Category Archives: Crime

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Killadelphia With over 100 "suspicious" deaths recorded, the real numbers could be much higher than the official ones

We had previously noted that, despite the occurrence of a documented murder, the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page numbers hadn’t moved.

Now we are informed that it had been a computer glitch, which has now been fixed, and the update is a big one: eight new homicides reported. The First Street Journal had reported, on December 7th, that there was a statistical possibility, at the margin of error, that Philadelphia had an outside chance of finishing the year with fewer than 500 homicides. That didn’t last long, and by the 12th, it had vanished, as the city was on a clear path to between 509 and 516 homicides.

We’re so far into the year now, December 15th having been the 349th day of the year, that one or two homicides don’t move the statistics much, but eight homicides in four days? That has moved the average daily killings number up to 1.4212, which puts the city on pace for 519 killings, 518.7393 to be more precise.

There’s more. There had been a seeming downturn after Hallowe’en, and that was what had made me hopeful that the city might, just might, finish under 500. But now there have been 51 homicides in the 45 days since October 31st, 1.3333 per day, and that works out to 18.13333 for the sixteen days remaining in the year, or a total of 514.

Two ways of calculating the trends, and the projected numbers are drawing ever closer. However, the Christmas holidays always seem to be big ones for killings — Peace on Earth, and all of that — and during the last 16 days of 2021, there had been 27 homicides. If the City of Brotherly Love hit that pace again, Philly would finish with 523 murders.

Retired Philadelphia Police Sergeant Mark Fusetti reported that, according to his sources, there have also been 110 “suspicious” and 76 “other” deaths recorded by the Philly Police Department. While there are supposedly no bodies attached to the 76 “other” cases, there are to the 110 “suspicious” ones. Some of the suspicious may be self-defense claims that have not yet been assigned that status, and would not be part of the homicide numbers, but others could be actual murders, but ones which the police have not yet developed sufficient evidence to call them such. Now that Ben Mannes of Broad + Liberty has broken the story of the large number of suspicious deaths — a story that our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper has thus far ignored — one wonders if, as those suspicious deaths get reclassified, will they be added to the ‘official’ homicide totals?

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Killadelphia What, did somebody recover from being dead?

We have already noted that there are questions concerning the homicide numbers in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page reported that there had been 488 murders as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, December 11th.

At 9:21 AM EST on Monday, December 12th, Stevee Keeley of Fox 29 News tweeted:

Identity & age of Philadelphia’s 489th homicide victim in 2022 still not known yet to @phillypolice A 16 year old was shot twice in same shooting incident in Northeast Philadelphia 3:46am @FOX29philly.

Mr Keeley’s tweet included an image of the police press release.

So, a male of unknown age was pronounced dead at the scene, and another person was shot there, yet no weapon was recovered, nor was anyone arrested. Obviously a firearm was used, and just as obviously, someone fled the scene.

So, when I checked the Current Crime Statistics page this morning, I expected to see at least 489 homicides. Maybe I’m not the greatest mathematician around, but 488 + 1 = 489, right?

Well, apparently not, because the Philadelphia Police Department are now reporting that there were 488 homicides through 11:59 PM EST on Monday, December 12th. What, did somebody recover from being dead?

Is it any wonder that some people have no confidence at all in the city’s statistics?

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw is on her way out. A political appointee of Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia), following stints in Oakland, California, and as Chief of Police in Portland, Oregon, and supposedly once considered to have become Police Commissioner of New York City, when Mr Kenney’s term is over at the end of next year, Miss Outlaw is almost certainly out as well. With 499 murders in the city in 2020, her first year — and remember: 502 was the number first reported, and then scaled back — followed by 562 in 2021, and almost certainly between 509 and 516, good for second place all-time this year, it’s difficult to see any of Philly’s mayoral candidates wanting to keep her around. Former Councilwoman Helen Gym Flaherty, the furthest left, and therefore most probable winner of the Democratic primary, is an ally of District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Mr Krasner and Miss Outlaw do not exactly get along. Even if another Democrat wins the primary — and no Republican has ever won a direct mayoral election in Philadelphia — they are all looking at how Let ’em Loose Larry has won by a landslide in his election.

In other words, Miss Outlaw’s got to go.

This is the time, with only a year left in office, for the Commissioner to do something really radical and tell the truth. If she’s going to have to leave anyway, she could at least do so honestly.

