Category Archives: Crime

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The Lexington Herald-Leader and journalistic ethics

In The First Street Journal, I frequently refer to journolism. 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.

The McClatchy Mugshot Policy states:

Publishing mugshots of arrestees has been shown to have lasting effects on both the people photographed and marginalized communities. The permanence of the internet can mean those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever. Beyond the personal impact, inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness. In fact, some police departments have started moving away from taking/releasing mugshots as a routine part of their procedures.

To address these concerns, McClatchy will not publish crime mugshots — online, or in print, from any newsroom or content-producing team — unless approved by an editor. To be clear, this means that in addition to photos accompanying text stories, McClatchy will not publish “Most wanted” or “Mugshot galleries” in slide-show, video or print.

Any exception to this policy must be approved by an editor. Editors considering an exception should ask:

  • Is there an urgent threat to the community?
  • Is this person a public official or the suspect in a hate crime?
  • Is this a serial killer suspect or a high-profile crime?

If an exception is made, editors will need to take an additional step with the Pub Center to confirm publication by making a note in the ‘package notes‘ field in Sluglife.

So, if a rape suspect was arrested in Madison County, someone who cannot be an urgent threat to the community, since he’s now in custody, someone who isn’t a public official or suspect in a hate crime, a serial killer or suspect in a high-profile crime, One would assume that the Lexington Herald-Leader wouldn’t publish his picture, right?

    Screenshot from Lexington Herald-Leader

    Kentucky State Police assists Madison County Sheriff’s Office with arrest of rape suspect

    by Christopher Leach | Thursday, January 27, 2022 | 7:23 AM EST

    Troopers with Kentucky State Police in Estill County arrested a suspect accused of sexual assaulting a minor on Tuesday, according to the Madison County Sheriff’s Office.

    Burl Hollon, of Waco, was charged with two counts of rape, two counts of sodomy and two counts of sexual abuse. He is being lodged at the Madison County Detention Center.

    No other details have been released about Hollon’s case. The sheriff’s office conducted the investigation while KSP made the arrest.

The mugshot there? That’s a screenshot taken from the Herald-Leader original, and it’s most certainly a police mugshot, taken from the Madison County Sheriff’s Facebook page.

Now, I have no sympathy for the accused, but not yet convicted, Mr Hollen. The Facebook page states that he has been accused of:

  • Rape, 1st Degree – Victim <12 years of age
  • Rape, 2nd Degree – No Force
  • Sodomy, 1st Degree – Victim <12 years of age
  • Sodomy, 2nd Degree
  • Sexual Abuse, 1st Degree – Victim U/12 years
  • Sexual Abuse, 3rd Degree

Just the first charge:

    KRS § 510.040. Rape in the first degree.
    (1) A person is guilty of rape in the first degree when:
    (a) He engages in sexual intercourse with another person by forcible compulsion; or
    (b) He engages in sexual intercourse with another person who is incapable of consent because he:
    1. Is physically helpless; or
    2. Is less than twelve (12) years old.
    (2) Rape in the first degree is a Class B felony unless the victim is under twelve (12) years old or receives a serious physical injury in which case it is a Class A felony.

Class A felonies in the Bluegrass State can result in prison sentences of 20 to 50 years, or life imprisonment.

If convicted, Mr Hollen should receive the maximum sentence allowable under the law; the only way he should ever leave prison is in a hearse.

But I noticed, as I have before, that the Herald-Leader, which very much eschews publishing the mugshots of photos of black persons accused of, or even convicted of, serious crimes, certainly seems less reticent when it comes to publishing the photos of white suspects.

According to the Lexington Police Department’s shootings investigations page, there have been nine non-fatal shootings in the city . . . and eight of the victims have been black. In 2021, with 134 shootings reported, there were 20 victims who are white, and 12 more listed as Hispanic, which leaves 102 victims listed as black. That’s 76.12%, in a city in which just 14.2% of the population are black. The lead McClatchy newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, stated that publishing mugshots and crime videos, “disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.”

So what are the editors of the Herald-Leader doing? Whether intentionally or otherwise, the paper’s coverage of crime and their choices in which photos to use appear to be aimed at persuading readers that the perpetrators of crimes in the region are primarily white. While in the eastern Kentucky areas of the Herald-Leader’s circulation area, that’s probably true, given that the non-white percentage of the population in that area is very low, but when you get to the city of Lexington, the numbers say that no, that’s not the case.

To not “perpetuat(e) stereotypes”, the newspaper would print no mugshots at all; printing a disproportionate percentage of mugshots in which the accused are white is an active attempt to not just avoid stereotypes, but to skew the public’s perception in an inaccurate direction.

Part of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics states:

    Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair. Journalists should be honest and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.

  • Never deliberately distort facts or context, including visual information. Clearly label illustrations and re-enactments.

What the editors of the Herald-Leader are doing is distorting the facts, using visual information.

