Category Archives: Crime

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Who would want to be a landlord these days?

I’d like to say that I am not a landlord, but that wouldn’t be technically true. My wife and I own one two bedroom house that we rent out, but it is rented within the family. The tenant, my wife’s sister, pays us rent, which we use to pay the mortgage.

More, when we bought our current property, meant as our retirement home, we were both still working, and not planning to retire for a few more years. We couldn’t just let the house sit empty, so we rented it out for three years, and while the tenant paid his rent, on time, being a landlord was not fun. We made very little money, as there were always things going wrong, things needing to be done. Being a landlord is not an occupation I would suggest for anyone.

Landlord-tenant officer shoots woman in head during eviction, police say

Landlord-tenant officers are not sworn law enforcement personnel.

by Jesse Bunch, Max Marin, and Ryan W. Briggs | Wednesday, March 29, 2023 | 5:23 PM EST

A Philadelphia deputy landlord-tenant officer shot a woman in the head while trying to enforce an eviction Wednesday morning, drawing a rebuke from housing advocates and raising alarm over the court system’s use of a deputized security force to eject renters.

The incident took place inside the Girard Court Apartments in Sharswood shortly after 9 a.m. Lt. Jason Hendershot, of the Police Department’s officer-involved-shooting unit, said the woman was at home with her husband in their first-floor apartment when the landlord-tenant deputy arrived in plain clothes to serve a court-ordered eviction.

A struggle ensued in the hallway, allegedly involving a knife, he said. The deputy discharged a weapon and struck the 35-year-old woman, who was taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in critical condition. It was not immediately clear if the woman, whose name has not been released by authorities, was holding the knife.

Hendershot said the deputy appeared to have a head injury, though it was unclear if he required medical treatment.

Court records show the landlord alleged more than $8,000 in unpaid rent, but ultimately reached an agreement with the tenants last May that no money was owed, the tenants would move out by January, and the landlord would make necessary repairs. The tenants sought to postpone their eviction in October, alleging the landlord had failed to fix the property as promised. A judge denied their petition last month.

Officials have not released the name of the deputy landlord-tenant officer and details on the timeline leading up to the shooting remained hazy.

Unlike other jurisdictions, Philadelphia courts rely on a private attorney, appointed by Municipal Court’s president judge and known as a landlord-tenant officer, to execute evictions. This attorney deputizes private security contractors to perform on-site lockouts in exchange for the right to collect millions in related eviction fees.

Of course, it didn’t take the furthest left Democratic mayoral candidate, Helen Gym Flaherty, to politicize it. She tweeted:

While details are still coming to light, I’m appalled by today’s shooting at Girard Court Apartments and my heart is with the impacted families.

I’ve raised alarm bells for years about our city’s terrible eviction practices and worked to reform them.

So, what did we have? The family were more than $8,000 in arrears on their rent, which was apparently forgiven by the owner, in lieu of an agreement that they’d move out by the end of 2022. But the family wanted to stay, and petitioned the court to extend, for an unspecified period of time, a petition which was denied. If the eviction was being carried out on March 29th, the tenants had stayed three months beyond their agreed evacuation date.

Mrs Flaherty, of course, always takes the side of the tenants facing eviction, but never seems to consider the property owners. If my sister-in-law stopped paying her rent, we would still owe the mortgage payments on the place, and mortgage companies don’t just give property owners a break because the rent that was due wasn’t paid. The county expects the property taxes to be paid, and the tenants not paying their rent won’t stop the county from seizing the property if the property owner doesn’t pay the taxes!

It’s a good thing that Philadelphia evictions are privately handled! If Mrs Flaherty was elected Mayor, she would be pressing Sheriff Rochelle Bilal — who is independently elected — to refuse to evict anyone.

That’s todays left: they pander to the tenants, and are perfectly willing to f(ornicate) over property owners.

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What could possibly go wrong?

In October of 2021, the very #woke[1]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 Philadelphia City Council was swayed by the notion that law enforcement had created a class of offenses which fell under the heading of “driving while black”, and they were determined to end that in the City of Brotherly Love:

Philly has become the first big city to ban minor traffic stops said to criminalize ‘driving while Black’

Philadelphia is the first large U.S. city to enact legislation aimed at curtailing the use of pretextual stops for low-level infractions, which disproportionately have targeted Black drivers.

by Sean Collins Walsh | October 14, 2021 | 6:42 PM EDT

Philadelphia on Thursday approved groundbreaking legislation that will bar its police officers from pulling over drivers for low-level motor vehicle offenses like broken taillights, a long-standing law enforcement tool that critics said led to Black motorists being stopped at disproportionate rates.

