Category Archives: Crime

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The tale of the Democrats’ failure in Philadelphia has been written in blood

As both of my regular readers know, I check the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page every weekday morning, to get the latest homicide numbers in the City of Brotherly Love. I was somewhat surprised that, after reporting 547 homicides through 11:59 PM on Thursday, December 23rd, the police reported ‘only’ 549 through Sunday, December 26th, and the same number as of Monday, December 27th.

Techish, 2640 Germantown Avenue, photo via Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

But this morning? The police report six more dead, for a total of 555, through Tuesday, December 28th. Philadelphia Inquirer nighttime breaking news reporter Robert Moran had two stories late yesterday, Unidentified man fatally shot inside North Philly phone store, in which a masked man entered the Techish phone sales and repair shop at 2640 Germantown Avenue, and fired sixteen shots, killing an unidentified man, without any prior known provocation, and Two men killed outside Club Risque among nine shot in Philadelphia overnight, in which two men were gunned down outside the Wissinoming strip club at 5921 Tacony Street, a less than attractive area across from Interstate 95, early Tuesday morning.

Club Risque, photo via Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

As usual, I had to dig for those stories; none were on the front page of the Inquirer’s website, because, as I have said many times before, black lives don’t matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Well, perhaps some of the six newly recorded dead had been shot the previous day, and simply didn’t expire in time to be included in the Monday stats:

    Seven are wounded, including a 14-year-old boy, in separate Philly shootings

    The shootings happened around the same time in Olney and Kensington, and later in South and North Philadelphia.

    by Robert Moran | Updated: Monday, December 27, 2021

    Seven people were injured, including a 14-year-old boy, in separate shootings Monday night in Philadelphia, police said.

    Shortly before 7:15 p.m., the teen was outside on the 200 block of Widener Street in Olney when he was shot in the face and back. He was taken by police to Einstein Medical Center, where he was listed in stable condition.

    Police reported no arrests in that case.

    Around the same time, three people were shot on the 200 block of East Cambria Street in Kensington, police said.

Among the most seriously wounded:

    2300 block of South Bouvier Street, via Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

    Just before 8:40 p.m., police responded to a reported double shooting inside a residence on the 2300 block of South Bouvier Street.

    A 52-year-old woman shot twice in the head was taken by police to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where she was listed in critical condition. A 54-year-old man also had a gunshot wound to the head. He was taken to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and was reported in critical condition.

At least according to Google Maps, South Bouvier Street doesn’t look too bad! More modern row houses, at least from the front, than is frequently seen in the city, though the street is one of Philly’s narrowest.

So, how many people have been murdered in Philadelphia? I noted, on Monday, January 4, 2021, that the police had reported 502 murders for the previous year. It wasn’t my imagination; that was the number showing on the then-current crime statistics page. I guess that I should have taken a screen shot of it, because somehow, three people managed to recover from death, and the number was quickly reduced to 499.

I won’t make that mistake this year!

I have my suspicions, of course. It could have been that three people reported murdered didn’t expire until after 11:59 PM EST on New Year’s Eve, and were thus counted as having been killed this year. Or, were I a conspiracy theorist, it could have been that 502 people were murdered in 2020, but three were pushed off until 2021, so that Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat, District Attorney Larry Krasner, a stooge of George Soros, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, wouldn’t have that ignominious gold medal on their records, leaving 1990’s 500 as still the record number of homicides, but, if that’s the case, it didn’t work, because the city hit the 500 mark just before Thanksgiving!

There are only three days left in 2021, but with the current 2021 homicide rate of 1.5331 per day, 560 is a distinct possibility; the actual projection is 559.5994. Looking at the homicide rate since the end of the Labor Day weekend, 192 people killed in 113 days, or 1.6991 per day, the city would see 560.0973 murders.

But even if the city finishes with ‘just’ 555 killings, and we take the 2021 guesstimated population of 1,607,667 — the 2020 census showed 1,603,797 people living in Philadelphia — that works out to a murder rate of 34.52 per 100,000 population, higher than New York, higher than Los Angeles, and higher than Chicago.

