Category Archives: Crime

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Killadelphia: What’s going on with the statistics?

What is happening with the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page? The report, pictured here as of 9:19 AM EST, claims that the 2022 total was 514 homicides, and that, as of 11:59 PM EST on Monday, January 2nd, there had been zero homicides in the City of Brotherly Love this year.

However, Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News tweeted that a homicide had occurred at 2:10 PM, and the victim pronounced dead at 2:40 PM at Temple University Hospital.

More than Mr Keeley just reporting it: he included the image of the Philadelphia Police Department’s press release on it. The Philadelphia Inquirer also reported on it.

At 11:14 PM EST on Saturday, December 31, 2022, Sergeant Mark Fusetti, now retired from the PPD’s Warrant Squad, but who has a source on the inside, tweeted that the final numbers for 2022 were 516 murders, 116 deaths classified as ‘suspicious,’ and 76 ‘other’ cases for the homicide unit.

I’ll tell the truth here: I would trust Sgt Fusetti’s numbers far more than anything, anything! that comes from the Philadelphia city government. As of 9:05 AM EST, the city’s shooting victims database has not been updated to account for any incidents after Thursday, December 29, 2022.

Perhaps I should be charitable here, and assume that whoever does the statistics for the Philly Police is on vacation today, and his replacement isn’t experienced and just made an error or two. But somehow, some way, I’m just not feeling it this morning.

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Killington: Lexington sets a new homicide record

Yeah, it’s true, I concentrate more on homicides in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia than Lexington, the closest large city to me, the city in which I lived from 1971 through 1984, and the city in which my daughters live, but the City of Brotherly Love didn’t set a new homicide record in 2022, while Lexington did.

Coroner releases name of man killed in Bradley Court shooting that left 2 others injured

by Karla Ward | Friday, December 30, 2022 | 9:47 PM EST | Updated: Saturday, December 31, 2022 | 12:23 PM EST

The Fayette County coroner has identified a man who died after being shot in Lexington late Friday.

Bradley Court, from Google Streetscapes September 2022. This is not the murder scene. Click to enlarge.

Tyron Shaw, 21, of Lexington, was pronounced dead at 7:54 p.m. as a result of the shooting on the 400 block of Bradley Court, the coroner said in a news release Saturday.

Lexington police who were dispatched to a call about an assault on Bradley Court, off Georgetown Street near Price Road, Friday night said they found one person dead and two injured.

Police said the three male victims were on the sidewalk suffering from gunshot wounds when they arrived at about 7:20 p.m.

Shaw was pronounced dead at the scene, while the other two people who were shot were taken to a local hospital. One had life-threatening injuries. The other victim’s injuries were not thought to be life-threatening, police said in a news release.

There’s more at the original, but Mr Shaw was the 44th person murdered in Lexington in 2022. The previous record, 37 homicides, was set in 2021. That’s an 18.92% increase.

Population guesstimates for Lexington-Fayette County — and the entire county is under the unified Lexington-Fayette Urban-County Government — range pretty widely, from the Census Bureau’s 321,793 in 2021, to as high as 346,663 in 2022 by the World Population Review. Using the extremes of those numbers, 44 murders works out to a homicide rate of between 12.69 per 100,000 population and 13.67. That’s nowhere near as bad as St Louis, with 198 homicides in 2022, according to the St Louis Metropolitan Police Department. With a guesstimated population of 293,310, that works out to a homicide rate of 67.51, while Philly’s 516 murders and population guesstimate of 1,576,251 works out to 32.74 per 100,000.

But with ‘just’ 34 homicides in 2020, and a population of 322,570, the homicide rate was a significantly lower 10.54. Something ain’t right in Lexington!

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Killadelphia: Well, isn’t this interesting?

As we noted on Friday, the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated during normal business hours, Monday through Friday, as far as the current year’s numbers are concerned, but the computer program does update previous years’ daily numbers. For example, the report on Saturday, New Year’s Eve, updated the numbers for December 30th from the 557 in 2021 and 494 homicides through 11:59 PM EST on December 29th to 559 and 498 on December 30th.

With the odd nature of the change from the initially reported 502 total for 2020 down to 499, which led some people to speculate that the numbers were fudged.

I had lamented taht I had made a rookie error in failing to get a screen capture of the 502 number, but, fortunately, a fellow styling himself NDJ in Philly did take the screenshot, which he forwarded on Twitter. Yup, that’s the evidence needed!

