Category Archives: Crime

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Chickenhawks in the Church

Pedophilia is defined as a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children, while hebephilia is that attraction to children in the early stages of puberty, approximately ages 11 to 14, and ephebophilia is the attraction to teenagers in the later stages of puberty, approximately 15 to 19.

Archdiocese of Philadelphia agrees to $3.5 million settlement in priest sexual assault lawsuit

The lawsuit alleged that Pastor John Close raped a boy at St. Katherine’s of Siena in Wayne in 2006.

by Nick Vadala | Wednesday, August 9, 2023

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia will pay $3.5 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that one of its priests sexually assaulted a 14-year-old boy in Delaware County nearly two decades ago.

Filed in 2020, the lawsuit alleges that Pastor John Close raped the boy at St. Katherine’s of Siena in Wayne in 2006. The plaintiff, whose name was withheld in court filings, was attending a Confraternity of Christian Doctrine program there, and Close was the head of the parish.

During a class, the boy became upset, fearing eternal damnation. He was sent to Close’s office, the pastor took his confession, and then raped him, according to the lawsuit. Afterward, the lawsuit says, Close told the boy that he was absolved of his sins, but he would be eternally damned if he told anyone about the assault.

While the age of the victim at the time of the assault was not given, he is 31 years old today, and the rape was 17 years ago. That means the victim was 13-to-15 years old at the time. Was that hebephilia, or was it ephebophilia? You know what? It doesn’t really matter, because urban slang gives us a far better definition: a chickenhawk, older males who prefer younger boys as sex partners.

Close, who was ordained in 1969, worked at several parishes and Catholic schools in the region throughout his 42 years in the ministry, including Christ the King parish, Cardinal O’Hara High School, Archbishop Wood High School, and the Cathedral of Basilica Saints Peter and Paul. He was placed on administrative leave in 2011 in connection with the reinvestigation of another alleged case and retired the following year. He died in 2018. . . . .

Spokesperson Kenneth A. Gavin said in a statement that the archdiocese “acknowledges settlement in this matter and the resolution it brings.” He added that the organization had no knowledge of the allegations against Close until the plaintiff’s lawyers reported them in July 2019, after the pastor’s death.

“In accordance with policy, the archdiocese reported the allegation to law enforcement,” the archdiocese said.

Is that true? Not according to the plaintiff!

The lawsuit argued that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was notified of a pattern of behavior from Close that put children in danger as early as 1976. That year, a pastor at Blessed John Neumann parish in Bryn Mawr (now known as St. John Neumann parish) reported that Close had teenage boys in his room at the rectory at odd hours, including overnight. As a result, Close was transferred to another parish, and “the archdiocese did not warn that next parish of this past behavior,” according to court documents.

Another alleged victim came forward several times starting in the late 1990s, reporting that Close had sexually abused him in 1969 when he was an altar boy at Christ the King parish in Philadelphia. The Archdiocesan Review Board investigated but could not substantiate the allegation, and it was dismissed, court documents say.

In 2011, following the release of a second scathing grand jury report that accused the church hierarchy of harboring more than two dozen priests suspected of abuse, a third alleged victim of Close came forward. That person said Close sexually assaulted him while he was a student at Archbishop Wood High School in Warminster in the early 1990s, when Close was the principal. The Archdiocesan Review Board again found the accusations could not be substantiated.

According to court documents, the archdiocese learned of at least two additional allegations. A woman in 2011 reported that a friend had told her that Close “messed around” with him at Cardinal O’Hara High School in Springfield in the 1970s. The review board found this to be unsubstantiated. And in 2014, a boy alleged that Close sexually abused him at Christ the King in the 1970s, but archdiocesan investigators were unable to make contact with the boy, court documents said.

We know of over $80 million in Church settlements, and there are other cases in which settlements were reached, but the amounts were not disclosed, and the vast majority of it is due to the Church sheltering chickenhawks.

Homosexuality has been a huge problem within the Catholic priesthood, and that problem has spilled out in the form of predator priests. while it is wholly politically incorrect to say, the sexual abuse of minors in the Church has been a problem of homosexuality: the vast majority of sexual abuse by Catholic priests has been against boys rather than girls. The John Jay Report noted that, of the abuse cases it studied, between 1950 and 2002, stated:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.

Despite attempts by the politically correct, you cannot explain that huge disparity by saying that boys were simply more available to priests years ago. This isn’t a matter of random selection, but of chickenhawk priests deliberately choosing which victims to groom and then assault.

How many parishioners have we lost over this? How many previously devout, Mass-attending Catholics have left the Church over the thoroughly disgusting cases of bishops — some of them predators as well — simply moving the abusers to another parish, without informing the new parish that the priest had ‘problems’? How many parishes have we had to close because there were no longer enough parishioners to keep them open? How many priests could have been moved into positions in which there was almost no contact with minors? And how many could and should have been referred to law enforcement, but were not?

This is what happens when you sweep things under the rug: as you keep doing that, the lump of material under the rug becomes more noticeable, and the debris under the rug became so large that the Church started tripping over it.

It isn’t just the Catholic Church, of course. We reported on Wednesday morning how a 49-year-old Henry Clay High School English teacher and Lutheran Church ‘youth volunteer’ was arrested for sexual offenses with children, and noted over a year ago how a Philadelphia high school teacher had groomed and started sexually abusing a teenaged girl, and others in the school knew about it and did nothing. But if it isn’t just the Catholic Church, the Church has definitely gained a negative reputation for having let it happen, and is often the first ‘suspect’ in people’s minds when they turn to the subject.