This is journolism, not journalism, this is the skewing of information to produce a false impression. If the editors are aware of what is being done in the newspaper and website they control, they are deliberately lying to their readers; if the editors are somehow not aware of what they have been doing, then they are not competent in doing their jobs, and need to be replaced.

It’s easy enough to just tell the truth. If the editors are concerned that publishing mugshots “disproportionately harms people of color,” then they should stop publishing all mugshots. In that manner, while they would not be telling the whole truth, they would not be distorting the truth. But what they have been doing recently is a distortion of the truth, and rotten journalism.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch is horrified that some Democrats want to actually fight crime!

Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s hard, hard left columnist, really hates the police and radical things like, oh, people having to obey the law!

You can already see it: the distinguished Mr Bunch is more worried about “mass incarceration”, “wrongful convictions,” and “police brutality” than he is about actual crime in the streets. The hysterical, boldfaced parts of his comments? Those are in Mr Bunch’s original; I did not add them.

Have there been brutality cases and wrongful convictions? Yup, sure have; no system of law enforcement is now, or ever will be, perfect. But those cases are far, far, far fewer than criminal acts on the streets. Mass incarceration? No; the problem there is that not enough people have been incarcerated! As we noted yesterday, there have been a lot of cases in which far more serious crimes have been committed by men who could, and should, have been behind bars for less serious crimes, but crimes, though less serious than rape or murder, were still treated too leniently.

Has Mr Bunch forgotten about Latif Williams, who (allegedly) murdered Samuel Collington near Temple University, in a botched carjacking? He had been released by a soft-headed judge on an unsecured bond, but could have been in custody when Mr Collington was killed, a crime which incensed the Inquirer so much that they published Mr Williams’ name, even though he is a juvenile?

Has Mr Bunch forgotten about Hasan Elliot, whom District Attorney let slide on probation violations and drug charges, before he killed a Philadelphia Police Corporal?

Oh, wait, I’m sorry: there is little evidence that Mr Bunch would be all that upset about a police officer being killed.

    That both political parties tripped over each other in racing to hire more and more cops, lengthen prison sentences, and wage an over-the-top “war on drugs” made it all the more stunning in the spring of 2020 when millions of Americans took to the streets after the police murder of George Floyd to demand radical change. For a remarkable — and remarkably brief — moment, most Democrats rushed to embrace a new world order in which cops wouldn’t just operate under stricter rules but policing itself would be downsized in favor of social services.

    The poster child of this pivoting ideology was arguably the then-Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden. He was a key architect of the 1994 federal crime bill that put a U.S. stamp of approval on mass incarceration, but when taking office in 2021, President Biden promised “to root out systemic racism in our criminal justice system and to enact police reform in George Floyd’s name.”

    But the echo of 2020′s bold promises had barely died down when the murder rate spiked across much of America, driven heavily, experts increasingly believe, by rage and ennui over the endless COVID-19 pandemic. Terrified by fear that the activists’ chants of “defund the police” would cost their party the 2020 and 2021 elections, top Democrats are now scurrying back to the old playbook by calling for more cops.

Does anyone think that maybe, just maybe, the public actually want more cops on the street, more police protection, when Philadelphia fell just one murder short of its all-time record in 2020, the year of the summer of riots and hate, and then completely blew that record out of the water in 2021? Might it just be possible that the public, in Pennsylvania, might be a bit more concerned now that the City of Brotherly Love is slightly ahead of the homicide pace it set last year?

    Pennsylvania’s Democratic candidate for governor, Attorney General Josh Shapiro is leading the way. The veteran Montgomery County politician needed no big push to stand with officers — the controversial Philadelphia Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police donated $25,000 to Shapiro’s 2020 AG campaign — and the lack of a primary challenger has allowed him to drift to the center-right, months before the general election.

    “We need more police … more police with time to form relationships in the community that they serve,” Shapiro said last month in West Philadelphia. Although Shapiro tempers his remarks with a call for community policing and calls for other services besides law enforcement, his emphasis on more cops — including a plan for hiring bonuses of $6,000 for new recruits — have grabbed headlines early in his campaign.

There’s more of Mr Bunch’s cry of outrage at the original, but Josh Shapiro has already won a statewide election, and, one would presume, has at least some idea what Pennsylvania’s voters might want. The Attorney General even cut District Attorney Krasner out of the loop with significant gun and drug trafficking charges, at least in part because he thought that Mr Krasner wouldn’t prosecute the (alleged) malefactors seriously.

    Look, no one is disputing that the increase in murders — including a record in Philadelphia last year, with horrific headlines about little kids struck by stray bullets or the Asian woman pushed in front of a New York subway train — demands full and prompt attention from our political leaders. But is there any evidence that hiring more cops is the answer? Especially when many high-profile killings — involving domestic violence or road rage — happen in places and ways that defy traditional police methods.

