Category Archives: Crime

Posted on by

Killadelphia The City of Brotherly Love is up to at least 207 murders so far this year

This is the 36th time I’ve used KIlladelphia as an article title. That, in itself, should tell you how bad the situation is.

What makes you think that it mattered? This was a planned assassination, and they were going to carry it out, period.

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics database does not update the current year until normal business hours, and with Monday being a holiday, that means Tuesday morning. The last update had 194 homicides as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, May 26th, and Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News has tweeted that there have been 13 homicides since the weekend began. Being the math genius that I am, I can add 194 + 13 and get a total of 207.

The previous years’ numbers do update automatically, telling us that through May 29, 2021, there had been 212 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love.

So, let’s do the math. 207 homicides in 149 days yields an average of 1.39 per day. Just using that number, multiplied by 365, we get an ‘anticipated’ total of 507 homicides for the year.

But that’s not how I do things, because the warm months are just beginning, and homicides spike during the warm months. Instead, I divide the current 207 by the 212 homicides as of the same day last year, and get 0.9764. Multiplying 562, the number of murders in 2021, by 0.9764 gives me an estimated 549 homicides for the year.

Even the lower number of 507 would be solidly in second place all time.

In 2013, Mayor Michael Nutter, Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, and (later convicted himself) District Attorney Seth Williams helped lead the city down to 246 homicides. Using the 1.39 homicides per day figure, Philadelphia is on track to tie that the 2013 total in just four weeks, before the year is even half over.

Posted on by

Killadelphia At least 199 murdered in the City of Brotherly Love so far this year.

The Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer, or at least its website main page, was just full of stories about firearms. Soccer beat writer and website home page editor Jonathan Tannenwald wrote “Alejandro Bedoya leads Union protest against gun violence: ‘This ain’t American exceptionalism’: ‘It ain’t freedom that we have to now look over our backs all the time,’ the Union’s captain said after his team wore T-shirts at Saturday’s game with the message ‘END GUN VIOLENCE.’” Breaking news editor and President of the News Guild Diane Mastrull wrote “2 women leaving a church funeral service were hit by stray bullets in Philly fatal shooting,” noting, almost as an aside, that there were three homicides in the City of Brotherly Love on Saturday. She did, however, scrub the story of any reference to race, even though the Philadelphia Police reported the race of the victims in each report. In that, she was following what is quite obviously the newspaper’s editorial policy under publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes’ and executive editor Gabriel Escobar’s orders.

Decades ago, the Inquirer’s masthead declared that the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper as a “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People.” Those days are long gone!

But the Inquirer did publish a few stories which might not quite fit Miss Hughes’ and Mr Escobar’s editorial slant. Continue reading →

Posted on by

They are doing their jobs; they are protecting our constitutional rights!

The Democrats and the left — please, pardon the redundancy — are never willing to inflate a crime into a crisis, and are using the school shooting in Texas to try to infringe on the rights of Americans who have done nothing wrong. There was District Attorney Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner, who would rather prosecute police officers and exonerate criminals chiming in with “What organization does more to enable murder by gun & mass shootings of Americans than the @NRA? Every elected official who panders to the NRA is failing. Period.”

Of course, under Mr Krasner, a defense attorney who hates cops, but who was elected District Attorney thanks to George Soros pumping money into ‘social justice’ and ‘racial justice’ candidates, while the Philadelphia Police Department were making record numbers of arrests for illegal possession of firearms, the DA’s office was winning, or even attempting to win, a far lower percentage of such cases.

Pennsylvania does not have outrageously tough gun control laws, but Mr Krasner isn’t attempting to enforce the ones they do have. We do know that Samuel Collington and Philadelphia Police Corporal James O’Connor IV would still be with us if Mr Krasner had kept previously charged violent criminals in jail when he had the chance.