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Killadelphia Is The Philadelphia Inquirer trying to keep the truth hushed up to protect Democrats?

I noted, just five days ago, that I saw a mathematical possibility, at the margin of error, that the City of Brotherly Love could finish very slightly below 500 homicides in 2022. That was based upon the decrease in the rate of killings since Hallowe’en.

Alas! while the rate of killings still isn’t in the 2021 range, it has picked up once again, and the math makes it seem impossible now. With 488 killings as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, December 11, 2022, Philly is now seeing 1.4145 murders per day; that works out to 516.29 murders for the year. And with at least six homicides over the last three days, the city has seen 43 murders in the 41 days since Hallowe’en. At that rate, 1.0488 per day, times thee 20 days left in the year, yields 20.98 homicides in these last three weeks. If there are 21 homicides in the last 20 days, that would end the year with 509 murders.

But that is working with the official homicide numbers, and Broad + Liberty, along with other outlets, broke the story of the uncounted deaths in the city, showing at least 101 “suspicious” deaths, in a photo taken just before Thanksgiving. That the credentialed media didn’t want to report that is evidenced by the fact that, since the story broke, The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, and the supposed newspaper of record for the area, and one which believes it is so important that the federal government should subsidize it, has nothing on that story, even though it was published four days ago, on a subject that would seem pretty serious and significant. Checking the Inquirer’s website main page, specific crime page, and doing a site search for suspicious deaths, as of 9:45 AM EST today showed no stories on the subject at all. Did the Inky investigate at all? Did Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw tell them that it was nothing, don’t worry about it? Did the top officers clam up?

You’d think that a leak like this, from someone inside the Philadelphia Police Department, would have piqued the interest of real journalists, especially the police-hating #woke of the Inquirer, but if you actually thought that, you’d be wrong, wrong, wrong!

Who knows, perhaps the unauthorized leak from someone in the Police Department was a fake, a political attack. If so, wouldn’t the 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 want to expose that? After all, it’s a serious accusation, one which attacks the political leadership of the Police Department and the city as a whole . . . and Philadelphia hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Harry Truman was President.

Oh, wait, that’s it: the editors of the Inky don’t want anything which could hurt the Democrats made public.

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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Why would anyone want to become a cop these days?

Following the unfortunate death of methamphetamine-and-fentanyl crazed drug addict and previously convicted felon George Floyd while he was resisting a legitimate arrest in Minneapolis, the left went wild, and “Defund the Police“, as though the problem wasn’t crime, but people being arrested for committing crimes. This stupid notion was popular with the street agitators, and thus some Democratic politicians took up the call, but it wound up fading from sight reasonably quickly, as sensible people — meaning, in this case: those not out in antifa demonstrations — soundly defeated a police reorganization proposal in Minneapolis.

But, of course, attacks on the legitimacy of the police continue, from shakedown lawsuits in Detroit to the George Soros-sponsored, cop-hating defense lawyer serving as Philadelphia’s District Attorney Larry Krasner trying to put police officers doing their duty in jail, Philadelphia didn’t actually defund the police, per se, but the effect of the city’s policies has been to do just that: as we have previously noted, the Philadelphia Police Department is nearly 600 officers understrength from its authorized full strength of 6,380, with around 800 more expected to retire within the next four years. Police Academy classes have not kept up with officer attrition. And really, who’d want to become a Philly cop when the Police Commissioner won’t support you and the DA is trying to throw you in jail?

Well, it’s not just Philly! From The New York Times:

N.Y.P.D. Officers Leave in Droves for Better Pay in Smaller Towns

This year has seen the highest number of resignations in two decades.

By Chelsia Rose Marcius | Friday, December 9, 2022

Earlier this year, the chief of police in Aurora, Colo., needed to find a few dozen officers to join his force.

The chief, Dan Oates, was 50 officers short to patrol Aurora, a city of roughly 400,000 people just east of Denver. But he knew limiting his search to Colorado would not be enough: Like many other leaders in law enforcement, he has found that fewer people these days want to be cops.

So Chief Oates and his team began to seek recruits at agencies where they believed pay and morale were low. They settled on New York City, and in August, he flew about 1,800 miles to meet with New York Police Department officers. He convinced 14 of them to move out west.