Pope Benedict XVI, in 2005, had the subject addressed, and the Congregation for Catholic Education released an instruction stating that homosexual men should not be admitted to seminaries to study for the priesthood. Naturally, the left went bonkers, with one former priest asking Why Isn’t Celibacy Enough? The answer, of course, is that celibacy would be enough if the chickenhawk priests actually remained celibate! The sexual abuse scandals which have rocked the Church occurred because too many priest could not remain faithful to their vows of celibacy.

What Pope Benedict recognized, that the oh-so-politically-correct left couldn’t stand, is that homosexuality among priests was, while not the sole contributor to the sexual abuse scandals, certainly the largest part. What about 81% of the victims were boys, and the two most abused age groups were, in order, 11-to-14-year-old boys, followed by 15-to-17-year-old boys can’t they understand?

Pope Benedict was right: admitting those with “homosexual tendencies” to the priesthood is a recipe for disaster, and had already been a disaster.

There is only one real solution, and that is to admit heterosexual married men to the priesthood. Not only will they not be preying on young boys, but they will have a sanctified outlet for their sexual drives, and can have a normal family life. We already have married priests, both in the Eastern-Rite Catholic Churches, but a few hundred married former Anglican priests who converted to Catholicism, and it hasn’t somehow been a disaster for the Church.

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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! * Updated! * Stupid is as stupid does.

Kevin Lentz, photo by Fayette
County Detention Center, and is a public record.</span<

As we are all aware, the teachers unions in our country, including the Fayette County Education Association, have nothing but the best of intentions when it comes to students in our public schools. Nothing, nothing! can stop them in the pursuit of a top notch education for students!

Lexington high school teacher charged with 17 sexual offenses involving minors

by Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Tuesday, August 8, 2023 | 4:01 PM EDT | Updated: 5:32 PM EDT

A Lexington teacher charged with multiple counts of sexual offenses involving minors was placed on leave by the Fayette County district Tuesday, according to officials and records.

Kevin Lentz was an English teacher at Henry Clay High School, Fayette County Public Schools spokesperson Dia Davidson Smith told the Herald-Leader.

The 49-year-old Mr Lentz faces these charges:

  • KRS §531.310(2)(b), 7 counts: Use of a minor in a sexual performance, which is a Class B felony if the minor us under 16 years of age. Under KRS §532.060(2)(b), the sentence for a Class B felony is imprisonment “not less than ten (10) years nor more than twenty (20) years”. The sentence shall include an additional five (5) year period of postincarceration supervision which shall be added to the maximum sentence rendered for the offense.
  • KRS §531.030(2), 10 counts: Distribution of obscene matters to minors, which is a Class A misdemeanor if a first offense, and which is how Mr Lentz is charged. Under KRS §532.090(1), the sentence for a Class A misdemeanor shall not exceed twelve (12) months.
  • KRS §524.100, 6 counts: Tampering with physical evidence, which is a Class D felony. Under KRS §532.060(2)(d), the sentence for a Class D felony is imprisonment “not less than one (1) year nor more than five (5) years.”

The charge of tampering with physical evidence requires that the accused believes “that an official proceeding is pending or may be instituted,” so to be guilty of this, Mr Lentz had to know that the police suspected him of the other offenses, that he knew the authorities were closing in.

Mr Lentz has been employed by the Fayette County public schools for 18 years, since August 11, 2005, which leads me to wonder: is this something he (allegedly) recently started, or has this been going on for years and years?

Public school teachers are (supposedly) not stupid, and Fayette County requires that teachers of Mr Lentz’s seniority have attained a Master’s degree. If you are a teacher, you just can’t not know that this kind of thing means a very long and unpleasant stay in the state penitentiary. As Leroy Jethro Gibbs said, to some college students he was interrogating, “Believe me, son, you will not do well in prison.” Just how can someone be that stupid?

These are the kinds of charges that the Commonwealth’s Attorney should not allow to be the subject of any lenient plea bargain; if convicted of use of a minor under 16 in a sexual performance, he should get the maximum sentence of twenty years, which will almost certainly be run concurrently rather than consecutively, as I would prefer — keep him locked up for 140 years! — which would keep him in prison until he’s 69 years old, something he might not survive anyway.
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Update! 11:05 AM EDT

I had wondered, even though I didn’t include it in my original, which was posted at 8:47 AM, whether Mr Lentz’s alleged victims were male or female, since Mrs Spears’ original never mentioned the sex of the victim or victims at all. Now, we know.

Henry Clay teacher exchanged obscene photos in texts with 9-year-old boy, citation alleges

by Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Wednesday, August 9, 2023 | 9:24 AM EDT | Updated: 9:59 AM EDT

A Henry Clay High School teacher induced a 9-year-old boy to send photos of his genitals in a text and also sent the boy adult pornography, a police citation alleges.

Kevin Lentz, 49, asked the boy to delete the conversations “so his parents wouldn’t know,” according to the Lexington Police Department citation. Lentz reportedly sent the child more than 10 images of pornography.

The incident occurred in July, the citation said.

There’s more at the Lexington Herald-Leader original.

