Category Archives: Crime

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What hath progressives wrought?

There is a cat food dish on the front porch of our house, because our two cats are both outside and indoor critters. A dozen feet in front of the porch is the fence line, which has plenty of foliage, from bushes all the way up to two walnut trees. It was November of 2018 when I noticed that a feral cat had made his home under those bushes, because he was living close to the food we put outside.

It took a few weeks before I could even approach the feral cat, but he eventually got used to me, and while he didn’t let me pet him, he would stop running away when I went out to fill the dish. Then, one very cold December morning, I went out with a scoop of food to fill the dish, and he was so hungry that he started eating even as I was putting the food in the dish. On impulse, I reached down, grabbed him, brought him inside immediately, and plopped him down in a chair in front of the fireplace.

“Ooooh, I like this,” the feral cat thought, and with that, Wild Thing just plain moved in. The moral of the story is simple: if you feed them, they will come!

Subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal are expensive, but many times you will find things in the Journal that the mostly liberal professional media will not publish, as Editorial Board member Allysia Finley does something really radical like tell readers the truth:

The Root Causes of San Francisco’s Disorder

Covid lockdowns hastened the city’s decline, but it won’t recover as long as it clings to progressive obsessions.

by Allysia Finley | Sunday, June 18, 2023 | 3:42 PM EDT

Author Shelby Steele and his son, Eli, were filming a documentary in San Francisco last week when someone broke into their rental car. “In the 10 minutes we were gone our SUV was broken into and nearly $15k of cameras stolen,” Eli tweeted. “Called 911 & they hung up twice.”

Welcome to another day ending in the letter Y in San Francisco.

For those of you stymied by the Journal’s paywall, you can read the article for free here, though the internal hyperlinks are not included.

“Many Twitter employees feel unsafe coming to work in downtown SF and have had their car windows smashed,” Elon Musk tweeted in response. “They also got such a null response from the police that they rarely even bother reporting crimes anymore, because nothing happens.”

It’s more accurate to say the police response depends on the identities of the victim and perpetrator. In January, Shannon Collier Gwin, a 71-year-old art-gallery owner, was arrested for spraying a hose at a homeless woman camped in front of his business. The woman often had been heard screaming in the middle of the night.

“I completely broke,” Mr. Gwin said in an apology. “I am not equipped or trained to deal with a citywide problem like this.”

There was a double episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “Past Tense,” in which Captain Sisko, Lt Commander Jadzia Dax, and Dr Julian Bashir wound up time traveled back to San Francisco in 2024. Messrs Sisko and Bashir are found by a pair of police officers, who believe them to be vagrants and warn them to get off the streets. They are escorted to a “Sanctuary District”, a walled-off ghetto that is used to contain the poor, the sick, the mentally disabled, and anyone else who cannot support themselves. A Journal commenter named Brent Law suggested:

Take the empty buildings (hotels, offices, etc) and make SF one giant homeless shelter. Move all those crossing our border illegally as well as the country’s homeless into these makeshift homes. Fence the place in and then take a page from the Left’s playbook by declaring victory.

Not too far off from Deep Space Nine, huh?

Neither, it seems, are the city’s politicians. The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. Yet San Francisco’s leaders refuse to acknowledge how their own policies have caused the spiral of public disorder that’s driving away businesses and residents in droves.

And here is the lesson of Wild Thing: if a city makes it easier for the homeless and the junkies to survive, allowing them to camp out wherever they choose, providing food and shelter and other services, the derelicts will flock to that city. Because of the policies of the oh-so-compassionate left, rather than solving the problems of homelessness and drug abuse, they have enabled more of it, to the point at which they have grown and festered, and are driving decent people and good businesses — and the taxes they pay — out of what was once one of America’s greatest cities.

The political leaders of the City by the Bay recognize the problems, because they hit them in the face, every day. The part that they don’t get is that their policies are responsible. But that’s hardly surprising: we see the same thing from the liberal Democrat leaders in New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, St Louis, Baltimore, Chicago, and Los Angeles . . . and that list is not exclusive.