It occurred to me, as I was showering this morning — many of my best ideas occur as hot water is pouring down my back, so don’t judge me! — that while there’d be no update on December 31, 2022 this morning, the computer’s automatic update would give us the numbers for 2021 and 2020, and perhaps we’d see how things had been fudged.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Another Bloody Year in ‘Killadelphia’

Well, guess what: the December 31st numbers for every past year were reset to zero, with the exception of 2013, which had a number 1 recorded. More, the percentage increase from the previous day last year showed 0%, which means that the computer calculation function had somehow gotten fouled up.

So, how did this happen? Are we supposed to believe that it was the gremlins, or, more nefariously, did someone at the Police Department contemplate the same thing I did, and want to hide the 2020 numbers?

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Killadelphia: It’s the last update of 2022 But The Philadelphia Inquirer is still trying to obscure the truth.

The Philadelphia Police Department have released their last ‘official’ homicide report for the year, showing that 514 people have spilled out their life’s blood in the city’s mean streets. Oh, there’ll be another report tomorrow, generated by computer to update past year’s daily numbers, but the current year’s numbers are updated only Monday through Friday, meaning that Friday’s numbers won’t be included on Saturday’s report, now will New Year’s Eve’s numbers on the Sunday report.

We might not even get the yearly total on Monday, because New Year’s Day, a government holiday, occurs on Sunday, and whomever in the Philadelphia Police Department updates the statistics will be allowed to take his holiday on Monday; that’s what happened on December 26th, the Monday after Christmas Day.

In 2021, there were five total murders on December 30th and 31st.

Of course, with a final number which will fit within the range I projected three days ago, 514 to 521, there’s no particular reason to fudge the numbers the way that some have alleged happened at the end of 2020, where an initial report of 502 was downgraded to 499. With the second-place number being an even 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, and the record of 562 set last year, this year’s 514 to 521 will be securely in between those two, so there’d no advantage to any downgrade.

If anything, a homicide or two committed early enough on New Year’s Day might as well be added to 2022’s statistics, in the hope that 2023 can come in under 500; that’s something I can easily see happening.

But, regardless of what the final number is, there’s no escaping one simple fact: under Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police commissioner Danielle Outlaw, the City of Brotherly Love have averaged 525 homicides per year, assuming that the current 514 is the final number for this year. Assuming that 514 is the end number for 2022, for the Kenney-Krasner-Outlaw triumvirate to average under 500, the city would have to see a homicide number for 2023 down to 421. Of course, for every homicide added to the 2022 total, that 421 number decreases by one.

It’s so bad that even The Philadelphia Inquirer noted this year’s numbers, though, of course, they never did the real math to note the average that the law enforcement triumvirate have racked up.

Philly’s gun violence remained at record levels for the third straight year

Philadelphia had recorded 512 homicides this year through Tuesday, police said, and nearly 1,800 people were shot and survived.

by Ellie Rushing and Chris Palmer | Thursday, December 29, 2022

When Taneesha Brodie’s eldest son turned 8, she moved her family out of North Philadelphia to Upper Darby, seeking a safer community away from the city’s gun violence.

She was proud of the people her children became, especially her eldest, Quenzell Bradley-Brown. A married father of four, the 28-year-old spent four years in the National Guard reserves, then worked two jobs and often performed hip-hop, poetry, and comedy at open mic nights.

In February, Bradley-Brown and his family moved back into the city, to Overbrook Park, for more affordable housing and to be closer to his elderly grandmother.

Brodie worried at first, but considered the area to be relatively safe.

Seven months later, her son was dead.

Quenzell Bradley-Brown was apparently a victim of a mistaken identity killing, and remains unsolved, as are hundreds more. With a mostly uncooperative public who hate the police, a police department around 600 officers undermanned, and a probable next mayor who hates cops, who can reasonably expect that number to get better?

Many subsequent paragraphs give us some of the statistics and references, before article authors Ellie Rushing and Chris Palmer go off the reservation:

Arguments and drug-related feuds remained the predominant motives in homicides, according to police statistics. But authorities also pointed to ongoing gang conflicts, social media posts, retaliation or revenge, and domestic violence.