“I feel bad raiding my home agency,” said Chief Oates, who once served as a deputy chief in New York City. “But frankly it’s a cutthroat environment right now among police chiefs to recruit talent, and we all desperately need it.”

The departure of those officers was no anomaly. The New York Police Department, with about 34,000 officers, has seen more resignations this year than at any time in the past two decades as other agencies have become more aggressive in recruiting from its ranks.

Through November, about 1,225 officers resigned before even reaching five years of service, according to New York City Police Pension Fund statistics obtained by The New York Times. Many left for other New York State agencies or police departments outside the state.

There’s a lot more at the original, but the numbers are pretty stark.

Chief Oates, who retired this week, said the officers he recruited from New York were partially lured by better pay. The starting salary at the Aurora Police Department is about $65,000 in an area where the average monthly rent is approximately $1,750 and the average home sale price is about $624,000, according to an August report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Incoming officers with four or more years on the job can earn a salary of around $100,000. Aurora also gives incentives to those who transfer from other departments, including a signing bonus of up to $10,000 and a $5,000 relocation bonus.

That is more money than officers make in New York City, where the median sales price for a home is $810,000 and the average monthly rent is about $4,500. The starting salary at the Police Department is $42,500, according to the most recent contract between the agency and the officer’s union. After three and a half years of service, officers can earn a salary of $47,000, and $85,292 after five and a half.

Even foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia pays its police officers more: $59,795 annual salary while a Recruit in the Academy, with a raise to $63,945 upon graduation and joining the PPD. Philly is a lot less expensive a city in which to live than New York: housing costs less, taxes are lower, and they can get Wawa coffee to drink as well!

But if the pay is higher, it also means putting up with open air drug markets in Kensington and having to patrol the Philadelphia Badlands.

As we noted on Thursday, when Philly had an official — whatever “official” means in Philadelphia — 499 homicides in 2020, neighboring Upper Darby Township had 10. With a population of 85,681 according to the 2020 census, that means that Upper Darby had a homicide rate of 11.67 per 100,000 population, while Philly’s that same year was 31.11 . . . and that paled before the 2021 homicide rate. Even directly adjacent to Philadelphia, smaller towns are safer.

Aurora, Colorado, which poached officers from the NYPD? With a population of 386,261 according to the 2020 census, the city saw 38 homicides that year, for as homicide rate of 9.84 per 100,000. Why wouldn’t a former NYPD cop, or Philadelphia Police officer, prefer to work there, where the pay is better and the crime rate a lot lower?

Yes, police pay is unacceptably low in New York City, and the left-leaning city council isn’t going raise it that much. But the real problem is that the big cities in the east — and not a few in the west — just plain hate cops! Why would anyone want to work in a place where the public spit on your shadow, if not your shoes?

The far left wanted to defund the police, and while they didn’t get it de jure, it has been achieved de facto: with major city police departments being hundreds of officers undermanned — Baltimore is 420 officers short staffed — what the left wanted has been achieved: fewer dedicated police officers to enforce the law.

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Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Let’s tell an obvious truth here: Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw will be out of a job in a year. An appointee of Mayor Jim Kenney, the mayor elected in 2023 to replace Mr Kenney, who is term-limited, will want someone, anyone! other than Miss Outlaw in that job. Even if the next mayor likes Miss Outlaw, and agrees with every single thing the Commissioner has done, no one is going to want to be saddled her record. At this point, the Commissioner needs to just woman up, and reveal the whole truth:

Questions about the accuracy of Philadelphia’s homicide statistics

Philadelphia reports an eight-percent year-to-date decline in homicides, but police sources again raise concern over how some deaths are classified in the city’s federally required crime reporting statistics.

by Ben Mannes | Thursday, December 8, 2022

At the time of the writing of this article, the Philadelphia Police Department reports a year-to-date homicide total of 482, a decline of 41 murders from this date last year. Normally, a eight percent decline in murders would be great news in a city that desperately needs some. However, ranking police sources have sent Broad + Liberty a photo from inside Police Headquarters concerning “Other” or “O Job” classification — leading many to question whether the eight percent decline was valid.

