Category Archives: Crime

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Killadelphia! Perhaps some introspection on just the numbers. 100 people killed in the City of Brotherly Love.

It was in no way unexpected that the City of Brotherly Love would see its 100th homicide of the year this week; the only question was on which day that would happen. For a numbers geek like me, it has led to some introspection, but first, the report from The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Philadelphia reaches 100 homicides for 2022, outpacing last year

More people have been killed in Philadelphia so far this year than by this time last year, which ended with a record 562 homicides.

by Robert Moran | Friday, March 11, 2022 | 7:00 PM EST

Philadelphia has topped 100 homicides so far in 2022, outpacing the number of killings this time last year, which ended as the deadliest in the city’s recorded history.

The 100th victim was a 28-year-old man who was shot multiple times shortly before 11 p.m. Thursday on the 100 block of North 53rd Street in West Philadelphia. The man was rushed by police to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 12:32 a.m. Friday.

As of Friday evening, the city had not yet named the victim. Fox 29 reported that his family had identified him as Bryheem Barr.

The reporter, Robert Moran, followed the Inquirer’s practice of deleting the victim’s race from the story, even though the Philadelphia Police Department provide it. Of course, the tweet Mr Moran embedded in the story told readers that Mr Barr was black. I wonder if, by disclosing that kind of information, whether Mr Moran will get in trouble!

By March 10 last year, Philadelphia had 92 homicides. The city had a total of 562 homicides in 2021, breaking the previous record of 500 killings reported in 1990.

For comparison, New York City had 488 homicides for all of last year. As of last weekend, the city reported 67 killings so far in 2022.

Chicago this week also reached 100 homicides for the year, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Mr Moran might have made a better comparison had he noted the populations of New York and Chicago, compared to Philly. The Big Apple had 8,804,190 residents, while the Windy City had a population of 2,746,388; the City of Brotherly Love had 1,603,797 souls in the 2020 census. Chicago is 71 percent larger than Philly, with the same number of killings, while New York City is 5¼ times Philly’s size, and has a third fewer total killings.

There had been ‘only’ 96 homicides on March 11, 2021, a jump from 92 the previous day, which means that Philly’s 100th murder is ‘only’ a 4.17% increase over last year; had the homicide been counted on Thursday, when Mr Barr was shot, it would have been an 8.70% increase.

How does this work out? There are different ways to do the statistics, the simplest being the number of homicides divided by the number of days in the year, 70, to come up with a homicide pace of 1.4286 per day, multiplied by 365, projecting to 521.42 homicides for the year. A more complicated way is to take the number of homicides on the 70th day of the year in 2021, and find that 17.08% of 2021 homicides had occurred by March 11, 2021, and, using that number, project that 2022 will see 585.48 killings.

Bryheem Barr, from Kelly Rule, Fox29. Click to enlarge.

I started this article Friday evening, but, as I was running the numbers through my head, I realized that I was doing what others have done: I had reduced Bryheem Barr to a number. Fox29 had a story on him:

‘He didn’t deserve this’: Man slain in Philadelphia’s 100th homicide was “hardworking” father, fiancé

Published March 11, 2022 | 6:30 PM EST

PHILADELPHIA – Authorities believe a Philadelphia father and soon-to-be husband was shot and killed during an attempted robbery Thursday night to become the city’s 100th homicide so far this year.

Family members say 28-year-old Bryheem Barr was walking to his car to go to work just before 11 p.m. near the intersection of North 53rd and Arch streets when the deadly shooting happened.

According to police, Barr was found shot multiple times and driven to Penn Presbyterian Hospital by officers where he died.

A police source told FOX 29’s Kelly Rule that they believe the deadly shooting happened during a robbery and the shooter took Barr’s legally-owned firearm.

One thing we know: if Mr Barr had a “legally-owned firearm,” he was not a convicted felon, and he had gone through the hassle of getting a permit in Philadelphia. This was not a case of one gang banger offing another, the way so many murders in the city happen.

Another is that he was going to work, obviously night shift somewhere.

Barr was a father of three and was soon to be married. His family said he was studying to become a nurse.

“Hardworking, bothers nobody, will give you the shirt off his back will do anything for his family, he wouldn’t hurt a soul,” Lorriane Barr, Bryheem’s aunt said.

There’s a bit more at the original, and that bit more is more than the Inquirer had on its website.