With a 14-2 vote, City Council passed the Driving Equality Bill, which details seven offenses — including improperly displayed registration or emission stickers — as “secondary violations” that cannot be the sole reason for police to pull over a driver. Instead, officers can issue citations for those infractions that will be mailed to drivers. The legislation will take effect 120 days after Mayor Jim Kenney signs it, which he is expected to do in the coming days.

In doing so, Philadelphia became the first large U.S. city to ban the use of so-called pretextual stops for low-level infractions, a practice that police departments have not only permitted, but encouraged for years to enable officers to potentially search the cars of drivers they suspected of carrying illegal drugs or weapons. Instead, critics say, it led to motorists being unfairly stopped and searched for what’s become known as driving while Black.

If that sounds like bovine feces to you, well that’s because it is. The Philadelphia City Council was saying, in effect, that black motorists are less capable than white drivers of keeping their cars registered and in proper working condition.

The new law is likely to have a significant impact on the nature of policing in Philadelphia. About 97% of police vehicle stops are for low-level violations, according to the Defender Association. Eliminating those could lead to as many as 300,000 fewer police encounters each year, it projected.

Ahhh, the Defender Association. When you hear the words on a police show, “You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you,” the Defender Association of Philadelphia is what you get in our nation’s sixth largest city, and they truly love them some criminal defendants.

The actual text of the Driving Equity Bill does not mean the police cannot stop you if you don’t have a license plate on the back of your car, but that’s pretty much how it has worked out. And so I saw this in Tuesday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

Cars with missing or covered plates are foiling speed cameras on Roosevelt Blvd.

In the 26 months since speed-enforcement cameras were installed on Roosevelt Boulevard, average speeds and violations have dropped.

by Thomas Fitzgerald | Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Over the last year, 30,630 vehicles caught speeding on Roosevelt Boulevard dodged tickets because the drivers were traveling without a license plate, according to the Philadelphia Parking Authority.

As a result, automated speed-enforcement cameras watching over one of the region’s most dangerous roads did not capture the data needed to send a ticket to the registered owner. PPA staff and city police officers who review potential violations had to reject them.

That’s kind of funny, actually, that the Roosevelt Boulevard Robocop couldn’t send tickets to guys eleven miles an hour over the speed limit, right?

And 240 vehicles with no plates were clocked at 100 mph or more, the report said.

Oops!

What is Roosevelt Boulevard like?

Roosevelt Boulevard has 12 lanes and long stretches without traffic signals. Though built like a highway, it runs through densely packed commercial and residential neighborhoods. Posted speed limits are 40 mph and 45 mph along the route. It’s often at or near the top of the list of most dangerous roads in the city and is especially perilous for crossing pedestrians.

The speed enforcement cameras have contributed to reduced speeds, as the robocop just sends tickets to drivers. But it seems that 30,630 drivers have taken advantage of Philly’s non-enforcement of non-hazardous vehicle violations; the peopple who scoff the law the most, by not having license plates visible, are the ones getting away with speeding on the Boulevard.

The 100+ MPH violators? Almost certainly street racers, and you’ve got to admit: if you’re going to drag race in the city, the Boulevard sure looks like an ideal place to do it! Maybe, just maybe, the “driving while black” laws have something to do with people not having license plates, or having them deliberately obscured. Hit-and-run fatalities are not exactly unheard of on Roosevelt Boulevard.

References

References
↑1 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.
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Killadelphia: Everyone wants to talk around the problem, without ever telling the truth

There are dozens and dozens of suggestions on how to reduce crime, but there is one way which actually does work: locking up the criminals that are caught for as long as the law allows, because the criminal who is behind bars is not out on the streets able to commit more crimes. But somehow, some way, that very simple logic has escaped the good citizens of the City of Brotherly Love. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Gun violence can affect every part of Philly life. Here’s how residents suggest solving it.

Philadelphians are “tired of looking over their shoulder.” Some want to leave the city altogether.

by Ellie Rushing and Nate File | Monday, March 20, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

Joshua Sanchez was leaving his bank one day in North Philly when a group of men with guns swarmed him. They robbed him, he said, then shot him once in the back before fleeing.

“It’s still there,” Sanchez, 38, said of the bullet, which is lodged too deep and close to his spine for doctors to remove.

