Category Archives: Crime

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As cities lose control of crime, how can anyone view public transportation as a solution to anything?

The Philadelphia Inquirer likes to use Twitter to pimp its articles online, but hey, so do all of my blogging friends. Thing is, this article from the Inky is restricted to paid subscribers only. Fortunately, I do subscribe, so you don’t have to! [Update: Saturday, June 10: Robert Stacy McCain linked a free, archived version of the article, so you can read the whole thing.]

‘We lost control of the train cars’

With ridership down and antisocial behavior up, SEPTA is grappling with how to make Philly transit feel safer.

By Thomas Fitzgerald, Ryan W. Briggs, and Rodrigo Torrejón | Tuesday, June 6, 2023

The Market-Frankford Line has its own incense: a combination of cigarette, weed, or K2 smoke. People in the throes of opioid addiction are sometimes frozen in a forward lean in train cars and on platforms. People experiencing homelessness might use a couple of seats or a station to seek rest away from the cold and the heat.

One of the stops on the Market-Frankford line is Allegheny Station, at the infamous Kensington and Allegheny Avenues. The fastest way to clean up the Market-Frankford line? Eliminate the stop in Kensington!

Recent high-profile shootings in and around SEPTA stations in Philadelphia reflect an alarming increase in violence following 2022, when crime on the transit system was trending down. In May, two teens were killed on SEPTA in separate shootings.

However, the types of crime passengers are most likely to encounter on SEPTA are smoking, turnstile-jumping, public urination, and other unruly acts. SEPTA is struggling to manage the incidents.

I’ve got to ask: is ridership down because of “the types of crime passengers are most likely to encounter,” or the fact that people are getting shot and sometimes killed?

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain, ‘Other Unruly Acts in Killadelphia

SEPTA, the newspaper tells us, “is struggling to manage the incidents,” and, from the way the paragraph is structured, I believe that the “incidents” referred to are “the types of crime passengers are most likely to encounter.” That’s actually a good thing, a form of ‘broken windows policing,’ trying to stamp out the less important crimes in the belief that such will lead to the worse crimes dropping.

These are not violent crimes but antisocial behaviors that make many people feel unsafe on the subway and El lines, according to interviews with multiple riders. Some avoid the trains, a potential catastrophe for a transit agency that must grow ridership to financially survive.

“It’s filthier than I’ve ever seen it. More dangerous than I’ve ever seen it,” said David Corliss Jr., 40, as he waited for an El train at 34th Street Station on a recent afternoon. He said his family worries about his safety when he rides public transit.

SEPTA, like all of the other municipal organizations, is understaffed, and yes, that means that cleaning up after the junkies gets delayed.

There’s a lot more, but I want to point out five paragraphs from further down the Inquirer’ article:

While repeat offenders are being caught and banned, the court-diversion part of the program has not been carried out, Transit Police say.

“We were finding that most of our misdemeanor [trespassing] cases were being withdrawn,” Nestel said. “The folks we were putting into the criminal justice system weren’t going to diversionary courts and weren’t getting the help they needed.”

Michael Mellon, a lawyer from the Defenders Association of Philadelphia, attributed that to concern among public defenders that SEPTA was using the ban policy to track and arrest people experiencing homelessness.

“Regardless of what SEPTA claims about the purpose of the [citation] program, in reality it criminalized poverty, homelessness, and mental illness,” Mellon said. “Some of the people they targeted languished in jail because they did not have the means or the traditional support to get released.”

In 2020, the Defenders Association and attorneys from the Homeless Advocacy Project contacted the District Attorney’s Office to express their concerns. Trespassing arrests dwindled soon afterward, Mellon said.

The Defenders Association of Philadelphia is the group which provides legal assistance for indigent defendants. And they got what they wanted:

Arrests by SEPTA police plummeted after the agency downgraded penalties for the most minor offenses, but arrests for other, more serious crime also plummeted as the agency has grappled with officer shortages and other issues. Data from the District Attorney’s Office showed annual arrests by SEPTA police for any offense — including misdemeanor and felony crimes — fell by 85% from 2019 to 2022.

The oh-so-sympathetic claimed that it “criminalized poverty, homelessness, and mental illness,” but regardless of the reason for criminal behavior, it was still criminal behavior. In their zeal to defend the drug addicts poor and downtrodden, they are nevertheless defending the people who have caused a serious downturn in SEPTA ridership.