Now comes Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA), calling for the state legislature to enact tougher gun control laws:

Students and leaders rally in Philly for stronger gun laws: ‘It doesn’t have to be this way’

“Our message to our legislators in Congress and Pennsylvania’s General Assembly needs to be: do your jobs,” said Gov. Tom Wolf.

by Oona Goodin-Smith | Friday, May 27, 2022

Gov. Tom Wolf rallied Friday with fellow lawmakers, clergy, students, and gun violence prevention activists in Philadelphia, calling for the Pennsylvania General Assembly to pass more stringent gun laws in the wake of the Texas school shooting that killed 19 children and two adults.

William Teach: House Democrats To Investigate….Gun Makers In Wake Of Texas Shooting

“Our message to our legislators in Congress and Pennsylvania’s General Assembly needs to be: Do your jobs,” Wolf, a Democrat, said to applause and a sea of orange CeaseFirePA T-shirts.

Wolf said the Republican-controlled state legislature for years has stymied the passage of “commonsense legislation” in the commonwealth. He urged lawmakers to: require reporting for lost and stolen guns within 72 hours, close loopholes and require background checks on all gun sales, require safe storage of firearms, and create “red flag laws” to protect those who may be a danger to themselves or others.

The renewed demand for action came days after the Uvalde massacre — the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, and the 27th school shooting in the country this year — and two weeks after 10 Black people were shot to death in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket in a killing reportedly motivated by a racist conspiracy theory.

Twenty-seventh school shooting this year?

  • May 17: Walt Disney Magnet School, Chicago: an 8 year old student discharged a gun, injuring a 7 year old. The Washington Post counted this as 1,420 students experiencing gun violence at school.
  • April 26: Aspen Ridge Elementary School, West Ishpeming, MI: Student shot himself in bathroom during school hours. Post counts this as 700 students “experiencing gun violence at school.”
  • April 11: Pine Bluff High School, in Pine Bluff, AR: Student fired shots in parking lot, no one injured. 820 students present.

Using The Washington Post’s interactive graphic of school shootings, it quickly became clear: the 26 other school shootings were gang violence involving kids who brought guns to school themselves, killing five in five separate incidents, along with security officers shooting outsiders harassing parents in two separate incidents. This is the kind of propaganda that the credentialed media use to artificially pump up numbers.

In Philadelphia, where gun violence is often unrelenting, shootings have surged in the past years with killings reaching record levels in 2021.

Well, yes, shootings have spiked in the City of Brotherly Love, but that’s because the District Attorney keeps turning loose criminals on ‘minor’ offenses, enabling them to be out on the streets to commit major ones. It is because the city and, let’s be honest here, the ‘disadvantaged communities’ tolerate and enable gang violence. So-called “red flag” laws will do nothing, because the public aren’t even providing evidence against actual shooters, and can’t be expected to report potential ones. The Buffalo shooter had posted plenty of messages on social media giving clues that he was a whacko, and New York state has a red flag law, but he was never reported or investigated. Red flag laws seem to be of more use for one enemy to get another enemy hassled by the police than stopping mass shootings.

Require “safe storage” of firearms? Philadelphians have been seeking permits and buying firearms at record paces due to the increased homicide rate; the last thing they want to do is have their weapons locked in a safe or inhibited by a trigger lock when seconds count while someone is breaking into their homes.

Governor Wolf and the ralliers shouted that they wanted the General Assembly to “Do your jobs!” but their jobs include protecting the constitutional rights of the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. What the ralliers want is for the legislators to infringe on our right to keep and bear arms. There is a certain irony involved when people exercise their constitutional rights to advocate that other people’s constitutional rights should be abridged.

In the end, the entire thing is enabled by utter stupidity: criminals are criminals because they violate the laws! They don’t care about gun control laws, because they don’t care about any laws that stand in the way of their desires. If someone is willing to violate the laws about shooting people, about trying to kill others, why would anyone expect him to care about a law trying to restrict his ability to do so?

The only people that gun control laws would affect are those who haven’t been breaking the law, those who do not intend to kill anyone, save perhaps in self-defense.