Three years later, he’s tried to move his life forward, but gun violence remains a looming threat. Sanchez hears shots at home and at job sites, where he works in property maintenance. The danger often feels overwhelming, the lifelong Philadelphian said. He worries that if he stays much longer, he or his son may not survive.

“I just put my house up for sale,” he said. “I’m getting out of Philadelphia.”

He wouldn’t be the first. The 2020 Census put the population of Philadelphia at 1,603,797, but just a year later, the Census Bureau was guesstimating the city’s population as down to 1,576,251, a 1.72% population loss. More than a year later, the Census Bureau has still not updated its website to reflect its guesstimate for 2022 population.

Nearly 50% of Philadelphians in recent poll said that gun violence has had a major negative impact on their quality of life, per the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and research firm SSRS, and 64% of respondents said they have heard gunshots in their neighborhood in the last year.

This is the second time in a week in which I have seen the Leftist Lenfest Institute referenced in an Inquirer story, yet in neither the previous one, nor this, does the newspaper article point out that the Lenfest Institute owns the Inquirer. To cite something as though it is an outside source without that disclosure violates every standard of journalism of which I can think. The Lenfest Institute’s website doesn’t even mention that it owns the Inky on its main page, and you have to go down to a second section on its “About” page to see that acknowledged.

In interviews with nearly a dozen residents, people conveyed an ever-present fear of life in the city. Many said they’ve changed their habits in recent years as shootings have spiked, and now limit their time spent outdoors, especially at night. Mothers said they worry about their children anytime they leave home. Others, such as Sanchez, said they’d move out of Philadelphia if they had the resources.

“People are tired of looking over their shoulder,” said Jacob Green, 69, a poll respondent who’s saving up money to move from Mount Airy to North Carolina.

Then there was this tweet from WCAU-TV, Channel 10, the NBC owned-and-operated station in Philadelphia. District Attorney Larry Krasner apparently wants to give them their severe slaps on the wrist, and released a series of mugshots of homicide suspects. Given that many of the credentialed media journolists[1]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 complained about Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News and his unsoftened coverage of crime in the city, they will doubtlessly be aghast that NBC10 put together this montage of the mugshots of the ten murder suspects, because nine of them are black, and one appears to be Hispanic, or “brown” as The Philadelphia Inquirer would call him. That the District Attorney had the police mugshots of nine of the ten suspects tells us that all but one had been previously arrested, which raises the obvious question: how many, if any, of these suspects could and should have been behind bars when they committed the murders of which they are accused?

More than that, in the linked story from NBC10, the mugshots of the ten suspects are all separate, but, for the tweet, the station put them all together, a montage of minority suspects.

As I guessed without looking first, the Inky didn’t have any of that on their website main page or specific crime page.[2]As of 10;10 AM EDT. The newspaper would much rather not show mugshots like that than help the police apprehend murder suspects.

Back to the original Inquirer article:

The poll also quantified a long-known fact of the crisis: Communities of color largely bear the brunt of it.

Black respondents were more than twice as likely to say that gun violence has seriously affected their quality of life, compared with white respondents. And across income levels, Black and Latino residents were more likely than white residents to report that they had heard gunshots in the last year.

So, while the Inky is willing to tell us that “(c)ommunities of color” are the primary victims of shootings and killings in Philly, the newspaper is unwilling to do anything to get identified and sought-after killers off the city’s streets. Got it!

The survey indicates that while 86% want improved relationships between the police and local communities, only 55% support increased funding for the Philadelphia Police Department. And the people of Philadelphia voted, by landslide margins in both the primary and general elections, in Philly’s most murderous year, 2021, to keep Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner as District Attorney.

Meanwhile, Margie Harkins, 63, a former X-ray technician who frequently worked with gun violence victims, said she wants to see stricter gun laws but knows that action must come from state leaders, not the city. But first, she said, the city must address the mindset of the people using guns.

“Why is everything settled by pulling a gun?” asked Harkins, a poll respondent from Southwest Philly.

Why? Because parents aren’t rearing their children properly, that’s why. With fathers absent or never known, and mothers trying to rear children on their own when there simply are not enough hours in the day to work and try to be both mother and father to their kids, with drugs rampant and a city that’s trying not to stamp out drugs but create ‘safe injection centers’, how can anyone expect anything other than savagery?

