Category Archives: Crime

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The ‘journalism’ of The Philadelphia Inquirer

North Judson and West Clearfield Streets in North Philadelphia. Image from Google Maps.

We have said, many times, that black lives don’t matter, at least not to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which only reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love in which the victim is an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl is the victim.

However, sometimes the Inquirer tries to paint someone as an innocent victim, but the details of the story, stories in this case, just don’t add up.

    Gunshots took a 13-year-old who was friends with everyone. At his North Philadelphia school, it’s ‘utter devastation.’

    A teacher at E.W. Rhodes School said seventh-grader Marcus Stokes was bright with an infectious smile, and that his peers “really enjoyed being his friend.”

    by Anna Orso | Friday, October 15, 2021

    Four days after 13-year-old Marcus Stokes was fatally shot in North Philadelphia on his way to school, his fellow students came back to the classroom at lunchtime to set up a makeshift memorial.

    They hung up a picture of Marcus that their teacher, Marcella Hankinson, had printed at Staples, and they strung balloons of blue and white, his favorite colors. They placed candles and a single rose next to a teddy bear on his desk, and they scrawled messages to him on red sticky notes next to his picture.

    The death has left students and teachers at E.W. Rhodes School traumatized, fearful, and in a state of “utter devastation,” said Principal Andrea Surratt, who oversees the school that serves kids in kindergarten through eighth grade. It’s the first time a student was fatally shot in her four years at the helm, and it took place five blocks from the school, triggering an hour-long lockdown.

There’s more at the original.

West Clearfield Street, from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

The murder of Young Marcus Stokes happened at on North Judson Street, at the intersection with West Clearfield Street. If you look at the map, North Judson is not five blocks from the school, which is at 2900 West Clearfield Street, but eleven blocks. It’s just a hair over 1/3 mile between the two.

Anna Orso’s story says, further down:

    Investigators believe Marcus and five other young people — including other Rhodes students — were sitting in a parked car on the 3100 block of Judson Street before 9 a.m. on Oct. 8. A gunman approached the vehicle and fired shots into it, hitting Marcus once in the chest, authorities said.

Yet a previous Inquirer story stated that Mr Stokes was shot “just after 9 a.m.” That’s an important difference, because the E Washington Rhodes School website states “Breakfast will be served from 8:15 am to 8:45 am each day. All students must be in homerooms by 8:45 am each day.” If you read Miss Orso’s story carefully, she stated that Mr Stokes and five other E W Rhodes’ students were “were sitting in a parked car on the 3100 block of Judson Street before 9 a.m.”, not that the victim was actually shot before 9:00 AM. Miss Orso has to have been aware of the previous article noting that he was shot after 9:00 AM, because she was one of the two Inquirer reporters who wrote it!

But, if you didn’t know that the shooting itself didn’t take place until after 9:00 AM, perhaps, just perhaps, you wouldn’t figure out that no, young Mr Stokes was not on his way to school. He should have been on his way, but it is obvious that he wasn’t.

Also in the earlier story which Miss Orso co-wrote with reporter Chris Palmer was this statement:

    (Chief Inspector Frank) Vanore said some neighbors said the car had been parked on the block for “quite awhile,” so it was not clear if any of the people inside had been able to drive it.

Miss Orso had to know that those kids weren’t driving to school, but she still wrote that the victim was “on his way to school”.

The Inquirer published the picture of the vehicle in question, a Plymouth PT Cruiser, not a particularly large vehicle, one in which six people aren’t normally going to cram just to have a chat or pray the rosary. Sunrise was at 7:03 AM on that day, and the weather was unseasonably warm, yet the photo of the vehicle shows all of the windows closed. What, some might ask, were six kids doing, sitting in a parked car with the windows rolled up 15 minutes after they were supposed to be in school? If the police know, if Miss Orso knows, such has not been revealed to readers of the Inquirer.

Back to the first cited article:

    Homicide Capt. Jason Smith said officers found 12 shell casings at the scene, and investigators have recovered some surveillance footage showing a possible suspect fleeing. No one has been arrested. Smith said detectives have not determined a motive but don’t believe Marcus was the shooter’s intended target. He did not elaborate.