You can click on the photo to enlarge it, but to simplify it for you, I’ll tell you: the photo is (allegedly) of a whiteboard in Police headquarters, supposedly the homicide unit, indicating that, at the point the photo was taken, there had been 465 murders, 101 ‘suspicious’ deaths, and 76 ‘other’ cases. In 2021, the numbers were the 562 homicides reported many times, plus 190 suspicious deaths. The ‘other’ is a new category, one which does not involve the finding of a dead body.

In contrast with the daily reporting and real-time tracking of reported crimes in television and social media, many are left to wonder if the questions of 2020, when the city ended the year with just one homicide short of their all-time record, was being repeated. Broad + Liberty reached out to the police department and talked with Capt. Jason Smith of the Homicide Unit to clarify these issues.

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.

Capt. Smith confirmed that they are both things, but there are no deaths or “bodies” associated with O-jobs. He clarified that “M-jobs” are murder investigations while “S-jobs” are deaths that may not be classified murders. Smith estimated that of the 103 S-jobs so far this year, at least twenty may be deemed self-defense, and thus not result in a homicide charge. Numerous others, according to Smith, are awaiting toxicology and brain samples from the medical examiner to determine whether or not they are homicides, vs. overdoses or accidental deaths, which could take months to get back from them.

Smith said that “The Homicide unit would be conducting an audit of all S-jobs in the next week,” which should reconcile numbers by year-end. Smith said that his unit tries to conduct such an audit every two to three months, which could result in an increase in homicides by two to three cases as a result. More relevant to the questions presented by the 2020 year-end homicide total, says Smith, is the issue of “delayed death investigations”, in where a victim dies later from injuries first reported as an assault, or when S-jobs are later reported as murders due to delayed results from toxicologists and/or medical examiners.

That’s all well and good, but Mr Mannes did not follow up with the obvious question: if there were “S” cases at the end of 2020 and 2021, which hadn’t been resolved into homicides or not homicides when we were given the end-of-year homicide totals, why, when they were finally resolved — surely at least some of them have been — did the year-end homicide totals for 2020 and 2021 never change? Are we expected to believe that, out of 190 ‘suspicious’ deaths in 2021, not a single one was revised to be a homicide? The odds of such would seem vanishingly small!

Smith told Broad + Liberty that a detailed breakdown of S-job classifications would be available after the audit and would be available for further updates. However, popular podcast host and former judicial warrant squad Sergeant Mark Fusetti reports some of his sources showed “S-jobs” that are obvious homicides, but remain outside the homicide statistics for various reasons; “Last year had a guy shot in the head in a van, but because the weapon wasn’t found, they have it as an S job” said Fusetti. “Sometimes its a clear murder, but the Medical Examiner sends back questions so it gets an S Job” continues Fusetti. “It then sits on the desk while the Detective has to work newer cases, and it never gets reported on the homicide stats.”

Also see: The OK Corral: The PPD Has Been Lying To Its Officers

The city shouldn’t have to rely on a retired Police Sergeant, or on an anonymous officer who tweeted out that photo of the whiteboard, a photo that you can bet your last euro that the city did not want to see released. Right now, Philly needs a homicide detective to put this information together and leak it to media who will report on it.

Of course, it would be preferable that, rather than having it leaked, if Commissioner Outlaw would realize that her career in Philly has no more than 12½ months left to run, that her job performance in the City of Brotherly Love means that she’ll never get a top police job in any city with a six-figure number of residents, and just go ahead and tell the whole truth herself. The end is coming; she might as well be honest about things, and rat out Mayor Kenney if he ordered her to massage the numbers.

Going out still lying about things won’t help her reputation anywhere she searches for another job, because, now that this story has broken, people will keep hammering down and hammering down and hammering down on it; it will eventually become completely public.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer just trashed its own gun control arguments

We have previously noted the change from the 502 homicides originally reported for 2020, down to 499. Now, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas noted someone that many expected to be on the list of 499, but who wasn’t there. This one seems legitimate:

A 22-year-old was killed just over the city line in Upper Darby. That might have helped his family’s quest for answers.

A mere 100 yards might have made all the difference in an attempt to find a measure of justice.

by Helen Ubiñas | Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Amir Parks was a 22-year-old new father who was shot and killed near Cobbs Creek Park in August 2020. He was loved, friends and family told me. He was missed. He mattered.

But when it came to Parks’ death, answers were mostly hard to come by for those who knew him best. And there was this mystery: Why wasn’t Parks mentioned on the official list of Philadelphia’s 499 homicide victims in 2020?