We have several times mocked the Inquirer for recently claiming that there were no real gangs in the city. We were reliably informed by the 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.” But, the embedded link led to another article, from just 11 days ago, in which Miss Rushing was one of the authors, along with Rodrigo Torrejón, telling of the violence not of gangs, but “West Philadelphia street groups.” They did use the word “gang” one time, but it appears to simply have been a matter of prose, because they’d already used “street group” in the sentence:

Lacey-Woodson and Mickens, affiliated with the street group “02da4,” were targeting a member of the rival gang “524″ and opened fire on the party, said Jeffrey Palmer, an assistant district attorney with the Gun Violence Task Force, which headed the investigation.

Unless I missed it, which is always possible, that was the only use of the word “gang” in the article. There were plenty of subsequent references to “street groups” and “groups” in the article.

Obviously, there was some editorial ‘guidance’ in this. While the article headline and subheading are “West Philly street group members charged for their roles in five different shootings: The rash of violence was part of ongoing feuds between feuding West Philadelphia street groups, authorities said,” the original article title, visible by hovering your cursor over the article tab, was “West Philadelphia gang members arrested in Sircarr Johnson Jr., Salahaldin Mahmoud fatal shooting”, and the article url is https://www.inquirer.com/news/sircarr-johnson-west-philadelphia-gang-arrests-july-4-shooting-20221219.html.

Translation: what I have often referred to as The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. is, I assume to follow Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes directives to be an “antiracist news organization“, the word “gang” is apparently racist. Perhaps, for Miss Hughes, the word “gang” draws into the minds of readers an image of black gangs, or perhaps it’s simply that, for her, the truth is racist.

The Enquirer, oops, sorry, Inquirer really doesn’t like investigating the truth. The paper will never report the numbers I use, all from documented sources, to note how the current law enforcement triumvirate have failed, nor have they, at least as far as I could find, mentioned what Ben Mannes reported on Broad + Liberty, that the homicide numbers are obvious fudges, given the high number of obvious homicides that remain classified as ‘suspicious,’ and not counted in the official homicide statistics.  When the Lenfest Institute, which owns the Inky, sends out begging letters which state that “It is impossible to have a democratic society without a free press that informs citizens,” and “Reporters at The Inquirer are dedicated to speaking truth to power and delivering you news that makes Philadelphia a better place,” one ought to expect that the reporters who are dedicated to speaking truth to power would do something really radical and investigate what that truth really is.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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Helen Gym Flaherty and Broken Windows

I had started on this story ten days ago, but had dropped it. It sat in my ‘drafts’ queue for a bit, until I say this tweet from Helen Gym Flaherty,[1]Even though Mrs Flaherty does not respect her husband, attorney Bret Flaherty, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal will not show him a similar disrespect. formerly a Philadelphia city councilwoman, and now a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Mayor:

But while the longtime activist who is typically aligned with the Democratic Party’s left wing said violence is “destroying our city and our people,” she was far from taking a tough-on-crime tone.

“I will not use this crisis to roll back the clock on civil rights,” she said. “While many people in this race will talk about public safety, let me be clear: Decades of systemic racism and disinvestment brought us to this place.”

Mrs Flaherty’s campaign website is full of the usual ‘progressive’ bromides, but, at least as of this writing, there’s no actual issues page, telling the city’s voters — of which I am not one — what she would actually do in office if elected.

But then, this self-described social justice warrior — or so I take it from this campaign website blurb — cites an article from The Philadelphia Inquirer. I’m sure that The Inquirer’s #woke[2]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 columnists and staffers will be aghast that this was even published! Why, it absolutely reeks of Rudy Guiliani and “broken windows policing“.

Renovating abandoned houses reduces the rate of gun violence, Penn study finds

Gun crimes went up during the study, but they went up less near houses that got new doors and windows, at a cost of $5,900.

by Tom Avril | Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Hammers and screwdrivers might be effective tools in preventing gun violence.

That’s the conclusion of a new study by University of Pennsylvania researchers, who measured crime rates near clusters of abandoned Philadelphia homes that were outfitted with new doors, windows, and other improvements.

Previous research has found that crime goes down when vacant houses are fixed up, but it was unclear whether the connection between those two things was more than a coincidence. To nail down whether home repairs actually prevent crimes, the Penn team tackled the question with the same rigorous approach doctors use to study a new drug: with a randomized, controlled trial.