One picture, it has been said, is worth a thousand words, and this screen capture from the newspaper’s article illustrates it perfectly. SEPTA police officers Kevin Newton, left, Anthony Capaldi, center, and Martin Zitter, the caption tells us, ask a person with whom they are familiar — ever heard the description of a suspect as someone ‘known to the police’? — to not block the entrance to the 13th street El station. A man, very probably an addict, chose to lay down with his food and water bottle in a manner which blocked the station entrance, even though, if he just had to lay down in the sidewalk, there was obvious room just to the right of the stairs, against the metal bars, where he could have settled which did not block the entrance.

The Inquirer has published several articles on the proposed Roosevelt Boulevard subway, a $3+ billion for which SEPTA simply doesn’t have the money. A lot of people believe it would be a great idea, but the obvious question arises: if SEPTA can’t really handle and maintain the system it already has, how does it make any sense to add more system?

The left want to push more and more Americans into public transportation, to reduce CO2 emissions to fight global warming climate change, and that is something into which Philly’s political leadership has fully bought.

Ridership remains well below pre-pandemic levels, and SEPTA needs those passengers back, officials say. Federal pandemic aid will run out by April 2024, and the agency depends on rider fares to make enough money to operate.

As the Democrats in a very Democratic city want to push SEPTA ridership, the public have been far less willing to actually use the service; Philadelphians and residents in the collar counties have, in effect, voted with their wallets. Some of it may be attributable to an increase in the number of people able to work from home some days, but when even the transit agency admits that it has lost control of the system, when the stories of serious crime on the buses and trains increase — the lesser crimes are no longer a story — how can anyone seriously contemplate public transportation as a solution to anything?

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Killadelphia: Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas begins with the truth, but then has to tell a huge lie to fit the newspaper’s requirements

There is at least a slight possibility that Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas isn’t a totally Kool Aid drinking #woke progressive, as her Monday morning column told a very uncomfortable truth.

After a Philadelphia mother lost her son to gun violence, she blamed one person

This mother’s personal journey is part of the layered, complicated story of gun violence in our beleaguered city.

by Helen Ubiñas | Monday, June 5, 2023 | 6:01 AM EDT

Helen Ubiñas

Andrea Robinson is brutally honest about the person responsible for helping lead her son to the streets that eventually cost him his life: her.

When Robinson’s son, Jermaine, was gunned down in April 2021 at age 29, it was the bleak culmination of a life lived on the edge.

He got kicked out of school for assaulting a teacher. He stole his grandmother’s gun. He lied incessantly — moments all, Robinson recognizes now, that essentially followed in her footsteps.

“I planted all the seeds,” she said.

Further down:

Robinson grew up with her mom and older sister in North Philadelphia. She regularly attended school and church. But when she got pregnant with Jermaine at 15, she fell away from both and into a life in the streets with the father of her two oldest children.

Yup, 15-year-old, being reared by a single mother, becomes a single, underaged mother, and a high school dropout, herself. What could possibly go wrong?

She drove around in “johnnies” — stolen cars. She wore clothes and jewelry that had been shoplifted. All the while, she told her children, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Her life was a messy tangle of contradictions.

In other words, she became a criminal herself, and, surprisingly enough, her children followed the example she set.

His friends insist her son’s nickname — “Shooter” — referred to his rapping talents. But Robinson said she knows better, just as she knows that she must answer for her part in her son’s choices.

Miss Robinson is answering for her part in her son’s crimes by trying to tell her tale to others in North Philly, to try to get them to avoid the mistakes she made. And she’s answering for her part in her son’s crimes by having to live on while he’s stone-cold graveyard dead.

Then came the paragraph for District Attorney Larry Krasner:

After the age of 11, the longest Jermaine stayed out of the criminal justice system was the two years before his death. But he never served much time for drug and gun charges. After Jermaine could no longer convince his mother to believe his lies, he exploited a legal system that Robinson said often just “slapped him on the wrist.”