Yeah, Mr Lentz, if convicted, will not do well in prison.

More, while part of Mrs Spears original that I did not quote stated that the county schools’ spokeswoman simply referred reporters to the police as far as to whether the alleged victim was a Henry Clay High School student, if he is a nine-year-old boy, the victim is too young to have been in high school. It turns out that he was also a church ‘youth volunteer,’ and though Mrs Spears did not identify at which church it was, it has been reported elsewhere that it was at Lexington’s Faith Lutheran Church.

Fayette District Judge Lindsay Thurston set a $50,000 bond and ordered Lentz to not have contact with minor children as a condition of his release, according to court documents. He remained in the Fayette Detention Center Wednesday morning.

Mr Lentz is innocent until proven guilty, so a reasonable bail amount had to be set; In Kentucky, only those accused of murder can be denied bail. Now that this information has been exposed, I suspect that Mr Lentz time at the Fayette County Detention Center will be disagreeable if he doesn’t make bail quickly.

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Will Larry Krasner send this case to juvenile court?

We previously reported on the identification of 15-year-old Rasheed Banks, Jr, as the alleged killer of Michael Salerno during a carjacking attempt, and pointed out that The Philadelphia Inquirer had not covered that story. A check of the newspaper’s website shows that they never did catch up to reporting on that.

However, now that young Mr Banks has been captured, the Inky has covered it:

15-year-old suspect arrested in fatal attempted carjacking in South Philadelphia

On July 12, Michael Salerno, 50, attempted to prevent a carjacking of his vehicle on the 1100 block of Porter Street when he was shot in the head.

by Robert Moran | Monday, August 7, 2023

Authorities on Monday arrested the 15-year-old boy wanted in the fatal shooting of a 50-year-old man during an attempted carjacking last month in South Philadelphia.

Rasheed Banks Jr. was apprehended in Camden by Philadelphia agents of the U.S. Marshals and members of a regional New York and New Jersey fugitive task force, the U.S. Marshals Service Philadelphia announced.

Naturally, the Inquirer did not publish the photo that Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News used in his tweet, nor young Mr Banks’ mugshot, which the Philly television media had and published.

Why not? Remember: publisher Elizabeth Hughes has mandated that the newspaper will be an “anti-racist news organization,” and would censor the news if the news happened to be too politically incorrect.

But what, exactly, is the Inky trying to hide? Yes, they did not publish young Mr Banks’ photo, but let’s tell the truth here: simply publishing his first name, Rasheed, tells every reader that the suspect is black. The newspaper isn’t fooling anyone!

The real question now is: will the George Soros-sponsored, police-hating ‘progressive’ Philadelphia District Attorney, Larry Krasner, charge Mr Banks as an adult? I have heard that Mr Krasner has never offered up a juvenile for an adult charge, though I can’t document that. But if young Mr Banks is indeed the murderer — and he is innocent until proven guilty — and is charged as a juvenile, the longest he could be held in juvenile confinement is until he reaches age 21; then he would have to be released, and his juvenile record sealed.

That’s six years, six years for wanton, willful murder.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer does some good reporting . . . and then they hide it

We have previously noted some articles in The Philadelphia Inquirer marked as exclusive for paid subscribers. The newspaper has a digital paywall which allows non-subscribers a limited number of articles a month before it descends and blocks access to all articles, but even if you haven’t tried to open an Inky article for months, the subscribers only block will stop you from accessing those stories. Nevertheless, the story below is one that should have been available to more Philadelphia readers!

Yes, the Inquirer does have to make money to stay in business, and the economic condition has been serious enough that the Leftist Lenfest Institute for Journalism has sent out begging letters to subscribers at least thrice that I have documented, so perhaps the $285.48 that I’ve been paying still isn’t enough.

Jim Kenney raised money to boost progressive candidates but spent it on consultants and restaurant tabs

Of the more than $780,000 that Kenney PAC has spent over the last three years, only about $60,000 went to other campaigns. The money has also gone to political operatives and miscellaneous expenses.

by Sean Collins Walsh | Monday, August 7, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

In early 2020, things were looking good for Mayor Jim Kenney, who had just coasted to reelection after a productive first term and was eyeing statewide office.

In June of that year, he launched Kenney PAC, a political action committee that he said would “help progressive candidates in the forthcoming legislative races in Pennsylvania defeat extremist pro-Trump Republicans.”

Giving money to Democrats across the state would have built goodwill for a mayor little known outside Southeastern Pennsylvania, and news of the PAC helped fuel speculation that Kenney might run for U.S. Senate or governor in 2022.

Well, those “extremist pro-Trump Republicans” haven’t had much success in the Keystone State, but the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania sure hasn’t benefitted under those ‘progressive’ Democrats! Under Mayor Kenney, the City of Brotherly Love, the town he was (supposedly) running, in 2020, the year he launched Kenney PAC, went from 356 homicides — which the Philadelphia Police have now revised down to 353 — to 499, and there are serious reasons to believe that the number was actually 502, as initially reported.

We have noted, several times, the change in the Philadelphia Police Department’s statistics, down from the 502 homicides initially reported for 2020, down to 499, one short of the then-all-time record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, under the ‘leadership’ of then-Mayor Wilson Goode, he of MOVE bombing fame. I made a totally rookie mistake, and failed to get a screen capture of that, but a Twitter fellow styling himself NDJinPhilly was apparently smarter than me that particular time, took the screen shot, and then tweeted it to me.

