differ in the specifics, in no country in the Muslim Middle East do women have equal rights with men. Racial equality? Among the Arabs, blacks are considered inferior, and have far fewer rights. Freedom of religion? To varying degrees Islam is the official religion in these areas, and not only are adherents of other faiths, or of atheism, subject to discrimination, apostasy laws exist throughout the Muslim Middle East, and Muslims renouncing Islam, or anyone criticizing Islam, can be subject to criminal penalties, up to and including capital punishment.

Miss Khalifa? She’s an idiot. In a video, she complains about the difficulty of getting into a non-pornography workforce, but she’s wearing a suit jacket without a blouse, to show off deep cleavage. Now, she’s drinking wine from Vichy France, which was controlled by the Nazis, and proudly saying that her wine is older than the state of Israel. But if she is a particularly clueless advocate, she isn’t qualitatively different from the American and European left in their support of the Palestinians.

Black lives don’t matter in Minneapolis

We have spent a considerable amount of bandwidth on the murder epidemic in Philadelphia, but it isn’t only the City of Brotherly Love in which this has happened. From The Wall Street Journal:

A Year After George Floyd’s Murder, It’s ‘Open Season’ in Minneapolis

Homicides have more than doubled in a year. Three children have been shot in the past month.

By Heather Mac Donald | May 24, 2021 | 5:56 PM EDT

Al Sharpton and civil-rights attorney Benjamin Crump led a march in downtown Minneapolis Sunday in advance of the first anniversary of George Floyd’s death on May 25. Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of Floyd’s murder last month.

What? The Reverend Al Sharpton, at a racially-charged event? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked!

It ought to be a maxim: if the Reverend Sharpton is at an event, whatever side he is promoting is the wrong one!

Messrs. Sharpton and Crump didn’t visit North Memorial Health Hospital, where two recent victims of a yearlong explosion of violence in Minneapolis are on life support. On April 30 Ladavionne Garrett Jr., 10, was riding in a car with his parents when a gunman opened fire. A bullet pierced Ladavionne’s head; doctors put him in a medically induced coma and removed part of his skull to relieve swelling on the brain. On May 15, 9-year-old Trinity Ottoson-Smith was jumping on a trampoline at a friend’s house when bullets fired from a passing car struck her in the head. She is also in critical condition at North Memorial, in the room next to Ladavionne’s.

Nineteen children in Minneapolis have been shot this year, an increase of 171% over the same period in 2020. Their relatives wonder where the protesters are. “Why ain’t nobody mad about a 10-year-old, my grandson, fighting for his life?” asked Sharrie Jennings, Ladavionne’s grandmother, at a May 17 mayoral event. “Because a cop didn’t shoot him, is that why?” Ms. Jennings warned of “a deadly summer” for kids if the mayor and police chief don’t “step up.” Later that day, Aniya Allen, 6, was caught in a shootout between rival gangs while in her mother’s car. Aniya died on May 19.

Minneapolis homicides between Jan. 1 and last week were up 108% compared with the same period in 2020; shootings were up 153%, and carjackings 222%. The crime increase began after Floyd’s death and has never let up. Nor has the assault on law enforcement that began with the arson destruction of the Third Precinct building on May 28, 2020. Officers are routinely punched, kicked and hit with projectiles. There was a near-riot in downtown Minneapolis in the early hours of May 22 following a shootout among club patrons. Two people were killed in that shootout and eight wounded. Responding officers called for backup across the Twin Cities at what the department called an “exceptionally chaotic scene.” The previous weekend, officers were maced, and pelted with rocks and debris while trying to disperse disorderly crowds.

After Floyd’s death, the Minneapolis City Council called for abolishing the police department and replacing it with a “new transformative model for cultivating safety.” Abolition didn’t happen, but “some folks” in the community got the message anyway that “they have a sort of open season on their enemies,” said Alicia Smith, the executive director of the Corcoran Neighborhood Organization.

As lawless as Minneapolis has become, it is hardly atypical. Drive-by shootings and homicides jumped nationwide during and after the Floyd riots. Homicides rose 50% in Chicago in 2020, 46% in New York City, and 38% in Los Angeles. The U.S. saw the largest annual percentage increase in homicides in recorded history in 2020. That increase has continued in 2021. The number of shooting victims in Chicago was up 43% in the first three months of 2021 compared with the same period in 2020. Through May 16, the number of shooting victims in New York City is up 78.6% over a year ago. In the Bronx, the number is up 165.7%.