Posted on by

Update on a Lexington killer Fayette County Commonwealth's Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn allows another killer a chance to get out of jail while still relatively young

On March 12th, we reported that Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn had ‘negotiated’ another lenient plea bargain arrangement for a murderer.

Xavier Hardin, mugshot from Fayette County Detention Center, dated June 15, 2021, and is a public record.

Lexington man who committed deadly Fayette Mall shooting reaches plea deal. Here’s why

by Jeremy Chisenhall | Friday, March 11, 2022 | 12:19 PM EST | Updated: 1:06 PM EST

The man who shot and killed a 17 year old inside Fayette Mall in 2020 has reached an agreement with prosecutors to accept a conviction for manslaughter instead of murder, according to court records.

Xavier Hardin, 21, pleaded guilty to manslaughter, assault and wanton endangerment charges in the killing of Kenneth Bottoms Jr., after reaching a plea agreement earlier this week, according to court records. Hardin, who was 19 at the time of the incident, also injured two bystanders when he fired shots inside the mall on Aug. 23, 2020.

Fayette Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn said Hardin’s plea agreement was reached through mediation and Bottoms’ family was in agreement with the plea deal. The plea agreement accounted “for the facts of the case,” Red Corn said, which included that “both the defendant and Kenneth were carrying handguns that day at the mall.”

“There were video recordings of their encounter, and the defendant raised a claim of self-protection,” Red Corn said. “Regardless of the defendant’s claim, he injured innocent persons and put others in harm’s way when (he) started shooting. This is another tragic example of why teens should not be carrying guns in the first place.”

There’s more at the original here. Naturally, what my late best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal didn’t publish Mr Hardin’s photo, due to the stupid McClatchy mugshot policy, but The First Street Journal is not bound by that! Continue reading →

Posted on by

What would so-called ‘red flag’ laws actually do? Far more harm than good is what they would do!

How does one actually implement the so-called “red flag” laws? It’s clear that neither Salvadore Ramos nor Payton Gendron were reported to law enforcement prior to buying his weapons, despite having left significant warnings via social media.

Nikolas Cruz had many ‘encounters’ with the Broward County Sheriff’s Department, but they always let him off with a warning. He assaulted a student in school, but the soft-hearted and soft-headed school board, eager to disrupt the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’, declined to report that to law enforcement.

William Teach discusses foot-in-the-door gun control proposals.

If private citizens were unwilling to see Messrs Ramos and Gendron as serious enough threats to take some action, if the idiots in Broward County were unwilling to actually enforce laws already on the books, with what does that leave us? Nina Jankowicz and her Ministry of Truth scouring Twitter and Facebook, reading every message, trying to ferret out bad people? Perhaps some sort of government surveillance of email, looking for nut cases?

No, what we’ll have are people using the system to cause problems for their enemies, cheating wives or their boyfriends trying to get at husbands, beta males trying to take the alphas down a peg, gang members trying to get opposing gang members disarmed and into the ‘system,’ cheating husbands or their girlfriends trying to get cheated on wives checked on by the police, or just liberals trying a new form of ‘SWATting‘ against sensible people. How about #woke teachers or school administrators upset when they find out some of their students are hunters? We’ve already seen efforts to get physicians and their staffs to ask patients, especially children, if there are any guns in their homes! With the HITECH Act pushing making medical records electronic and transferable — with appropriate precautions, of course! — we already have records in place which the government could search to see who has admitted to having firearms at home.

I was asked that question one time, and I responded that not only was it none of their business, but that I found the question intrusive and offensive.

Robert Stacy McCain talks about The ‘Gun Lobby,’ ‘Assault Weapons,’ ‘Common Sense Gun Laws’ and Other Things Joe Biden Keeps Lying About

In the end, they’re typical leftist ideas to get more and more government supervision of our lives, Minority Report thinking that we can somehow police impure thoughts of people who may not have committed any crime.