What did the Inquirer have? Yet another story on Thomas Siderio, Jr, the 12-year-old punk kid to took a shot at the Philadelphia Police, and paid the ultimate price for it. Even as sympathetic to young Mt Siderio as the Inquirer could be, the story couldn’t help but disclose that:

  • In 2021, police “were searching a house where he was living after receiving a tip that he’d pulled a gun during a large fight at Second and Porter Streets in South Philadelphia. They found clothes matching a photo taken at the scene, but no gun.”
  • “In recent Instagram posts, TJ could be seen in a ski mask, and there are several references to guns and drug use.”
  • “’He had a tendency to follow the wrong kind of kids,’ said Terry Elnicki-Varela, who works in special education and started helping TJ at school three years ago. ‘He was no angel. Far from it.’”
  • Young Mr Siderio had been failed by both parents. His father who is currently in prison, and “previously spent at least a year in prison in Philadelphia” on a prior conviction, while his mother, Desirae Frame, also has a criminal record, with two drug cases and other arrests for theft, forgery, contempt of court, and receiving stolen property. The son is noted, in the article, as primarily living with a grandmother, but also living with a great-aunt.

Yes, he had a rough life, and little chance of improving it, but he was still a punk.

Mr Barr? If the Inquirer is working on a story to humanize the victim of the city’s milestone homicide, at least as of 8:49 this morning, it hasn’t been published. Instead, the paper is trying their best to excoriate the Philadelphia Police Department, something which can only lead to more killings in the city.

Mr Barr, at least as far as we know — there’s always a risk in taking just the family’s word for things — was a working man, and a law-abiding Philadelphian. For the Inquirer, his story isn’t an important one, save that he hit a certain number in the liquidation lottery. No, the paper would rather spend time and money trying to make a martyr out of a young punk.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to make a 12-year-old punk who shot at police some kind of martyr.

Thomas J Siderio Jr

I have previously noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t like reporting on the not good guys who get gunned down in the City of Brotherly Love, but when an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl gets killed, the paper is full of stories. I noted when the Inquirer and reporter Anna Orso tried to make an innocent victim out of young Marcus Stokes. In her story on the impact that the murder of Marcus Stokes had on E Washington Rhodes School, Miss Orso wrote, very specifically, that young Mr Stokes “was fatally shot in North Philadelphia on his way to school“, but the evidence, as printed in the Inquirer, indicates that he was not actually on his way to school. He was sitting, with five other young people, in a parked, and possibly disabled, car, many blocks away, fifteen minutes after he was supposed to be in his homeroom at school.

Miss Orso knew those facts; she is listed as either the sole or one of two authors in each of the articles I have cited. Did no one, including she, ever ask themselves any questions about why these young people, “including other Rhodes students“, were sitting in that car, ask themselves what they were doing there?

Miss Orso isn’t a stupid woman. She was graduated from Pennsylvania State University, a highly selective college, that doesn’t accept dummies. She isn’t inexperienced, having worked in journalism for seven years now, including four with the Inquirer.

Now, the Inquirer is trying the same thing with Thomas Siderio, Jr, the 12-year-old shot by the police after Mr Siderio opened fire on them:

    South Philly community mourns TJ Siderio, 12-year-old fatally shot by Philadelphia police officer

    Friends and family mourned mourned TJ this week, holding each other up as the waves of grief often took them off their feet.

    by Rodrigo Torrejón | Thursday, March 10, 2022

    Some would call him Tommy. Others Tom Dog. But most in Thomas Siderio’s tight-knit constellation of friends and family just knew him as TJ.

    A name was important, Pastor Mandell Gross said Thursday morning at Lighthouse Baptist Church in South Philadelphia. It was important during TJ’s short life. And it was important as dozens of TJ’s loved ones gathered at his funeral to say their final goodbyes.

    One by one, Gross asked the young people there, TJ’s friends, to say their names. Though he lamented the reason the community had gathered, Gross told the young people there to mourn the loss that they must try to come together in brighter days too. In TJ’s name.

At that point, the paper included a photo of Mr Siderio, one obviously taken several years earlier.

Four plainclothes officers were in the area, due to the high crime rate in the neighborhood. When they spotted Mr Siderio, who was visibly armed, they illuminated their unmarked car, the boy then shot at the officers, and took off running. One officer was injured in both eyes from flying glass, one remained in the vehicle with him, and two others got out to pursue the perp.

    A lawyer for TJ’s father previously disputed the accusation that the child fired the gun, calling it “egregious speculation” that has not been confirmed by evidence. Video and audio recordings analyzed by The Inquirer show that the gun that police say TJ tossed after shooting into the police car was found five doors down — or roughly 60 feet — from where he was fatally shot.

Sixty feet equals twenty yards, a distance a physically fit 12-year-old boy, who was already at a dead run, could cover in two seconds, but the Inquirer does not mention that.

The sappy article concluded:

    Next to his casket was a sign with a final, loving message from his parents, Thomas Siderio and Desirae Frame.

The elder Mr Siderio, inmate number NS5455, is behind bars at the State Correctional Institute Coal Township, three years into a sentence with at least two more years to serve on gun charges stemming from a murder in 2017. He has prior convictions for resisting arrest, assault, and the attempted theft of a motorcycle. He wasn’t there to have kept his son from running with a bad crowd and carrying a weapon, but, then again, as a convicted felon, he might not have been the best role model.