2020 was the year of the unfortunate death while resisting arrest of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled convicted felon George Floyd in Minneapolis, and riots broke out in many cities, including Philly, but the change in attitudes continued far beyond 2020; Philly saw a whopping 562 homicides in 2021, a number which blew the old record completely apart, along with 190 deaths marked ‘suspicious’. 2022 saw an improvement of sorts, with the official number of homicides down to 516, which was still second all time.

Why, it’s almost as though Philly could have used those “extremist pro-Trump Republicans” running the city!

Back to the Inky:

But of the more than $780,000 that Kenney PAC has spent over the last three years, only about $60,000 went to other campaigns, according to an analysis of campaign finance reports. Instead, the PAC’s money has primarily gone to benefit operatives close to Kenney — who abandoned his hopes of higher office after his popularity tanked starting in 2020 — and to pay for miscellaneous expenses, such as events, hotel rooms, and restaurant bills.

You know what that is? That’s actually good, investigative reporting, which makes me wonder why the newspaper’s Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Gabriel Escobar decided to restrict the article to subscribers only. If there’s anything in the Inquirer’s reporting which should draw in new subscribers, it’s the “high-impact journalism“, “speaking truth to power“, and “high-impact election reporting” the Leftist Lenfest Institute told us the newspaper delivered, yet that’s just what Mr Escobar, or possibly one of his minions, restricted.

I’ve quoted a lot of the article, and cited my sources, as always, but unless you are a subscriber, you can’t even check to see if I’ve lied to you; that bothers me.

I can’t simply quote the whole thing, and I really wish that more people could read it for themselves, but I’ll note briefly here that reporter Sean Collins Walsh pointed out that the top ten donors to Kenney PAC, roughly $399,000 out of $850,000, were all building trade unions; the unions had also been the primary contributors to the Mayor’s two campaigns. Mayor Jim Kenney has just plain checked out, marking time until he’s no longer in the job. The members of those very same unions are the working men of the city who are at risk from the bullets flying around town, especially in the working-class neighborhoods.

What the unions bought with their support of Mr Kenney is greater danger for their members and their families! Perhaps some of those “extremist pro-Trump Republicans” could have done a better job? After all, it hardly seems that they could have done worse!

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Why was ‘Peanut’ out on the streets in the first place?

My good friend — OK, OK, I’ve never met him in person, but with the internet, I have a lot of good friends I’ve never physically met! — Robert Stacy McCain, in his continuing series Crazy People Are Dangerous, tells us about the suicide-by-cop of Ryant ‘Peanut’ Bluford of San Francisco.

The police video of the shooting was released Friday, showing that Bluford had a pistol in his waistband, which he later aimed at police before he was shot. Despite all this, however, some people continued to ask why police couldn’t “de-escalate” the situation. The obvious answer is that Ryant Bluford didn’t want it to be “de-escalated.” Ryant Bluford was crazy and wanted to die in the proverbial hail of police gunfire.

The police have yet to confirm whether Mr Bluford actually fired a shot at the police, though Mission Local reported:

Bluford’s friends and family also said he had a gun, and fired once at the officers; they pointed on Thursday to a chalk circle on the street, where they said the casing from Bluford’s bullet had landed.

In reality, it doesn’t matter: you aim a gun at the police, and they do not have to, nor should they have to, hold their fire until first fired upon.

Mr McCain’s theme is that Mr Bluford was crazy, which he was, but that’s not the part of the story I find most important:

Bayview neighbors lament police shooting death of Ryant ‘Peanut’ Bluford

Friends, family say slain man feared, detested police after more than decade behind bars

by Gilare Zada, Griffin Jones, and Joe Rivano Barros | Thursday, July 27, 2023

Peanut, before getting shelled. Photo via R S McCain.

The Bayview man shot and killed yesterday afternoon by San Francisco police officers, 41-year-old Ryant Bluford of San Francisco, was known as “Peanut” to friends and family. They recalled him as a loving father, brother, cousin and friend — while acknowledging the violent crime in his past.Neighbors interviewed Wednesday night and Thursday morning said Bluford struggled with mental illness and had a disdain for the police, the result of more than a decade spent in prison for various serious offenses.

Bluford was convicted in the 2006 gang rape of a 16-year-old girl in San Francisco, and spent more than a decade in prison as a result. He was again charged, in 2022, for domestic violence and sexual assault.

Oh, Heaven forfend! Mr Bluford “has a disdain for the police,” he “feared (and) detested police,” because he was locked up for the gang rape of a 16-year-old girl? Apparently the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the mission of which is, “building what will become the “California Model” – building safer communities through rehabilitation, education, restorative justice and reentry,” didn’t do much correcting or “rehabilitation, education, restorative justice and reentry” when it came to Mr Bluford. After spending “more than a decade” of a 14-year sentence behind bars for the 2006 gang rape, Mr Bluford was later accused with domestic violence and sexual assault. That means at least one more person was assaulted and raped by a man who was supposed to be corrected and rehabilitated for the same crime.