That’s darkly humorous: Mr Robinson was killed in April of 2021, so the two years before his death were while Mr Krasner and his social justice brand of prosecution infested the City of Brotherly Love, but if Mr Robinson received nothing but slaps on the wrist for his past crimes, those would have been primarily under District Attorneys Lynne Abraham Ford (in office 1991 through 2009) and Seth Williams (in office 2010 through mid 2017). Neither Mrs Ford, 82, nor Mr Williams, a now convicted felon, will ever be a prosecutor again, but perhaps, somehow, some way, Mr Krasner might be able to get it through his thick skull that cutting Mr Robinson didn’t, in the end, do him any favors. A guy with the street name ‘Shooter’ was shot himself, sent to his eternal reward by some other street punk.

Of course, Miss Ubiñas had to make sure we didn’t draw any politically incorrect conclusions from her story:

Whenever I write about gun violence, there are always those who insist on putting the blame on victims or the victims’ families. They trot out the myth of Black-on-Black criminality, despite white people committing crimes against other white people at about the same rate that Black people do against other Black people. The reality is that the vast majority of most crimes are committed by a person of the same race as the victim.

Bovine feces. Through June 1st in Philadelphia, there have been a total of 150 fatal and 600 non-fatal shootings in the city. Of those, 107 of the victims killed were black males, 71.33%, and 407 of the wounded but surviving victims, 67.83%, were black males. For white males, there were 6 killed, 4.00% of the total, and 20 wounded, 3.33%.

According to the Census Bureau, only 40.8% of the city’s population are black, while 38.5% are while. If “white people committing crimes against other white people at about the same rate that black people do against other black people,” shouldn’t we see the numbers of shootings by race being close to equal?

The St Louis Metropolitan Police Department is one of the few which breaks down the homicide statistics by race on a daily basis, something which would undoubtedly horrify Miss Ubiñas and her colleagues at the Inquirer, and in a city in which white residents outnumber blacks, 49.1% to 44.3%, 63 out of 72 murder victims, 97.5% were black, and 48 out of 51 identified murder suspects, 94.12%, are black.

Yeah, I know: math is racist!

Simply put, Miss Ubiñas was willing to tell the truth about Mr Robinson’s criminal life, and the responsibility that his mother took for rearing a very bad guy, but the Robinsons being black made her jump back and tell a big, fat, well-known, and obvious lie, because, horrors!, telling the truth alone would violate the newspaper’s mission to be an “anti-racist news organization.” That lying about the facts due to race might be racist in itself would just never occur to anyone in the Inky’s newsroom.

Philadelphia Inquirer circulation.

Could things like that have anything to do with the newspaper’s cratering circulation?

Maybe the newspaper could do something really radical like just tell the truth?

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There’s no threat quite like an empty threat!

That Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) checked out of his job a year ago is well known.

Frustrated and beaten down, Mayor Jim Kenney quit on the city of Philadelphia late Monday night.

After yet another shooting — this time involving two police officers shot during the July Fourth celebration on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway — Kenney, in a moment of candor, said: “I’ll be happy when I’m not here — when I’m not mayor, and I can enjoy some stuff.”

A reporter followed up, asking: “You’re looking forward to not being mayor?”

Kenney added: “Yeah, as a matter of fact.”

You’d think that with an estimated net worth of $18.6 million, he could have afforded to resign his job, and $240,000 salary, and let someone else take the reins of our nation’s sixth-largest city if he hated the job so much, but he hasn’t done that.

Saturday night was not a good night in the City of Brotherly Love:

Teen killed after street racing chaos, police-involved shooting in Philadelphia

At the scene, troopers found a large group of cars doing “burnouts” and “drifting.”

by 6ABC Digital Staff | Sunday, June 4, 2023 | 3:33 PM EDT

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) — Overnight street racing chaos involving hundreds of drivers in Philadelphia led to a deadly police-involved shooting on Sunday.

Investigators say it began when over 300 cars gathered at Bustleton and Philmont avenues in the city’s Bustleton section around 1 a.m. Sunday.

One of the drivers struck a responding police vehicle.

Not long after, police responded to another incident involving the same group of drivers that shut down a portion of I-95 in Society Hill.

As of 4:05 PM EDT on Sunday, June 4th, there isn’t a single story on that on The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page, or the newspaper’s specific crime page, though both contain several stories that are two and three days old. We have embedded the WPVI-TV report, in this article, below the fold. Continue reading →

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Oops! Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Vinny Vella might be about to get called on the carpet!