References

References
↑1 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.
↑2 As of 10;10 AM EDT.
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‘Progressive’ San Francisco defense attorney who wants to be District Attorney thinks people should just suck it up and accept crime to live in the city

Every once in a while, I come upon something which leaves me shaking my head. This is from John Hamasaki on Twitter. Mr Hamasaki is saying, basically, that in order to live in an urban environment, you must simply accept being a crime victim!

Mr Hamasaki is saying that a loss of “thousands of dollars” is pretty much just something you have to expect, and living in the suburbs, living somewhere more reasonably safe, shelters people so very much that they just aren’t tough enough for “city life.”

Of course, it is hardly just a “property crime” problem, as though the loss of property for which people worked hard to obtain — something else that’s part of “city life” — is mostly a nothingburger. Car break-ins have surged dramatically in Mr Hamasaki’s home town, but he doesn’t care. Catalytic converter theft is becoming more and more common, especially in states where emissions testing is required as part of an annual inspection, and they can cost up to $3,500 to replace. If you live in Philadelphia, where the median household income is $52,649, that’s a big chunk of change, though as a criminal defense attorney in San Francisco, perhaps it’s not quite as big a chunk of change for him. As a candidate to replace ousted San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, he had the support of the same ‘progressive’ allies — translation: soft on crime — as the recalled Mr Boudin.

Car thefts have increasingly become carjackings, because newer vehicles require a separate key fob for the vehicle to start, and the easiest way to get that is to hijack the car while the owner is present with the fob. Of course, carjackings are robberies by force, most frequently armed carjackings in which owners are confronted with a gun in their faces.

The bad guys don’t always stick with simple larceny. The crime wave which really got started in 2020 is a huge murder rate as well. Mr Hamasaki believes that you’ve got to be tough to live in the city? Well, in Pennsylvania, the homicide rate for the 65 counties which did not include Philadelphia and Pittsburgh increased by 1.18% between 2018 and 2021, while in Allegheny County — Pittsburgh — it jumped 33.77%, and in Philly, a whopping 59.21%. 54.72% of all murders in Pennsylvania occurred in Philadelphia, which has just 12.37% of the commonwealth’s population. With 78.11% of the state’s population, the counties outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh saw only 33.30% of the killings.

Mr Hamasaki complained that those of us who complain about unchecked crime simply hate cities. No, it’s what our major cities have become that people hate. But when kids get gunned down near their schools in targeted gang hits, and city parents refuse to send their kids to those schools, it’s people in the cities themselves who are concerned and scared. When applications for concealed carry permits more than sextupled in Philly, it’s not because people aren’t ‘tough enough’ for ‘city life,’ but because they’re just plain scared.

Robert E Howard, the 1930s author of the Conan stories, wrote in the Tower of the Elephant, “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” Mr Hamasaki appears to be sanctioning the new savagery in our cities, without realizing that it can get your skull split, in the more modern form of getting your brains blown out by a Glock 9mm.

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“I’ll take ‘Things you won’t find in the Inquirer’ for $200, Alex.”

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Journalists Against Journalism: Reporter in Crime-Ridden Philadelphia Criticized for Reporting About City’s Crime Wave

As I’ve pointed out many times before, The Philadelphia Inquirer is our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, serving the nation’s sixth largest city and seventh largest metropolitan area, winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, the unofficial newspaper of record for the area, but they just don’t want to report the news!

Man Shoots Would-Be Car Thief During Gun Battle, Police Say

During the gun battle, the 18-year-old was shot four times throughout his body and collapsed to the ground after trying to flee, according to investigators.

By David Chang • Published March 16, 2023 • Updated on March 16, 2023 • 11:54 PM EDT

An 18-year-old man was shot four times after he got into a gun battle with the owner of the car he was trying to steal in Northeast Philadelphia, police said.

Police said the 18-year-old and a second suspect were trying to steal a Toyota sedan along the 4400 block of Princeton Avenue around 3:30 p.m. on Thursday. The two suspects went inside the car when the vehicle’s owner, a 26-year-old man, heard the commotion and exited his home, according to investigators.

Continue reading →

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Once again, the #woke credentialed media don’t want to cover the story * Updated! *

As we reported on Saturday, some of the credentialed journalists, journolists as we see them, really don’t like it when other journalists do something really radical like report the facts. 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.