Here is where Mr Bunch really veers into the weeds. The high-profile cases might not be affected, but the vast majority of murders, in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in St Louis, are low-profile, so low-profile that they rarely make the pages of Mr Bunch’s newspaper, the killings of the young black males who are blowing each other away with such alarming frequency. Those are the murders which would be reduced if lower-level crimes were treated seriously, if the gang-bangers who could have been locked up for lesser crimes had been locked up, had been treated seriously.

Of course, as I’ve said before, black lives don’t really matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer. And the price for doing things the way that Will Bunch wants would be measured in the blood in the city’s mean streets.

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The incomparable genius of Larry Krasner! Albert Einstein supposedly said, "The definition of a fool is someone who does the same thing over and over again expecting different results."

Murder is not normally an entry-level crime. When someone goes out armed and shoots someone else, the odds are very high that the shooter previously had ‘encounters’ with the police, and often a significant rap sheet.

Rudy Giuliani knew this, and that’s why, as Mayor of New York City, he instituted what’s known as ‘broken windows policing,’ cracking down on the minor crimes, to try to get the little guys on the path to becoming bad guys straightened out before they became major bad guys, and to end the social norms that allow crime. If one window is broken out in a building, and left unrepaired, the theory states that the rest will soon be broken as well, because it becomes acceptable for punks to throw rocks to break out the other windows.

Well, George Doros-funded, cop-hating District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia) doesn’t believe in that!

    ‘A terrible crisis’: Krasner discusses Philly’s gun violence after officer’s son gunned down

    Homicides in the city have already hit 38 this year, two more than at the same time last year, Krasner said. “This is truly a terrible crisis that we are suffering through,” he said.

    by Mensah M Dean | Monday, January 24, 2022

    The son of a Philadelphia police officer was shot and killed early Monday morning in North Philadelphia, the 38th homicide already this month and one reflecting “a terrible crisis” for the city, District Attorney Larry Krasner said.

    The 23-year-old man, whom police identified as Hyram Hill, was shot in the 1400 block of West Allegheny Avenue at 4:38 a.m. in what appeared to be a robbery. Paramedics rushed him to nearby Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 5:01 a.m.

    Hill had been shot multiple times in his left chest, right arm, abdomen and back, police said Monday afternoon. In the morning, Joanne Pescatore, Krasner’s newly appointed supervisor of the Homicide and Non-Fatal Shooting Unit, said he had been shot nine times. . . . .

    “This is a slight increase from terrible to terrible,” Krasner said. “That’s where we are with homicides. This is truly a terrible crisis that we are suffering through.”

    The district attorney said the gun-violence toll ― which accounted for the majority of 562 homicides last year, a record ― has convinced him that his office should focus on such violent crimes rather than lesser crimes such as prostitution and marijuana possession.

    “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,” he said. “We cannot continue to waste resources and time on things that matter less than the truly terrible crisis that we are facing.”

Really? Perhaps, just perhaps, if law enforcement, from the police through the prosecutor, would treat the crimes that “matter less” than homicide seriously, people like the cretin who gunned down Hyram Hill would have been behind bars Monday morning, not out robbing someone, and not putting nine bullets into an apparently innocent victim.

Remember Cody Allen Arnett, the multiply-convicted felon who was let out early by the Kentucky state Parole Board, who then went out and forcibly raped a Georgetown College coed? Now he has a life sentence, but if he’d been kept behind bars when he should have been, if he hadn’t been treated leniently, his victim would never have been raped.

Remember Vincent Pinkney, who could have been behind bars, if he had been treated seriously, and instead was out on the street to murder a Columbia graduate student? How about Latif Williams, who (allegedly) murdered Samuel Collington near Temple University, in a botched carjacking? He had been released by a soft-headed judge on an unsecured bond, but could have been in custody when Mr Collington was killed.

Then there was Hasan Elliot, 21, a known gang-banger, whom Mr Krasner treated leniently:

  • Mr Elliott, then 18 years old, was arrested in June 2017 on gun- and drug-possession charges stemming after threatening a neighbor with a firearm. The District Attorney’s office granted him a plea bargain arrangement on January 24, 2018, and he was sentenced to 9 to 23 months in jail, followed by three years’ probation. However, he was paroled earlier than that, after seven months in jail.
  • Mr Elliot soon violated parole by failing drug tests and failing to meet his meetings with his parole officer.
  • Mr Elliott was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine on January 29, 2019. This was another parole violation, but Mr Krasner’s office did not attempt to have Mr Elliot returned to jail to finish his sentence, nor make any attempts to get serious bail on the new charges; he was released on his own recognizance.
  • After Mr Elliot failed to appear for his scheduled drug-possession trial on March 27, 2019, and prosecutors dropped those charges against him.

On Friday, March 13, 2020, Mr Elliot shot and killed Philadelphia Police Corporal James O’Connor IV. Had Mr Krasner’s office treated Mr Elliot seriously, he would have been behind bars on that Friday the 13th, and Corporal O’Connor would still be alive.