It looks like Philadelphia Inquirer suburban reporter Vinny Vella is going to get called onto the carpet in Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Gabriel Escobar’s office: he referred to “gang” rather than “street group”! Then again, it wasn’t his first offense.

A group of Philly teens stole nearly 20 guns from a Bucks County gun shop, according to police

LugarMan Inc., in Langhorne, was burglarized at about 3 a.m. Tuesday, police said. The suspects were arrested in Trenton after a long chase through the suburbs.

by Vinny Vella | Tuesday, May 30, 2023 | 1:20 PM EDT

A group of Philadelphia teens burglarized a Bucks County gun store early Tuesday, according to police. The incident, which ended with three young people in custody, is the latest in a series of similar heists targeting gun stores in Bucks and Montgomery Counties.

This is a major pet peeve of mine! People have used “burglarize” so much that it’s now in the dictionary, but any educated person, especially a writer, should use the original word, burgle.

A motion-sensor alarm at LugerMan Inc. in Langhorne notified police in Middletown Township at around 3 a.m., Detective Lt. Steve Forman said. When officers arrived, they saw a car pulling out of the store’s lot and followed it.

The Middletown Township officers continued to chase the vehicle as it sped away from the store, Forman said. Officers from nearby Falls Township assisted, throwing down a spike strip that struck the car’s tires but didn’t end the pursuit.

The teens continued to Morrisville and then over the Calhoun Street Bridge to Trenton, where they lost control of the car and crashed without injury, according to Forman. Trenton Police helped arrest three teens, who haven’t been identified and remain in custody in the New Jersey city as they await extradition to Bucks County.

Mr Vella reported that all of the stolen firearms were recovered.

I just had to go ahead and take the screen capture, to document what was there before it got edited away.

Naturally, I don’t have access to any formal statement of the Inquirer’s stylebook, so perhaps the word “gang” actually is permitted, and only reporters Ellie Rushing, Jessica Griffin, Ximena Conde, and Chris Palmer, who wrote:

In Philadelphia, there are no gangs in the traditional, nationally known sense. Instead, they are cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families. The groups have names — Young Bag Chasers, Penntown, Northside — and members carry an allegiance to each other, but they aren’t committing traditional organized crimes, like moving drugs, the way gangs did in the past.

actually persist in the “street group” nonsense, something that I have previously mocked.

The best part of Mr Vella’s story? The fact that the burglaries occurred in Bucks County, and not in Philadelphia, so the soft-on-crime, police-hating defense mouthpiece who is now Philly’s District Attorney, Larry Krasner, won’t have the authority to let the alleged burglars and thieves off with the lightest of slaps on the wrist. These “teens” need to be charged as adults if possible, tried, convicted, and locked up for as long as the law allows.

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At what point does it have to be asked: “Jim Kenney, Larry Krasner, Danielle Outlaw, have you no shame?” They have not just failed, but failed spectacularly

We have previously noted how the government of Mexico has used street scenes from Kensington in ads to warn the Mexican people about the dangers of using drugs, and asked the very politically incorrect question: why should we spend money to keep junkies alive?

Now comes London’s Daily Mail:

Inside Philadelphia’s tranq hellscape: Disturbing new footage shows devastating scale of drug crisis in Kensington neighborhood – with addicts crowding filthy sidewalks and shooting up in broad daylight

By Will Potter for DailyMail.com | Saturday, May 27, 2023 | 12:43 PM EDT | Updated: 8:37 PM EDT

Shocking footage has revealed the scale of Philadelphia’s untamed ‘tranq’ epidemic, which has transformed the city’s streets into a drug-infested hellhole.

The Kensington neighborhood – known as ‘ground zero’ for the city’s drug crisis – is seen littered with zombie-like addicts, with many shamelessly shooting up in broad daylight.

Gruesome scenes in the ‘City of Brotherly Love’ show droves of homeless addicts aimlessly staggering through the streets, surrounded by tents and scattered trash.