So, who in the vehicle was the intended target? When you read about an intentional ‘hit’ like this, the most common answers which leap to mind are ‘rival gang member’ or ‘rival drug dealer’. Other characterizations could come to mind, but few would guess ‘community organizer’ or ‘Baptist youth minister.’ And the fact that we haven’t been told that the possibly intended target was a community organizer or Baptist youth minister, which is the kind of information which would have been disclosed if true, leads one to believe that ‘rival gang member’ or ‘rival drug dealer’ is the more probable guess.

Who is Anna Orso? Her Linkedin biography tells us that she has:

    spent the last seven years as a reporter in Philadelphia covering mostly general assignment and breaking news. I’m currently a member of the Justice and Injustice team at the Philadelphia Inquirer, which is part of its broader News Desk. My coverage is focused on issues related to public safety and policing.

She isn’t someone three months out of a small college journalism program, but earned her Baccalaureate degree in “Print Journalism, sociology/ criminology” in 2014. Yet she wrote a story in which her statements contradicted what has been previously published, contradicted the timeline, and contradicted the map. She made young Mr Stokes into an innocent victim, when what has been published about this crime throws doubt on that notion.

An actual journalist would have looked at the points I have made, and done something really radical like investigated more deeply and more thoroughly. Who knows? Perhaps young Mr Stokes really was an ‘innocent,’ but if he was, Miss Orso didn’t do much in answering the obvious questions around the time and place of the shooting. Was the Inquirer really so desperate to paint him as a boy doing nothing wrong, just going to school on a Friday morning, that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, dig for the truth?

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You can’t fix the problem if you won’t admit what the problem is

Philadelphia’s homicide rate has skyrocketed since Mayor Jim Kenney took office, and only gotten worse since George Soros-sponsored police hater Larry Krasner became District Attorney. The appointment of left coaster Danielle Outlaw –she was formerly Chief of Police in Portland, Oregon, and a deputy chief in Oakland, California — didn’t improve things.

From October 12, 2020 through October 12, 2021, 551 bodies have littered the streets of America’s sixth largest city. With a population of 1,603,797, that works out to a homicide rate of 34.36 per 100,000 population. As we noted just a few days ago, the city is on track for 554 homicides this year, so the rate has remained constant, despite a slowdown in killings from mid-July through August.

But the city’s homicide rate for all of 2020 wasn’t that high: it was ‘just’ 31.11 for the entire year, even though that year saw 499 homicides, just one short of 1990’s all-time record. No, the killing rate got far, far worse after the death of George Floyd while resisting arrest in Minneapolis, and the summer long protests, demonstrations and #BlackLivesMatter riots against the police. Continue reading →

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The whole truth doesn’t interest newspapers these days

While checking on Lexington Police Department data to update the information in Bullets flying in the Bluegrass State, I found that the police had finally updated the city’s shootings investigations page. In 2020, a year which saw the city set its annual murder record with 34 homicides, there were also 140 non-fatal shootings. As of October 10, 2020, there had been 107 non-fatal shootings.

And the thugs are keeping pace, as there have been 109 non-fatal shootings as of October 10, 2021!

Out of 140 non-fatal shootings in Lexington last year, the victim was white 32 times, and listed as Hispanic on four occasions. Out of 140 non-fatal shootings, 104 of the victims, 74.29%, were black, in a city the 2020 census determined was 68.3% white; 14.9% black; 4.2% Asian or Pacific Islander; 7.1% two or more races; and 9.2% Hispanic or Latino.

So far in 2021, there have been 17 non-fatal shooting victims listed as white, and another 10 listed as Hispanic, leaving 82, or 75.23%, listed as being black.

Naturally, the journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading at a politically correct newspaper like the Lexington Herald-Leader won’t tell its readers this!

The Sacramento Bee, the lead newspaper of the McClatchy Company MNI: (%), led the way for the group, of which the Herald-Leader is part, in deciding not to publish mugshots:

    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.

Further down:

    And the San Francisco Police Department earlier this month announced it will no longer release mugshots, unless the public is in imminent danger.