According to MediaFeed, Baltimore ranks 23rd and St Louis 14th — the only two US cities on the list — of the 25 highest murder rates in the world. Most of the other cities are in Venezuela, Brazil, and Mexico.

Add to this list the Westfield San Francisco Centre, whose owners last week handed their property to their lender. “A growing number of retailers and businesses are leaving the area due to the unsafe conditions for customers, retailers, and employees, coupled with the fact that these significant issues are preventing an economic recovery of the area,” the mall’s owner said last month after the center’s Nordstrom store announced it is closing.

Nearly half of the mall’s retailers have closed since 2020 as San Francisco has lost some 7.5% of its population—a larger share than any other major city. Those leaving are by and large affluent. According to Internal Revenue Service data, about 14,700 San Francisco taxpayers with an average adjusted gross income of $415,000 moved to other states in 2020 and 2021. Tens of thousands more flocked to Bay Area exurbs.

It ought to be so simple that even a liberal could understand it: law-abiding people, taxpaying people, mostly want to go to and from work safely, and live where the streets aren’t littered with derelicts and drug addicts, human poop and used needles. But because the progressive mindset is to not clean up the streets and remove the homeless and the junkies, because, well, just because.

The Journal article continues, to note that the COVID-19 lockdowns exacerbated the problems in an unexpected way: once the people who could work remotely, a population which included some of the city’s better-paid workers, they had little desire to return to, or if they had stayed in ‘Frisco, remain in that jungle of junkies.

The lockdowns remained in force until May of 2021, 14 months rather than the fifteen days to flatten the curve, and many people found out that they could make just as much money, progress in their careers, much further away from the city’s crime, ridiculous housing costs, and higher taxes.

The city has long been grungy, but the blight and crime worsened during the pandemic as city officials reduced the jail population by about 40% by releasing hundreds of inmates—never mind that they were far more likely to die of drug overdoses on the streets than of Covid in their cells. Meantime, the city encouraged the homeless to isolate in hotels by offering them free booze and marijuana. “They’re doing San Francisco a great service by staying inside,” one city official said. “We’re saying, ‘We’re doing what we can to support you staying inside and not have to go out and get these things.’”

Yet they still went out and got “things.” At least 18 homeless people died of drug overdoses in one hotel alone. Hotel damage from vagrants has cost the city roughly $44.5 million in settlement payments, which the city is asking the Federal Emergency Management Agency to reimburse. Some hotels have fallen into such disrepair that even many of the city’s homeless are refusing offers to be put up there.

Let’s tell the truth here: everything they did, everything!, was the wrong thing to do. The Journal goes on to tell us that while other cities have mostly returned to pre-panicdemic hotel and other business levels, San Francisco has not . . . and some hotel and building owners have simply walked away from their mortgages, seeing little hope that things will ever recover.

Therein lies the root cause of San Francisco’s public disorder. The city won’t recover unless its leaders get over their neurotic obsession with eliminating wealth.

The author might have been a little bit hyperbolic with that one, because the political leaders aren’t trying, in their minds, to eliminate wealth, but are so deceived by their own biases that they think government largesse for the poor will make everyone wealthy, while ignoring the signs, all around them, that the wealthy will protect what they have rather than let the government make them poor, and that giving free stuff to the deliberately poor simply enables them to survive while destitute.

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There is a Faustian bargain out there, that the reasonably well-to-do left just don’t understand. Reasonably hard-working themselves, providing decent lifestyles for their families and themselves, it is simply outside their paradigm that some people could choose to remain destitute as long as they could still survive rather than get off their asses and work. The well-to-do liberals can be comfortable in saying that marijuana isn’t harmful, without being able to wrap their pumpkin heads around the concept that alcohol and drugs can be addictive, and can rob the addicts of any real free will.