There’s a lot more at the original; hat tip to @DawnStensland. Since this article has an embedded video, the rest is off the front page. Continue reading →

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The real way to keep your kids out of trouble Doing the right things teaches your kids to do the right things

We have previously noted the homicide rate in St Louis, which, with an even 200 murders in 2022, and a Census Bureau estimated population of 286,578 as of July 1, 2022, yields a homicide rate of a whopping 69.79 per 100,000 population. When Philadelphia says that it’s the murder capital of the United States, St Louis laughs and says, “Hold my beer!”[1]With a Census Bureau estimated population of 1,567,258 as of July 1, 2022, and 516 murders that year, Philly’s homicide rate works out to a measly 32.92 per 100,000 population.

More specifically, with 45 of the homicide victims so far this year in the Gateway City being black males, black males in St Louis are bearing a homicide rate of a staggering 179.93 per 100,000 population.[2]The math: 286,578 total population, times 0.448, the percentage of the population listed as being black, times 0.487, the percentage of the population who are male, yields a black male population of … Continue reading

Now, why do I raise that subject? It is due to an article I saw in the St Louis Post-Dispatch:

Archbishop of St. Louis closes 35 parishes, reassigns 155 priests in Catholic church reorganization

by Blythe Bernhard | Pentecost Sunday, May 28, 2023

SHREWSBURY — The Archbishop of St. Louis will close 35 parishes and reassign 155 priests in the most sweeping reorganization of the Catholic church in St. Louis history.

After 18 months of waiting, Catholics learned on Saturday the fate of their priests and parishes in the downsizing of the archdiocese called “All Things New.”

The changes, which will reshape the archdiocese from 178 individual parishes into 134, were announced Saturday by Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski in a press conference and in a letter read by priests during vigil Mass.

“I wish these changes were not necessary, but it is what we are called to do at this moment,” Rozanski said Saturday.

The archbishop maintained that the plan affects the entire region, although nearly half of the closures are in north St. Louis and north St. Louis County and only one, St. John Bosco in Maryland Heights, is west of Interstate 270 in St. Louis County.

There’s more at the original.

One thing really jumped off the page at me: in the very areas in which St Louis was suffering the greatest number of murders, the “North Patrol,” are also the areas in which Mass attendance has declined so greatly that the Church is having to close parishes.

Let me be perfectly clear here: if you want your children not to grow up to be gang-bangers, not to be getting into situations in which gunfire or other serious violence is going to be the result, take them to church! Don’t send them to church, but take them to church. Don’t find excuses to sleep in, don’t say, “Oh, we’ll go next Sunday,” but take them to church every Sunday.

Some readers will complain that I have been overly simplistic in this, that there are so many other factors involved, but I really don’t see it that way. Taking your kids to church, every Sunday, teaches them that you believe religion and reverence are good and important things. Taking them to church every Sunday shows them that you are willing to make the effort to get out of bed yourself, to do the right thing. Taking them to church every Sunday exposes them to other kids and other families, also being taught the same lessons.

And taking the kids to church every Sunday encourages parents to do the right thing as well.

Is this the only thing that parents need to do? No, it isn’t, but it is the one thing which will help them get started, help them to do better, which does not require a lot of money or some complicated organizational effort. All you need to do is get the kids, your spouse, and yourself out of bed in the morning, and go. Yeah, it’s nice if you can drop some money in the collection basket, but if you don’t have the money to spare, the priest will still be happy to see you, other families will be glad you are there, and soon enough you will be able to manage to contribute something, anything, to the church. Doing the right thing very often brings the right rewards, even if it doesn’t always seem obvious.

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↑1 With a Census Bureau estimated population of 1,567,258 as of July 1, 2022, and 516 murders that year, Philly’s homicide rate works out to a measly 32.92 per 100,000 population.
↑2 The math: 286,578 total population, times 0.448, the percentage of the population listed as being black, times 0.487, the percentage of the population who are male, yields a black male population of 62,524. 45 black male victims divided by 0.62524 equals 71.97236, divided by 146, the day of the year, and multiplied by 365 days in the year yields 179.93.
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Killadelphia: Could Philly see ‘only’ 450 homicides in 2023?

I have not been posting nearly as many ‘math’ stories about the homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love this year, because that math is so different.

According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, there have been 165 total homicides through 11:59 PM EDT on Wednesday, May 24, while the website Broad + Liberty has the total at 168. The 24th was the 144th day of the year, which leads to a homicide rate, using the ‘official’ PPD number, of 1.1458 homicides per day, on pace for 418 murders for the entire year.