    “This policy emerges from compelling research suggesting that the widespread publication of police booking photos in the news and on social media creates an illusory correlation for viewers that fosters racial bias and vastly overstates the propensity of Black and brown men to engage in criminal behavior,” Police Chief William Scott said in a statement.

Perhaps that correlation is not so illusory!

The data are there, but the Herald-Leader reporters and editors do not follow the data, do not investigate something that an elderly man, namely me, was able to find sitting in his home three counties away, and so far out in the boondocks that I can’t get a dead-trees copy of the paper delivered.

Jymie S. Salahuddin, 53, from Lexington station WTVQ.

The McClatchy Mugshot Policy, which the Herald-Leader follows, claims that publishing mugshots of people charged with crimes is harmful, if they are not actually convicted of the crimes for which they have been arrested. Yet, in an article by Karla Ward, Lexington man sentenced to 21 years in prison for cocaine trafficking, the newspaper declined to print the publicly available photo of a convicted felon. Since federal law requires that Jymie S. Salahuddin, 53, serve at least 85% of his 262 month sentence, he will not be eligible for release for 18½ years, when he would be 71 years old. I’m not certain how an 18-year-old mugshot would harm an elderly convict on his release.

Not that it would matter: he’s not a charged but not convicted person, but one who pleaded guilty. It’s not like the paper needed to save bandwidth; they included a stock photo of jail cell bars.

Jacob Heil; photo by WLEX-TV press pool footage.

And the newspaper has assigned reporter Jeremy Chisenhall to sit in and cover the trial of Jacob Heil, 21, who is on trial for reckless homicide and DUI after he was involved in a crash which killed a 4-year-old pedestrian. The Herald-Leader has published at least two stories about the ongoing trial, including Mr Heil’s photograph. Though that phot shows him wearing a face mask, the paper published a full-face photo of him on February 22, 2019.

The paper is willing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, when it comes Mr Heil’s trial, on charges of which he could be acquitted, yet when the statistics point to a significant racial disparity in crime and victimhood in the city, all of these well-educated and experienced reporters and editors keep their keyboards closely in check.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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A stunning lack of perspective

Well, perhaps not that stunning after all.

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong tells us how tears came to her eyes as she witnessed a Black Lives Matter demonstration in remembrance of the death of addled drug user and convicted felon, George Floyd:

    Tears came to my eyes during a visit to a West Mount Airy neighborhood

    Each night, residents walk to one of four corners at the intersection of Emlen Street and West Mount Airy Avenue and stand for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in memory of George Floyd.

    by Jenice Armstrong | Monday, October 11, 2021

    People think I’m so tough, but I cried at work on Thursday.

    I didn’t break into the ugly cry, thankfully, but a few tears fell. I was in West Mount Airy, visiting a neighborhood where for the last year, residents have been coming out each night and standing in silence for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, marking how long a murderous Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck.

    Dozens participated each night during the summer of 2020, in the aftermath of the killing of the unarmed Black man. Lately the numbers have been down. Still, at least a handful of residents emerge from their homes just before 8 each evening and walk to the corners at the intersection of Emlen Street and West Mount Airy Avenue for the observance.

    The evening I was there last week, something else was afoot that led to even more participants: Twice in less than a week, a Black family had been the target of vandalism. First, someone smashed the windshield of their parked car with a rock. Days later, another rock came crashing through a window on their enclosed front porch.

    “An incident like this is unusual in Mt. Airy and is a reminder that there are still people who are unfriendly to anti-racism and that even our peaceful, diverse neighborhood is not insulated from divisiveness, fear and hatred,” Keely McCarthy wrote me in an email.

There’s more at the original, including two photos showing the public out holding Black Lives Matter signs.

But let’s tell the truth here: black lives don’t matter, at least not to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which only reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love is an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl is the victim. We noted, on Saturday, the killing of a 13-year-old boy sitting in a car with “several others” at the intersection of North Judson and West Clearfield Streets, in what the Philadelphia Police and the Inquirer will not say was a targeted hit, but of course, it was. Someone shooting at least ten rounds at a parked car full of people isn’t exactly an accident.