The details of the gang rape, and the fact that Mr Bluford orally, vaginally, and anally raped the victim, identified only by her initials, can be found here. Mr Bluford and his codefendants were sentenced to just 14 years in a plea deal. And that makes me wonder: why were Ryant Bluford, Eddie Perkins, Vincent Timmons, and Allen Releford offered a 14-year sentence, rather than taking this to trial and getting them locked up for the rest of their miserable lives. The plea deal was:

one count each of forcible kidnapping (count 1; Pen. Code, § 207, subd. (a)) with an admitted gang enhancement (§ 186.22, subd. (b)(1)(c)), and aggravated assault (count 12; § 245, subd. (a)(1)), for fixed aggregate prison terms of 14 years.

The dropped charges were:

forcible rape in concert (count 2; §§ 261, 264.1), forcible vaginal insertion of a gun in concert (count 3; §§ 289, 264.1), forcible anal and vaginal insertions of a bottle in concert (counts 4-5; §§ 264.1, 289), forcible oral copulation in concert (count 6; §§ 264.1, 288a, subd. (d)(1)), forcible sodomy in concert (count 7; § 286, subd. (d)), gang participation (count 8; § 186.22, subd. (a)), carrying a concealed gun in a vehicle (count 9; § 12025, subd. (a)(1)), firearm identity tampering (count 10; § 12090), and possessing cocaine base for sale (count 11; Health & Saf. Code, § 11351.5). Most dismissed counts carried multiple enhancements ranging from handgun arming and use, increased risk from moving a kidnap victim, to gang furtherance. An amendment of count 1 to forcible kidnapping (§ 207, subd. (a)) from kidnapping in concert for purposes of rape eliminated sentence exposure to a life term (§ 209, subd. (b)(1)).

One thing we do not know is how willing the victim was to testifying against Messrs Bluford, Perkins, Timmons, and Releford. It has to be conceded that the plea bargain might have been reached to keep the victim from having to testify to such a traumatic assault. But the notion that Mr Bluford was ever let out of prison is repugnant; the gang rape of a 16-year-old, of anyone, should result in life in prison without the possibility of parole!

Back to Mission Local:

Neighbors described the shooting as a tragedy.

“He had four kids and a wife, two were twins. He did the best he could,” said a friend of Bluford’s, who gave his name as Tyke, saying Bluford’s mental health worsened after time in prison. “He was in the pen for 12 years; he had some mental issues from that.”

I don’t know about you, but, to me, the tragedy is that Mr Bluford got out two years early.

At the Bayview intersection, Bluford’s family lit candles. They described Peanut as a man who had been through the wringer, and criminal records show past convictions for rape and other violent crimes.

When 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 start using the subject’s nickname in an article, in other than a direct quote, you know that they are trying to raise sympathy for him!

He had a fearful association with police, neighbors said, one borne from a lifetime of negative experiences dealing with law enforcement: According to criminal records, Bluford was charged with kidnapping, rape, assault with a deadly weapon, and various other crimes in 2006; he was incarcerated in 2008, according to criminal records, and friends and family said he spent more than a decade in prison.

Then in 2022, he was charged again, with domestic violence, sexual assault, and criminal threats. It was not immediately clear if he was convicted and imprisoned for these alleged crimes.

“You have to think about the kind of trauma someone has experienced with the police,” said one neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous. “He looked done, driven to suicide by cop.”

Oh, so Mr Bluford experienced “trauma” because of the police? Some people might be more concerned with the trauma the girl he and three other thugs raped suffered.

“He had a lot of mental health issues,” said another anonymous neighbor. “He had a family. He loved his kids. A lot of people around here have mental issues.”

As Mr McCain pointed out, Joe Biden got 85.26% of the vote in San Francisco, so yeah, a lot of people there must have mental health issues! 🙂

That neighbor, for her part, wished there had been a non-violent response initially to de-escalate the situation — or at least a less-lethal one.

“It’s like there’s no logic. They don’t ask what’s going on, they don’t even think to just ask. They need more training with people with mental health issues,” she said. “When it comes to African Americans, they use force and think later. Even if they felt he was a threat, they could have Tased him or shot him in the leg.”

Well of course the locals were upset that Mr Bluford was sent to his eternal reward. But at least Mission Local added important information:

San Francisco police, however, do not carry Tasers. And are not trained to shoot-to-wound.

Shooting someone is the use of deadly force, and if you are legally justified in shooting someone, you are legally justified in killing him. Shooting to wound is neither legally required nor very smart.

Naturally, the news source had to throw in a racial angle:

Since 2000, 19 of the 61 people shot and killed by SFPD were Black — 31 percent; 18 of them were Black men. That rate is disproportionate to the city’s population: Black people make up about five percent of San Francisco.

The odd notion that perhaps, just perhaps, black men males might engage in activities, activities such as Mr Bluford aiming at and apparently firing upon the police, which get them shot at a greater percentage of the time seems not to have entered the minds of the reporters.

At some point, people have to drop their sympathy for criminals. Who knows, perhaps the bad guys can eventually mentally reform, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be treated responsibly for the criminal acts that they have committed.

Releasing Mr Bluford, which seems to have occurred in 2020, which would have put it in the same timeline with the releases of prisoners due to COVID-19, was the release of a violent criminal, and it was one which led him to be able to be charged with a subsequent sexual assault crime. Someone else, at least one someone, became Mr Bluford’s victim at a time when he could have been still behind bars.