Philadelphia has been governed by Democrats since before I was born, since January of 1952, when George VI was still King of England, and Harry Truman President of the United States. And one thing has become blatantly clear: the policies of the Democrats have not worked in the City of Brotherly Love!

The tale of their failure has been written blood.

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Chicago thinks it’s the nation’s murder capital. Philadelphia laughs and says, “Hold my beer!” The good people of those two fine cities are getting exactly that for which they voted.

A police officer places makers on evidence on the 3900 block of Poplar Street 18-year-old Nasir Marks was fatally shot on Tuesday, May 25, 2021. Steven M Falk, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer. Click to enlarge.

According to the Chicago Tribune, as of Sunday, December 19th, there had been 783 murders in the Windy City thus far in 2021, 34 more than on the same day last year. As of the same day, 540 homicides had occurred in Philadelphia. The 19th being the 353rd day of the year, that works out to 2.2181 homicides per day in Chicago, and ‘only’ 1.5297 per day in the City of Brotherly Love.

But, according to the 2020 census, there were 2,746,388 people living in Chicago, and 1,603,797 in Philly. Using the homicide rates, that works out to a projected 558 killings in Philly and 810 in Chicago. Murder rates are calculated based on 100,000 population, meaning that Chicago is headed for a homicide rate of 29.4933 per 100,000, while Philadelphia is looking at 34.7924. Philadelphia is far deadlier than Chicago!

We noted that Philadelphia tied its 1990 homicide record of 500 the day before Thanksgiving, and at that point, the city was actually seeing slightly fewer killings per day than it was on December 19th. And guess what: with 547 homicides as of the end of Thursday, December 23rd, the rate has crept up slightly again, to 1.5322 per day, making the projected number of killings 559!

I will admit to a sort of grim fascination with the numbers, but murder in Philadelphia has really changed things. One murder, it has been said, is a tragedy, but 547 is just a statistic, and to the leadership of the city, and the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer, that’s all it is, a statistic, a number that they can attribute of “gun violence,” but never examine the real problem: bad people!

In Ironic Justice: Two Anti-Police Lawmakers Get Carjacked, Robert Stacy McCain noted that two Democratic politicians, one in Chicago and one in Philly, who supported the “reform” of policing — meaning: getting even softer on crime — were carjacked within 24 hours of each other.

Illinois state Sen. Kimberly Lightford (D-Maywood) was targeted in suburban Chicago on Tuesday night, while Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) was carjacked Wednesday afternoon after an event in South Philadelphia.

Well, it seems that, given that Representative Scanlon is a sitting congresswoman, the feds are getting involved:

“The investigation into this incident is in its very initial stages, and we are continuing to investigate and evaluate charging decisions,” said U.S. Attorney Williams. “Armed carjacking is a serious federal crime. There have been a rash of violent crimes like this recently, and while there were national security implications to this particular incident, we are always working collaboratively with our local partners to evaluate if cases should be taken federally. Working together means more resources, more tools, more intelligence. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If you pick up a gun and use it to commit a crime, together, we will come after you. And we are very good at what we do.”

In point of fact, however, if armed carjacking is a “serious federal crime,” when was the last time the feds got involved in such a case? Just two weeks ago, Philadelphia police said the city has seen an 80% increase in carjackings this year, and what had United States Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams done in response? Nothing, until a Democratic congresswoman got carjacked in — sweet irony! — FDR Park.

Seriously, go look through the press release archive at the U.S. Attorney’s web site and tell me if you find a case where they previously prosecuted a carjacking. I went back as far as April and didn’t find one, so if the Biden DOJ was making it a priority to “come after” carjackers before this week, they weren’t very successful at it. But then again, success really hasn’t been a hallmark of the Biden administration, has it?

Mr McCain was employing sarcasm, but there’s a not-so-veiled slam at Philadelphia’s District Attorney, Larry Krasner, a George Soros-financed stooge whose main goal is getting the bad guys released, not jailed. At some point, you’d think Philadelphians would get tired of all of the crime and violence in their city’s streets, but not tired enough: Mr Krasner was re-elected last month!