Pikers! Bush league!

According to the Minneapolis Police Department’s Crime Statistics page, Minneapolis has seen 34 homicides between January 1, 2021 and May 30, 2021. With a population of 420,324, the city is a third again larger than St Louis, yet the Gateway City has more than twice the number of murders at 76. Philadelphia, with 1.579 million souls, 3.76 times Minneapolis’ population, doesn’t have 3.76 times as many homicides, 124, but almost twice as many, at least 212. th” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>The Chicago Tribune’s Tracking Chicago homicide victims page had the Windy City with 227 murders as of Tuesday, May 18th, up from 191 on the same date in 2020, a mere 18.85% increase.[1]The Tribune’s page states that it will be updated weekly, but the scheduled update for Wednesday, May 26th, hadn’t been posted as of 3:30 PM EDT on Sunday, May 30th. We previously noted … Continue reading

Minneapolis’ rate of increase has been what has been noted: 34 homicides to date this year, versus 18 on the same day last year, is an 88.89% increase, while Philadelphia’s is a mere uptick. While the police data did not break it down by race, but the Minneapolis Star-Tribune noted, on May 29th:

Coming a few days before a particularly violent weekend, and in the wake of the shootings of three young Minneapolis children, the Police Department report detailed the city’s 2021 crime surge up to that point.

There had been 187 shootings in Minneapolis since Jan. 1 — two-and-a-half times the pace of gunplay in the same period a year earlier.

And 87% of the victims were Black.

Blacks make up only 19.19% of Minneapolis residents.

Of course, the evil reich-wing Donald Trump left office on January 20, 2021, while the great unifier, Joe Biden, who was going to make everything sweetness and light, is now President of the United States, and with the statistics of virtually every violent crime — rape is the exception — climbing in Minneapolis, mostly since Mr Biden took office, I suppose the left can’t blame this on President Trump.

Minneapolis is a Democratic city; the municipal government is, and long has been, run by Democrats. St Louis? Run by Democrats. Philadelphia? The last Republican mayor left office in 1952! The major cities in which we are seeing this huge spike in murder rates are all run by Democrats, and the Democrats have been giving to the Black Lives Matter protesters much of what they have wanted.

But as the distraught grandmother of 10-year-old Ladavionne Garrett, Jr., noted, nobody is upset that he was shot in the head, because he wasn’t shot by a policeman. When a black person is killed by a white police officer, the Reverend Sharpton is right there, ready with his outrage, ready to make whatever political, and monetary, capital he can out of it. Black Lives Matter, we are all told.

But when black people are gunned down by other black people, often times over trivial things, all we hear are the crickets. Their black lives don’t matter.

References

References
1 The Tribune’s page states that it will be updated weekly, but the scheduled update for Wednesday, May 26th, hadn’t been posted as of 3:30 PM EDT on Sunday, May 30th. We previously noted Alden Global Capital’s takeover of Tribune Publishing, a newspaper group which includes the Chicago Tribune, completed on Monday, May 24th, and I have to wonder: did that takeover somehow impact the Tribune’s maintenance of that page?

Journolism: Newspapers don’t think their readers can handle the truth! Once again, the Lexington Herald-Leader gets racially selective in publishing mugshots

Have you ever heard of JournoList? It was an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, to facilitate communication between them across multiple newsrooms, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

As we have previously noted, the McClatchy Company, which owns the Lexington Herald-Leader, has an explicit mugshot policy:

Publishing mugshots of arrestees has been shown to have lasting effects on both the people photographed and marginalized communities. The permanence of the internet can mean those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever. Beyond the personal impact, inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness. In fact, some police departments have started moving away from taking/releasing mugshots as a routine part of their procedures.

To address these concerns, McClatchy will not publish crime mugshots — online, or in print, from any newsroom or content-producing team — unless approved by an editor. To be clear, this means that in addition to photos accompanying text stories, McClatchy will not publish “Most wanted” or “Mugshot galleries” in slide-show, video or print.

