Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Some people would rather be less safe than cooperate with and support the police

If you want to know why homicides in Philadelphia are both proceeding along record numbers and being solved at very low rates, The Philadelphia Inquirer has decided to tell you. Trouble is, I don’t think that they meant to convey the message that they did.

Black and Latino residents in University City feel the weight of police presence

The neighborhood is home to several overlapping police patrols, which doesn’t make everyone who lives there feel safe.

by Nate File | Monday, October 17, 2022

If you were to start your workday in University City by arriving at 30th Street Station, then walking along Market Street for a few blocks before turning towards UPenn, you would have been subjected to at least seven separate and overlapping police patrols.

Of course, if you debark at the 30th Street SEPTA Station, you’re going to be greeted by a large amount of used drug injection needles just laying around on the tracks, so you just might get the impression that the 30th Street Station isn’t the nicest place in the city.

The jurisdictions you would have passed through are: SEPTA and Amtrak Police, UPenn and Drexel Police, unarmed University City District public safety, and the 16th and 18th precincts of the Philadelphia Police Department. University City is blanketed with police officers, and Black and Latino residents feel it every day.

The police’s larger presence here is not entirely condemned or welcomed by residents; feelings can be mixed. But what is clear is that the police’s presence often feels overwhelming to the neighborhood’s most marginalized people.

There were 499 murders in the City of Brotherly Love in 2020, and a record-shattering 562 in 2021. This year is seeing a slight dip in the homicide rate, a whopping 1.86% fewer than on the same date last year, but still on track for 543 murders for the year.

As we have previously noted, that neighborhood is hardly the worst in Philly, but yes, murders have been committed there, recently.

After a couple of paragraphs noting the University of Pennsylvania’s investments in the neighborhood, and its campus police department, we come to this:

It also invested in its police force; UPenn currently has the largest privately funded police force in the state with over 120 officers. Drexel’s police force is much smaller, with about a third as many officers, but it has only been in operation since 2010.

Tamika Diggs, a Black woman who has lived in University City her entire life and works in the area too, has noticed that investment.

“There has been a change in the 30 something years that I’ve been in University City. Initially, there was just a regular police department. You didn’t really see a large police presence. However, as more gentrification happened… more Black and brown families were pushed out of the area, you (saw a surge) of more police,” she said.

“You certainly feel a sense of surveillance,” said Christopher Rogers, a Black PhD student at UPenn. Rogers feels a tangible difference in how much he is watched and perceived by law enforcement in University City as compared to elsewhere in Philadelphia.

He described the burden of the police’s presence more as an everyday “weight”, as opposed to having excessive confrontations with them.

So, Mr Rogers hasn’t has any interactions with the police that he saw as necessary to mention to the Inquirer’s reporter, but he just feels that they’re around. That the police forces are there to try to protect law-abiding citizens from criminals doesn’t seem to be important to him.

There are several more paragraphs in a similar vein, but the concluding three are the important ones:

But investigations and promises can’t undo firmly entrenched problems, and they so far haven’t changed the way Black and Latino residents of University City feel about the police.

“I think there’s an assumption that everyone else that’s not a student is … (dangerous) for the students that are at Penn or Drexel,” said Olivia.

Diggs has made sure to teach her teenage sons to be careful of how they present in public for that very reason. “I always tell them—my youngest is 6-foot-3—’You are not looked at as a teenager by (University City District), Drexel, any police officers … you’re looked at as a grown man. And so when you walk outside, you have to act accordingly.’”

Well, yes, people ought to act like adults! That’s what Olivia — who declined to provide her last name to the Inquirer reporter — is supposed to be teaching her kids.

