Category Archives: Crime

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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.

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When supposedly responsible people make irresponsible promises

Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff, image from her campaign website. Click to enlarge.

That The Philadelphia Inquirer would not like a law-and-order Democrat like Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff[1]Even though married to a man named David McDuff, Mrs McDuff has not shown him the respect of taking his name. As stated in our Stylebook, at The First Street Journal we do not show similar disrespect … Continue reading is not much of a surprise. In an article published on February 15th on the four women running for the Democratic nomination for Mayor, she was listed last — which does happen when listed in alphabetical order — though the Inky did give her more words, 244, than Helen Gym Flaherty, 233, the #woke progressive who will probably be favored by the newspaper’s Editorial Board.

What Mrs McDuff posts as her campaign promises actually sounds reasonable, right up until it hits up against political reality:

Most shootings in Philadelphia are perpetrated with illegal firearms. Though the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania prevents Philadelphia from passing its own gun laws, it is within our legal authority to prosecute individuals possessing guns illegally. The Rhynhart Administration will aggressively pursue those trafficking illegal guns into our city, working in conjunction with law enforcement partners.

Recently, Philadelphia Police have been arresting more people for carrying illegal guns, but prosecutions have not kept pace. As Mayor, Rhynhart will convene a task force with the District Attorney’s Office, the Philadelphia Police, and the courts to review illegal firearm cases and ensure all three arms of the criminal justice system work cooperatively to eliminate illegal firearms from our streets.

The District Attorney is not a subordinate official to the Mayor, but is independently elected on his own, and the current DA, Larry Krasner, does not want to prosecute people for carrying “illegal guns,” and has said so openly:

“With so many guns available,” Krasner says, “a law enforcement strategy prioritizing seizing guns locally does little to reduce the supply of guns, and, if it entails increasing numbers of car and pedestrian stops, has the potential to be counterproductive by alienating the very communities that it is designed to help.” He notes that “people of color are disproportionately stopped in Philadelphia and arrested for illegal gun possession in Philadelphia and statewide.” African Americans, who represent 44 percent of Philadelphia’s population, account for about 80 percent of people arrested for illegal gun possession in the city.

The city’s George Soros-sponsored defense attorney now serving as chief prosecutor apparently cannot conceive of the notion that a higher percentage of blacks than whites are arrested for illegal firearms possession because perhaps, just perhaps, a higher percentage of black Philadelphians than whites are carrying guns illegally. Given that the vast majority of shooting and homicide victims in the city are black, you’d think he could figure that out on his own.

“Focusing so many resources on removing guns from the street while a constant supply of new guns is available is unlikely to stop gun violence, but it does erode trust and the perceived legitimacy of the system,” Krasner writes. “This in turn decreases the likelihood that people will cooperate and participate in the criminal legal system and associated processes, reducing clearance, conviction, and witness appearance rates.”

Krasner highlights an oddity of Pennsylvania law that compounds the racially disproportionate impact of arrests for illegal gun possession. For Pennsylvanians generally, carrying a concealed weapon without a license is a first-degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to five years in jail and/or a maximum fine of $10,000. For Philadelphia residents, the same offense justifies an additional misdemeanor charge. As a local law firm explains, the combination of those two charges is “almost always graded as a felony,” which means “it may carry significant jail time even for defendants who do not have a prior criminal record.”

That Mr Krasner and his office could, if they so chose, not pursue the additional misdemeanor charge went unspoken, but given that city officials have long sought to be able to pass stricter gun control measures for Philadelphia, the whole thing becomes laughable: the District Attorney wouldn’t prosecute them anyway.

Yet Mrs McDuff just airily brushes that concern aside.

Sadly, it gets worse, which was my inspiration for this article. In this tweet, Mrs McDuff says, directly, “As your Mayor, I will reduce this homicide rate, I will cut it in half within my first term, from over 500 to under 250, where it was seven years ago.”[2]Direct quote from her spoken words, rather than the reduced version in the heading of the tweet.