Any exception to this policy must be approved by an editor. Editors considering an exception should ask:

  • Is there an urgent threat to the community?
  • Is this person a public official or the suspect in a hate crime?
  • Is this a serial killer suspect or a high-profile crime?

If an exception is made, editors will need to take an additional step with the Pub Center to confirm publication by making a note in the ‘package notes‘ field in Sluglife.

As I have previously stated, despite several Google searches, using various permutations, I have not been able to find this policy in written form. I found this tweet:

and a photograph I have previously used from another tweet, along with the Sacramento Bee’s precursor article. Assistant Managing Editor Ryan Lillis wrote:

The Sacramento Bee announced Wednesday it will limit the publication of police booking photos, surveillance photos and videos of alleged crimes, and composite sketches of suspects provided by law enforcement agencies.

Publishing these photographs and videos disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.

McClatchy’s headquarters are located in the Sacramento Bee’s building.

And thus we return to the Herald-leader:

Eastern Kentucky man tries to run over a cop, flees police after being shot at

By Jeremy Chisenhall | May 28, 2021 | 8:13 AM

An Eastern Kentucky police officer shot at a suspect Thursday afternoon after the suspect allegedly tried to run the cop over, according to Kentucky State Police.

James Bussell, a 45-year-old from Owingsville, allegedly sped away from a Mount Sterling police officer during a traffic stop, made a U-turn and tried to run over the officer. The officer involved in the traffic stop fired his gun at Bussell, but didn’t hit him. The suspect made another U-turn and tried to run the cop over again, state police said.

After Bussell’s second attempt to run the officer over, his car got stuck, according to state police. He got out and fled on foot, state police said. The altercation didn’t result in any injuries, police said.

Clearly a bad dude. There’s more at the original, including this:

Well, how ’bout that? The Herald-Leader posted another photo, of a criminal suspect, this one coming from the Mt Starling, Kentucky, Police Department’s Facebook page.

Unlike the photos of Jessica Ahlbrand and Ronnie Helton,[1]The newspaper deleted Mr Helton’s mugshot from the article a couple of weeks after publication, by May 16. which the newspaper published, Mr Bussell is still on the loose. The text of the MSPD’s Facebook page and Jeremy Chisenhall’s newspaper article does not make clear that Mr Bussell fits as “an urgent threat to the community,” but he is charged with:

  1. Attempted Murder (Police Officer).
  2. Fleeing or Evading Police 1st Degree (Motor Vehicle).
  3. Wanton Endangerment 1st Degree (Police Officer).

Yeah, those are pretty serious, and I would not disagree with the assessment that Mr Bussell is a threat to the community. But so was Juanyah Jamal Clay, and the Herald-Leader declined to publish his mugshot when he was on the lam.

So, why did an editor approve of publishing Mr Bussell’s photos, but not Mr Clay’s? Mr Bussell is charged with attempted murder, while Mr Clay was wanted on an murder, not attempted murder, but actual murder charge. Why publish the mugshots of Miss Ahlbrand and Mr Helton, both of whom were in custody, but not Mr Clay, who was still on the loose?

Why? Despite my obviously brilliant mind, I am not a telepath, and cannot read the minds of Mr Chisenhall, or peter Baniak, Executive Editor and General Manager of the Herald-Leader, but, when I look at all of the photos of criminals and criminal suspects that the newspaper has published, it has been easy to notice one thing: all of the published mugshots I’ve seen have been of white suspects. Mr Lillis’ article noted that the Sacramento Bee was concerned about “perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community,” and that could fit in well with the pattern I have noticed in the Herald-Leader.

I am not the only person who has noticed!

We have noted previously Elizabeth Hughes, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and her determination to make her newspaper “an anti-racist news organization,” but has turned it into exactly that, a newspaper more concerned with racial identity and sorting out its news coverage that way than it has been about the “public’s right to know.”

The Society of Professional Journalists published their Code of Ethics; you should read it. It says, among other things, that “Journalists must be free of obligation to any interest other than the public’s right to know the truth.” This is exactly the opposite of McClatchy’s decision to suppress photographs of criminals and crime suspects because publication might cause “disproportionate harm” to one group or another, or what facially appears to be the Herald-Leader’s editorial decisions[2]Remember: an editor must approve all published mugshots. This is (supposedly) not left up to the various article authors. to skew the public’s perception by publishing only the photographs of white criminals and suspects.