You think that’s alarmist concern? Look at the way the government tried to track people — ‘contact tracing,’ they called it[1]In jurisdictions with testing capacity, symptomatic and asymptomatic close contacts to patients with confirmed and probable COVID-19 should be evaluated and monitored. For areas with insufficient … Continue reading — who tested positive for COVID-19, and tried to punish people who chose not to get vaccinated.

The left say that this is a minor thing, just something to keep us safer, especially after the recent massacres in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas. But these ‘minor things’ are just more attempts to get their foot in the door, just another ‘minor step’ to achieve their eventual goal of disarming the public.

References

References
↑1 In jurisdictions with testing capacity, symptomatic and asymptomatic close contacts to patients with confirmed and probable COVID-19 should be evaluated and monitored. For areas with insufficient testing support and/or limited public health resources, the following evaluation and monitoring hierarchy (Box 4) and the case investigation and contact tracing prioritization recommendations can be used to help guide prioritization. The hierarchy is based on the assumption that if close contacts listed in Priority 1 become infected, they could potentially expose many people, those at higher risk for severe disease, or critical infrastructure workers. If close contacts in Priority 2 become infected, they may be at higher risk for severe disease, so prompt notification, monitoring, and linkage to needed medical and support services is important.
Posted on by

Black lives don’t matter, at least not to credentialed media

While I have mentioned the censorship of The Philadelphia Inquirer previously, we don’t always get the evidence quite so directly.

Police Officer Miguel Torres, Badge Number 7191, reported on a shooting in Mantua:

16th District — Shooting Incident

35XX Fairmont Avenue on highway at 7L06 PM. Victim #1 – Black female 19 years old was shot 2X in the right side. She was transported to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center by RPC 16S6. She is in stable condition. Victim #2 – Black female 34 years old was shot 2X in the right leg. She was transported to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center by EPW 1601. She is in stable condition. Victim #3 – Black male 59 years old was shot 3X in the right leg. He was transported to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center by RPC 16S7. He is in stable condition. Victim #4 – Black male unknown age was shot multiple times in the right side. He was transported to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center by RPC 16T1. He is in critical condition. Scene held, no arrest and no weapon recovered.

So, how did the Inquirer report the incident?

Gun violence across the city Wednesday also included a quadruple shooting in Mantua. At about 7 p.m., while walking on the 3500 block of Fairmount Avenue, a 19-year-old woman was shot twice in her right side, a 34-year-old woman was hit twice in right leg and a 59-year-old man was shot three times in his right leg. A 19-year-old male was shot multiple times in his right side,. All of the victims were brought to Penn Presbyterian, police said. Three were in stable condition, but the teenage male was in critical condition.

Police told reporters on the scene that the four victims were walking to a prom send-off party when they were shot, possibly by someone riding by on a bicycle, according to FOX29.

Reporter Rita Giordano cited Fox 29 News as her source, but the Fox 29 report did not state that the victims were transported to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, so Miss Giordano had to have a second source. The police report noted that each of the victims was black, something wholly omitted from the Inquirer article. Why does the Inquirer censor the news?

The 19-year-old male victim appeared to be the person specifically targeted when the “gunman rode past the four victims on a mountain bike and fired at least 9 shots from a semi-automatic weapon,” according to the Fox 29 News report. The other victims were simply struck by “stray bullets.” Continue reading →

Posted on by

Lies, damned lies, and statistics How The Washington Post manipulates statistics to mislead readers

Screen capture of Washington Post headline, May 25, 2022. Click to enlarge.

The headline was dramatic: More than 311,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine. Read that, and you’d think that half the schools in America were being machine gunned down, which is, let’s be honest about it, exactly what the editors of The Washington Post want you to believe.

But what, exactly, does “experienced gun violence at school” mean? From their methodology:

To calculate how many children were exposed to gunfire in each school shooting, The Post relied on enrollment figures and demographic information from the U.S. Education Department, including the Common Core of Data and the Private School Universe Survey. The analysis used attendance figures from the year of the shooting for the vast majority of the schools. Then The Post deducted 7 percent from the enrollment total because that is, on average, how many students miss school each day, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Reporters subtracted 50 percent from a school’s enrollment if the act of gun violence occurred just before or after the school day.