Here we have several stories, from black and Hispanic residents in one of Philadelphia’s nicer communities, telling us just how much they dislike and distrust the police. But think about that: before very liberal and #woke Jim Kenney became mayor, the previous two mayors, John Street and Michael Nutter, were black. From 2010 into mid 2017, the District Attorney was black. For all of Mayor Nutter’s eight years in office, the Police Commissioner, Charles Ramsey, was black, his successor, Richard Ross, Jr, was black, and the current Commissioner, Danielle Outlaw, is black. The District Attorney, Larry Krasner, is a progressive, police-hating defense attorney, so Philadelphia’s black population know that he’s not going to pursue cases in which there is really any question about guilt.

There’s really nothing more the city of Philadelphia could reasonably do to engender trust betweenj law enforcement and the black community. Yet reporter Nate File was only able to document black or Hispanic residents in a rebuilding, gentrifying area, minority residents who would be generally better off than their minority brethren in the combat zones, who were still very leery of the police.

This, to me, reveals why Philadelphia is the most internally segregated city of over a million people in the United States, because Philadelphians are segregated mentally, segregated in their mindsets to the point that they’d prefer to live in a less safe area than support the police who are trying to make things safer.

Until the black, Hispanic, white, and Asian populations in the City of Brotherly Love can come closer together culturally, the city will remain segregated, and remain violent. That will take a long, long time to change.

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If you’re scared, say you’re scared! And The New York Times are scared poopless!

Today’s credentialed media are wholly in bed with progressivism and the Democratic Party, so it must’ve really hurt The New York Times to publish this:

Republicans Gain Edge as Voters Worry About Economy, Times/Siena Poll Finds

With elections next month, independents, especially women, are swinging to the G.O.P. despite Democrats’ focus on abortion rights. Disapproval of President Biden seems to be hurting his party.

By Shane Goldmacher | Monday, October 17, 2022, | 3:00 AM EDT

Republicans enter the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress with a narrow but distinctive advantage as the economy and inflation have surged as the dominant concerns, giving the party momentum to take back power from Democrats in next month’s midterm elections, a New York Times/Siena College poll has found.

The poll shows that 49 percent of likely voters said they planned to vote for a Republican to represent them in Congress on Nov. 8, compared with 45 percent who planned to vote for a Democrat. The result represents an improvement for Republicans since September, when Democrats held a one-point edge among likely voters in the last Times/Siena poll. (The October poll’s unrounded margin is closer to three points, not the four points that the rounded figures imply.)

With inflation unrelenting and the stock market steadily on the decline, the share of likely voters who said economic concerns were the most important issues facing America has leaped since July, to 44 percent from 36 percent — far higher than any other issue. And voters most concerned with the economy favored Republicans overwhelmingly, by more than a two-to-one margin.

There’s a lot more at the original.

Also see: William Teach: Surprise: Republicans Have The Edge On Mid-Terms

I’ve said this before, countless times: while a subject like global warming climate change may elicit large claims of support for action to do something to stop it, when it’s a choice between spending more or being taxed more to fight a problem that may be thirty or fifty or eight years in the future, and putting food on the table this evening, food on the table will always be the more immediate concern. And today’s Democratic Party is running on everything but today’s concerns. They’ve invested so much effort in the so-called “January 6th Committee”, but that’s an issue of the past, not the present. They’ve energized the supporters of former President Trump to fight against the Democrats far more than energized Democrats to fight against Republicans, because it’s simply not an issue that’s important in 2022. They’ve shilled climate change, at a time when inflation has significantly reduced the real value of Americans’ wages. Joe Biden walking away eating an ice cream cone and telling us that the economy is great might not be the best sales technique to people who have noticed that groceries cost a lot more, as does the gasoline to get to the grocery store. The Democrats’ concentration on abortion, abortion, abortion is, in effect, a concentration on black voters — black women have abortions at five times the rate white women do — and while there was a surge in support of Democrats when Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization was announced, much of that has now faded, as most of the states in which Democrats are strongest had already acted to keep prenatal infanticide legal in those states. The Democrats’ cries about 15-year-old rape victims turned out to be kind of meaningless when the vast, vast majority of abortions are in no way or sense therapeutic. When you have a former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate saying that one of the reasons she’s leaving the party is because they can’t even tell the difference between males and females anymore, you know that the Democrats, as fueled as they are by their hatred of former President Trump, just aren’t campaigning in the real world anymore.