Philadelphia Police Officers and FOP members block District Attorney Larry Krasner from entering Temple University Hospital to meet with slain Police Corporal James O’Connor’s family.

The Philadelphia Police saw that as well, and a group of police officers blocked the entrance to the emergency room at Temple University Hospital to deny Mr Krasner and his entourage entrance to visit Corporal O’Connor’s family.

Yet Mr Krasner, who just hates locking up the bad guys, wants to continue with the same policies which have contribute to Philadelphia’s huge homicide rate. Philadelphia’s daily average inmate population was 6,409 when Mr Krasner took office, and was down to 4,849 on August 31, 2019. As of January 23, 2022, the jail population was even lower, 4,519 inmates. Mr Krasner sees this as a good thing; I see it as 2,000 more punks out on the street victimizing law-abiding people.

It ought to be obvious even to the densest person: a criminal who is in jail is not out on the streets committing more crimes. But District Attorney Krasner would leave the lower-level bad guys out, walking around free when he could have them behind bars, and then be shocked, shocked! when one of them blows away the son of a police officer.

An intelligent man, which Mr Krasner purports to be, ought to have learned from what treating Hasan Elliot leniently did, and changed his policies accordingly; a stupid man would have just continued with the failed policies of his own, and others, that have let violent crime fester and grow.

There’s really only one conclusion: Larry Krasner is one stupid man!

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To our credentialed media, truth is racist! And they just can't handle the truth!

As always, I checked the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page on Monday morning, and it tells me that, as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, January 23, 2022, 37 souls had been sent untimely to their eternal rewards. IT also tells me that ‘only’ 36 people were murdered in the city’s streets on the same date in record-breaking 2021, and ‘just’ 34 in 2020, which saw 499 killings.

That ugly 37 number was three higher than the last time the Police Department updated the homicide numbers, for Thursday, January 20th, yet The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page and crime page show no stories on homicides over the weekend, and the crime page has several stories that are days old.

And so I found this, a Washington Post story, but reprinted in the Inquirer:

    Homicide rates have soared nationwide, but mayors see a chance for a turnaround in 2022

    For a decade, Atif Mahr mentored young people, preaching the virtues of anti-violence even as the streets of his north St. Louis neighborhood echoed ever more often with the crack of gunfire.

    by Griff Witte | The Washington Post | Sunday, January 23, 2022

    For a decade, Atif Mahr mentored young people, preaching the virtues of anti-violence even as the streets of his north St. Louis neighborhood echoed ever more often with the crack of gunfire.

    Then one day last October, those bullets tore a jagged hole in Mahr’s own family. His daughter Isis was dropping off a friend when a gunman unloaded on her car. The soccer standout, who had been saving money to pay her way through nursing school, was 19.

    “I always feared it,” Mahr said. “I never imagined it.”

    Isis’s death filled him with hurt. The reaction from the community, however, gave him hope.

    The past two years have been dreadful for public safety in U.S. cities as homicide numbers soared – in some cases to record levels. Experts say a constellation of factors is to blame, including the coronavirus pandemic’s scars and a breakdown in trust between police and the communities they serve during the social unrest of 2020. But as 2022 kicks off, city leaders from coast to coast say the stars may be aligning in a very different way.

    Flush with federal pandemic-relief funds, mayors are pumping money into crime prevention programs that have demonstrated early promise. Police chiefs are using advanced data to target places and people for intervention, even as they attempt to mend badly strained neighborhood ties. And communities such as Mahr’s, tired of burying their own, are rising up against those most responsible for the deaths. The result, some officials and experts say, may be a golden opportunity to break the trend of spiraling violent crime.

    “People have said ‘Enough is enough,'” Mahr said. “They’re ready to fight back.”

There’s more at the original. Here’s the link to the Post original.

The main thrust of the story refers to St Louis, Missouri. As we noted a few days before the New Year, KSDK proudly noted that homicides in 2021 had fallen back to “pre-pandemic” levels, with ‘just’ 192 souls sent untimely to their eternal rewards, compared to 263 in 2020, and 194 in 2019. The 2021 year-end total wound up being 196.

Being the numbers geek that I am, I actually did the math — and we know that math is racist, so that’s obviously a problem — and the numbers worked out to a homicide rate of 8.54 per 100,000 for white males, and 205.48 per 100,000 for black males in the Gateway City. Like Josef Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.”

Both the Philadelphia and St Louis numbers represent too small a sample size to make any meaningful statements about trends in homicides, though with 37 murders in 23 days, Philly is on pace to another record number, 587 homicides. Even if the city’s killings slowed down to 2020’s pace, it would represent a bloodbath in the City of Brotherly Love.