So, if a firearm was discharged on school grounds during school hours, but no one was struck, 93% of the school’s enrollment “experienced gun violence at school.

  • One of the incidents shown by the Post was on November 15, 2021, when an armed 13-year-old boy in Poughkeepsie High School, in Poughkeepsie, New York, fired “several rounds in front of the school, striking multiple vehicles”, but neither killing nor injuring anyone. The Post counted that as 570 students “experiencing gun violence at school”.
  • On November 19, 2021, at Hinkley High School in Aurora, Colorado, “Teenagers exchanged gunfire in the parking lot, wounding three students.” The Post counted that as 1,940 students “experiencing gun violence at school,” even though this was a gun battle between gangs, and not an attempt to shoot up the school.
  • November 29, 2021, at Cesar Chavez High School in Laveen, Arizona, a 15-year-old boy shot the 16-year-old who had just sold him the gun in a school bathroom. While it was hardly an attempt to shoot up the school, the Post counts this a 2,400 students having “experienced gun violence at school.”
  • December 1, 2021 at Sam Rayburn High School, in Pasadena, Texas, a 21-year-old man fired a shot into the air while robbing a student on campus, with no one injured or killed. The Post counts this as 2,530 students “experiencing gun violence at school.”
  • February 28, 2022, at Jonesboro High School, in Clayton County, Georgia, a student discharged a weapon in school, hitting nobody. The Post counts this as 1,282 students “experiencing gun violence at school”.

There are many, many more similar examples, of accidents, stray bullets, gang battles and one-on-one fights, things that make up the vast majority of the incidents compiled into the statistics, but which the editors hope you don’t read, which the editors hope the readers will conflate to thousands of Columbines or Marjory Stoneman Douglases.

Given that so many readers do not read closely enough, do not delve more deeply into the stories, the editors can reasonably hope that their propaganda is persuasive. Not lies, per se, but statistics compiled in such a way to have the effect of lies.

Here’s the money line:

The Post has found that at least 185 children, educators and other people have been killed in assaults, and another 369 have been injured.

Remember: that’s 185 killed, and 369 injured, since 1999. Both of those numbers are lower than the number killed and injured in Philadelphia so far this year.

Screen capture of The Washington Post’s website main page, May 25, 2022. Click to enlarge.

The school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, by a misfit high school dropout who was bullied while he was in school due to a “childhood speech impediment” was certainly a terrible thing, but in practicing journalism[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 rather than journalism, by publishing wholly sensationalized but nevertheless misleading statistics, the editors of the Post are pretty much lying outright in their attempt to push Congress into infringing upon our Second Amendment rights.

The Post had ten, ten! separate articles listed on their website main page on Wednesday morning, most geared toward a push toward unconstitutional gun control, because that’s what the editors do.

The Post, perhaps inadvertently, undermined its own gun control reasoning:

In cases where the source of the gun could be determined, more than 85 percent of shooters brought them from their own homes or obtained them from friends or relatives, according to The Post’s analysis.

The ranks of school shooters include a 6-year-old boy, who killed a classmate after saying he didn’t like her, and a 15-year-old girl, who did the same to a friend for rejecting her romantic overtures.[2]Why do I suspect that, from the language stating that the 15-year-old girl killed a “friend” who rejected her romantic overtures that the slain friend was another girl?

Seven in 10 of them, however, were under the age of 18, which means that — often because of an adult’s negligence — dozens of children had access to deadly weapons.

In other words, most of the weapons used were legally purchased by other people, people with no criminal intent, and then taken by those who did have criminal intent in mind. The only way that ‘gun control’ stops that is if private ownership of firearms by the law abiding is banned . . . which is, of course, what the editors want anyway.