Of course, that ignores the normal increase in homicides during the long, hot summer!

The number of homicides is 12.23$ lower than the same day in 2022. If we multiply that over the course of the year, that would yield a total homicide number for the year of 452.87, certainly a vast improvement over 2022’s 516 killings. Doing the same math, using 2021’s record-setting pace, the math works out to 450.15 homicides.

But then I look at 2020’s official homicide total of 499 — though there’s reason to believe that 502 is the correct figure — and the math works out quite differently. The current numbers are 12.24% higher than 2020’s homicide pace, which works out to 560.10 murders for 2023.

So, why is this significant? Because today, May 25th, is the third anniversary of the unfortunate death of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl addled convicted felon George Floyd while he was resisting arrest for passing counterfeit money in Minneapolis. With that, the American left went absolutely bonkers, and killings soared. The idiotic #BlackLivesMatter protests led to more black people being killed!

The death of Mr Floyd was hardly the only tragedy of 2020, as the COVID-19 panicdemic[1]No, that isn’t a typographical error: the spelling of ‘panicdemic’ reflects exactly how I see it as having been. hit, the economy was trashed, and our civil rights unconstitutionally restricted.

But life has returned to (mostly) normal now, and with the numbers working out as they do, I have to wonder: absent another monumental stupidity like we saw three years ago, could Philadelphia see well under 500 homicides this year? Is something around 450 a reasonable projection?

References

References
↑1 No, that isn’t a typographical error: the spelling of ‘panicdemic’ reflects exactly how I see it as having been.
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In trying to avoid calling street gangs gangs, The Philadelphia Inquirer has again beclowned itself

We have expended some bandwidth mocking The Philadelphia Inquirer for its statement that there are no real gangs in the City of Brotherly Love:

In Philadelphia, there are no gangs in the traditional, nationally known sense. Instead, they are cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families. The groups have names — Young Bag Chasers, Penntown, Northside — and members carry an allegiance to each other, but they aren’t committing traditional organized crimes, like moving drugs, the way gangs did in the past.

We also mocked the George Soros-sponsored defense mouthpiece who is now the city’s District Attorney, Larry Krasner, when his office decided to refer to them as rival street groups. And we pointed out, at the end of last year, that what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. was still using euphemisms to refer to gangs those cliques of young men, though the word “gang” in one article, apparently for prosaic reasons, since the term “street group” had been used previously in the same sentence.

Since then, we have noted the newspaper’s adoption of the term “street groups.”

And now? The Enquirer Inquirer is taking a silly effort to justify it!

North Philadelphia street group ‘BNG’ members have been charged in multiple shootings

Prosecutors say four men committed a string of shootings in 2021 that left two people dead and five others injured.

by Ellie Rushing | Tuesday, May 23, 2023

The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office on Tuesday announced charges against four young men affiliated with a North Philadelphia street group that investigators say committed a string of shootings in 2021 that left two people dead and five others injured.

Following a more than year-long investigation, prosecutors charged four men they say are affiliated with the group “BNG” or “Big Naddy Gang” — named after a 15-year-old boy known as “Naddy” who was fatally shot in April 2021.

So, the “street group” members call themselves a “gang,” but the Inky can’t? 🙂

After the teen was killed, prosecutors said, his friends — seeking retaliation and local notoriety — formed BNG and committed at least five shootings in the next six months, chronicling the violence along the way on social media, in rap songs, and in texts to one another.

District Attorney Larry Krasner said Tuesday that the young men wrote in one text that they “put the ‘h’ in homicide.”

“Today, we’re going to put the ‘j’ in jail,” the DA said.

One does wonder whether Mr Krasner had the opportunity to put the ‘j’ in jail for the accused previously, but declined to do so.

Mugshots via 6ABC News, because the Inquirer would never publish them.

The story went on to describe the crimes allegedly committed by the members of the gang, Dontae Sutton, then 17, Jamir Brunson-Gans, 18 at the time, Elijah Soto, then 16, and Khalil Henry, then 17.

Brunson-Gans and Soto have each been charged with murder, attempted murder, and related crimes.

Henry has been charged with murder, two counts of attempted murder, and related offenses.

Sutton has been charged with murder, four counts of attempted murder, and many additional crimes.