While law enforcement has not released the identity of the victim, The Philadelphia Tribune, a publication for the city’s black community, noted that, in 2020, black victims accounted for about 86% of the city’s 499 homicide victims, and 84% of the 2,236 shootings; non-Hispanic black Americans make up only about 38% of the city’s population. In all probability, on that corner, in that neighborhood, the 13-year-old victim was black.

And now there’s this:

Let’s just stop with the subtitle: the victim, sitting in a parked car after 9:00 AM, was not on his way to school; the E Washington Rhodes School website states “Breakfast will be served from 8:15 am to 8:45 am each day. All students must be in homerooms by 8:45 am each day.” The victim was more than 15 minutes late, and not making any move to get to school, which was eleven blocks away at 2900 West Clearfield Street. The shooting intersection is in the middle of the 2300 block of West Clearfield.

    A 15-year-old was shot in the leg in North Philadelphia on Sunday night as he was leaving a vigil for a 13-year-old boy who was killed Friday morning, police said.

    At least 10 shots were fired just before 7 p.m. Sunday on the 2600 block of North 22nd Street, where dozens of people had gathered to release blue and white balloons in remembrance of a boy who was fatally shot Friday just blocks from his school.

    The 15-year-old shot Sunday was struck in the left calf and hospitalized at Temple University Hospital in stable condition, police said. No one was arrested in connection with the shooting, which took place just outside the Cecil B. Moore Recreation Center. Police said it’s unknown if the two shootings are related.

There’s more at the original, but one thing is absolutely true: with each day that passes, the good people of the City of Brotherly Love, and 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 journolists[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading of The Philadelphia Inquirer prove that black lives don’t matter, don’t matter much at all. If the shooting on Friday was a targeted attack, then the one at the vigil on Sunday was as well. “At least ten shots” rang out at a vigil for the murder victim, and if the shooter displayed the gang bangers’ notoriously poor accuracy with bullets, it was very accurate in sending the intended message: whatever beef the gang had with the victim, or perhaps someone else sitting in that parked, and possibly disabled,[3]Police Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said some neighbors said the car had been parked on the block for “quite awhile,” so it was not clear if any of the people inside had been able to drive it. vehicle, thinking anything good or nice about the victim was not allowed thinking.

Perhaps the Sunday shooter was trying to knock off one of the people sitting in that car but who wasn’t hurt.

I have to ask: what good are the few dozen people in Mt Airy doing, holding up signs and gathering for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in the memory of a career criminal like George Floyd, rather than working to make Philly’s streets safe for the black, and white, and Hispanic, and Asian, people still alive in that city? Don’t tell me how horrible it is that Mr Floyd died while being restrained by a white policeman when nobody gives a damn about the hundreds of people spilling out their blood in the city’s mean streets.

——————————

Update: Tuesday, October 12, 2021 | 8:30 AM EDT

The last referenced story has already disappeared from the Inquirer’s website main page, though truly important stories like this one about a British golf ball remain up and how the paper’s deputy food editor described an egg sandwich as his only comfort food while deciding to ‘come out’ as homosexual. How does revealing to its readership one of the paper’s writers sexual orientation outweigh the murders in the city, and why do we even need to know about it? If he is going to be reviewing a restaurant, why should it be important for anyone who doesn’t know or interact with him personally to know with whom he sleeps?

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page was finally updated after the long holiday weekend,[4]Only government employees get Columbus Day Indigenous People’s Day off. and, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Monday, October 11, 2021, 431 souls have been sent untimely to their eternal rewards. 431 Philadelphians murdered in 284 days works out to 1.5176 per day, and if that rate holds constant for the rest of the year, 554 people will bleed out their lives’ blood in the city’s mean streets.

The city has already seen its eleventh highest homicide total ever, with 81 days remaining in this bloody year. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw have already presided over the city’s second bloodiest year, missing tying the record by just one dead body, and now they are on track to not just break the record set in 1990, the depths of the crack cocaine wars, but shatter it, decimate it, blow it out of the water by more than 10%, and nobody at the nation’s third oldest newspaper gives a damn.