Despite controlling both Houses of Congress, and the White House, the Democrats are in trouble because they are not campaigning on the things which affect the vast majority of Americans today.

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Credentialed media are finally starting to see the problems with plug-in electric vehicles Of course, they solve that problem by not letting the plebeians have cars!

I’ve been saying this for a long time now: plug-in electric vehicles will be a nightmare for people without a garage or dedicated parking space. Now the credentialed media are noticing as well:

Extension cords across sidewalks: Charging an electric vehicle in Philly is a challenge

Electric vehicle owners without dedicated parking spaces stretch wires, and the limits of legal codes, to keep their EVs charged.

by Andrew Maykuth | Thursday, October 13, 2022

Anthony Wong and Robert Berkowitz waited several years for a back-ordered Tesla, the popular electric vehicle brand. By the time the new car was delivered in 2018, Philadelphia had canceled its controversial program to set aside curbside parking spots for EVs. That left the Bella Vista residents with few options for charging their new Tesla at home.

Like many urban EV owners without off-street parking, Wong and Berkowitz improvised. They’re retired and say they have more time to charge the Tesla’s battery at public charging stations at such destinations as stores or casinos.

“If we drove the car every day for work, then we might need to charge overnight to keep the car going,” Wong said.

But sometimes they need to charge their car at home. Their solution: Run a cable out the second-floor window of their rowhouse to their car parked in the street. They prop the cable atop a street sign to allow pedestrians to pass underneath. “It’s not really that noticeable, and it’s not in somebody’s way,” Wong said.

While it is, perhaps, not in anybody’s way, it’s also not legal, though nobody has been enforcing that law.

Philadelphia had a short-lived program which allowed electric vehicle owners to get a reserved EV parking space in front of their homes, but neighbors quickly complained that this was an undeserved perquisite for EV owners, the vast majority of whom were financially well off. The Inquirer reported that only 68 of these spaces were created before the program was canceled. And here’s the clincher:

After the city abandoned its EV parking program, a task force recommended that the city encourage the use of mass transit and the buildout of public charging stations rather than use its scarce resources to support private electric vehicles.

“In the grand scheme of sustainable transportation priorities, personal vehicles are still kind of low in the hierarchy in terms of what we want to be encouraging people to do,” said Christine Knapp, the city’s former sustainability director. “I don’t think anyone’s vision of a truly sustainable city 30 years from now is that we have the same number of cars on the road as we do now, but they’re running on electricity instead of gas.”

Philadelphia Badlands. Photo via Philadelphia Inquirer Click to enlarge.

Our Betters, you see, don’t want the peons to have their own vehicles, but to be packed on Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority buses and trains, to SEPTA stations filled with litter and used needles, drug addicts getting high, homeless people sheltering there, and a rising crime rate. We have previously noted the Allegheny Avenue SEPTA station in Kensington, with its open-air drug markets, which the city and Philadelphia Police are simply ignoring.

Christine Knapp, I would guess, doesn’t live in the Philadelphia Badlands, so notorious that it was once actually a part of Google Maps, though later removed, removed for telling a politically incorrect truth. She probably doesn’t have to take the SEPTA 30th Street Station, not near Kensington, but Drexel University.

Philadelphia is a rowhouse city, filled with working-class neighborhoods built a hundred years ago, with little in the way of parking. The Patricians have it a bit better than the plebeians, with parking garages for Center City high rise condos, and single-family homes with private driveways and garages in Chestnut Hill. They’ll have their dedicated parking spaces with protected charging stations, so they can advocate electric cars.

The rest of the people? Too bad, so sad, must suck to be them!