    “Rest In Peace TJ my son. Love Daddy and Mommy always and forever.”

    After the short sermon finished Thursday morning, the pallbearers gathered to carry TJ to his final resting place at Fernwood Cemetery. Most of the pallbearers were young, just a few years older than TJ.

    They were the friends that became TJ’s family on the streets of South Philadelphia. And with TJ’s face on their chests, the friends gathered for one last picture together, holding the young boy’s memory in their hearts.

An alleged but unconfirmed photo of Thomas Siderio Jr.

Give me a break! Young Mr Siderio was armed, with a stolen laser-sight equipped 9mm Taurus semiautomatic handgun, and he responded to the police lights by raising the weapon and firing it at the cops. This is not the sweet little angel the Inquirer has tried to make him out to be!

What was 12-year-old Mr Siderio doing out on the street, armed and ready to kill? Where was his mother, that she allowed him to have a stolen firearm, that she allowed him to go out into the streets armed? The newspaper’s Editorial Board has already opined that the killing of a young, gun-toting punk who opened fire on police young Mr Siderio should “should make every Philadelphian outraged,” blaming the city for not having safer and saner recreational outlets for boys like Mr Siderio, and blaming the state government for not passing virtue-signaling gun control laws that infringe on the constitutional rights of law abiding citizens but do absolutely nothing to stop criminals, blaming everybody but his father, who provided such a poor role model, and his mother, who didn’t supervise her son, and the boy himself, who knew he was breaking the law, and who took a shot at the police.

Let me be plain about this: had young Mr Siderio gotten away, he’d still be out on the streets, still be carrying a firearm, and still be a menace to every law-abiding citizen in the city. In just two days, March 8th and 9th, 13 people were shot in the city, and three of them died, all of them black males, but the Inquirer didn’t care enough about any of them to have a single story on any of them. I guess there wasn’t anything there out of which the newspaper could portray the victims as somehow innocents or heroic.

Young Mr Siderio is no hero, and he is no martyr. He was a young punk who thought he was a big, tough man, and had he escaped, would almost certainly amassed a long and violent criminal record. It is unfortunate that the manner of his death will cost a good police officer his job, and possible criminal charges, but the odds are high that Philadelphia is better off with Mr Siderio having gone to his eternal reward.

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The cause of death was stupidity

No, not that the victim was stupid — though he might have been — but that the man who (allegedly) killed him was stupid.

We noted, Saturday afternoon, Lexington’s sixth homicide of the year. Lexington Herald-Leader reporter updated her story at 4:02 PM on Monday, giving us more details:

    Juan Carlos Linares, Photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record., Click to enlarge.

    An arrest citation says a verbal altercation with Linares and two other people led to a physical altercation with Linares’ family and two others. At the end of the fight, Linares shot one of the victims, who was laying defenseless on the ground, according to court records.

    Court records also say Humberto Saucedo-Salgado, who resides in Phoenix, Az., caused physical injuries to one of the victims with his hands and feet. That victim was taken to the emergency room and intubated due to his injuries.

You can read more here.

In other words, Juan Carlos Linares had won his fight, had beaten the still unidentified victim into defenselessness, and then decided, heck, why not, might as well just shoot the guy, right? That’s just plain stupidity.

The other two members of his ‘side’ of the fight, Oziel and Humberto Saucedo-Salgado, were charged with first degree assault, and released on $10,000 bail each. Mr Linares bond has been set at $750,000, and he’s still locked up. Even so, bail can be denied in Kentucky for persons charged with offenses for which capital punishment is possible.

Mr Linares’s record at the Fayette County Detention Center indicates that the only charge against him, as of 5:10, when I accessed the information, is murder, though it’s obvious the first-degree assault could be added.

Under KRS §508.010, Assault in the first degree is a Class B felony, punishable by no less than ten years and up to twenty years in the state penitentiary, along with a $1,000 to $10,000 fine. Under KRS §507.020, murder is a capital offense, though the penalty can be less than death. Under KRS §532.030, the penalty can be death, life without the possibility of parole, life with the possibility of parole after a minimum of 25 years in prison, or a twenty to fifty year sentence.

Mr Linares act of stupidity, (allegedly) murdering an already beaten foe, could, and should, have him locked behind bars for the rest of his miserable life. If he had just stopped with the beatdown, he’d have been looking at getting out of prison when he was 43 years old, at worst, certainly a long time behind bars. Now, he’s looking at spending the rest of his life behind bars.

Unless, of course, Fayette County’s Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Ann Red Corn decides to let him plead down to a lesser offense, as she has done so many times recently. Such would not surprise me in the slightest.

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Killadelphia 2021 set a new record for killings in Philadelphia; 2022 is well ahead of last year's pace.