The good people of those two cities are getting exactly that for which they voted.

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36

A man’s life, reduced to four paragraphs. From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

    Coroner releases name of man, 21, who died after shooting in Lexington

    by Karla Ward | Saturday, December 18, 2021 | 12:44 PM EST | Updated: 1:48 PM EST

    A 21-year-old man died after being shot in a neighborhood near downtown Lexington late Friday.

    Lexington police said they were called to the shooting on the 800 block of Oak Hill Drive, off Loudon Avenue, at 10:56 p.m. When they arrived, police found the man inside a residence, Lexington police said in a news release Saturday.

    The Fayette County coroner’s office said the man, Devon Sandusky, was pronounced dead at the scene at 11:25 p.m.

    They said the investigation is ongoing. No suspect information was released.

There was a fifth paragraph, but one which simply told readers where to report information to the police. A sixth paragraph noted that this was the city’s 36th homicide of the year, a new record. The previous record was 34, set in 2020. At the current pace, Lexington is projected to see one or two more killings before 2021 is over.

To me, this was sadly reminiscent of the stories I see in The Philadelphia Inquirer, where a murder victim’s life is reduced to a few short paragraphs, often without even the victim’s name being published. But, unlike the Inquirer, the Herald-Leader will print more about the murder as more information is released. With ‘only’ 36 homicides on which to report, the newspaper’s staff can put a little bit more time into reporting on it; the Inquirer’s staff are overwhelmed, with 535 homicides through Thursday, December 16th, and the City of Brotherly Love on pace to record another 23 killings, for a total of 558.

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Another (alleged) killer arrested in Lexington, but the Herald-Leader doesn’t want readers to know what he looks like

We noted, at the end of September, that two men, Tayte Patton, 22, and Antonio Turner, 19, were charged with the murder of Mykel Waide in 2020. What my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal naturally refused to print the mugshots of the two accused killers, but we did.

Now a third suspect has been charged:

    Antwone Davenport, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

    Third suspect charged with murder in killing of Mykel Waide in Lexington

    by Christopher Leach | Wednesday, December 15, 2021 | 2:44 PM EST

    A third suspect in connection to the killing of Mykel Waide, a former high school basketball player in Lexington, has been arrested and charged with murder, according to Lexington police.

    Antwone Davenport, 33, was arrested by US Marshals in Illinois, police said. He has been charged with murder and other charges, and he is being held at the Fayette County Detention Center on bond of over $1 million.

    Davenport is the third suspect to be charged with murder after Tayte Patton and Antonio Turner were arrested in late September.

    According to a criminal complaint, Davenport was involved in an altercation at the Residence Inn on Newtown Court in August 2020.

    An eyewitness told police they saw Davenport in a vehicle at the parking lot of the hotel, according to court records. During the altercation, Davenport allegedly got out of the vehicle and started shooting at a crowd of people.

There’s more at the original.

According to the story, four people were struck by bullets as Mr Davenport fired into the crowd, but Mr Waide was the only person killed.

The Fayette County Detention Center record for Mr Davenport states that three charges, murder, wanton endangerment in the first degree, and possession of a handgun by a convicted felon, were dismissed without prejudice, meaning that they can be reinstated, but it does tell us something. It tells us that Mr Davenport was a previous convicted felon, so we aren’t talking about a good guy here.

Neither Mr Patton nor Mr Turner show up in the Detention Center website, which means they have been bailed out. It seems that the Herald-Leader doesn’t want to inform its readership what two alleged murderers, now loose in the city, look like, so that readers can avoid the suspects if they see them.

What Mr Davenport looks like is hardly a big secret: WKYT-TV, Channel 27, broadcast his mugshot, as did Channel 56, the Fox affiliate.

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Lexington breaks the record!

In 2019, Lexington, where I lived from 1971 through 1984, and, since my return to the Bluegrass State in 2017 is the closest ‘major’ city to me, set a new city homicide record of 30. In 2020, it broke that record, with 34 murders.