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Bad causes attract bad people

In The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, we note:

Those who claim to be transgender will be referred to with the honorific and pronouns appropriate to the sex of their birth; the site owner does not agree with the cockamamie notion that anyone can simply ‘identify’ with a sex which is not his own, nor that any medical ‘treatment’ or surgery can change a person’s natural sex; all that it can do is physically mutilate a person.

Sadly, the credentialed media do not follow the same rule. Rather, they almost uniformly refer to the ‘transgendered’ by the names and sex they claim to be, rather than doing something really radical like telling the truth.

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain had the story of Steven Joaquin Perez, a man male who believes he is a woman and who calls himself “Zhoie”. Mr McCain concentrated on Mr Perez’s actions in trying to provoke law enforcement and security personnel to take action against him, as a “first amendment auditor,” comparting such to “sovereign citizens,” people who believe that they are completely independent of what they see as a corrupt government. I encourage you to read Mr McCain’s original on that part.

Me? I’m more interested in the complicity of the credentialed media in perpetuating the lie that girls can be boys and boys can be girls. Mr McCain likes to link an archived version of his sources, to help people get past paywalls, and I saw the archived version of the story here. I went to the original.

Guard won’t be charged in shooting of YouTube activist ‘Furry Potato.’ She’s suing him

by James Quelly | March 13, 2019 | 6:25 PM PDT

Zhoie Perez, second from right, speaks during a news conference in downtown Los Angeles. (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times). Caption is a direct quote from The Los Angeles Times. Click to enlarge.

Los Angeles prosecutors Wednesday declined to file criminal charges against a security guard who shot and wounded a YouTube personality during a bizarre clash outside a synagogue last month, an announcement that came just hours after the woman filed a civil lawsuit against the guard and his employers.Edduin Zelayagrunfeld, 44, was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon Feb. 14 after shooting 45-year-old Zhoie Perez while she was filming outside the Etz Jacob Congregation/Ohel Chana High School building in the Fairfax district.

Prosecutors had asked the LAPD to conduct a deeper investigation into the incident before they made a filing decision, but they formally rejected the charges Wednesday. In a declination memorandum, Deputy Dist. Atty. John Harlan wrote that prosecutors ultimately would not be able to disprove Zelayagrunfeld was acting in self-defense.

There’s more at the original.

I went to the original for the specific purpose of counting how many times the Times referred to Mr Perez as though he was a woman. The word “woman” is used once to refer to him, and the feminine pronouns are used — assuming I counted them correctly — fifteen times. The article does note that he is “transgender” once, but does not tell us Mr Perez’s real name; I only know it because Mr McCain had looked it up and posted it.

Look at the photo that the Times used. Even Stevie Wonder could see that Mr Perez isn’t a woman, but the Times called him one uncritically. A different photo used my Mr McCain doesn’t really indicate Mr Perez’s height in the same manner, but reveals a clearly masculine face. Every bird, every reptile, and every mammal can tell the difference between males and females of their own species, and my observations are that dogs and cats, at the very least, can distinguish between the sexes of human beings, but somehow the left, including our credentialed media, have lost that very fundamental ability.

It has been said that bad causes attract bad people, and Mr Perez is simply another example of it. He went to a synagogue to deliberately provoke a fight, and he succeeded. One would think that someone who is ‘transgendered’ would want to live a relatively quiet life, in the hopes of getting his circle of friends to see him as a real woman, rather than have publicity demonstrating to the entire country that no, he ain’t a real woman, but a complete kook. The “first amendment auditors” are certainly right that they do have rights, but going about proving it by trampling on other people’s rights, and trying to provoke confrontation is not exactly a way to win friends and influence people, or at least not to influence people to support them.

And if bad causes attract bad people, then the reverse is also true: if you see a bad person, look at the causes he supports a bit more closely, and you’re very likely to find those political causes he supports aren’t all that great.