And the Inquirer? The city’s newspaper, third oldest continuously published daily in America, is doing its job in steadfastly ignoring the deaths. We can find stories, from five days ago, about the cute white woman killed when some miscreant bludgeoned her to death with a pipe, and, also five days ago, about the man being charged with a firearms violation for fatally shooting the criminal trying to steal tha catalytic converter from his car. The story, from ten days ago, about the retired postal worker who defended himself with his legally-owned firearm, still shows, but there’s nothing there about the vast majority of the killings, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the victims were people about whom there was nothing exceptional about their killings.

I have mentioned, many times, Inquirer publisher Elizabeth Hughes’ statement that she was making the newspaper into an “anti racist news organization,” but I failed to delve into just what “anti racist” meant. From National Public Radio:

    ‘Not Racist’ Is Not Enough: Putting In The Work To Be Anti-Racist

    by Eric Deggans | August 25, 2020 | 12:03 AM EDT

    When the topic of racism comes up, I often think of a billboard in the small town of Harrison, Arkansas.

    It was a sign promoting a white supremacist radio station called White Pride Radio. The sign’s message, emblazoned next to the picture of a cute-looking white girl with a cute-looking dog, read “It’s not racist to [heart] your people.”

    My takeaway: Even white supremacists don’t want to be called racist.

    Which might explain why, for people dedicated to fighting racism, simply saying you’re “not racist” doesn’t feel like quite enough. To effectively defeat systemic racism — racism embedded as normal practice in institutions like education and law enforcement — you’ve got to be continually working towards equality for all races, striving to undo racism in your mind, your personal environment and the wider world.

    In other words, you’ve got to be anti-racist.

I have to ask: does “undo(ing) racism” in my “personal environment” mean that I must move from the 99.07% white county, even though it’s a poverty-stricken county in eastern Kentucky? We didn’t choose the place where we bought our retirement home due to the county’s demographics, but because it was what we wanted, for a very low price. I guess that doesn’t make me ‘anti racist’ enough!

What anti racism has come to mean, in the hallowed halls of American journalism, is to not tell the truth. The Sacramento Bee, the lead McClatchy newspaper, led the way in that company’s decision to stop publishing mugshots of criminals, by stating:

    Publishing these photographs and videos disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.

Miss Hughes’ article pointed out that she was:

  • Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime.
  • Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.
  • Commissioning an independent audit of our journalism that resulted in a critical assessment. Many of the recommendations are being addressed, and a process for tracking progress is being developed.
  • Training our staff and managers on how to recognize and avoid cultural bias.
  • Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

In simpler terms, under Miss Hughes’ leadership, the Inquirer will take decisions in its news coverage and editorial decisions based not only on whether the information being considered for publication is factual and well-sourced, but on whether it might reinforce negative stereotypes against a particular racial group. It makes itself obvious in the fact that the Inquirer simply does not report, save in the briefest terms, about the individual homicides in the city.

It also makes itself known in what the Inquirer says about the bloodbath in the city’s streets. It’s never about bad people shooting others, but “gun violence,” as though guns magically levitate themselves and fire away at innocent people, without any human agency at all. The editorial policy, as well as the political policies of the city’s Democratic leadership — and Philadelphia’s last Republican mayor left office while Harry Truman was still President! — has been to ignore the fact that the vast majority of both victims and perpetrators in city homicides, and in crime in general, have been black.

What has anti racism really become? At least in Philadelphia, it has become the acceptance of an urban black culture in which the killing of young black men by other young black men is just plain expected. The problem cannot be seriously addressed because it cannot even be admitted, because to admit it would be racist!

I am not the only one who has made fun of the notion that math is racist, but the Inquirer, along with many of our major, and not-so-major, daily newspapers, have adopted a policy which says, at bottom, that truth is racist, that facts are racist.

Elizabeth Hughes knows this, Inquirer editor Gabriel Escobar knows this, Lexington Herald-Leader editor Peter Baniak knows this, they all know this, but they knuckle under to political correctness anyway, because they just can’t handle the truth.

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Another murderer treated leniently in Lexington Black lives don't really matter in Lexington

From WKYT-TV, because the Lexington Herald-Leader ignored the story:

    Suspect in killing of Lexington teen pleads guilty

    Malachi Jackson, from WLEX-TV. Click to enlarge.

    By WKYT News Staff | Published: Jan. 19, 2022 at 2:12 PM EST

    LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) – The suspect in a Lexington murder case has pleaded guilty.

    According to the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office, Malachi Jackson pleaded guilty Tuesday to first-degree manslaughter, second-degree assault, and first-degree criminal attempt to commit robbery.

    Police say Jackson shot and killed Kevin Olmeda, 15, on Garden Springs Drive in 2018. They believe the shooting stemmed from a drug-related dispute. Olmeda was a student at Lafayette High School.

    Jackson had been facing a murder charge.

    The commonwealth attorney says the recommended sentence is 15 years for manslaughter, 10 years for assault, and five years for criminal attempt to commit robbery.