Maybe the police had misidentified him or even misspelled his name, I thought, hardly an uncommon error in a city that averages more than a homicide a day.

After double and triple checking the list with the police, an answer. His loved ones were right; he had died around the woods along Cobbs Creek, in the 6500 block of North Church Lane not far from Marshall Road.

But that was about the length of a football field beyond the Philadelphia city line in Upper Darby Township, a section many misidentify as being part of Cobbs Creek.

What no one realized then was how crucial those 100 yards would be in his family’s quest for justice.

In 2020, when Philadelphia was just shy of 500 homicides, Upper Darby had 10.

As we have previously reported, the homicide rate, even adjusted for population, is several times higher in Philadelphia as in the rest of Pennsylvania. Those 499 homicides in 2020? They constituted 49.48% of all murders in the Keystone State, while the city has just 12.33% of the Commonwealth’s population.

It got worse last year, as the city’s 562 homicides were 54.72% of Pennsylvania’s total.

Of all the homicides in Philly in 2020, only 210 were solved, or about 42%‚ typical in a city where a majority of murders are unsolved.

By comparison, nine of the 10 homicides in Upper Darby that year have been solved, including last month when police arrested a 20-year-old man for killing Parks.

Now, I doubt that Mr Parks was included in the 502 number; the call was handled by the Upper Darby Police.

There followed several human interest story paragraphs concerning how nice a guy young Mr Parks was, and noting that, for the majority of homicides in Philadelphia itself, no one is arrested.

According to police, Parks was killed while illegally trying to sell guns to a potential buyer — a trade that (his cousin Shamiese) Parks–Gunagan said she believes her cousin took up in a desperate attempt to support his family.

And there it is: young Mr Parks was not the great guy in Miss Ubiñas story. Actually, it’s a bit of a surprise that the story was published at all, in that the Inquirer doesn’t usually tell us about the bad guys who get killed in the process of being bad guys.

I will admit to some doubts that a 22-year-old, in just “a desperate attempt to support his family,” would turn to gun-running. Such is not usually an entry-level crime. To be a gun-runner, you have to have money in advance, to buy the weapons you plan to sell at a profit. He could, I suppose, have just been a mule for the real gun-runner, but that would mean he’d have had to have known a pretty bad guy, and was trusted by that bad guy enough to make the sale.

Parks left a note on his phone shortly before he was killed: “Just in case something happens this is the person in the car.”

So, yeah, young Mr Parks knew that he was doing something bad, and that bad things could happen in the process. Miss Ubiñas’ first internal link was to Mr Park’s obituary in the Philadelphia Obituary Project, which tells us what a great and loving guy he was. But, if the Upper Darby Police are correct, he was still killed while he was committing a crime.

And it was more than just a simple, one-off crime. If Mr Parks was running guns, even as just somebody else’s mule, he was doing something which he had to know — and his obituary tells us that he was supposedly a smart guy — would enable other people to commit other crimes.

This is more than just a story about the killing of Mr Parks. It also points out the silliness of the arguments by Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) and District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), that the problem is that the state legislature in Harrisburg will not allow Philadelphia to pass its own, stricter gun control laws. Marshall Road in Upper Darby turns into Spruce Street in Philadelphia after you have crossed the bridge over Cobbs Creek as you pass the boundary between the two, but the Philadelphia Police are not sitting there, checking every border-crosser for contraband. If Philly had stricter gun control laws, the next thing about which the city, and the editors of the Inquirer, would whine is that those laws needed to be applied to Upper Darby and Haverford and Plymouth Meeting and Bensalem, because, as Mr Parks’ killing shows, the bad guys know how to drive to the next town.

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Killadelphia The bad guys are just as bad, but the good guys have gotten a bit better

I will admit it: I was a bit, a bit, mind you, more optimistic when I saw the article by Robert Stacy McCain screencaptured at the right yesterday evening. I’m something of a numbers geek, because numbers, at least accurate numbers, tell a truth not shaded by human lies.

Mr McCain’s article began with a screen capture of his own, of an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer — archived version here, to get around the newspaper’s paywall — noting yet another gruesome killing in the City of Brotherly Love. This story actually made the Inky because it was different from the usual gang “clique of young men” being shot by a “rival street group,”[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 so that is at least interesting.