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2022 wins the Gold Medal in Lexington!

2022 has won Lexington’s Gold Medal!

Oh, it was no surprise, given that the city had tied its all-time homicide record on Sunday, September 25. At the time, the city was seeing one murder every 7.24 days, so the fact that it has taken three weeks to reach record-breaking 38 is at least somewhat good news.

Man dies after stabbing on Bryan Avenue; New record for homicides in Lexington

by Karla Ward | Saturday, October 15, 2022 | 12:10 PM EDT | Updated: 8:18 PM EDT

A man died after being found with stab wounds late Friday night.

Lexington police said they were called to the 1000 block of Bryan Avenue to help the Lexington Fire Department with an unresponsive person at 11:43 p.m. The man was pronounced dead at the scene, police said in a news release Saturday morning.

The Fayette County coroner’s office had not released the victim’s name as of noon Saturday. No arrests have been made in the case.

The homicide means Lexington has officially surpassed its record of 37 homicides set in 2021. The city tied its previous record with the shooting death of Adetokundo Okunoye on Oxford Circle Sept. 25.

The numbers are slightly better. With 37 homicides in 287 days, or one every 7.55 days, Lexington is on track for 48.33 murders in 2022, which is down from the 50.39 I projected three weeks ago.

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Seth Williams missed the point

In 2009, Rufus Seth Williams was elected to become District Attorney of Philadelphia, succeeding long-time prosecutor Lynne Abraham, a position he held from January 4, 2010 to July 24, 2017. Mr Williams was a decent prosecutor, but he wound up in legal trouble of his own, and spent 2½ years in federal prison.

Why do I begin with that? The answer is that, despite Mr Williams being a convicted felon and former drug addict, he has been turning his life around, and at least appears to be doing so successfully. Because he is doing that, and because he does not seem to minimize the personal failures he has had — Mr Williams states plainly in his Twitter biography that he was “Federally Incarcerated” — I can respect him.

On October 14, 2022, Mr Williams tweeted:

Tragically, yesterday 3 homicides were added to Philadelphia’s official year to date total. Sadly, we are now 0.7% off the all time record high. This should be unacceptable to everyone that truly values life. The violence, lack of accountability and lawlessness need not continue.

“This should be unacceptable to everyone that truly values life”? It has to be asked: how many people in heavily Democratic Philadelphia truly value life? In November of 2020, the good people gave 603,790 (81.44%) of their votes to the (purportedly) Catholic Joe Biden, who publicly supported, and still supports, an unlimited abortion license, to just 132,740 (17.90%) for Donald Trump, who at least claimed to oppose abortion, and appointed three pro-life Justices to the United States Supreme Court.

In 2016, the margin was even higher, percentagewise, as Philadelphians gave 584,025 (82.53%) of their votes to the odious Hillary Clinton, versus 108,748 (15.37%) to Mr Trump. Democrats outnumber Republicans in Philadelphia by huge margins, and the city’s last Republican mayor left office while Harry Truman was still President of the United States.

It is the stated position of the Democratic Party to always and everywhere support abortion, in every case, for any reason. The elected political leadership of the city support an unlimited abortion license, and The Philadelphia Inquirer wholly supports unlimited abortion.

So, I ask the question again, how many people in heavily Democratic Philadelphia truly value life? A Google search for abortion clinics in Philadelphia indicates that the city itself supports six abortion clinics, with two more nearby, in Bensalem, Pennsylvania and Cherry Hill New Jersey. While the political and media leadership of the city support abortion, it’s pretty clear that enough of the population do as well, if they can support that many abortuaries.

Is it any wonder, then, that a city which so heavily supports getting rid of inconvenient life when it comes to abortion would not be all that upset about other people getting rid of inconvenient life when it comes to the gang-bangers?