So, many who could take their money and flee have done just that. As nice as California’s climate can be — another magnet for the derelicts, not too hot and not too cold — there are plenty of other nice places to live. California has actually lost population, with nearly 700,000 more people moving out than moved in to the Pyrite State, even though The Los Angeles Times doesn’t see that as a problem. Of course, California is the nation’s capital of self-delusion.

The Deep Space Nine episodes describing the city’s ‘Sanctuary District’ are set next year. I can understand that, in 1994, when the episodes were written and produced, thirty years into the future was unknowable. California was, at the time, nearing the end of Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s first term — he would be re-elected in 1994 — following eight years under Governor George Deukmejian, another Republican, and the state was perceived as somewhat liberal, but not wild-eyed whacko leftist.

Who knows? Perhaps the writers of the episodes, Ira Behr and Robert Wolfe, figured that it was evil Republican, conservative policies which would lead to a semi-concentration camp existence for the poor, but the state has suffered the ills it has not under evil reich-wingers, but a super-majority of ‘progressive’ elected officials. The Fool’s Gold State won’t establish a ‘sanctuary district’ to house the destitute and the junkies — the Deep Space Nine episodes did not mention drug addicts, which would have been horribly, horribly politically incorrect, just the poor and unemployed — but the city’s and state’s policies are slowly turning all of San Francisco into its own sanctuary district, not by walling in the destitute, but by pushing out the hard-working and productive people.

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Crime, like any other cancer, left untreated, metastasizes Philadelphians have no one else to blame; they've done this to themselves

I have previously said that the greatest loss I have suffered in moving away from the Keystone State was the loss of freshly baked, hot Philadelphia pretzels. Coming in as a close second is the loss of Wawa coffee. Yes, you can buy Wawa coffee in K-cups, but even though we use filtered water in our Keurig, it just isn’t the same.

Wawa in Philly’s Headhouse Square to close

Neighborhood groups had complained to Wawa about aggressive panhandling, crime, and drug use at the store.

by Mike Newall | Friday, June 16, 2023 | 11:15 AM EDT

The Headhouse Square Wawa will close July 16, a company official told The Inquirer. The move comes after neighborhood associations had complained to Wawa about aggressive panhandling, crime, and drug use at the store and outside on the sidewalk.

The site will become the sixth Center City Wawa to shutter since 2020.

“While closing a store is always a difficult decision to make, Wawa constantly conducts careful and extensive evaluations of business performance and operational challenges of all stores on an ongoing basis,” said Wawa spokesperson Lori Bruce in a statement Friday, confirming the pending closure of the Wawa at Second and Lombard. “We continue to invest in our home market of Philadelphia.”

Also see: Ben Mannes on Broad + Liberty: Can cities rebound from lawlessness to cultures of responsibility and compliance?

This isn’t exactly a poor neighborhood! A 585 ft² rear apartment is listed for $305,000, while a 4 bedroom, 5 bathroom, 2,516 ft² upscale row house, with basement parking, is listed for $1,270,000. Yet the area is suffering from street crime and junkies. Who wants to fork out well over a million bucks to be tripping over junkies laying out in the street?

Joe Dain, cofounder of the Delancey Square Town Watch, which was formed earlier this year, said his group and other neighborhood organizations had met with Wawa officials in April to discuss ongoing concerns at the Headhouse Square Wawa. By that time, the company, he said, had already taken measures to curb panhandlers and other public nuisance issues, including curtailing its hours, hiring private security and working with city police to provide patrols.

“There were certainly efforts being made,” Dain said. “What we were addressing was the fact that more needed to be done.”

Wawa notified the group that it would be instead closing the location, he said. The closure will be only the latest vacancy to hit the historic cobblestone district. A CVS across the street from the Wawa also closed its doors in recent years. The drugstore had been battling many of the same concerns, Dain said. In 2019, Giant Heirloom said it planned to open a supermarket at Abbotts Square at Second and South, around the corner, but that project has since fallen through. The property sits vacant.