Mr McCain’s article did something that what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[2]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. naturally did not: he included a mugshot of the suspect, Ahmad Shareef.

Ahmad Shareef, photo via The Other McCain. Click to enlarge.

Mr McCain wryly implied that, with a name like Ahmad Shareef, most readers would automatically think that the suspect was black. I asked the question more directly a few months ago: is the Inquirer actually perpetuating a stereotype it wishes to avoid? Is the newspaper, by censoring all mugshots, contributing not only to the stereotype that most criminals are black, but actually pushing a message, that all criminals are black?

Mr Shareef is not black. Rather, he is Syrian. The Inquirer would probably say that he is “brown” if the #woke[3]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 writers there were asked, but he’s clearly Caucasian.

When I said, at the beginning of this article, that I was actually a bit optimistic when I first read Mr McCain’s original, it was expressed in this comment on his article:

Surprisingly enough, Killadelphia’s murder pace has slacked a bit, with ‘just’ 478 homicides in 339 days, which puts the city on pace for ‘only’ 514.66 murders for the year.

However, since Hallowe’en, there have been just 33 killings, in 35 days. If that particular rate continued through the end of the year, there would be ‘just’ 23.57 more murders, which works out to ‘only’ 501.57. Just a couple off from that average, and the City of Brotherly Love could actually finish at 499 for the year!

Alas! it didn’t take but this morning’s check of the city’s homicide statistics to dampen that optimism. Two more homicides, which once again raises the numbers. 480 killed ÷ 340 days elapsed = 1.411764705882353 homicides per day x 365 days in the year = 515.2941176470588 projected murders for 2022.

Taking just the reduced homicide rate since Hallowe’en, 35 killings in 36 days yields 0.9722222222222222 homicides per day. With 25 days remaining in the year, that works out to 24.3055555555555556 more in December, or a total of 504 killed.

The chances of the city seeing fewer than 500 homicides starts to get beyond any margin of error.

Nevertheless, the numbers are fairly starkly different. In 2021, there were 41 killings between December 7th and the end of the year, a completely different pace than we are seeing now.

That different pace, however, isn’t indicative of what it might seem. According to the Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard, there had been 2,187 shooting victims in the city through December 5th, compared to 2,183 on the same date in 2021. It’s not that the cliques of young men blasting away at rival street groups have slacked off; it’s just that they haven’t been quite as successful in killing rather than wounding their enemies. Much of that is due to the Philadelphia Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy of placing shooting victims in patrol cars and taking them directly to the emergency room rather than waiting on the ambulance, along with even more experience in dealing with gunshot wounds by emergency personnel.

In other words, the bad guys are just as bad, but the good guys have gotten a bit better.

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.” If you think you’ve read this footnote previously, you have: its mocking nature is such that I have it saved for frequent use.
↑2 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.
↑3 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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Progressives can’t see the forest because of all the trees

According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, there have been 473 people murdered in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, December 1st. So, about what was District Attorney Larry Krasner worried on Thursday?

Advocates sound alarm on murders of transgender women in Philadelphia

Fox 29 News | Thursday, December 1, 2022 | 5:57 PM EST

PHILADELPHIA – Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner was among a group of LGBTQ activists who spoke about a troubling trend of deadly violence against trans women in the city over the recent years.

Investigators say on Thanksgiving morning, Sharee “Diamond” Jackson-McDonald – a transgender woman – was found shot to death inside a Germantown apartment. The murder of Jackson-McDonald was the 35 killing of a transgender or gender-non-conforming person in the United States this year.

Because I’m including the video from Fox 29 News, the rest is below the fold. I will warn the reader in advance: this is not politically correct in the slightest, and if that offends you, stop reading now. Continue reading →

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#HelenGym Flaherty wants to do for all of Philadelphia what Larry Krasner has done for law enforcement

The City of Brotherly Love finished the 11th month of the year with 472 homicides, 38 fewer than the total on November 30, 2021, a 7.45% decrease. That’s the good news, though 472 murders can hardly be considered as anything good.  That’s still 1.4132 per day, for a projected 515.81 for the year. Yet, as we have previously noted, homicides have been falling this fall — pun very much intended — and have been nothing like the surge seen between Labor Day and New Year’s Eve in 2021.