The results left little doubt, said lead author Eugenia C. South, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.

Gun crimes increased everywhere in the city during the study period, but there was less of an increase in the neighborhood blocks surrounding renovated homes, compared to those where abandoned homes were left alone, South and her coauthors reported in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The repairs likely helped in two ways, she said: by healing the social fabric of the neighborhood and by eliminating possible hiding places for guns.

There’s a lot more at the original, and while the original, and the study behind it, are more concerned with new windows, doors and façades on abandoned houses, it’s obvious that upgrading occupied units would be even better: fewer places to become drug shooting galleries, fewer places to stash weapons and stolen goods, and more responsible neighbors.

The left really didn’t like broken windows policing, because it involves more than just fixing up neighborhoods; it also involves seriously prosecuting ‘minor’ crimes, and giving the ‘entry-level’ criminals a small taste of life behind bars, giving them an early opportunity to decide that, hey, this life isn’t for me.

And Mrs Flaherty, a strong supporter of the police-hating defense attorney who, aided by George Soros’ money, became District Attorney in Philadelphia, certainly won’t like that part.

Cleaning up the city’s streets is certainly important, but cleaning up crime has to be part of it. Philadelphia has tolerated the open-air drug market around the Allegheny Street SEPTA train station, and discarded drug needles just wherever, and it’s little wonder that there’s no respect for the law when the law shows little indication of being actually enforced.

Mrs Flaherty won’t support something like that, and that means that, even with her (apparent) support of spending city money to redo windows and doors on abandoned rowhouses, there won’t be much of a positive impact on reducing crime. One fact is just too simple and too obvious to penetrate the progressive mindset: the criminal who is already behind bars isn’t out on the streets committing other crimes.

References

References
↑1 Even though Mrs Flaherty does not respect her husband, attorney Bret Flaherty, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal will not show him a similar disrespect.
↑2 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

We’ve pretty much reached the end point, at which any calculations of the final toll of blood in the City of Brotherly Love are down to the margin of error. With just five days left in the year, Philadelphia has seen 510 ‘official’ homicides, so the final toll is going to be somewhere in the 514 to 521 range.

It was just twenty days ago that I noted the margin of error possibility that the city could finish slightly under 500 homicides. I guess that the gang-bangers “cliques 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 took that as something of a personal challenge.

So, my congratulations to Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, on the fine job they’ve done.

In eight years under Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, Philly never once cracked the 400 ‘barrier,’ and saw two years, 2013 and 2014, in which the homicide total was under 250! Homicides were under 300 during the trio’s final three years in office together.

New York City has seen 418 homicides through Christmas Day. Philly, with just 18.5% of the Big Apple’s population, just smiles and says, “Hold my beer!”

References

References
↑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“
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Killadelphia The gold medal remains out of reach

It was only yesterday that we noted that the City of Brotherly Love had won the bronze medal, tying for third place in annual homicides with 499.

It was, of course, no surprise that, just one day later, the city tied for the silver medal, given that second place was just one higher, the 500 killed during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, under Mayor Wilson Goode, he of MOVE bombing fame.

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page now puts the city as having had an even 500 ‘official’ homicides, as of 11:59 PM EST on Monday, December 19th, and twelve days remaining in the year.

500, the number of homicides, ÷ 353, the number of days elapsed in the year, = 1.4164 homicides per day, x 365 = 516.9972 anticipated murders for 2022. With 55 murders in the 49 days since Hallowe’en, a rate of 1.1224 per day, and 12 days remaining, yields 13.4694 more murders at that rate, or 513 to 514 murders total for 2022. And that will put the law enforcement team of Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw very solidly in second place, the silver medal to go along with the gold that they won last year.

The gold medal? That would require 62 more homicides this year, a number virtually impossibly out of reach unless someone shoots down an airliner over the city.

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Killadelphia: the city is tied for third place all time in murders, with 13 days left in the year

I had asked, just yesterday, if the City of Brotherly Love would hit 500 ‘official’ homicides when the Philadelphia Police Department released its official statistics this morning. Well, not quite: Philly is sitting at 499 homicides, which ties for third place in the all time records, matching 2020.

We had previously noted that Philadelphia actually cut back three from the 502 originally reported, but 499 was bad enough, and whatever accounting tricks might have been used to downgrade to 499 from 502 became pretty much irrelevant when there were 562 murders, plus apparently 190 ‘suspicious’ deaths not yet classified as homicides.