Yesterday, a 15-year-old Hispanic boy was shot and killed, shot ten times, making it an obvious hit, not far from Samuel Fels High School. Here’s the story from Fox 29 News:

Police: 15-year-old chased down Philadelphia street, shot to death in broad daylight

Published March 13, 2023 1:27PM | Updated 10:17PM

PHILADELPHIA – A 15-year-old is dead after police say he was chased down a Philadelphia street by a group of gunmen and shot at least 10 times. Continue reading →

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Trying too hard? The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to put lipstick on a pig.

As we have previously reported, the shooting of seven people near Strawberry Mansion High School has led parents of students at another school whose children were going to be transferred to Strawberry Mansion due to asbestos remediation to protest that vigorously, claiming that the Mansion was inherently unsafe. When the transfer actually happened, only 28 students actually showed up at Mansion.

So now The Philadelphia Inquirer is telling us what a great school Strawberry Mansion is!

Strawberry Mansion High School continues to fight an old reputation. But students say the school is an oasis.

“We will meet our students where they are, and really work to get them to their highest potential,” Strawberry Mansion Principal Brian McCracken said.

by Kristen A Graham | Monday, March 13, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

When Patience Wilson shares with people that she attends Strawberry Mansion High School, they often shake their heads and tell her all the bad things they’ve heard about her school.

But Wilson, a smiley 17-year-old senior, knows the real Mansion, the one behind the hasty headlines and deep-seated stereotypes.

The real Mansion, she says, is different: a place where students can start on a path to a building trades career, partner with nonprofits, spend their lunchtime in clubs and activities, and have access to trips, career and technical education programs, college classes, and adults who surround them with expectations and supports and love — no matter where they’re coming from or how long they’re able to stay.

“People usually judge us based on what’s happened in the past. But they’re not focusing on what’s happening right now,” said Wilson.

Reporter Kristen Graham focuses on Philadelphia schools, and it’s a good thing that the newspaper has someone who does that with such a large public school system. Mrs Graham then began to tell us about the school’s problems:

For years, Strawberry Mansion has fought on several fronts: against the challenges of its surroundings (the neighborhood has the highest number of shootings this year in the city; a full 52% of children under 18 in the immediate area live in poverty, according to Philadelphia and federal data), against a mismatch between available funding and concentrated student need.

It’s coped with a system that, because it emphasizes choice, has made things tougher for comprehensive high schools, which accept all students who walk in the door. Less than 10% of the students who live in Mansion’s attendance zone go to the school, according to district data, and those who do tend to be the most vulnerable.

I’m actually impressed that these two paragraphs were placed where they were, fifth and sixth in the story, because much of the remainder of the story is extremely positive about the school itself. But when Mrs Graham tells us that the neighborhood has the highest number of shootings in the city so far this year — and plenty of them in previous years — one thing is obvious: the concerns that the Building 21 parents raised are valid: it doesn’t matter how great a school might be if the students are getting shot!

There are several more paragraphs telling readers — and the newspaper didn’t restrict it to subscribers only, so if you don’t have too many Inquirer story reads, you can access it online — what the school has been doing to try to be better, almost to the point of pro-Mansion propaganda, Mrs Graham comes to this point:

On paper, Mansion’s statistics are startling: By the district’s measure, last year, 41% of the school’s ninth graders were on track to graduation. Just 9% met state standards in reading, 2% in math.

But the intense needs of Mansion’s students mean those numbers require lots of context. Consider the student who’s never been identified as requiring special-education services but who reads at a second-grade level. Or the teen whose attendance and grades are spotty but recently had been removed from his family’s care and now lives with a foster family, whom the school can’t reach.

If fewer than half, barely 41%, of freshmen are on a path to graduation, a figure I find questionable if “(j)ust 9% met state standards in reading, 2% in math,” it’s difficult for me to see how the school is doing its job. If there are students, in a high school, who need “special education services” going unnoticed by teachers when reading at the “second-grade level,” how are readers supposed to believe that the teachers are doing a good job? How would the parents of the displaced Building 21 students ever think that Strawberry Mansion High School is a good place to send their kids even without the question of violence in the neighborhood?

You know, I get it: Mrs Graham wanted to inform readers of the good things happening at Mansion, and pointed out several things that are supposed to be good, about vocational education to get some students into trades which don’t require college, several things telling readers how hard the school under principal Brian McCracken is trying. But when fewer “than 10% of the students who live in Mansion’s attendance zone go to the school,” it’s an inescapable fact: parents and students, people who are most familiar with the neighborhood and the school, are voting with their SEPTA passes, voting against the place. With fewer than 10% of the students in the school’s attendance zone going there, is it any surprise that the parents of the Building 21 students don’t want their kids there?