I had already known that this was a bloody weekend in the City of Brotherly Love, thanks to this tweet from former United States Attorney and Republican Gubernatorial candidate Bill McSwain:

I replied:

    Of course, the @PhillyInquirer, the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and supposedly the region’s newspaper of record, will ignore most of this.

I was only partially right, as the Philadelphia Inquirer did have one story on the killing:

    Three killed in West Oak Lane shooting

    Police responded to reports of gunfire at the intersection of Cedar Park Avenue and Haines Street on Saturday night.

    by Jenn Ladd | Sunday, March 6, 2022

    Three men were killed in a shooting in the city’s West Oak Lane section late Saturday, police said.

I normally quote the first four paragraphs of a story, but had I done so this time, I would have quoted the entire story. Three lives taken, two men in their twenties, and a third in his thirties, all shot multiple times, all dead at the scene, none named, and their lives, and deaths, reduced to four paragraphs in the Inquirer.

Though the Philadelphia Police Department specified that all three victims were black males, the Inquirer’s story only told us that the victims were male. I would say that I wonder why that is, but I really don’t.

That was just three of the killings. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is normally updated only Monday through Friday, during normal business hours, so I was surprised to find, on Saturday morning, that it had been updated, to indicate 88 homicides as of 11:59 PM on Friday, March 4th, up one from the previous day. It was not updated on Sunday, but this morning showed the seven more, 95 lives cut short by bullets or blades, on the 65th day of the year. On the same date in 2021, ‘only’ 86 people had been murdered, and ‘just’ 67 in 2020.

To put that in perspective, 2020 saw 499 homicides, which was, at the time, the second highest total ever, topped only by the 500 homicides in 1990, in the midst of the crack cocaine wars. 2021 blew those records out of the water, hitting 500 murders on the day before Thanksgiving, and finishing the year with a staggering 562.

And 2022 is now 9 killings ahead of last year’s bloody pace. What a fine job Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw have done!

As a bit of a numbers geek, I did the math, and if the current rate of increase over 2021 is maintained over the rest of the year, Philadelphia is on track for 622 homicides this year! Donald Trump has been out of office for well over a year, COVID-19 restrictions are almost gone, the economy is doing well enough that workers are in demand, all of the excuses that the left used to blame the homicide rate on anything other than bad people doing bad things are gone.

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Another murder in Lexington Still, the city is two behind last year's murder pace

Juan Carlos Linares, Photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record., Click to enlarge.

Lexington just suffered it’s sixth homicide of 2022, and the Lexington Police Department arrested Juan Carlos Linares for the murder of the victim. I suppose that we could say that Mr Linares was ‘known to the police,’ to euphemism, in that his record at the Fayette County Detention Center showed seven mugshots of him, from arrests beginning on January 27, 2018 through March 5, 2022.

    Three people arrested after shooting in downtown Lexington leaves one dead, one injured

    by Karla Ward | Saturday, March 5, 2022 | 2:04 PM EST | Updated: 4:50 PM EST

    Lexington police have arrested three people in connection with a shooting in downtown Lexington that left one person dead and another with life-threatening injuries early Saturday.

    Police announced the arrests in a news release late Saturday afternoon, saying the three suspects, Juan Linares, 23; Humberto Saucedo-Salgado, 25; and Oziel Saucedo-Salgado, 28, were being held in the Fayette County Detention Center.

    The name of the person who died in the shooting has not been released.

Oziel Saucedo-Salgado. Photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record. Click to enlarge.

There’s more here.

The brothers — or at least I assume they are brothers, from their names — Saucedo-Salgado were booked on First-degree assault charges, and they each had just the current mugshots listed.

Naturally, what my unfortunately late best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal chose not to publish the mugshots shown in this article, but those mugshots are public records, and I do believe in publishing them.

It would seem that Messrs Saucedo-Salgado chose the wrong guy to hang with. Mr Linares, charged with murder, is looking at spending the rest of his miserable life behind bars, and could even get the death penalty, at least if the Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney. Lou Ann Red Corn doesn’t cut him a sweetheart plea bargain deal like she has done so many times recently.

Humberto Saucedo-Salgado. Photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record. Click to enlarge.

If Mr Linares has been arrested seven times from January 27, 2018 — and we don’t know if he has a prior, sealed juvenile record — it has to be asked: why was he out on Short Street in downtown Lexington on March 5, 2022? The initial charges listed in the Detention Center records do not have the tell-tale charge of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, so we cannot assume that any of his previous arrests were for felonies, or even that he was ever convicted of anything. However, he was booked on a Saturday, so additional charges might well be filed once the work week begins.

With six homicides thus far in 2022, Lexington is two behind the same date in record setting 2021, when 37 souls were sent untimely to their eternal rewards, though with one shooting victim in the hospital with “life-threatening injuries” the toll could rise to seven.