Being tied for third place shouldn’t last long, as second place is held by 500 homicides, set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990; the odds are that the city will hit that with tomorrow’s report.

There’s virtually zero chance that the city will match last year’s record of 562; there are only 13 days left in the year. Even in blood-soaked 2021, there were ‘only’ 22 murders between December 18th and the end of the year. But the 514 to 519 range seems most probable given current statistics.

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Philadelphian Amanda Marcotte is very, very upset that 35 transgender people have been murdered this year, but doesn’t care about 496 killings in her home town

Unless she has moved again, and I missed it — something which is always possible — Salon’s senior politics writer Amanda Marcotte lives in Philadelphia. As of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, December 15th, the City of Brotherly Love had seen 496 homicides officially, and with 110 deaths listed as “suspicious,” the total is doubtlessly well above 500. At least one other homicide occurred on Friday, but the Police Department do not update the homicide statics until Monday morning, so it’s entirely possible that the city will top 500 by then.

Yet, to Miss Marcotte, the important thing is hate crimes!

Republicans want to blame Club Q shooting and other hate crimes, baselessly, on police defunding

During Wednesday’s House hearing, Republicans minimized the role bigotry plays in anti-LGBTQ hate crimes

by Amanda Marcotte | Thursday, December 15, 2022 | 6:00 AM EST

“To the politicians and activists who accuse LGBTQ people of grooming children and being abusers, shame on you.”

During Wednesday’s House Oversight committee hearing on anti-LGBTQ violence, Club Q bartender Michael Anderson was blunt, both about his experiences and whom he holds responsible for the horrific mass shooting he survived. A combination of “inaction on gun reform” and “hate speech,” he said, led to that terrible night last month in Colorado Springs, where he “saw my friend lying on the floor, bleeding out, knowing there was little to no chance of surviving the bullet wound.”

Matthew Haynes, the owner of Club Q, testified that there is a direct line from Republican leaders who reject LGBTQ rights to the five deaths and massive trauma suffered by his customers and staff. Noting that “169 members of Congress” voted against a recently-signed law protecting same-sex marriage, he asked, “Are LGBTQ people not part of your constituency? Do you not represent us? While we wait for you to answer, we are being slaughtered and dehumanized across this country, in communities you took oaths to protect.”

Well, perhaps some of them represent the great majority of their constituents, many of whom do not accept the notion of same-sex ‘marriage.’

There were, as Miss Marcotte cited, five deaths in the Club Q shooting; that’s only 491 fewer than her adopted hometown has seen through her publication date.

Republicans on the Oversight Committee, however, had a different villain in mind to blame — for not just the Club Q shooting, but for the fact that the past two years have seen record levels of fatal violence against trans and gender non-conforming people. They pointed fingers at Democrats, protests against police brutality, and mostly non-existent police defunding.

Well, I followed the link Miss Marcotte gave us, and found this:

Sadly, 2022 has already seen at least 35 transgender people fatally shot or killed by other violent means. We say “at least” because too often these stories go unreported — or misreported. In previous years, the majority of these people were Black and Latinx transgender women.

The 35 transgender people killed? There had been 35 Philadelphians killed by January 23rd — 37, actually — of this year, but their deaths weren’t worth the notice of the political left.

What was I writing about in January of 2022? I was writing about The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far-left columnist Will Bunch, and his hatred not of crime, but of the police! I was writing about Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, and his refusal to seriously enforce the gun control laws the city does have.

The left complain that so many ‘transgender women of color’ have been killed, without wanting to recognize that the majority of them were working as prostitutes, and tricking some frequently intoxicated johns into thinking they were real women.

Even beyond Colorado Springs, there’s little reason to think police “defunding” is shaping crime. As the Center for American Progress reported in July, “Democrat-run cities spend more money on policing than Republican-run cities” and of “the 25 largest cities, 20 saw increases in their police budgets from FY 2019 to FY 2022.” The slogan “defund the police” that was bandied about Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 never really took off with Democratic politicians and certainly hasn’t had much impact on actual police funding. For certain, some cities have attempted to reallocate police funding to prevention services, but in general, those efforts have been overstated in the media coverage given to the “defund the police” movement.