It ought to be simple: just tell the truth, and be consistent in publication policies. If the editors are going to decide to publish photos of suspects who are still on the loose. publish photos of all suspects who are on the loose. Be journalists, and not journolists.

References

References
1 The newspaper deleted Mr Helton’s mugshot from the article a couple of weeks after publication, by May 16.
2 Remember: an editor must approve all published mugshots. This is (supposedly) not left up to the various article authors.

Black lives don’t matter in St Louis

St Louis is our most murderous city. As of last night, there had been 76 homicides in the Gateway City . . . and 71 of the victims were black. St Louis is ‘only’ 45.3% black, but comprise 93.4% of the city’s murder victims. Of the 32 murders of blacks in St Louis, all 32 suspects are black.

St Louis population is 308,000, with roughly 139,000 blacks and 136 whites. Calculating out the figures to give a projected homicide total for the year, we find 7.44 whites murdered, and 176 blacks. That works out to a homicide rate of 5.48 per 100,000 population for whites, and 126.61 per 100,000 population for blacks.

But that isn’t really reported, because black lives don’t matter, not unless they are taken by a white police officer, because black-on-black homicide doesn’t fit Teh Narrative.

Does Amelia Carter believe that the law should not apply to black Americans?

Conservatives have roundly mocked the chyron used by CNN to tell us about the “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” as a television reporter who might as well have been called Baghdad Bob stood in front of a burning building.

So now we come to Amelia Carter, an organizer for the Philly Human Rights Appeal event, Human Rights Violated Here, scheduled for May 31. She is from Philadelphia and lives on 52nd Street. Miss Carter was granted OpEd space in today’s what might as well be called Philadelphia Enquirer:[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, which brings to my mind the National Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but I thought it very apt.

A year ago, 52nd Street was teargassed by police. Now we’re fighting back. | Opinion

To make change in policing locally, we need to look in new directions.

By Amelia Carter | May 28, 2021

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings. One year since the public flooded the streets, calling for an end to police impunity, the defunding of police budgets, and investment in Black people. And one year since our communities — including mine on 52nd Street — experienced the severe state repression that followed that call.

I have never seen or felt anything like the seven-hour police occupation of my predominantly Black neighborhood, Cobbs Creek, on May 31, 2020. Although neighbors screamed, “Kids live here! Please don’t shoot,” tear-gas canisters flew relentlessly through the air, landing on residential streets. Gas quickly filled the nurseries where babies napped and the hallways where everyday people did everyday things. To escape the tear gas, families were forced from their homes into the street, where police were indiscriminately shooting people with rubber bullets. The cops said they were there to protect us from rioters — but it was them we feared.

The thing that struck me most about that day was the unity I experienced with neighbors. People sprung into action: bringing milk for our stringing eyes, picking us up off the ground, even as they were stumbling. Some made makeshift protest signs and confronted police directly on Chestnut Street as the tear gas finally subsided. At one point, we all decided — without speaking — to hold the line at Chancellor Street to ensure tanks didn’t press farther into our neighborhood. Without realizing it, we all became activists that day.

There’s much more at the original, which you can read if you follow the link embedded in the title. But what you will not find in the 802 words the Inquirer granted Miss Carter is why the police were using tear gas, were using force along 52nd Street. Fortunately, the Inquirer did report just why that happened:

Does the destruction of buildings matter when black Americans are being brazenly murdered in cold blood by police and vigilantes?

That’s the question that has been raging on the streets of Philadelphia, and across my architecture-centric social media feeds, over the last two days as a dark cloud of smoke spiraled up from Center City. What started as a poignant and peaceful protest in Dilworth Park on Saturday morning ended up in a frenzy of destruction by evening. Hardly any building on Walnut and Chestnut Streets was left unscathed, and two mid-19th century structures just east of Rittenhouse Square were gutted by fire.

Their chances of survival are slim, which means there could soon be a gaping hole in the heart of Philadelphia, in one of its most iconic and historic neighborhoods. And protesters moved on to West Philadelphia’s fragile 52nd Street shopping corridor, an important center of black life, where yet more property has been battered.