With 445 homicides at the end of Hallowe’en, there have been slightly less than one murder per day for November, actually 0.9 per day. If that rate continued through December, it works out to 27.9 more killings in 2022, which would put the city at ‘only’ 500 murders for the year, perhaps even 499 or 498, depending upon the vagaries of chance and just pure, dumb luck. That would leave 1990’s old record of an even 500 homicides in second place.

We did note, at the beginning of the month, that the city had initially posted 2020 as seeing 502 murders, something which, alas!, I failed to screen capture for documentation . . . but fortunately another person did not. I do not know, but I strongly suspect that someone in the city government did not want the number of murders to reach 500, and it was close enough for the city to push the number down somehow, by moving some to 2021, or by perhaps reclassifying three deaths as ‘suspicious’ rather than homicides. Thus, I have little real confidence that 2020 ended below 499, but, of course, I can’t prove it. Nevertheless, if 2022 can finish with just 500, or perhaps even a couple fewer homicides, that would be something of a victory.

However, the city is still seeing more shootings than last year, 2,154 so far in 2022, versus 2,144 through the end of November last year. It’s not that the gang-bangers, oops, I’m sorry, “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, aren’t just as violent, but that they’re poorer shots, and the Philadelphia Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy of putting shooting victims into patrol cars and taking them to the emergency rooms themselves, rather than waiting for an ambulance, along with even more hard-earned experience dealing with gunshot wounds, may have reduced the death toll somewhat.

Now comes former city councilwoman Helen Gym Flaherty[2]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., who wants to reverse that:

Helen Gym makes it official and launches a run for Philadelphia mayor on a pledge to address gun violence

The now-former Council member and leader of the city’s progressive movement launched her run at the William Way LGBT Community Center in Center City.

by Anna Orso | Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Former City Councilmember Helen Gym announced Wednesday that she will run for Philadelphia mayor on a pledge to address the city’s alarmingly high rate of gun violence, saying, “Everything is at stake right now.”

In remarks to a room of about 350 supporters gathered at the William Way LGBT Community Center, Gym centered her message on public safety, vowing to declare a state of emergency on her first day in office and prioritize improving homicide clearance rates.

I am amused that Mrs Flaherty chose a homosexual ‘Community Center’ as the place in which she announced her long-anticipated candidacy.

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.”

There’s more at the original.

Naturally, I went to Mrs Flaherty’s campaign website, to see how she had addressed the issues . . . and found out that she hadn’t; there was no specific “issues” page. Thus, we are left with secondary sources as to what she would do as Mayor.

Gym has opposed tax cuts for businesses and corporations, and has been critical of the Police Department, championing legislation to ban the use of tear gas on protesters and rejecting calls to bring back stop-and-frisk. In 2020, she voted against a planned increase to the Police Department’s budget — along with a majority of Council, including Green.

And here’s what Mrs Flaherty tweeted in 2019.

I support reducing the prison population by 50% from 2019 levels, We must center transformative and restorative justice practices in Philadelphia.

Can any policy have failed as badly as District Attorney Larry Krasner’s ‘decarceration’ program has failed the city since then? Murders get the most attention, and yes, they’re down a bit, but shootings, and every non-self-defense shooting is an attempted murder, are up. A Twitter friend who goes by the handle Over Salted Pretzel — and really, there’s no such thing as an over salted pretzel, though there are certainly under salted ones — did a lot of the research, and has the graphs here.

Mrs Flaherty apparently wants to move Mr Krasner’s policies into City Hall as well.

It may be smart politics: despite the huge increase in murders, the vast majority of them in Philadelphia’s “black and brown” neighborhoods — and Philly is our second most internally segregated large city, so there really are segregated “black and brown” neighborhoods — Mr Krasner was re-elected in 2021, with his greatest support coming from those areas of the city. As Mrs Flaherty appears to be running on the same things as Mr Krasner has, and to the left of the other candidates, she might very well win the Democratic primary, which, in Philly, is virtually the same thing as winning the election.

There are really only two possibilities:

  • The candidate truly believes the things she has said in the past, which proves that she is just boneheadedly stupid; or
  • The candidate knows that those policies not only do not work, but are actively harmful, but she doesn’t care because she thinks they’ll win her votes, in which case she is actively evil.

You can choose for yourself which one you believe is correct.

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“
↑2 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.