Because, let’s be brutally honest about this: getting rid of inconvenient life, whether we are talking about a pregnant woman who does not want to be ‘burdened’ with a baby, or a gang-banger or wannabe who does not want a member of a rival gang clique of young men[1]We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes … Continue reading to burden his life are taking exactly the same decision, based on exactly the same reasons.

This lesson is not lost on the teenaged and twenty-something young men males of the City of Brotherly Love. They can see that ‘inconvenient’ life is cheap in Philly, cheap enough that the Philadelphia Police have a difficult time finding cooperating witnesses to solve homicides, and cheap enough that most people just don’t care! A wannabe gangsta gets offed in Strawberry Mansion? BFD, nobody other than his family cares, and a whole lot of people think that, hey, the neighborhood is better off with the victim no longer around. Even the very #woke[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading Inquirer only seriously covers the victims of the city’s murders when the victim is an ‘innocent‘, someone already of some note, or a cute little white girl.

I have noticed that the (apparent) gang-land killing of 13-year-old Jeremiah Wilcox generated just one sympathetic story about the victim, and since then, the Inky has gone radio-silent; a site search for Jeremiah Wilcox, conducted at 10:18 AM EDT on Friday, October 14th, four days after young Mr Wilcox was murdered, returned no new stories. I suspect, given that, and the apparently deliberately-targeted nature of his killing, Inquirer journolists[3]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading have found nothing new that they want to publish.

It’s clear: life is just plain cheap in Philadelphia, and no one other than the immediate family and friends of a particular murder victim care about the victims. Because the Philadelphia media don’t cover the deaths of the not-so-innocent victims, all that those of us who do care, who do “truly value life,” are left with are the numbers, the statistics.

Abortion is like that. No one knows who was not born because his ‘mother,’ and some ‘doctors’ and ‘nurses’, saw to his unnamed death. Children killed by abortion are not names, just numbers, statistics often poorly kept.

And everybody who pays attention sees that, everybody who pays attention can tell that, to mangle the quote allegedly attributed to Josef Stalin, the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of 429 is a statistic.

My apologies to Mr Williams, but he has it entirely wrong: few people in the City of Brotherly Love actually do care about human life. That’s how they can support six abortion clinics, and that’s how they can choose not to help the police catch killers. In the end, there really is no difference.

References

References
↑1 We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups“
↑2 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑3 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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He had a second chance, and he blew it

If you robbed a bank, got caught, and sentenced to five year in the big house, and somehow managed to get a university professorship, you’d have to think that you had gotten a huge, lucky break, and you need to straighten up and fly right, wouldn’t you? If you had an annual salary of $173,422 as a university department head, you’d think that you’d really turned your life around and pretty much had it made, right?

UK professor arrested for sexual abuse of a minor was ‘model teacher,’ personnel file says

by Monica Kast | Thursday, October 13, 2022 | 1:47 PM EDT | Updated 1:57 PM EDT

Kevin Real, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

The University of Kentucky professor who was arrested last month for sexual abuse of a minor and incest was convicted of robbing a bank in the 1980s and was sentenced to five years in jail, according to court documents.

When asked if the university was aware that Kevin Real, the chair of the UK Department of Communication, had been convicted of bank robbery before his employment at UK, the university declined to comment. Real remains on paid leave from the university, UK spokesperson Jay Blanton told the Herald-Leader.

Real appeared to be well-liked among colleagues and students, according to his UK personnel records the Herald-Leader obtained through an open records act request. In a letter of recommendation for Real to receive the Outstanding Teacher Award in 2015, one colleague called him “a model teacher.”

There’s more at the original.

You know, that’s actually a common feature in stories about sexual predators: they are always well-liked by the people who know them.

Lexington Herald-Leader reporter Monica Kast did a better job than Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Vinny Vella in concealing whether Dr Real’s (alleged) victim was a boy or a girl:

Real was arrested on Sept. 8 by the Lexington Police Department on charges of incest, first degree sexual abuse of a person under the age of 12 and first degree sodomy. According to his arrest citation, Real allegedly abused the victim when they were 6 years old, and again in July 2022.