What Miss Carter told her readers was “the public flood(ing) the streets, calling for an end to police impunity, the defunding of police budgets, and investment in Black people,” was in fact, a destructive riot. The Inquirer reported that:

  • A crowd had broken into the Foot Locker store at the intersection of 52nd and Chestnut Streets;
  • people breaking into stores;
  • a few setting police cars on fire; and
  • some officers pinned down by people throwing rocks along one of West Philadelphia’s busiest business corridors

From the story:

Just before 3 p.m., an officer’s voice crackled over police radio.

“Just to advise you, at 5-2 and Chestnut off of 5-4 and Market, we’ve got a large crowd gathering.”

Radio calls from that afternoon depict an increasingly volatile scene stretching from Arch to Chestnut Streets growing chaotic, and quickly. For 90 minutes, police asked for backup, and as it arrived, people pelted police officers with debris, according to radio calls. People smashed the windows of police cars, looted their contents, and set some ablaze. Others put a burning squad car in drive and pushed it toward officers on the street.

Fifteen officers were injured. A captain took a cinder block to the leg and developed a blood clot and needed emergency surgery. Inspector Derrick Wood, a 22-year veteran who oversees police operations in West Philadelphia and has made rebuilding the relationship with residents a focal point of his command, suffered a fractured nose in two places when he was hit by a brick.

To be fair, Miss Carter did link that story in her original, but she never indicated, in any other way, that the police were using force because the Mostly Peaceful Protesters™ were rioting.

52nd Street is a mostly black business corridor; the police were attempting — sadly, with little success — to protect the black residents who were not rioting, and the primarily black businesses from being damaged or destroyed. “Hardly any building on Walnut and Chestnut Streets was left unscathed,” the article originally entitled “Buildings Matter, Too” noted.

I suppose that Miss Carter doesn’t think that buildings matter, despite the fact that people, including a majority of black people, live and work in the neighborhood the police were trying to defend.

But, let’s tell the truth here: the neighborhood are afraid that 52nd Street is ‘gentrifying.

The topic of the community meeting — a plan to beautify 52nd Street, to make it safe, welcoming, and prosperous once again — was, on its face, nothing but good news for West Philadelphia’s long-declining business corridor.

Yet the audience of about 50 residents and retailers, mostly African American, grew increasingly agitated as urban designer Jonas Maciunas flipped through a PowerPoint presentation of proposed improvements. Many weren’t seeing a vision of a neighborhood revitalized from Market to Pine Streets. Instead, in the talk of redesigned intersections, leafy thoroughfares, and better bus shelters, they heard the ominous whisper of gentrification.

“It just seems that when white people decide to come back to a certain neighborhood, they want it a certain way,” said Carol Morris, 68, a retired elementary school teacher. . . . .

The area’s population remains predominantly black, but residents say they’ve noticed a growing white presence.

I suppose that, for that neighborhood, more white people is considered a bad thing.

Integration was supposed to bring white and black Americans closer, to beat down prejudice and discrimination. I guess that the (mostly) white liberals of the 1960s thought that to be a good thing, but apparently many in black neighborhoods don’t see it that way.

And so we return to Miss Carter. Her complaint is that the law applies to black people as well as whites:

As Malcolm X pointed out, we will always be limited in our ability to fight for the rights of Black Americans through civil rights, because that requires asking for justice from the very systems built on our oppression. Instead, just as the NAACP and W.E.B. Du Bois appealed to the United Nations, we must claim the rights and freedoms entitled to us in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — and join hands with survivors of state repression around the world to upend this broken country. We must recognize that, just as America weaponizes diplomacy to wage long-haul wars abroad, the police are its mechanism for shoring up the empire at home.

The City of Brotherly Love, the city in which Miss Carter lives, has seen 211 people murdered so far this year, and the great majority of those murder victims, in a city that is not majority black, are black. Does she not want the police to respond to calls over robberies or rapes, over arson and vandalism, over muggings and murders?

The police are not there to oppress black people; the police are there to try to enforce the law. Does Miss Carter believe that enforcing the law is “oppression” of black people? Does she believe that the laws should somehow be different for black Americans? Philadelphia got its ‘social justice’ prosecutor in District Attorney Larry Krasner, and all the city, all the black neighborhoods like Miss Carter’s, got for that is more Philadelphians, primarily more black people, pouring out their life’s blood on the city’s mean streets.

References

References
1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, which brings to my mind the National Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but I thought it very apt.