I’ll put it bluntly: releasing violent criminals early, releasing them even one day before the maximum time that they can be kept locked up legally, increases the danger to the community.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

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.
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“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

In the Bard’s play, Henry VI (Part 2), Dick the Butcher is cast as a large and powerful man, second-in-command to the anarchist Jack Cade, in the rebellion against His Majesty the King. Dick’s most famous line is, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” I am no anarchist, but one thing is certainly true: lawyers f(ornicate) up just about everything!

The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States ought to be easy to understand:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

But, of course, there are always those, including those who are themselves guarded by armed men, who do not want Other People to be allowed to keep and bear arms. And thus we’ve had the Second Amendment violated for more than 200 hundred years, as various states passed laws to restrict Americans from owning firearms. In United States v Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876), the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment only prohibited the federal government from banning private ownership of firearms:

The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The Second Amendment means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress, and has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the National Government.

Under the Cruikshank decision, states, counties, and municipalities could ban the private ownership of firearms. It took until District of Columbia v Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), for the Court to hold that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, and McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010) incorporated the Heller decision to apply to the states. A full 219 years passed between the ratification of the Second Amendment and the Supreme Court finally applying it to the states.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Why America’s Gun Laws Are in Chaos

Judges clash over history a year after Supreme Court upended how courts decide Second Amendment cases—‘the whole thing puzzles me’

by David Gershman | Tuesday, August 1, 2023 | 5:30 AM EDT

The Supreme Court last summer sought to clarify its expansive reading of the Second Amendment. Instead, it set off chaos.

The decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen decreed that gun-control laws of today must have a clear forerunner in weapons regulations around the time of the nation’s infancy, regardless of the modern public-safety rationale behind them.

The Journal’s paywall begins to fad out te text at this point, but you can read the entire thing for free here.

The result: Hundreds of gun cases litigated in recent months have become a free-for-all, with lower courts conflicted or confounded about how and where to draw limits on gun rights.

“There’s all this picking and choosing of historical evidence. ‘This is too early. This is too late. Too small, too big,’” Judge Gerard Lynch of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said during a recent argument about a new law in New York that prohibits guns in sensitive places like parks, museums and bars. “The whole thing puzzles me.”

Associate Justice Clarence Thomas is a brilliant jurist, but somehow, some way, he couldn’t just leave the Second Amendment where it was: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Instead, he created a standard under which the right of the people to keep and bear arms could be infringed, if only we had started infringing upon them early enough. This is what happens when lawyers are involved!

Of course, other lawyers, our federal, state, county, and municipal lawmakers were just never satisfied with a simple statement of rights!

In that case, the right of licensed handgun owners to carry weapons into bars and theaters could hinge on 19th-century statutes that barred drunks from carrying firearms, and outlawed guns and butcher knives in social parties attended by ladies. A case decided last fall held that the federal ban on guns with obliterated serial numbers was unconstitutional because unmarked guns were perfectly legal in the 18th century.

The Bruen case launched the upheaval. In that decision, the Supreme Court said New York couldn’t require concealed-carry applicants to prove a dire need for self-protection. The 6-3 opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas and endorsed by five fellow conservatives, said the restrictive licensing rules violated the Second Amendment right of ordinary, law-abiding citizens to carry handguns for self-defense.

The opinion rejected the practice of lower courts considering the public-safety intentions of gun laws being challenged. The courts often found that the government’s goal of curbing gun crimes and mass shootings outweighed the liberty interests of gun owners.

That practice watered down gun rights, the opinion said. Instead, Thomas wrote, to pass constitutional muster, gun restrictions within the scope of the Second Amendment must be deeply rooted in historical precedent. Governments defending them bear the burden of showing that their laws are similar, or at least analogous, to firearm regulations widely enforced around the time of Second Amendment’s ratification in 1791.

Dion Green spoke to other gun-violence survivors at the Supreme Court ahead of the Bruen case oral arguments in 2021. PHOTO: LEIGH VOGEL/GETTY IMAGES

It was at that point that the Journal included a photo. The speaker shown, Dion Green, has a placard that claims, “Gun laws save lives.” That’s certainly what the left claim, but is it actually true?

As we have previously noted, gun laws are almost uniform across Pennsylvania, because state law does not allow local governments to impose legislation on firearms which is stricter than the state law. Yet Philadelphia, with just over 12% of the Keystone State’s population, has suffered slightly over half of the murders in the Commonwealth. If “gun laws save lives,” as the left claim, shouldn’t we see homicide rates relatively even across the state?

There is a lot more at the Journal original, much of it dealing with older laws being contemplated by today’s lawyers and judges, in their attempts to see if yet another gun control law passes constitutional muster. And this is the problem with Justice Thomas’ opinion: he added a standard, one very loosely defined and giving lower courts very little guidance, when the simplest standard is the words of the Second Amendment, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Near the end of the article comes the point I found most important. U.S. District Judge Stephen McGlynn of East St. Louis, Ill., ruling against the state’s assault-weapons ban, said:

Can the senseless crimes of a relative few be so despicable to justify the infringement of the constitutional rights of law-abiding individuals in hopes that such crimes will then abate or, at least, not be as horrific? Likely no.

That’s the point the gun-grabbers can never seem to address: why would taking away the right of law-abiding Americans disarm criminals, who by definition, don’t obey the law?