Crime affects everybody, not just the immediate victims. Owners see the value of their properties decline, shoppers have fewer options, including the loss of Wawa coffee, and things just generally deteriorate. Trouble is, among the good Democrats of the 5th Ward, which includes Headhouse Square, sort-of progressive but not wild-eyed crazy Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff received 4,777, 47.1%, of the votes in the May primary, while police-hating, hard, hard left progressive Helen Gym Flaherty came in second at 2,908, 28.7%. Primary winner Cherelle Parker Mullin, who campaigned on fighting crime among other things, came in fourth, with 931 votes, 9.2%.

The adjacent 2nd, 8th, and 30th showed similar results.

Simply put, the liberal Democratic voters of the area voted for their own problems!

Wawa has been shrinking its Center City presence.

In October, when Wawa announced it was closing stores at 12th and Market Streets and 19th and Market Streets, the company cited “continued safety and security closures.

Then, even further down, we get to the part where the Inquirer amused me:

Dain, of the Delancey Square Town Watch, said the Headhouse Square store had become more of a problem for residents in recent years.

“We would have groups of kids coming in and ransacking the place at night,” he said. Some of the panhandlers that often congregated outside the store had become aggressive, he said. The store had also become a gathering spot for people in addiction, he said, who would then camp in the historic Shambles structure or by the Headhouse Square Fountain.

“(P)eople in addiction”? That isn’t listed as a direct quote, and I had to chuckle; is that the newspaper’s stylebook phrase for junkies?

This is what you get when you tolerate crime, even the ‘little’ crimes, in what have been mostly minority neighborhoods. Sure, junkies camping out on the streets at Kensington and Allegheny Avenues aren’t bothering anyone in Center City . . . until now, they do. Someone knocking over a bodega in North Philly doesn’t really concern the people in Headhouse Square, and doesn’t even make the news unless a Temple University student gets hurt, so they can safely vote for soft-on-crime, police hating politicians like Mrs Flaherty, or District Attorney Larry Krasner, but crime, like any other cancer left untreated, metastasizes.

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A SEPTA security guard is shot

It was just eight days ago that we noted The Philadelphia Inquirer’s story in which the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, SEPTA, admitted that they had “lost control of the train cars.”

Then, just Wednesday, we heard that the City Council was going to have hearings on the proposed, $3+ billion Roosevelt Boulevard subway extension, driven in part by the collapsed bridge on Interstate 95 in the city. A lot of people support that, though it seems to me that adding more subway lines when SEPTA has lost control would be premature, to say no more.

And now we get this!

A SEPTA security guard was shot on a train in Frankford, police say

The shooting happened just after 3:10 p.m. at the Arrott Transportation Center, which is located on Frankford Avenue at Margaret Street.

by Robert Moran | Thursday, June 15, 2023 | 6:35 PM EDT

A SEPTA security guard was shot on a Market-Frankford Line train Thursday afternoon in the city’s Frankford section, police said.

The shooting happened just after 3:10 p.m. at the Arrott Transportation Center, which is located on Frankford Avenue at Margaret Street.

The Arrott Transportation Center on the Market Street-Frankford line is just four stops away from the infamous Allegheny Station in the heart of Kensington.

The 27-year-old security guard was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he was listed in stable condition with a gunshot wound to his right leg.

The victim works for SEPTA through a contract the transit agency has with the security firm Scotlandyard, said SEPTA spokesperson Andrew Busch.

A person answering the phone at Scotlandyard said the company had no comment.

Police reported no arrests but said a gun was recovered.

There’s more at the original, and at least so far, it’s not a subscribers’ only protected story.

As we’ve noted previously, the global warming climate change activists want more people to move into densely-populated urban areas, where they can use privately-owned automobiles less frequently and take public transportation. But when even the security guards on SEPTA are getting shot, perhaps a lot of people won’t see using SEPTA as a good or wise idea.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer whines that not enough blacks are getting into the legal marijuana business.