At this point, I would note that even under Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, the number of homicides was not cut from the 391 in the year before he took office to “under 250,” 246 to be precise, in his first term, but his sixth year in office, and that Administration had far less of a reduction to get under 250.

Mrs McDuff has promised to do something unprecedented. If she wins, will she decline to run for a second term if she fails to meet that first term promise?

References

References
↑1 Even though married to a man named David McDuff, Mrs McDuff has not shown him the respect of taking his name. As stated in our Stylebook, at The First Street Journal we do not show similar disrespect to husbands, and always refer to married women by their married names.
↑2 Direct quote from her spoken words, rather than the reduced version in the heading of the tweet.
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Don’t waste time and money trying for a death sentence which will never be carried out

Sergeant Mark Fusetti is a retired Philadelphia Police officer, who last served on the Warrant Squad, and one of my electronic friends. His major concern right now — other than helping his friend Sam Oropeza gat on the ballot for a Philadelphia City Council At Large seat — is crime in the City of Brotherly Love. The fatal shooting of Temple Police Officer Christopher Fitzgerald, allegedly by a privileged punk kid from Bucks County, has Sgt Fusetti, and many of the other law-and-order conservatives in and around Philly rightly concerned.

There are a lot of responses to Sgt Fusetti’s tweet, and almost all of them call for the death penalty in this case. Continue reading →

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Someone needs to check the water supply in Loudoun County Something is making public officials lie through their scummy teeth

It seems that Loudoun County, Virginia, isn’t the greatest place to work or go to school.

Remember the sexual assault by a ‘transgender’ student against a girl in the girls’ bathroom, which came to light when the victim’s father was demanding answers from the school board, and then dragged to the floor and arrested. It was all a big right-wing myth, the credentialed media told us:

The media’s defense of transgenderism fell apart quickly when the rapist was found guilty. Continue reading →

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You can never solve a problem unless you admit what the problem is, and Philly’s Democrats won’t do that

As we noted on Friday, with “(N)early thirty” spent shell casings — and an Inquirer photo shows a #29 evidence marker at the shell casings — and three shooters, and everyone is going to know that this was a targeted hit intended for one or more of the victims, and this is Philly same old, same old. Of course we were right!

The Strawberry Mansion shooting that wounded 7 was a targeted attack that hit bystanders — including a 2-year-old and her mother

Surveillance footage shows the three black-clad masked shooters firing at the teenagers, as bystanders flee stray bullets.

by Rodrigo Torrejón, Oona Goodin-Smith, and Chris Palmer | Friday, February 24, 2023 | 11:02 PM EST

The shooting that wounded seven people Thursday evening in Philadelphia’s Strawberry Mansion neighborhood appeared to be a targeted attack between three shooters and a group of teenagers — with stray bullets injuring a 2-year-old girl and her mother — police said Friday. The gunmen remain at large.

It occurred shortly before 6 p.m. as the group of four teens rounded the corner of 31st and Norris Streets, in front of a beer distributor and half a block from James G. Blaine School.

Surveillance footage shows that as the group turned the corner, three black-clad masked shooters hopped out of a silver Hyundai parked in front of the beer shop and began to shoot at the teenagers using at least one gun with an extended clip — peppering the street with gunfire. . . . .

Police said Friday they are still searching for three shooters and a gray, four-door Hyundai Elantra, possibly a model from 2011 to 2016, with an unknown Pennsylvania license plate. Police said it wasn’t immediately clear why the group of teens was targeted.

“It wasn’t immediately clear why the group of teens was targeted”? Bovine feces! It is crystal clear: one group had a beef with another, and in Philadelphia’s normal culture under Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, beefs among the gang-bangers “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families” are settled with bullets. It wouldn’t be quite so bad if the bad guys underprivileged young men from neighborhoods depressed by years of housing ‘redlining’ and economic disinvestment were better shots and only struck their intended victims. Continue reading →

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Killadelphia: Once again, The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to obscure the truth. Philly's "cliques of young men" are some really lousy shots!