Who knows? Perhaps Justice Thomas just could not get the rest of the majority to agree that the Second Amendment simply means what it says, that the right of the people to keep and bear arms should not, shall not, be infringed. In the end, a simple and clear statement of a basic constitutional right has been messed up by lawyers!

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The problem is not mass incarceration; the problem is that not enough people are incarcerated, for not a long enough time

Yes, I’ve spent a rather significant amount of bandwidth reporting on the unchecked crime in Philadelphia, the growth of which many, including me, have attributed to the lax-on-crime policies of the George Soros sponsored, police-hating and criminal loving defense lawyer now ‘serving’ as the city’s chief prosecutor, but it isn’t just the City of Brotherly Love that has been so afflicted. It has also happened in the city in which I was born:

DA Pamela Price and ultra-woke Oakland leaders blasted by NAACP over rise in violence, crime

By Marjorie Hernandez | Friday, July 28, 2023 | 5:51 PM EDT | Updated: 7:55 PM EDT

Pamela Price, photo via The Washington Examiner.

The Oakland, California, NAACP civil rights organization blasted woke city leaders for their soft-on-crime policies which they say have led to skyrocketing numbers of shootouts and violent armed robberies, forcing residents to leave the area for good.

The group issued the statement Thursday as dozens of Oakland residents packed a public safety meeting and demanded progressive Alameda County DA Pamela Price to address the alarming uptick of violent crime in the city.

In the letter, the local NAACP chapter said residents are “sick and tired” of the shootings, car-break-ins and highway shootouts and implored city leaders to declare a state of emergency.

“There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety,” the group wrote.

“It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime. No one should live in fear in our city.”

Let’s be clear here: Alameda County voters knew what they were getting when they elected Miss Price! As The Mercury News pointed out, she is a “longtime civil rights attorney, (who) was elected on a platform denouncing tough sentencing”. To anyone who has been paying attention, it will come as no surprise that, like so many other far-left prosecutors, Miss Price was the recipient of largesse from George Soros.

The group, along with Bishop Bob Jackson of the Acts Full Gospel Church, said Price’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute serious criminals, as reported by The Post, has created “the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric and created a heyday for Oakland criminals.”

The city’s 911 system also is failing its residents, while criminals know police response is usually slow since the city is suffering from a shortage of 500 officers, Oakland NAACP officials said in the letter.

As of July 16, robberies in Oakland have increased by 22% with 1,880 reports, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Crime overall was up 15% citywide and up 42% in total since the first half of 2021.

Let’s tell the truth here: everyplace that there has been a Soros-sponsored prosecutor elected, the results have been the same: significant increases in crime. What is also true is that the primary victims of the increases in crime have been the same minority communities that the left are supposedly trying to help. Miss Price

brokered a plea deal earlier this year that had many critics alarmed. The deal would have reduced sentencing in a triple murder case from 75 years to life in prison down to 15 years.

That deal would have allowed 31-year-old Delonzo Logwood out of prison by age 46 — if he wasn’t released even earlier under the Pyrite State’s lenient laws — an age at which he would still be quite physically active and likely to kill again. Fortunately the judge rejected the deal.

It’s actually pretty simple for the left: Mr Krasner, Miss Price, and the other Soros-sponsored prosecutors believe that “mass incarceration” has devastated black neighborhoods. What they can’t seem to get through their heads is that not locking up criminals has led to a different sort of devastation in black neighborhoods, the devastation wrought by increased murders, increased non-fatal shootings, assaults, robberies, and rapes. Zachary Faria wrote:

You do not need to look hard to find proof that the criminal justice reform movement is less about creating a more just legal system and more about fighting “mass incarceration” with pro-criminal policies. You simply need to look at how “reform” prosecutors treat murderers.

The latest example of this comes from Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, one of the many liberal prosecutors funded by Democratic megadonor and “reform” advocate George Soros . Price has previously announced that she was trying to seek non-prison punishments for gang members who shot and killed a toddler and dropped special circumstances against a convicted murderer, which removed the possibility of him serving a life sentence without parole.

Her latest entry in pro-criminal “prosecutions” comes in the case of Sergio Morales-Jacquez, who was 17 years old when he shot and killed newlywed Rienhart Asuncion in a road rage incident. Not even two weeks later, Morales-Jacquez and two other teenagers opened fire at a party in Oakland, resulting in the deaths of two teenagers.

That’s three murders that Morales-Jacquez directly participated in. But, because he was 17 and the criminal justice reform movement demands little to no accountability for juvenile offenders regardless of how heinous or violent their crime, Price refused to try him as an adult. Instead, she secured the now-18-year-old just a seven-year sentence in a juvenile facility, with the possibility of probation.

He’ll be out of prison juvie — and how wise is it to have an offender in his twenties in a juvenile facility? — by the time he’s 26, if not sooner, prime crime-committing years.

What Miss Price and the others have missed is that the people who have been convicted of felonies and imprisoned are almost all genuinely bad people. Sergio Morales-Jacquez is a genuinely bad person, and the odds are high that when he does get out, he will kill again. Will Miss Price be held accountable for any murders he commits when he gets out, when he could have been locked up for the rest of his miserable life?

We are finally seeing the minority communities begin to fight back. In Philadelphia, the more ‘progressive’ mayoral candidates, Helen Gym Flaherty and Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff, lost to Cherelle Parker Mullin in the Democratic primary, as Mrs Mullin campaigned on a tougher-on-crime platform. And now, the residents in the minority neighborhoods in Oakland are protesting Miss Price’s idiocy.