His bond hearing took place Thursday morning, where Real was permitted to leave house arrest as long as he stays in Fayette County and avoids certain locations. He will continued to be electronically monitored and must stay 1,000 feet away from a local high school and the residence of his victim. In court documents, Real denied the allegations against him.

At the time of his arrest, Dr Real was assigned a $30,000 bail, which was reduced to $15,000 the following day. He was ordered into home confinement with electronic monitoring, though allowed to make limited released, and have no contact with children other than his own. Following a court hearing on Thursday, the conditions of his release were lightened: he’s still under electronic monitoring, but he is allowed to travel throughout Fayette County, as long as he avoids certain locations. Under Kentucky law, any suspect not charged with murder is entitled to have a reasonable bail set, which begs the question of whether $15,000 is reasonable.

  • Under KRS §510.110, first degree sexual abuse of a child under 12 years old is a Class C Felony.
  • Under KRS §510.070, first degree sodomy of a child under 12 is a Class A Felony.
  • Under KRS §530.20, incest with a child under 12 is a Class A Felony.
  • Under KRS §532.060, the penalty for a Class A felony is not less than 20 years, nor more than 50 years, or life imprisonment; for a Class C felony, the term is not less than 5 years nor more than 10 years in prison.

Only Dr Real and the (alleged) victim absolutely know whether he is guilty, but if he did commit those crimes and is convicted of a Class A felony, he’ll never get out of jail; he’s already 65 years old. And that means he has every reason to make a run for the border.

$15,000 bail, for a man who had been receiving — and is still receiving; he’s on paid suspension — a salary of $173,422, $15,000 is really nothing, not for a bail amount. He has the money, and the freedom to move around Fayette County, to get a stolen car with a bogus license plate, cut off his ankle bracelet, and get the heck out of town! If he can get as far west as Kansas, he’d be entering the mostly empty states, and could turn either north or south, and head to Canada or Mexico, borders which are not really well defended.

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Is this why Central Bucks schools have been pushing back against LGBTQ+ agenda?

We have previously noted how the Central Bucks school district has drawn all sorts of fire from the left as the district pursues a path of excluding sexually-charged materials in school libraries and stated that teachers and staff should not use ‘transgendered’ students’ preferred names and pronouns without the consent of their parents. I have to wonder: did this case help push the school district in its decisions?

A former Central Bucks teacher entered a no-contest plea to molesting and secretly recording his students

Joseph Ohrt, a longtime fixture at schools in the district, touched two of the victims inappropriately during incidents in the 1990s, according to prosecutors.

Joseph Ohrt, via the Bucks County Herald. Click to enlarge.

by Vinny Vella | Thursday, October 13, 2022 | 2:15 PM EDT

A once-prominent teacher in the Central Bucks School District entered a no-contest plea Thursday to molesting two of his former students and secretly recording another one.

Joseph Ohrt, 57, entered the plea to indecent assault, corruption of minors, invasion of privacy and tampering with evidence before Bucks County Court Judge Jeffrey Finley on what was initially scheduled to be the first day in his criminal trial.

Ohrt’s attorney, Matthew Sedacca, declined to comment after the hearing.

For nearly 40 years, Ohrt was a fixture in the Central Bucks district, serving as a music teacher and choral director at various middle, elementary and high schools. He gained recognition beyond the region in 2021, when the pop singer P!nk, who attended Central Bucks West High in her youth, praised him on Twitter and in one of her music videos as an early mentor of hers.

There’s more at the original, including a statement that parents of students had claimed in court filings that Mr Ohrt’s behavior was an “open secret” in the schools, though the Inquirer article did not specify whether the claim was that this was an open secret among students only, or if any teachers or staff were also aware.