We have previously mentioned the Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney, Lou Ann Red Corn, and noted her office’s acceptance of lenient plea bargain arrangements. And, Malachi Jackson, who was 16 at the time, killed 15-year-old Kevin Olmeda, purportedly over a drug dispute. Young Mr Jackson was arrested the night after the shooting, and has been locked up since May 23, 2018. This means that he has already served 3¾ years behind bars.

“Murder is not usually an entry-level crime. If you can’t lock up perpetrators of so-called “minor” offenses then you’re going to have a lot more murders. Nobody seems to care, as long as it’s just people killing each other in the ghetto, but then a UCLA student gets murdered, and some people start paying attention.” — Robert Stacy McCain.

First degree manslaughter is a Class B felony, carrying a sentence of 10 to 20 years, with a mandatory 85% of the sentence which must be served before parole is granted. The Commonwealth’s Attorney recommended 15 years on the manslaughter charge, 10 years on assault, and five years for attempted robbery. If the judge accepts those recommendations, and sets the sentences to run consecutively, Mr Jackson could be out after serving 15½ years, 3¾ of which have already elapsed. If the judge elects to have the sentences run concurrently, Mr Jackson could be out after serving 12¾ years, or just nine more years, when he would be only 31 years old.

In nine more years, Kevin Olmeda will still be stone cold graveyard dead.

Why did Lou Ann Red Corn go along with a plea bargain? Why didn’t she just laugh in Mr Jackson’s attorney’s face and take him to trial for murder? Murder is a capital offense in Kentucky, though, since Mr Jackson was a minor at the time he killed Mr Olmeda, the death penalty would not be on the table. However, the potential sentences could be life without parole, 25 years to life, or 20 to 50 years behind bars. Miss Red Corn could have seen this miscreant locked up until he was an elderly man.

Instead, she has opened the possibility that he could be back out on the streets as young as age 31.

I’ve said it before: black lives really don’t matter in Lexington, and Mr Olmeda’s black life was snuffed out when he was just 15 years old. Does Lou Ann Red Corn not care about that?

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The Philadelphia Police solve one murder

The killing, the 33rd of the year in the City of Brotherly Love, was, as most are, totally senseless.

    A man accused of beating a woman to death with pipes inside an Old City office was charged with murder

    Jeffrey Stepien, 48, is accused of killing Samantha Maag, 31. He is being held without bail after being charged with murder.

    by Chris Palmer | Thursday, January 20, 2022 | 2:39 PM EST

    Jeffrey Stepien, photo from 6ABC in Philadelphia. Click to enlarge.

    A 48-year-old man has been charged with murder for beating a woman to death inside an Old City office building on Wednesday, according to police.

    Jeffery Stepien was being held without bail and has also been charged with possessing an instrument of crime, according to court records.

    He is accused of attacking Samantha Maag, 31, of Gloucester Township, Camden County, who police said was seated at a reception desk on the eighth floor of an office building on the 300 block of Chestnut Street around 2:15 p.m. when Stepien attacked her from behind, striking her in the head with a pipe.

    Maag was taken to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 3:16 p.m. Attempts to reach her relatives Thursday were not immediately successful.

Of course, The Philadelphia Inquirer did not publish Mr Stepien’s mugshot, even though it was freely available, and published by both WPVI-TV, Channel 6, the ABC owned-and-operated Philadelphia station, and KYT-TV, Channel 3, the CBS owned-and-operated affiliate.

Samantha Magg, photo from KYT-TV. Click to enlarge.

Mr Stepien has a prior criminal record, for simple assault (18 § 2701 §§ A(1)), “attempts to cause or intentionally, knowingly or recklessly causes bodily injury to another”, and recklessly endangering another person (18 § 2705), both of which are second degree misdemeanors, to which he was sentenced to the maximum, one to two years in the penitentiary. He pleaded guilty to the offenses, and the case was disposed of on May 5, 2011, so this was not an instance of a criminal who could have still been behind bars.

Police stated that Mr Stepien had rented space in the Old City office building, and may have been living there at the time, and may have been angered about being asked to move out of a non-residential space, but the crime remains under investigation. It was captured on surveillance video.

This makes two stories in the Inquirer, and I have to wonder: will there be more? After all, the victim was not just another gang-banger, but an innocent, and a cute white woman, both of whom tend to generate Inquirer stories.

Mr Stepien is being represented by the Defender Association of Philadelphia, which had no comment at press time. They will, of course, try to get him off with as little jail time as possible, but, if Mr Stepien is convicted of this, he should spend the rest of his miserable life behind bars at SCI Phoenix maximum security prison.

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A sad update A man shoots and kills a criminal in the act, and now he's facing firearms charges

We noted the story of a Philadelphia car owner shooting and killing the man who was trying to steal the catalytic converter from his automobile. The initial report was that the owner had a license for his firearm; that report was erroneous:

    A Philly man shot someone who was trying to steal his car. Now he’s charged with gun violations.