At least Lexington isn’t Philadelphia, where at least 88 homicides have occurred through the end of Friday, March 4th, five killings ahead of last year’s pace.

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How far from the tree did the apple fall?

Thomas J Siderio Jr

A kid shoots at Philadelphia Police Officers, in a crime-ridden neighborhood, and winds up dead. Naturally 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 at The Philadelphia Inquirer want to make it police brutality!

Mystery deepens on whether 12-year-old boy was armed when police shot him in the back

The family of Thomas “TJ” Siderio prepares to bury the 12-year-old boy as investigators examine whether he tossed the gun before his was fatally shot by police.

by Barbara Laker, David Gambacorta, Craig R. McCoy, and Ryan W. Briggs | Friday, March 4, 2022

While the family of Thomas “TJ” Siderio prepares to bury the 12-year-old boy shot and killed by Philadelphia police, investigators are examining whether he had tossed a gun moments before a fatal bullet struck him in the back.

Notice that both the headline and the first sentence state that the dead delinquent was 12 years old, something the police officers almost certainly did not know during the incident — it was at night — and that he was shot in the back. You have to read further to learn that young Mr Siderio was armed and fleeing the police.

Two plainclothes officers chased TJ on Tuesday night after they heard gunfire and a rear window shattered in their unmarked car near 18th and Barbara Streets in South Philadelphia.

They fired toward TJ, who they said was holding a handgun and fled east on Barbara Street.

New details reveal that the officers fired four shots in total, according to police sources.

During the first two blasts, TJ was holding a gun. But the last two shots — one of which was fatal — are “concerning,” the sources said, because TJ may have tossed his weapon before he was hit.

In any normal story, the subject is referred to by his last name in second and subsequent mentions; but here the Inquirer writers refer to him by his nickname, a not-so-subtle attempt at making him a sympathetic character. The boy shot at the police!

“(B)ecause TJ may have tossed his weapon before he was hit,” huh? Note that the first sentence says “moments before a fatal bullet struck him in the back,” emphasis mine. It would seem that if he tossed his firearm, it was almost immediately prior to being struck, too quick for officers to have noticed it and taken it into account.

Four officers were sitting in an unmarked car when the episode began around 7:20 p.m. They were Edsaul Mendoza, Kwaku Sarpong, Robert Cucinelli, and Alexander Camacho, according to police records obtained by The Inquirer. They were staking out the area because a 17-year-old boy and 20-year-old man had been seen on social media brandishing weapons, police sources said.

The officers approached TJ and a 17-year-old, who were on bicycles, police said, because they believed one of them had a handgun. They turned on their flashing lights, then heard gunfire. Camacho was injured in both eyes by shards of glass, police records show.

Apparently the officers were right: young Mr Siderio did have a handgun. They illuminated, and then a bullet was fired at them, with Officer Camacho injured by a shattered window in the vehicle. Two of the officers then exited the vehicle and took off chasing Mr Siderio. A loaded 9mm semi-automatic handgun was recovered at the scene, as were five shell casings.

According to Police Department policy, an officer would not be justified in using deadly force solely if a suspect resisted arrest or attempted to escape. Other factors are supposed to be taken into consideration, such as whether a suspect was armed, or posed an immediate threat to an officer. Officers should not shoot at a fleeing suspect “who presents no immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury,” the policy states.

Mr Siderio was armed, and his willingness to fire at police officers shows that he was an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury. To me, shooting at an armed suspect, who had fired first at police officers, fits well within the ‘other factors’ to be taken into consideration.

Naturally, the 17-year-old at the scene claimed that the police did not turn on their lights or identify themselves before shots were fired, but even if that were the case, Mr Siderio shot first. As for believing a 17-year-old delinquent over the police, nope, not going to do that.

In the last six months, there were 652 crimes reported in the South Philly area where TJ was shot and killed, according to city police statistics. The area — bounded by Snyder Avenue south to I-76, and Broad Street west to 25th Street — saw two homicides, 36 robberies, and 23 aggravated assaults in that time period.

So, the police were there because it’s a bad neighborhood.

You might be asking, “How did a 12-year-old have a semi-automatic 9MM handgun? Where were his parents?” Well, his father, Thomas J Siderio Sr., inmate number NS5455, is behind bars at the State Correctional Institute Coal Township, three years into a sentence with at least two more years to serve on gun charges stemming from a murder in 2017. He has prior convictions for resisting arrest, assault, and the attempted theft of a motorcycle.

How far from the tree did the apple fall?

KYW Channel 3, the CBS owned-and-operated station in Philadelphia spoke with the mother of the 17-year-old who was with Mr Siderio when the incident happened:

“He had no chance in life and now, he’s gone before he could even get a chance in life,” the mother of the 17-year-old boy said.