The Garden State legalized pot, so now The Philadelphia Inquirer is lamenting that not enough of New Jersey’s drug dealers are black!

New Jersey has few Black-owned marijuana dispensaries. A banker-turned-budtender is about to open one.

Tahir Johnson is preparing to open Simply Pure Trenton in his hometown of Ewing Township.

by Nick Vadala | Saturday, June 10, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

As a college student at Howard University in 2005, Tahir Johnson decided to go to the beach. He put on his pink polo shirt, packed up his decked-out red Lexus, grabbed his youngest brother and little cousin, and set off for Ocean City, Md.

But rather than a day in the sand, Johnson got pulled over due to a broken taillight — one traffic stop of what he estimates to be about 100 in his life. The officer told Johnson, who is Black, that he looked like a drug dealer. Johnson told the officer he had weed in his trunk. The police found it, and arrested him. He was convicted on a possession charge, and would later be arrested two more times for marijuana.

Looks like the officer — assuming that Mr Johnson told his tale accurately, and that it’s not just a whiny ‘driving while black’ meme — got it right.

His marijuana-related arrests and conviction have since been expunged. But Johnson’s legal issues never scared him away from cannabis.

Now, Johnson, 39, is preparing to open Simply Pure Trenton in Ewing Township, N.J., his hometown. The shop will make Johnson one of the first Black recreational dispensary owners in New Jersey, and one of the state’s first operating owners with a cannabis-related conviction. Simply Pure Trenton is tentatively set to open in July.

Tahir Johnson, CEO of the soon-to-open recreational marijuana shop Simply Pure Trenton in Ewing, N.J., Friday, May 12, 2023. Johnson programs his robot receptionist named Pepper to greet guests.

So, not only did the Inquirer tell us about Mr Johnson’s new business, but even provided the hyperlink to it, helpfully aiding readers to get to his store to get high.

In Mercer County, which includes Trenton and Ewing, police arrested Black people for marijuana at a rate 4.1 times higher than white people between 2010 and 2018, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. And New Jersey’s prison population has the highest racial disparity in the country, with Black people being incarcerated at a rate 12.5 times higher than whites, a 2021 report from the Sentencing Project found.

As we have previously documented, at least when it comes to homicide, black Americans both commit and are victims of that crime at a hugely elevated rate compared to white Americans. Unlike most offenses, murder is a crime of evidence, not a crime of reporting, as it’s very difficult to simply dispose of a body without it being noticed; dead bodies get found, and that leads to mostly reliable statistics. Yet the left somehow, some way, cannot seem to grasp the concept that perhaps, just perhaps, black Americans might commit other crimes at ‘disproportionate’ rates. Perhaps, just perhaps, if black New Jersey residents are “being incarcerated at a rate 12.5 times higher than whites,” this is indicative not of racism, but black New Jerseyans committing crimes at a far greater rate than whites. Why is that not a possibility being considered?

Discrimination, especially in enforcing marijuana laws, was “egregious” in Trenton, Johnson said. “If you’re unlucky enough to have even a seed or a roach, your whole life is ruined.”

So, the way to not have your life ruined is to not have “even a seed or a roach”, right?

A common criticism of the legal marijuana industry is that while Black people have been disproportionately targeted for cannabis offenses, white business owners are benefiting from legalization. New Jersey’s marijuana legalization laws have attempted to address that impact: The state’s Cannabis Regulatory Commission gives priority to applicants with cannabis-related convictions, as well as those who come from communities inordinately harmed by the war on drugs, such as Trenton and Ewing.

So, the Garden State is actually giving preferential treatment to convicted criminals rather than citizens with clean records. Wouldn’t the normal suspicion be that someone who has previously broken the law would be less likely to obey the law in the future? Isn’t that why we have the perfectly reasonable conditions that criminals released from prison have probation officers to whom they must report, and are legally barred from owning firearms?