    Police arrest car owner who fatally shot a would-be car thief Tuesday morning.

    by Mensah M Dean | Wednesday, January 19, 2022 | 6:03 PM EST

    The Cobbs Creek car owner who fatally shot a man who was trying to steal his car or its catalytic converter on Tuesday morning has been charged with carrying a gun without a license, Philadelphia police said Wednesday.

    Steven Thompson, 54, who shot and killed one of three men who were tampering with his Acura as it was parked in front of his home in the 5800 block of Cobbs Creek Parkway, was charged with two counts of firearms violations.

    On Tuesday, police incorrectly said Thompson had a permit to carry the gun he used to shoot the would-be car thief, Satario Natividad, 51, just after 8:15 a.m.

Further down:

    Sherell Natividad welcomed news of an arrest in the death of her husband, a father of eight children and stepchildren.

    “I’m getting a little bit of justice,” she said. “That’s good news to hear. You just can’t go shooting people and not expect there’s going to be consequences behind that.”

    But she said murder charges were in order.

    “He took my children’s father away from them. He took my husband away from me,” she said. “I want more. He murdered my husband. Even though he was doing wrong, he still murdered him. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t do nothing.”

Sorry, Mrs Natividad, but your husband, the father of your children, was out breaking the law, was out stealing from people, and people defending their property might just do so violently. Replacement catalytic converters can cost over $1,000, so it’s not as though your husband stole a newspaper off someone’s porch. The Inquirer article noted that “Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said police found catalytic converters, tools and a handgun inside the Honda Accord.” That’s catalytic converters plural, so Mr Natividad and his fled-on-foot partners-in-crime had robbed at least two other car owners, had the tools to do so — which means that this was thought-out, and not a spur-of-the-moment thing — and had a firearm to boot. One assumes that the bad guys were prepared to meet any resistance with deadly force.

It’s not just that Mr Natividad “was doing wrong,” it was that he was a bad guy, a criminal.

Was this Mr Natividad’s first venture into crime? He was 51-years-old, not normally the age at which someone starts out on a felony theft career.

There is, of course, the obvious question: was Mrs Natividad aware of her husband’s criminal activities? Was she tolerating a criminal as her husband?

The only justice in this case would be dropping all of the charges against Mr Thompson: he took a criminal off of the streets of Philadelphia.

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Killadelphia! 2022 begins where 2021 left off in the City of Brotherly Love!

Nineteen days into the new year might be a touch early to draw conclusions from the numbers, so this can be taken with a large grain of coarse kosher salt.[1]This is what we use in the Pico household, which is why I put it that way. There is no additional meaning implied by that.

As of 11:59 PM EST on Wednesday, January 18th, the Philadelphia Police Department reported that there have been 32 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love so far in 2022. That compares to ‘just’ 27 on the same date in 2021, a year which saw a record-shattering 562 murders in the city.

As both of my regular readers know, I’m kind of a numbers geek, so I did the math: 32 killings in 18 days works out to 1.7778 per day.

There was a bit of a lull in city murders in late July and August of 2021, but the killing rate picked up after Labor Day. Beginning the Tuesday after Labor day, September 7, 2021, there were 199 killings in the city, in 116 days, which works out to 1.7155 per day. The homicide rate in the city has actually picked up slightly this year. We can only hope that this year’s current murder rate is an early aberration, because it projects out to 649 homicides in the city!

I noted, just a few days ago, that The Philadelphia Inquirer had a positive story on Oliver Neal, the retired postman, who defended himself against a carjacker using his legally licensed firearm. I noted that I expected an Inquirer OpEd piece, or even a main editorial, telling us that Mr Neal’s actions, though legal, were unwise, but at least thus far, such hasn’t been posted on the newspaper’s website.

Now comes another story:

    Police: Southwest Philly homeowner fatally shot a man trying to steal his car or parts from it

    Police say a homeowner fatally shot a thief who was tampering with his car in the 5800 block of Cobbs Creek Parkway Tuesday morning.

    by Mensah M Dean | Wednesday, January 18, 2022

    For the second time in as many weeks, a Philadelphia citizen licensed to carry a gun shot a would-be thief, police said Tuesday.

    The 8:15 a.m. shooting in the 5800 block of Cobbs Creek Parkway happened when a neighborhood resident discovered three men trying to steal his car or its catalytic converter, police said.

    The owner stepped out of his front door and fired at least one shot at the three men, who tried to flee in a gray Honda Accord but ended up crashing into the side of a yellow Radnor Township school bus. Medics transported the wounded man to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead just after 9 a.m.

    Relatives who gathered at the crime scene, crying and embracing one another, said the shooting victim’s name was Satario Natividad, 51. The two other men who were with him fled on foot and remained at large.

    Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said that homicide detectives are heading up the investigation and that it is too early to make a decision on if the shooting was justified or not. They did not identify the car owner.

This is the kind of case in which I could see social justice District Attorney Larry Krasner wanting to charge the owner with something. We’ll probably find out — if the media report it — that Mr Natividad already had a criminal record; people don’t normally enter a life of crime at age 51.

Of course, the relatives of the dead criminal demand justice!

    “He did not have to come out and shoot him,” she said. “It was a car! All he had to do is call the police. Once someone turns their back, they are no longer a threat. He still has his car, but we do not have [Natividad]. It’s a material thing. They need to charge him. He’s in his doorway. You don’t shoot someone out in the street over a car.”

Actually, in a city like Philadelphia, where the police have no control over crime, and the District Attorney doesn’t like to prosecute the criminals who do get caught, yeah, you do shoot someone out in the street over a car. Inspector Vanore said, “Just from vision you could see catalytic converters, some tools, and what appears to be a firearm.” Robert Stacy McCain would say, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” and Mr Natividad played a stupid game. Naturally, Mr Natividad’s relatives have been defending him, but the simple fact is that he was a criminal, caught in the act, and he won’t be stealing any more catalytic converters.

In my attempt to see if the Inquirer had written something to criticize Mr Neal’s actions, I found this main editorial:

    A new year requires a better plan to tackle gun violence crisis

    One of this board’s resolutions for the new year is to remain vigilant in our coverage to ensure that city efforts to reduce gun violence are working.

    by The Editorial Board | Monday, January 3, 2022

    It took about 90 minutes for Philadelphia to experience its first homicide of 2022.

    By 1:30 a.m. on Jan. 1, a 33-year-old had been fatally shot in Feltonville. Less than 20 minutes later, four miles away near Temple University, a 16-year-old was shot and killed. The first two homicide victims of 2022 were among 14 people who were shot on the first day of the new year.

    The grim statistics hardly do justice to the mounting toll of gun violence in our city: 562 lives lost last year and another roughly 1,800 people who were shot and survived.

    In 2021, the city reached a bleak milestone in notching a record number of homicides. Now, the question city officials should be asking themselves is: How do we keep it from happening again in 2022?

Of course, the Editorial Board blame all sorts of things: the coronavirus pandemic, burned out streetlights, not enough public libraries, no new gun control legislation by the state government, really on everything but the criminals themselves.

    One of this board’s resolutions for the new year is to remain vigilant in our coverage to ensure that the city’s efforts to reduce gun violence are working. We propose a new year’s resolution for every entity in city government: Before every action, decision, or new program, ask how it contributes to reducing gun violence — and communicate the answer. That’s the kind of commitment a crisis of this magnitude requires.

No, what a crisis of this magnitude requires is correctly identifying the problem, requires telling the truth about what the problem really is, and this an “anti racist news organization” like the Inquirer will not do. The Editorial Board want to blame everything but the criminals themselves, because to blame the criminals is to say aloud the part everyone knows: the homicide problem in Philadelphia, and in all of our major cities, is a black homicide problem!

Of course, it’s raaaaacist to point that out, but until that is pointed out, until that is addressed, the problem can never be solved.

References

References
↑1 This is what we use in the Pico household, which is why I put it that way. There is no additional meaning implied by that.
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Let the punishment fit the crime

Brandon Combs, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Brandon Lee Combs, who must be presumed innocent of all charges until proven guilty, is currently lodged in the Fayette County Detention Center, charged with “TORTURE DOG/CAT W/SERIAL PHYS INJ OR DEATH”

KRS § 525.135 Torture of dog or cat:

  1. As used in this section, unless the context otherwise requires, “torture” means the intentional infliction of or subjection to extreme physical pain or injury, motivated by an intent to increase or prolong the pain of the animal.
  2. A person is guilty of torture of a dog or cat when he or she without legal justification intentionally tortures a domestic dog or cat.
  3. Torture of a dog or cat is a Class A misdemeanor for the first offense and a Class D felony for each subsequent offense if the dog or cat suffers physical injury as a result of the torture, and a Class D felony if the dog or cat suffers serious physical injury or death as a result of the torture.

It would seem that being charged with “serial” physical injury puts this as a Class D felony. The punishment for a Class D felony is imprisonment for “not less than one (1) year nor more than five (5) years.”

I wonder: will the Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney, Lou Ann Red Corn, show Mr Combs, if he is in fact the person who tortured Lillah, the same lenience she showed James Edward Ragland, when she allowed Mr Ragland to plead down from murder to manslaughter, setting a total sentence of ten years for fatelly shooting a woman in the back in a fight outside a strip club? If Iesha Edwards’ life didn’t matter more than that to Miss Red Corn, why should the physical pain and injuries to a dog merit five years in the clink?

If Mr Combs is convicted, I know to what punishment I would sentence him, but, of course, I’m not a judge.