Actually, he did have a chance at life, and he used that chance at life to try to take the life of someone else, a police officer. Naturally, there’s plenty of sympathy for young Mr Siderio, but he had his chance at life, and squandered it.

I’m enough of an [insert slang term for the rectum here] here to ask the obvious question: what if, rather than shooting at the fleeing delinquent, officers had let him get away? Then there’d be another 12-year-old carrying a gun on the streets of the City of Brotherly Love. Had the officers not fired at Mr Siderio, we’d have been reading about him soon enough in the future, perhaps the next time when he killed an innocent victim.

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.
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Three more dead in Philly, and the Inquirer doesn’t care But Larry Krasner and the Inquirer sure do care about cops who are exonerated!

As both of our regular readers know, I check the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page on weekday mornings, and the news was pretty depressing. As we noted on Wednesday, the city had crept to one above the same-day homicide total for 2021. But as of 11:59 PM EST on Wednesday, February 23rd, the total had jumped by three to 79 homicides, vis a vis ‘just’ 75 on the same date last year, and 53 in 2020.

Make no mistake here: 2020 was a bloody year, finishing with 499 murders, just one short of the then-record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990. But 2021 didn’t just surpass the old record; 562 homicides blew it out of the water.

Wednesday’s killings? There wasn’t a single story on any of them either on the main page or the crime page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, something which was no surprise at all. There were, however, a couple of related stories which caught my attention. In one, “The Inquirer’s look at itself ignores the paper’s history of exposing racial injustice: The sweeping claims in ‘Black City, White Paper’ are overly broad and shamelessly short-sighted, writes Huntly Collins, a reporter who spent 18 years at the newspaper,” a LaSalle University journalism professor and former Inquirer reported responded to the newspaper’s crying 21st century judgement about its 19th and 20th century history. Though he avoided the use of the term #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, he was clearly referring to them as he made it clear that the paper’s history needed to be viewed through the lens of the circumstances of the times. He noted that perhaps the paper could have hired more minority staff, but also noted that newspapers in general had been shedding journalists’ positions for a couple of decades now, and union contracts specified that, in layoffs, the last hired were the first fired.

The Inquirer’s look at itself also glossed over the economic crisis facing local newspapers as they strive to hire more minority journalists at a time when newspaper jobs are in steep decline. Since 2004, some 1,800 newspapers have folded, including 60 dailies. Nationwide, newspaper employment of editorial staff has plummeted to just 30,000, down a whopping 57 percent from 2008. The Inquirer once employed some 680 reporters, editors and other editorial staff. Today, that number is down to about 200. Even the best laid plans to diversify the staff falter when confronted with economic forces that shrink the size of the pie rather than enlarging it.

Publisher Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes has basically told readers that the newspaper she runs will not report on things which could lead to a negative image of minority populations, that the newspaper she runs will self-censor the truth in favor of “anti-racism” and social justice.[2]Commenter Lavern Merriweather stated that I must be racist for noting that the Inquirer hides the racial aspect of the news even in the stories that it covers, and that, not being black myself, I … Continue reading The plain truth, the unvarnished truth, is apparently a bad thing.

Then there was this gem:

DA Krasner denounces dismissal of charges against two officers charged with beating man with special needs

Krasner said he sees “a disturbing pattern” of judges dismissing charges against police officers.

by Mensah M Dean | Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner on Tuesday criticized the decision by a judge to dismiss charges against two police officer brothers whom he charged in April with chasing and beating a man with special needs after falsely accusing the man of tampering with cars in their far Northeast neighborhood.

Krasner, who pledged after taking office in 2018 to hold accountable officers who break the law, suggested that the decision by Municipal Court Judge William Austin Meehan Jr. during a preliminary hearing to clear the two brothers — former Police Inspector James Smith and former detective Patrick Smith — was part of a larger pattern of judges going easy on accused police.

“We are seeing a disturbing pattern of criminal cases against police officers getting charges against them thrown out by judges during the preliminary hearing phase, only to be reinstated on appeal. The law applies equally to everyone,” Krasner said. “Philadelphians should ask why some judges are finding no accountability at a preliminary hearing for police when they commit the same crimes that get everyone else held over for trial.”

Krasner, who has frequently clashed with the officers’ labor union, added: “My office will consider all possible avenues for seeking justice in this matter, and to hold accountable the individuals who chased, terrorized, and assaulted a young and innocent man with Asperger syndrome.”

There’s more at the original, but Judge Meehan heard the testimony of the alleged victim, and then dismissed the charges against the tweo former police officers.

“The court dismissed all charges…because the evidence presented by the prosecutor failed to prove that a crime was committed,” said defense attorney Fortunato Perri, who represented James Smith. “Inspector Smith and Detective Smith have dedicated decades of their lives proudly protecting and serving the citizens of Philadelphia. They look forward to continuing those efforts in the future.”