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The Philadelphia Inquirer: using grammar to avoid telling the whole truth

Writers attempt to communicate with the written word, and decent writers should know at least something about grammar, to ply their trade most efficiently. One important concept in grammar is the difference between the comparative and the superlative.

Comparatives vs. Superlatives

Published October 7, 2019

Not all things are created equal: some are good, others are better, and only the cream of the crop rise to the level of best. These three words—good, better, and best—are examples of the three forms of an adjective or adverb: positive, comparative, and superlative. . . . .

There are a few irregular adjectives and adverbs. For those, you must memorize how these change the spelling of their positive form to show comparative and superlative degrees.

Some common irregular adjectives are good, better, best and bad, worse, worst.

Some have more than one option: little can become littler or less (comparative), and littlest or least (superlative). Many, some, or much become more in the comparative and most in the superlative.

It was this paragraph which caught my attention, in the main editorial in this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer. Any decent writer understands that he shouldn’t use the same word twice in a sentence if possible, so when the Editorial Board wrote that “too many residents endure,” the following should be “where most, but not all, the shootings occur.” Continue reading →

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Killadelphia

I suspect that Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Stephanie Farr doesn’t normally write the crime reports, but simply drew the weekend assignment. But the City of Brotherly Love had a bloody, bloody weekend, and Miss Farr wound up being the reporter who had to write about it. Then, when I saw her Inky bio at the bottom of the article, in which she wrote, “I write about what makes Philly weird, wild, and wonderfully unique,” I found the irony inescapable. But, I must at the very least, give her props for using the Oxford comma!

Five people were killed in seven shootings across Philly in an eight-hour span this weekend

A 14-year-old is among the weekend’s homicide victims. At least 76 people have been killed in the city this year in just 64 days.

by Stephanie Farr | Sunday, March 5, 2023

A 14-year-old walking with his friends in Overbrook and a mother whose young child brought a gun he found on the street into their home were among seven people shot in an eight-hour period between Saturday night and Sunday morning in Philadelphia, according to police.

Five of the victims died, including the teen. The mother, whose shooting appears accidental, remains in stable condition, police said.

The shootings come less than a week after activists held a march against gun violence in Strawberry Mansion, following the shooting of seven people, including five teens and a 2-year-old, on Feb. 23 near the James G. Blaine School.

As the Inquirer also reported, parents of students at Building 21, West Oak Lane High School, are incensed that those students have been reassigned to Strawberry Mansion High School due to an asbestos problem at Building 21. Nobody wants anything to do with Strawberry Mansion if they can help it, because it’s just plain unsafe. Another story Monday afternoon reported that only 28 out of 390 Building 21 students showed up at Strawberry Mansion.

As of Sunday afternoon, at least 76 people have been killed in Philadelphia this year in a span of just 64 days, according to police statistics.

Sadly enough, Miss Farr’s report is already out-of-date: the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page now has 79 homicides as of 11:59 PM EST on March 5th, 79 homicides in 64 days, or 1.2344 per day.

As a daily average, 1.2344 homicides per day yields ‘just’ 451 for the year, but in Philly’s deadliest year, 2021, the 83 homicides as of the 64th day worked out to ‘only’ 473 murders . . . and the city saw 562 killings that year. Warmer weather brings out more gunfire, and Philly is on a clear path to another year of more than 500 people being sent untimely to their eternal rewards.

Yeah, Philly’s law enforcement trio of Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw are sure doing, to use a Kentucky expression from the 1960s, a fine, fine, super fine job!

“I also fight for Philly’s honor against all of its haters,” Miss Farr included in her bio. Well, Philadelphia’s haters are the ones roaming the city’s mean streets, killing other Philadelphians.

One of the comments was from someone styling himself only as T, who wrote:

Let me get this straight. The city got tore up for a career violent criminal, Walter Wallace. Got tore up for a career violent criminal, George Floyd. But when a 14 y/o presumably innocent kid gets murdered, the residents don’t even talk about it. Can someone make it make sense?

“(P)resumably innocent kid”? If the “residents don’t even talk about it,” perhaps they didn’t see him as all that innocent. With 27 rounds fired, this was clearly a targeted hit, and people get targeted for killing for real reasons. Those reasons may not make any real sense, but who knows what they are?

This, Miss Farr, is what leads people to trash Philadelphia. Philly is a wonderful and historic city, founded in 1682 by William Penn.