There’s more at the original, a lot of it being laments about “underrepresented” racial and ethnic groups having difficulty raising money to get into that stinking business. I have to wonder: would the Inquirer have written it this way if the subject was liquor stores?

Let’s tell the truth here: marijuana use hurts black Americans at a ‘disproportionate’ rate, because it keeps more of them out of good jobs. If you are applying for a job which requires a commercial driver’s license, you will be subjected to pre-employment drug testing, and the company will be, under federal laws, required to maintain some form of random drug testing of covered personnel. Test hot for pot, and it’s off to the unemployment line you go! Many jobs which require personnel to handle money, along with other things, require pre-employment drug screens. And in the Inquirer’s hometown, where pot isn’t legal, rampant drug use of things other than marijuana has led to tremendous drug abuse problems; why wouldn’t the editors of the newspaper be taking a hard line against drug usage if they are so concerned about economic conditions for black Philadelphians?

Yet, in this article, the Inky is practically advocating more marijuana use by black citizens.

Using drugs, including alcohol, alters people’s sobriety, and being less than sober hurts people’s abilities to take good decisions and get and hold decent jobs. In America’s poorest large city, one would think that a sensible editorial position for our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper would be to want more residents, of all racial and ethnic groups, to be at their best and strongest economic and competitive conditions, to improve their lives individually and as part of the larger community, but that’s not what the Inky seems to do.

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He will not do well in prison

Earlier on Friday, I commented on a tweet from Steve Keeley, showing the mugshot of a Philadelphia man,35, charged with $300k take in spree of 24 robberies and burglaries in Philadelphia & 5 Montgomery & Bucks County suburbs in just 10 month span. I said, “Love the expression on his mug shot,” because he had a ‘what the heck have I done’ look on his face.

A 15-year-old Georgia boy thought that he was a big-time hood; he wound up crying for his mother.

‘Mama!’ teen screams in court, accused of killing Columbus woman while stealing gun

by Tim Chitwood | Friday, June 9, 2023 | 9:38 AM CDT

Screams erupted in a Columbus courtroom Thursday as a 15-year-old accused of fatally shooting a woman while stealing her brother’s gun fought deputies escorting him out after his hearing.

“Mama!” Jabori Baptiste yelled as he struggled to get back into the courtroom, where a woman screamed and wailed in response. Sheriff’s deputies wrestled with Bapiste while trying to restrain him, while other officers rushed his relatives out of the Recorder’s Court building on 10th Street.

Outside, the ruckus continued as Baptiste’s family saw the suspect was still fighting with deputies trying to get him into a patrol car. The shouting resumed, and it took several minutes for officers to get the teen securely into the cruiser. The car raced away toward the Aaron Cohn Regional Youth Detention Center, where Baptiste is being held.

Though he is being charged as an adult with felony murder and robbery, Recorder’s Court Judge David Ranieri allowed no news media to photograph or record the suspect in court because he is a juvenile.

Young Mr Baptiste was allegedly among a large group of similarly aged kids, and tried to steal a gun owned by Eugene Bell, out by the fuel pumps at a convenience store. As Mr Bell resisted, his sister, Natalie Bell intervened, the gun discharged, and Miss Bell was struck and killed. Young Mr Baptiste fled, with the weapon.

Like almost every other convenience store these days, the Mystic Mart at 645 Brown Avenue had surveillance cameras, which caught the whole incident on tape, and Mr Baptiste’s face was clearly recorded. The money line was near the end of the story:

Muscogee County School District Police, along with Baptiste’s probation officer, identified the youth from those images, he said.

So, he was 15-years-old, and already had a probation officer? Sounds like Big Time had already been busted and convicted before.

There is an old episode of NCIS, where Mark Harmon, as Leroy Jethro Gibbs is interrogating some young college students, and leans over one, saying, “Believe me, son, you will not do well in prison.” I’m guessing that a 15-year-old punk kid who cries for his mother will not do well behind bars.

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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.