Of course, the District Attorney ought to be familiar with dismissed charges, because that’s what he does very frequently: since District Attorney Krasner took office, the percentage of firearms charges resulting in convictions has dramatically decreased. In Mr Krasner’s first year in office, 2018, 57% of Violations of Uniform Firearm Act only arrests resulted in convictions, with 35% having the charges dismissed. Those trend lines crossed the following year, with a larger percentage of charges dismissed, 47%, than resulting in convictions, 43%, and only got worse in 2020 and 2021, 49%/42%, and 62%/36% respectively. In their attempts to get illegal firearm possessions off the streets, the Philadelphia Police Department increased the number of VUFA arrests each year, and each year Mr Krasner’s office let the (alleged) malefactors off the hook in increasing numbers. Mr Krasner said:

This office believes that reform is necessary to focus on the most serious and most violent crime, so that people can be properly held accountable for doing things that are violent, that are vicious, and that tear apart society. We cannot continue to waste resources and time on things that matter less than the truly terrible crisis that we are facing.

The alleged injuries that the officers’ alleged victim suffered included “a black eye and abrasions on the back of his head, elbows, and knees,” pretty much the type of crimes the District Attorney doesn’t care about prosecuting anyway . . . unless they are committed by a police officer.

So, we have seen 79 homicides in 54 days, 1.4630 per day, ahead of the pace set last year, and at least at the time of writing this article, 10:38 AM EST on Thursday, February 24th, the Inquirer hadn’t even noticed, but was still promoting the softer-than-soft on crime, George Soros-sponsored District Attorney’s story from two days earlier. I have said it before: to the “anti-racist” Philadelphia Inquirer, black lives — and if any of the victims had been white, the paper would have been all over the case — really don’t matter.

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 Commenter Lavern Merriweather stated that I must be racist for noting that the Inquirer hides the racial aspect of the news even in the stories that it covers, and that, not being black myself, I have no right to comment on the black community in the City of Brotherly Love.
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Killadelphia Ho hum: the killing rate in Philly has crept higher than last year's

Jonathan Akubu, mugshot by Philadelphia Police Department, and is a public record. Click to enlarge.

The good, anti-racist Philadelphia Inquirer would not, of course, publish the mugshot of an accused murderer with a long past criminal record, but Steve Keeley of Fox29 did.

The Inquirer did have the story on his arrest:

The suspected leader of a Philadelphia carjacking ring has been arrested for two murders

Jonathan Akubu, suspected of leading a carjacking operation, has also been charged with committing two shootings and may be connected to dozens of other incidents.

by Chris Palmer and Anna Orso | Tuesday, February 22, 2022

A 28-year-old man who police say led a loosely organized carjacking ring has been charged with committing two murders and two shootings as part of a weeks-long crime rampage — and investigators are probing whether his group is connected to dozens of other crimes.

Jonathan Akubu of Drexel Hill was arrested Saturday in connection with the fatal carjacking of a 60-year-old man killed Feb. 6 in Northeast Philadelphia. He is also charged with killing another man, a 28-year-old car locksmith, less than a week later in the city’s Eastwick section.

Detectives used ballistics and cell phone records to connect Akubu to at least five incidents in the last two months. He was arrested at an apartment in Lansdowne, where police found a stolen handgun and an AK-47-style rifle.

Akubu is so far the only defendant charged in each case. Homicide Capt. Jason Smith said Tuesday that investigators believe his carjacking operation targeted Toyota SUVs and involved at least three other people in their teens or early 20s who are at large.

There’s more at the original, including the fact that Mr Akubu is being held without bail on multiple counts of murder, aggravated assault, conspiracy, robbery, theft, and illegal possession of firearms.

The Inquirer article then gives us several paragraphs detailing Mr Akubu’s alleged crimes, before getting to this:

Akubu has several past arrests, records show, including in Chester County in 2020 for charges that included robbing a car. But nearly all counts were dismissed in municipal court, the records show. It was not immediately clear why. Akubu pleaded guilty to a summary charge of harassment, the records show.

Years before that, Akubu pleaded guilty to committing a 2013 aggravated assault in Southwest Philadelphia. According to charging documents, he fired shots at someone in a car using a gun he was barred from possessing. He was sentenced to 38 to 96 months in jail plus 17 years of probation, court records show, and in 2018 was sent back to jail for violating his probation.

Larry Krasner was the District Attorney in Philadelphia in 2018. Clearly, he shouldn’t have been released, and should have served out the rest of the seventeen year sentence. Unfortunately, the Inquirer doesn’t give us the details. How many of those 38 to 96 months in jail did he actually serve? Obviously not all eight years, or he wouldn’t have been on the street in 2018.

In 2015, Akubu filed a federal lawsuit against the city, saying that a prison guard beat him and bit him on the head while he was handcuffed, an incident that was captured on surveillance video. The city settled with Akubu for $99,999, which was paid in November 2015.