Supporters of dictatorial government always want a disarmed citizenry. Their fellow travelers in the credentialed media are only too glad to help.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑2 Why do I suspect that, from the language stating that the 15-year-old girl killed a “friend” who rejected her romantic overtures that the slain friend was another girl?
Posted on by

The Field Negro and #BlackLivesMatter Do #BlackLivesMatter only when they are taken by a white guy?

There is a Philadelphia blogger named Wayne Bennett who writes a site called The Field Negro.[1]If you are wondering about the name he chose, here is Malcolm X’s definition of the difference between a “house Negro” and a “field Negro. Several years ago, Mr Bennett had a box in his sidebar called Killadelphia, in which he kept track of murders in his hometown, though he ceased doing that a few years ago. Mr Bennett still maintains that blog, though he writes far less frequently than previously, with only three postings so far this month. Yes, he is fairly liberal, but I still used to enjoy reading his site, although it’s one which has almost totally dropped from my attention.

The City of Brotherly Love utterly destroyed its previous yearly homicide record with 562 killings last year, and if the totals are down 7.46% date-over-date as of last Sunday, as we pointed out yesterday that’s only because the gang-bangers’ marksmanship has suffered. The number of shootings in the city are almost the same — down 1.10% — and if the bad guys were as successful in their attempted murders as they were last year, the total number of killings would be just three fewer than the same date last year.

It didn’t surprise me in the slightest that Philadelphia writer Amanda Marcotte blamed the Buffalo massacre on Tucker Carlson and other evil reich-wing Republicans. At least as far as I can tell, she never writes about murders in her adopted hometown.

From Mr Bennett, I expected better, but I didn’t get it. Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 If you are wondering about the name he chose, here is Malcolm X’s definition of the difference between a “house Negro” and a “field Negro.
Posted on by

Killadelphia All the News That's Politically Correct!

The WordPress software I use for The First Street Journal assigns numbers to posts with the same name; the system tells me that this is the 34th post entitled “Killadelphia”. That says something right there!

Robert Stacy McCain wrote too quickly:

The homicide total so far this year is 180 in “Killadelphia,” meaning that the city’s averaging about one homicide a day, but nobody seems to consider this an emergency, and Congress is sending billions to Ukraine.

If only it was just one homicide per day! The 180 murdered number was for Thursday, May 19th, the date for which that 180 total is accurate — the Philly Police do not update their statistics on Saturday or Sunday — was the 139th day of the year, meaning that the City of Brotherly Love is killing the brothers at the rate of 1.295 per day!

But, come Monday morning, and we get the update: there have now been 186 souls who have been sent early to their eternal rewards on Philly’s mean streets as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, May 22nd, upping that average to 1.310 per day. As of right now, the statistics project 520 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love for 2022.[1]Methodology: I have taken the number of homicides on this date in 2022 and divided that by the number of homicides on the same date in 2021, then multiplied that number by 562, the number of … Continue reading

As of the same date, 807 people had been shot in the city. Maybe the gang bangers had actually killed 180 people, but they tried to kill at least 807!

As of May 18th, ‘only’ 160 out of 180 homicides was committed by firearm; on the same day Philly reported 802 shootings, down from 807 on the same date in 2021. While homicides were down by 9.91%, shootings were down only 0.62%. Translation: the thugs are shooting at each other at about the same rate, but they have become poorer shots, killing only 19.95% of their intended victims.

Actually, it’s even lower than that, since we have no statistics on how many people were shot at, but missed completely.

Interestingly enough, The Philadelphia Inquirer actually reported on the weekend’s bloodletting, in a story which was linked on the main page of the newspaper’s website, which was yet another surprise to me! Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 Methodology: I have taken the number of homicides on this date in 2022 and divided that by the number of homicides on the same date in 2021, then multiplied that number by 562, the number of homicides in 2021. I do this to account for the fact that homicides tend to increase as the weather warms up, and this approximates the trend as the year progresses. Other methods of doing this could be used. If I simply multiplied the current daily homicide number by 365, it would result in an anticipated homicide number of 478, but that doesn’t take into account the effects of warmer weather, nor does it seem anywhere like a reasonable number the way the trends are moving.