Vinny Vella, the article author, was very careful to conceal the sex of the students molested by Mr Ohrt, because that’s just so politically incorrect, but he revealed it in the eighth paragraph:

County prosecutors first began investigating Ohrt in May 2021, when a former student reported that Ohrt had touched him and told him he loved him while he was a senior at Central Bucks West in 2016. After the student graduated, during a choir trip to Kansas City, Ohrt shared a bed with him and put his hand down the teen’s pants, according to the affidavit of probable cause for Ohrt’s arrest.

So, the molestation, the “grooming,” was homosexual in nature. Naturally, I took a screen capture of that paragraph, because I strongly suspect that the story will be subsequently edited to hide that fact. Surely, surely! one of Mr Vella’s editors will notice this, but now that it’s out there, and an [insert slang term for the rectum here] both noticed and documented it, the Inky might have no real choice but to leave it up, because they might figure that, having been noticed and documented, the Inquirer’s bias would be publicly noted . . . again.

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Danielle Outlaw is disgusted, and Larry Krasner is disgusting.

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw released a statement after three SWAT Team officers were shot and wounded, though none fatally, while attempting to serve a warrant in the Richard Allen housing projects on North 10th Street Wednesday morning:

Today, shortly after 6 AM, while serving a warrant on a murder suspect, members of our SWAT unit were fired upon. As the officers were knocking and announcing the warrant, without warning, this suspect fired through a window and door. Three of our brave officers were shout by the assailant, but were still able to return gunfire.  By the grace of God, it appears our officers will physically recover from their wounds.

The suspect was killed in the exchange.

Although I am currently in Dallas, Texas, for the Major Cities Chiefs’ Conference, I was grateful to be able to speak with the officers involved, and thank them for their remarkable service to our city.

While our SWAT officers are highly-trained professionals, this is yet again another cold reminder of the dangers involved in the work they do. Warrant service is always a high-risk assignment; particularly when the suspect is wanted in connection to violent crime.

That, of course, is why the SWAT Team officers were wearing body armor and helmets; they knew that the “suspect,” Raheem Lee, was armed and willing to kill people.

But let me make sure something is perfectly clear: it is NOT the job of our officers to be shot at.

Well, it shouldn’t be, but apparently a fairly sizable segment of the city’s population do believe that it is the job of police officers to be shot at. The Philadelphia Inquirer tried to make a hero out of young Thomas Siderio, who shot at police. And District Attorney Larry Krasner wants to try for murder officers who shoot back and kill offenders.

The Commissioner then, without naming his name, begins her criticism of Mr Krasner, the anti-police defense attorney who, thanks to $1.45 million from George Soros, was elected District Attorney.

It is not their job to be stabbed, spat upon, accosted or attacked in any way. And this type of violence towards our police — towards anyone — cannot continue to be normalized.

We are tired of arresting the same suspects over and over again, only to see them right back out on the street to continue and sometimes escalate their criminal ways.

We are tired of having to send our officers into harm’s way to serve warrants on suspects who have no business being on the street in the first place.

No — not everyone needs to be in jail. But when we repeatedly see the extensive criminal histories of those we arrest for violent crime, the question has to be asked as to why they were yet again back out on the street and terrorizing our communities.

A whole lot more people do need to be in jail, but the voters of the City of Brotherly Love first elected, and then, by a landslide margin, re-elected Mr Krasner, who not only made the promise to drastically reduce the number of criminals locked up, but kept his promise.

I am beyond disgusted by this violence. Our entire department is sickened by what is happening to the people that live, work, and visit our city.

Residents are tired of it.

Business owners are tired of it.

Our children are tired of it.

We are long past “enough is enough.”

As your Police Commissioner, I can promise you this: Our officers will not be intimidated, and we will continue to do everything we can to make Philadelphia a safer place to live.

Philadelphians keep saying that they want the violence to stop, but at the same time, they keep voting for the public officials who let the bad guys go, who won’t take responsibility for the results of their policies,