From the Inquirer’s embedded link:

Attorney Guy Sciolla says inmate Jonathan Akubu was being escorted through a common area, he was handcuffed, hands behind his back, when he was overpowered and punched repeatedly by correctional officer James Weisback.

According to prison documents, Officer Weisback claimed Akubu threatened and spit in his face, but Sciolla says there’s no evidence of that.

Sciolla and co-counsel in this case, Patrick Link, say they will also refer this case to the District Attorney for possible criminal action.

Akubu is in prison charged with a shooting. His attorneys say it was domestic in nature and no one was injured. A source says Akubu has accumulated nearly 20 disciplinary infractions while in custody.

Well, of course his attorney is going to minimize Mr Akubu’s actions; that’s what he’s paid to do. How Mr Akubu could afford sharks like Messrs Sciolla and Link was not indicated. “Nearly twenty” disciplinary problems while in prison seems like it would be a testament to Mr Akubu’s character.

District Attorney Krasner could have had Mr Akubu still behind bars when he (allegedly) killed George Briscella, but didn’t. Mr Krasner did not pull the trigger, three times, resulting in Mr Briscella’s death. But Mr Krasner might as well be named an accomplice, given that his actions allowed Mr Akubu to be out on the streets earlier this month, (allegedly) jacking cars shooting people.

In related news, with 76 homicides as of 11:59 PM EST on Tuesday, February 22nd, the City of Brotherly Love has moved one ahead of the killings pace set in 2021’s record-setting year. Nothing to see here, folks. Please, just move along.

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Philadelphia 12-year-old charged with murder Why do we have to rely on the New York Post to tell us what The Philadelphia Inquirer will not?

This site has noted many times previously the Lexington Herald-Leader’s refusal to print mugshots of people accused of crimes, even violent crimes, if they are black. The Philadelphia Inquirer takes it further, and, as far as I can tell, doesn’t print mugshots at all, which means that, in the case of 16-year-old Qiyam Muhammad, readers of the Inquirer don’t know what he looks like, and cannot help the Philadelphia Police Department find young Mr Muhammad, who, as of Friday morning, was still on the lam.

We shouldn’t have to go to the New York Post for the information, but we do:

    Teens and boy, 12, charged with murder in Philadelphia carjacking

    By Joshua Rhett Miller | Friday, February 18, 2022 | 10:22 AM EST | Updated 10:46 AM EST

    John Nusslien. Photo by Philadelphia Police Department, and is a public record. Click to enlarge.

    A 12-year-old boy and two teens are facing murder charges in the savage beating death of an elderly man during a carjacking in Philadelphia, authorities said.

    The trio of young suspects are accused of attacking Chung Yan Chin, 70, during a violent carjacking in the city’s Mayfair section on Dec. 2, police said.

    Prosecutors allege the youngsters walked up to Chin and knocked him to the ground as they started punching and kicking him to the face, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

    Police said “unknown offenders” then took off with Chin’s Toyota Camry.

    Chin was rushed to a hospital in critical condition with a brain injury and facial fractures, court documents show. He died from his wounds weeks later on Dec. 21.

    “Justice has to be done,” Mayfair resident Amy Ford told WPVI. “It is just not fair. It is sickening. It is terrible. It is too close to home.”

    Qiyam Muhammad. Photo by Philadelphia Police Department, and is a public record. Click to enlarge.

    John Nusslein, 18, of Northeast Philadelphia, was charged last month in Chin’s slaying, while an arrest warrant has been issued for Qiyam Muhammad, 16, police told The Post.

    The 12-year-old boy, who has been charged with murder as an adult, is not being identified by The Post due to his age.

    Both Nusslein and the 12-year-old are being held without bail and attorneys representing them did not return calls seeking comment, the Inquirer reported.

Note that the Philadelphia Police Department had a mugshot of Qiyam Muhammad on hand, which tells us the obvious: young Mr Muhammad had been arrested previously.

Will District Attorney Larry Krasner really continue to charge the 12-year-old as an adult? I would guess not, because Mr Krasner is both soft-hearted and soft-headed. And it is always possible that the presiding judge will refuse to accept an adult charge for a 12-year-old. Would the courts accept a charge which could keep a 12-year-old locked up for the rest of his miserable life? Any competent attorney hired by the boy’s parents — assuming that he has any — or appointed by the court, would move to transfer the charges to the juvenile justice system.

Murder is not normally an entry-level crime, so I have to wonder: is this the 12-year-old’s first (alleged) crime? He was, again, allegedly, running with an 18-year-old and a 16-year-old, obviously out to commit a violent crime, even if they never intended to kill the victim. Normally, boys the ages of Messrs Muhammad and Nusslien don’t run gang with 12-year-olds.

There’s more to this story than we have been told.