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 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.
↑3 Police Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said some neighbors said the car had been parked on the block for “quite awhile,” so it was not clear if any of the people inside had been able to drive it.
↑4 Only government employees get Columbus Day Indigenous People’s Day off.
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Bullets flying in the Bluegrass State

Lexington isn’t Philadelphia, but that doesn’t mean that the guns aren’t firing there! I was checking The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website Sunday evening, to see if there were any stories on homicides, and then said to myself, “Self, you should check the Lexington Herald-Leader as well!”

    1 woman, 1 teenager shot outside a Lexington home, police say. Suspect flees scene

    By Jeremy Chisenhall | Sunday, October 10, 2021 | 4:40 PM EDT | Updated: 7:38 PM EDT

    Endon Drive, Lexington, from Google Maps. The red mark on the map does not indicate the shooting site. Click to enlarge.

    A Lexington shooting suspect fled Sunday after wounding a woman and a teenager outside a home, according to Lexington police.

    The shooting happened around 1:45 p.m. on Endon Drive, according to police. The woman was believed to have “critical” injuries, according to police Lt. Chris Van Brackel. Both victims were taken to University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital for treatment, Van Brackel said.

    The suspect fled in a vehicle, Van Brackel said. But he wasn’t the only one who took off from the area after the shooting.

There’s more at the original, but there wasn’t a whole lot more information. Then again, it seemed as though the Lexington Police didn’t want to share much with the article author. The victims were a 56-year-old black woman and 15-year-old black male.[1]The last sentence was added at 10:30 AM on Wednesday, October 13, 2021, with information taken from Lexington Shootings Investigations page.

Lexington isn’t like Philly, jammed up with row houses. Endon Drive is a starter home neighborhood, some brick, a couple of them stone, some clapboard and even a couple showing what appears to be asbestos shingle siding. The Google Maps streetview image, taken in October 2015, shows an Alison Lundergan Grimes campaign sign in support of her 2015 re-election campaign for Kentucky’s Secretary of State, a campaign she won. Mrs Grimes had been the 2014 Democratic Senate nominee, a campaign she lost to Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) by a landslide margin.

References

References
↑1 The last sentence was added at 10:30 AM on Wednesday, October 13, 2021, with information taken from Lexington Shootings Investigations page.
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Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner has done what he set out to do

For the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer, it isn’t brutal criminals or gangbangers or thugs that kill people, but the nonsense term “gun violence,” as though guns magically roam the streets, firing themselves. Oddly enough, I have never seen a gun which just went off by itself, but maybe I’m just not as smart as the editors of what RedState writer Mike Miller laughingly called the Philadelphia Enquirer.

Multiple victims wounded in Strawberry Mansion shooting as gun violence continues in Philly

by Robert Moran and Julie Shaw, Updated: 5:19 PM EDT

Multiple people — possibly six — were wounded in a shooting Tuesday afternoon in the city’s Strawberry Mansion section, police said.

Police received their first report of a shooting just before 4 PM in the vicinity of 30th and York Streets. Victims were taken by private vehicle to Temple University Hospital.

Police were investigating several locations as possible crime scenes.

Earlier Tuesday, two boys were injured by gunfire in separate incidents, and an undercover narcotics officer was fired upon as gun violence continued in the city.

The concluding paragraph:

Over the weekend, 30 people were shot in the city, including five people at a party to honor a victim of gun violence.

I guess the only good news is that the gang bangers are such lousy shots. But at what point do the editors recognize that the problem isn’t guns, but bad people?

Let’s go back to 2017. The editors, surprisingly, endorsed Republican Beth Grossman over Democrat Larry Krasner for District Attorney. Daniel Denvir waxed wroth:

The Philadelphia Inquirer just endorsed mass incarceration

by Daniel Denvir | October 17, 2017

In May, Philadelphians went to the polls and made history, voting by a large margin to back civil rights attorney Larry Krasner in the city’s Democratic primary for district attorney. On Sunday, residents awoke to find that the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial board had endorsed Krasner’s Republican opponent, Beth Grossman, a former top prosecutor in the District Attorney’s Office.