Since three of the four were under 18 at the times of their alleged offenses, the obvious question becomes: will Mr Krasner charge them as adults, or juveniles? Mr Soto has already had that break previously:

Soto was arrested in January 2022 and charged with conspiracy and simple assault after court records say he and three others attacked, kicked, and stabbed a juvenile. A court spokesperson said the adult charges against Soto were withdrawn and the case was transferred to juvenile court.

Here’s where the Inky gets funny:

This is the third sprawling indictment of a Philadelphia street group in just the last six months, as the District Attorney’s Office, in partnership with local and federal police, try to crack down on the numerous street groups across Philadelphia.

Those groups — which prosecutors call gangs, a label sometimes contested by community members given the groups’ small size and fluid structure and membership — are often made up of a small group of friends, mostly young men, largely from the same neighborhood. Many are involved in the drill rap scene, and their music and social media posts often chronicle — and fuel — shootings, authorities say.

So, even the District Attorney calls them gangs now, but The Philadelphia Inquirer will not? One wonders: what is the minimum size at which a “street group” becomes a “gang” as far as the Inky is concerned? Maybe when they call themselves Bloods or Crips?

At what point do the editors and the publisher of the Inquirer realize just how foolish they look? Everyone reading the Inky’s stories knows that they mean “gang” when they write “street group,” so it isn’t as though the newspaper is somehow fooling anybody.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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Killadelphia: Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Sometimes, reporters for The Philadelphia Inquirer don’t really pay attention to their sources. Dylan Purcell wrote:

Through midnight Friday there were 155 homicides citywide, a 14% decline from the same date last year.

Well, that’s what the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page said on Saturday, but, as the website states, the figures are only updated Monday through Friday during normal business hours. The 155 figure is actually from Thursday, May 18th, but Mr Purcell was apparently unaware of that. Since Mr Purcell describes himself as “a local investigative reporter specializing in data and documents that expose wrongdoing”, one would think that he’d understand his data sources better.

And I note that the template still states that the percentage change is compared to 2021, but it’s actually the change compared to 2022.

Multiple weekend shootings in Philly leave four dead, and a 17-year-old in critical condition

A 21-year-old man was killed in the triple shooting in which two teenagers were wounded

by Dylan Purcell | Saturday, May 20, 2023

Multiple shootings Friday night and early Saturday in Philadelphia left four people dead and five others hospitalized, including a 17-year-old who was in critical condition, police said.

A 21-year-old man died after suffering multiple gunshot wounds in a triple shooting on the 5600 block of Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia about 8:45 p.m. Friday, according to police. The victim was identified as Michael Goodwin, of the 1200 block of South Greylock Street.

The two other victims — a 17-year-old who is in “extremely critical condition” and a 16-year-old reported in stable condition, were taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center.

Of course, Mr Purcell deleted what was actually reported, that a 21-year-old black man died, because reporting all of the news is against the Inquirer’s editorial guidelines.

Less than an hour earlier, a shooting inside a barbershop in the 2000 block of Kensington Avenue took the life of a 43-year-old man. The victim, Adinson Suarez-Marte, of the 3000 block of Hartville Street, was taken by police to Temple University Hospital for several gunshot wounds to his torso. He was pronounced shortly after arrival.

Police are seeking information on as many as eight men who they said were seen wearing dark clothing and masks. No arrests were made, or weapons recovered from the barbershop scene.

As many as eight men being sought? In other words, a gang shooting, not that the Inky uses the word “gang” anymore.

Mr Purcell also noted an apparent murder/suicide that was found shortly after midnight, which would place it under Saturday’s statistics.

The website Broad + Liberty maintains its own homicide tracker, because, quite frankly, a lot of people do not believe that the city’s statistics are completely reliable, and that site documents 160 homicides through Thursday, May 18th. B+L has a third homicide listed for the 19th, beyond the two the Inquirer reported, and does not, as of 12:40 PM EDT on Sunday, May 21st, include the reported murder/suicide.

Broad + Liberty is very careful in its collection of statistics, and includes links to its documentation of homicides; while a few of the reports are listed as media reports, the vast majority are from Philadelphia Police Department news releases or emails. This is a source Mr Purcell needs to consider, but if the Inquirer has ever questioned the PPD statistics, I’ve yet to see it.