Miss Marcotte claimed that the failure of Colorado Springs to enforce the law against the Club Q shooter for his previous crimes, or use the so-called “red flag” law against him, wasn’t the result of defunding the police problems, without recognizing that while Philadelphia hasn’t defunded the police de jure, being around 600 officers short of authorized staffing levels has done so in a practical sense. Philadelphia is her (adopted) hometown; surely a political junkie like her can’t be unaware of that.

But she can be aware of the fact that she just doesn’t care about the crime which isn’t politically useful for the Democrats. She is appalled that Republicans in the state House of Representatives impeached District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), due to his let ’em loose attitude when it comes to criminals and the city’s homicide rate, blaming it instead on Pennsylvania’s not-terribly-strict gun control laws, but she never did anything really radical like look at the numbers behind those laws. It was about Mr Krasner and “his anti-racist and progressive views on fighting crime,” without looking at the fact that crime has gotten worse, not better. She whined about the National Rifle Association standing up for our Second Amendment rights, after eight people were murdered in Buffalo and another ten in Boulder, blaming it on, you guessed it, evil white men:

The grim reality is that the entire nation is in the thrall to a minority of extremely insecure mostly white men who, drunk on decades of NRA-fueled propaganda, have decided that having the ability to commit mass murder at a moment’s notice is a crucial component of maintaining their manhood against the ever-encroaching threats from de-gendered Potato Heads and lady video game players. Most of these men claim exoneration because they don’t personally grab one of their many overpriced killing machines to lay waste to a grocery store or high school. Grotesquely, some even use these mass shootings to indulge in public fantasies about how they would totally stop an active shooter, though somehow they never seem to actually get around to doing it. But ultimately, they’ve become complacent in the face of mass murder from decades of being told by right-wing media that there’s a binary choice between preventing murder and watching Michelle Obama personally run off with their testicles in her handbag. Worse, the right has cultivated an overall suspicion of the very concept of concern for the lives of others at all.

On the day she published that, March 23, 2021, 111 Philadelphians had bled out their life’s blood so far that year in the city’s mean streets, the vast majority of them black, and the vast majority of their (too few) known killers also being black. Unless my math is very, very wrong, 111 killed in Philly, in her adopted hometown, is a larger number than the 18 victims she mentioned. While not in the daily homicide totals, the Philadelphia Shootings Victims Dashboard takes the information from the city’s Shootings Victims Database, and has noted that, from the beginning of 2015 through Thursday, December 15th, out of 2,779 fatal shootings in the city, 2,129, or 76.61%, were black males, with another 154, 5.54%, being black females.

Think about that: of 2,779 homicides by firearm in Philadelphia, blacks were the victims 2,283 times, 81.15%, in a city in which only 38.3% of the population are non-Hispanic black. And while Philly doesn’t make the statistics by race easy, St Louis does. Out of 191 recorded homicides reported on December 18, 2022, 170, or 89.01%, of the victims were black. Of the 141 identified suspects, 135, or 95.74%, are black.

According to the Census Bureau, only 44.8% of the city’s population are black.

What am I to think other than, when it comes to Miss Marcotte, and just as I have said about The Philadelphia Inquirer, black lives just don’t matter, not unless they are somehow politically useful to the #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 left.

Robert Stacy McCain just published an article on his site, Crime is not just a statistic, adapted from The American Spectator, No Safety in Chicago: A daylight robbery highlights danger in urban crime wave. Somehow, some way, we evil reich-wing white males are actually concerned with the huge crime rate in our major cities, about black people being killed in the virtually normalized gang, oops, sorry, cliques of young men[2]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 shootings, while for the oh-so-noble left, those things are normalized and ignored, because they just aren’t politically useful for the left.

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated during normal business hours, Monday through Friday, so the last ‘official’ report was 496 homicides as of the end of Thursday. I’ve already heard of two more, and I’m wondering: will the city hit 500 when the statistics are published again on Monday?

The left don’t like conservatives using the crime statistics for political gain, but conservatives can use the crime statistics that way for one reason, and one reason only: what the left have been doing simply has not worked. But for the left to admit that they have not worked is to challenge their entire mindset, their entire political philosophy.

So, they do the only thing that they can: they hide their heads in the sand and deny reality. For the left, they’d rather keep their governing philosophy, and if that means ignoring over 500 homicides a year in Philly, well that’s just what they’ll do.

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.

↑2 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.”