A lot of people in those neighborhoods don’t like the idea of ‘mass incarceration,’ but they are learning, the hard way, that being soft-on-crime has led to more crime. Bad guys who are in prison are not out on the streets, committing more crimes. The problem is not mass incarceration; the problem is that not enough people are incarcerated, for not a long enough time.
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Killadelphia: Another story I didn’t find in The Philadelphia Inquirer How can a newspaper be called a newspaper when it doesn't report the news?

Yes, I’m paying good money to subscribe to The Philadelphia Inquirer, $5.49 per week, or $285.48 a year, so you’d think that that august journal, our nation’s third-oldest surviving daily newspaper, the winner of 20 Pulitzer Prizes, would do something really, really radical like report the news!

Well, I didn’t find this story in the Inquirer, but due to a tweet from Fox 29 News

Man charged in deadly ambush shooting of mother near crowded Philadelphia park, police say

Published July 27, 2023 11:00AM |Updated 12:04PM | Crime & Public Safety | FOX 29 Philadelphia

Alexander Grady, photo via Fox 29 News.

PHILADELPHIA – Homicide detectives have made an arrest in the deadly shooting of a local mother gunned down in a parked car in Philadelphia earlier this week, police say.

Note the date of the Fox 29 News article: it was initially reported at 11:00 AM on Thursday. That means that the Inquirer has had plenty of time to write its own story. But, as of 9:29 AM EDT on Friday, July 28th, there is absolutely nothing on this on either the Inky’s website main page or specific crime page.

Tina Arroyo, 32, was gunned down on Monday evening while sitting in the driver’s seat of a Honda Civic parked on the 500 block of East Louden Street, according to police.

“She pulled up on this scene and within moments another vehicle pulls up and shoots her,” Sgt. Eric Gripp said. “How quickly it happened and the callousness of all of it is deeply troubling.”

The shooting took place across the street from a crowded park, officials say.

On Thursday, police announced the arrest of 26-year-old Alexander Grady.

Grady has been charged with murder, criminal conspiracy, VUFA and related charges.

How can the newspaper be called a newspaper when it doesn’t report the news?

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Killadelphia: How many extra have died? The statistics require a lot of assumptions, but I see an entire 'extra year' of killings in Philly due to the left

It was on May 25th that I noted the somewhat unusual statistical trend, and ask the headline question, Could Philly see ‘only’ 450 homicides in 2023?

In 2020, the City of Brotherly Love had 499 ‘official’ homicides, though, as we have noted, several times, the change in the Philadelphia Police Department’s statistics, down from the 502 homicides initially reported for 2020, down to 499, one short of the then-all-time record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, under the ‘leadership’ of then-Mayor Wilson Goode, he of MOVE bombing fame. I made a totally rookie mistake, and failed to get a screen capture of that, but a Twitter fellow styling himself NDJinPhilly was apparently smarter than me that particular time, took the screen shot, and then tweeted it to me.

The trend of the numbers was such that it looked as though the total homicide numbers would be higher than 2022’s 516, but also lower than 499. As of Wednesday, July 26th, the total homicide numbers year to date have dropped below the level in 2020.

How do the numbers work out? Wednesday was the 207th day of the year, meaning that, if the 242 homicides number is correct, Philly has been seeing ‘only’ 1.169 murders per day, an average which works out to 426.71 for the year. However, the first half of the year contains more colder months than the latter half, and homicides normally increase with warmer weather. In 2022, which saw 516 killings, 59.88% of the year’s murders were committed by July 26th. At that rate, we would expect a total of 404.14 killings for all of 2023, a number which is close enough to 399 to leave the city with fewer than 400 murders.

May 25, 2020, saw the unfortunate death of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl addled convicted felon George Floyd while he was resisting arrest for passing counterfeit money in Minneapolis. With that, the American left went absolutely bonkers, and killings soared. May 24, 2020 had seen 147 murders in Philly, 1.021 per day, on a path toward 373.625 for the year, a bit above the 356 homicides for the previous year, but not monstrously so.

My conclusion is simple: the lawless reaction of Antifa and the idiotic #BlackLivesMatter protesters led to the killings of an additional 125 people in Philadelphia in 2020!

There are some assumptions that I have to take here, assumptions which may not play out. But if I plot out a graph from 374 ‘should have been’ homicides in 2020, to a ‘projected’ 427 for this year, assume that rise to have been steady, there should have been 391 murders in 2021, 409 in 2022, and the projected 427 for this year. That means that the left-wing riots led to 125 more murders in 2020, 171 in 2021, and 107 in 2022. Yeah, there are entirely too many assumptions that I’ve had to take, but I’m seeing 403 more people murdered, in Philadelphia alone, due to the lawlessness of attitude spawned by the riots, and most of those murder victims have been black males.

Yes, this is way too simplistic a calculation. The inaction of District Attorney Larry Krasner when it comes to locking up criminals before they are graduated to murder, as well as the strongly pro-abortion status of the city’s politicians have a lot to do with it, but there has been a cheapening of life, a callousness in the city, a callousness which doesn’t see killing other people as all that bad a thing. Yes, I see an entire ‘extra year’ of killing in Philly due to Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and #woke progressives.