Krasner rallied Philadelphians to an upstart, radical campaign calling for an end to the era of mass incarceration and impunity for police misconduct. The city’s struggling paper of record endorsed a candidate who presided over a nationally infamous civil asset forfeiture program through which prosecutors seized homes and other property from city residents, oftentimes poor and working-class, black and Latino. At least, the editorial gushed, she has “a welcome hesitancy to go for the death penalty.”

Philadelphians want change. The Inquirer board ploddingly declared itself for the enervating cause of defending an intolerable status quo that will most likely be defeated on election day.

But points for consistency: Grossman is the second candidate for top prosecutor the paper has endorsed who has also been backed by the city’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #5, an unapologetically reactionary officers union headed by a man who recently called Black Lives Matter protesters “a pack of wild animals.” That first FOP-backed candidate the Inquirer endorsed was Rich Negrin, one of Krasner’s primary opponents. Oddly, the board’s praise for Negrin included a note that the “criminal justice pendulum has been swinging in a new direction for some time, away from ‘tough on crime,’” but failed to mention that it was Krasner’s insurgent, movement-based campaign that had swung the primary field to the left.

After a few more paragraphs of such drivel, Mr Denvir wrote:

In reality, the board’s rationale is a pretext to protect an office that has long prized convictions and lengthy sentences regardless of the costs or whether the outcomes comport with any sense of justice. The Inquirer praises Grossman for her career going “after drug dealers, gunslingers, thieves, and blighters” and her “passion for defending the rights of crime victims.” Not a word about mass incarceration. To editorialize in favor of such a brutal status quo is an insult to the Philadelphians on whose behalf the board purports to be writing.

Well, Mr Denvir got his wish: Larry Krasner won the election. And rather than Mrs Grossman going “after drug dealers, gunslingers, thieves, and blighters,” the City of Brotherly Love has a District Attorney who does not do that, who fired a whole slew of veteran prosecutors upon taking office, and who certainly doesn’t believe in “mass incarceration.”

The result? In 2018, Mr Krasner’s first year in office, city homicides jumped from 315 to 353, a 12.06% increase. The following year, homicides held almost steady, rising to 356, but so far this year, 276 people had been murdered in Philadelphia, a 31.43% increase over the same day (August 17th) last year. If the homicide rate of 1.2 killings per day continues, Philly should see 439 murders by the end of the year.

The cost of Mr Krasner’s victory, and the policies Mr Denvir wanted to see put in place, has been written in blood. Philadelphia has seen more murders, many more murders than New York City, which has more than five times Philly’s population.

Philadelphia’s daily average inmate population was 6,409 when Mr Krasner took office, and was down to 4,849 on August 31, 2019.

One of the people who wasn’t in jail on Friday, March 13, 2020, was Hassan Elliot, 21. How did the District Attorney’s office treat Mr Elliot, a known gang-banger?

  • 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 attend 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 that Friday the 13th, Police Corporal James O’Connor IV, 46, was part of a Philadelphia police SWAT team trying to serve a predawn arrest warrant on Mr Elliott, from a March 2019 killing. Mr Elliot greeted the SWAT team with a hail of bullets, and Corporal O’Connor was killed. Had Mr Elliot been in jail, as he could have been due to parole violations, had Mr Krasner’s office treated him seriously, Corporal O’Connor would have gone home safely to his wife that day. The Inquirer reported:

Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 president John McNesby also has criticized Krasner, saying his policies led to the killing of O’Connor. “Unfortunately, he’s murdered by somebody that should have never been on the street,” McNesby said.

McNesby also said FOP members and police officers formed a human barricade to block Krasner from entering the hospital Friday to see O’Connor’s family.

The numbers don’t lie. Under Mayor Jim Kenney, who has managed to make past Mayors John Street and Michael Nutter look great, District Attorney Krasner and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw (who, to be honest, is really just Mayor Kenney’s puppet), Philadelphia has become measurably much worse. Mr Kenney has been in office since the beginning of 2016, and Mr Krasner since the start of 2018, and Philly is now much more dangerous. Their policies were put into governing practice, and, unless chaos and death was the goal all along, they failed miserably.