According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, there have been 68 people murdered in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, February 23rd, four more than the previous day’s report.

The Twitter site Philly Crime Update reported on two of them, which was more than our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, did. The Inky did, however, have a big story on a multiple shooting in which no one was killed, because it was near a school:

7 people, including a 2-year-old girl and 5 teenagers, were shot in Strawberry Mansion

The gunfire erupted just after 5:50 p.m. at 31st and Norris Streets, police said. Three shooters remained at large, police said.

by Robert Moran, Ellie Rushing, and Kristen A. Graham | Thursday, February 23, 2023 | 10:48 PM EST

Seven people, including a 2-year-old girl and five teenagers, were wounded in a shooting Thursday evening near a school in the city’s Strawberry Mansion section, police said.

The gunfire erupted just after 5:50 p.m. on the northeast corner of 31st and Norris Streets in front of a beer distributor, said police, who provided the following information on the victims:

  • 2-year-old black female who was shot in her left thigh, transported by private vehicle with a police escort to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, listed in stable condition.
  • 15-year-old male, race not specified, shot twice in the chest and once in the right side of his body was transported to Temple University Hospital, listed in critical condition.
  • 13-year-old black male shot in his left hand, transported to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, listed in stable condition.
  • 16-year-old black male shot in his left arm, transported to Temple University Hospital, listed in stable condition.
  • 16-year-old black male shot in his right arm and left leg was taken by medics to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, reported in stable condition.
  • 17-year-old black male with a graze wound to his thigh was transported by Uber to Thomas Jefferson, reported in stable condition.
  • 31-year-old black female, was shot twice in the left leg, transported to Temple, listed in stable condition.

Except that, nope, what I listed above was the information actually provided by the police. What the Inquirer published was:

A 2-year-old girl who was shot in her left thigh was transported by private vehicle with a police escort to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where she was listed in stable condition.

A 15-year-old boy shot twice in the chest and once in the right side of his body was transported to Temple University Hospital, where he was listed in critical condition.

A 13-year-old boy shot in his left hand also was transported to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where he was listed in stable condition.

A 16-year-old boy shot in his left arm also was taken to Temple and was reported in stable condition.

Another 16-year-old boy shot in his right arm and left leg was taken by medics to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. He was reported in stable condition.

A 17-year-old boy with a graze wound to his thigh was transported by Uber to Thomas Jefferson and was reported in stable condition.

The seventh victim, a 31-year-old woman, was shot twice in the left leg. She was listed in stable condition at Temple.

Note that the newspaper deliberately scrubbed all references to race from their story. It’s nice to have the direct confirmation of what I have been saying, that the Inky has been deliberately censoring the information they have received, in order to fulfill publisher Elizabeth Hughes’ dictate that the newspaper will be an “anti-racist news organization,” but at some point, I’ve got to ask: who do they think they’re fooling? It’s Strawberry Mansion, and anybody who knows anything about Philly will simply assume that the victims are black.

Of course, it wasn’t just the victims about whom the Inky censored information:

Late Thursday night, police said they were looking for three shooters and a gray 4-door Hyundai Elantra, possibly a model year from 2011 to 2016, with an unknown Pennsylvania license plate.

The Inquirer printed the same images that Philly Crime Update had received from the police, but the newspaper censored the fact that all three suspects are black males, another thing that almost all readers would suspect. “(N)early thirty” spent shell casings — and an Inquirer photo shows a #29 evidence marker at the shell casings — and three shooters, and everyone is going to know that this was a targeted hit intended for one or more of the victims, and this is Philly same old, same old. The police will interrogate the victims, to attempt to find out which one had been the real target, though it’s always possible that the intended victim will clam up, expecting street justice from other members of his crew.

One final point: at least 29 rounds fired, and the gang-bangers “clique of young men”[1]We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes … Continue reading didn’t actually kill anyone? Philly’s “cliques of young men” are some really rotten shots!

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