Well, that didn’t last long, as the city has now seen 35 homicides, with the murder of Ramon Pennie on December 7th. 35 killings in 341 days works out to one every ten days, and projecting the current homicide rate further, the city could see 37.4633 murders by the end of the year. Unlike Philadelphia, city leaders have at least touched on the reasons for the increased homicide numbers:

    ‘It’s a community problem.’ Lexington police chief addresses record homicide numbers.

    by Christopher Leach | Wednesday, December 8, 2021 | 5:03 PM EST | Updated: 5:10 PM EST

    The city of Lexington broke its annual homicide record after a 51-year-old man was shot and killed on Tuesday evening.

    Ramon Pennie was shot and killed on Hill Street Tuesday night, marking the 35th homicide in Lexington in 2021. That surpassed the record number of 34 in 2020. With a few weeks until the calendar flips to 2022, it’s possible the new-record homicide count could rise.

    Lexington Chief of Police Lawrence Weathers hosted a press conference Tuesday afternoon to address the high number of homicides. He said a number of factors play into the disturbing trend, but the root of the problem starts within the community.

    “What I know for a fact is that this is not just a police problem, it’s not a city, government problem, it’s a community problem,” Weathers said. “Where we can do things immediately on the front end, I think all of us working together in the community, with the community’s help, can do things not just to alleviate and reduce criminal activity, especially homicides in the short long, but in the long run.”

Read more at: https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/crime/article256427956.html#storylink=cpy

The Lexington Police Department’s Homicide Investigations page is somewhat in arrears in its data: only 33 homicides are listed, the last on November 20th. In only 12 of the 33 listed killings is there an indication that a suspect has been apprehended.

One thing that the homicide page does not include in its public data is the race and sex of the deceased, but the non-fatal Shootings Investigations page does. Out of 127 non-fatal shootings, 20 of the victims are listed as white, and 12 are listed as Hispanic, which means that 95 of the victims are listed as being black. That’s 74.80%, in a city in which only 14.61% of the population are listed as black.

Out of those 127 non-fatal shootings, the police list 11 as solved. That’s a whopping 8.66% of cases. 🙁

Chief Weathers was right: it is a community problem. He just couldn’t bring himself to say which community.

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The powers that be in Philadelphia continue to blame each other for a problem about which they cannot tell the truth

There are times when I worry about being a bit of a broken record on the homicide rate in Philadelphia, and I skipped some recent stories, but the blame game in the City of Brotherly Love has gotten both hysterically funny and monumentally tragic.

Mayor Kenney acknowledges Philadelphia has ‘a gun crisis’ but sidesteps questions about DA Larry Krasner’s crime comments

District Attorney Larry Krasner drew criticism Monday when he said: “We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence.”

By Anna Orso | Wednesday, December 8, 2021 | 5:26 PM EST

Two days after District Attorney Larry Krasner stirred outrage by insisting the city isn’t in the midst of a crime or violence crisis, Mayor Jim Kenny and the city’s police commissioner sought Wednesday to gingerly wade into — or away from — the issue.

During their scheduled biweekly news conference, one that began this year in direct response to the rising number of shootings, Kenney and Commissioner Danielle Outlaw both said they do believe the city has a gun violence problem.

Both also declined to say more about Krasner’s comments or the ensuing pushback, including a blistering statement from Kenney’s predecessor, former Mayor Michael Nutter, who called Krasner’s remarks “some of the worst, most ignorant, and most insulting comments I have ever heard spoken by an elected official.”

Kenney on Wednesday said while he agrees “we’re in a gun crisis,” he would not “get involved in a back-and-forth between a former mayor and the DA.”

There’s more at the original.

Michael Nutter wasn’t the best mayor Philadelphia ever had, but, during his eight years in office, his Police Commissioner, Charles Ramsey, and he presided over a significant decrease in killings in the city. The city saw 391 homicides in Mayor John Street’s last year of 2007; that number was down 60, to 331, in Mayor Nutter’s first year in office, and though tied again in 2012, the numbers were generally down. In their last three years, 2013, 2014, and 2015, the city saw fewer than 300 murders, 246, 248, and 280, respectively.

Though that number dropped slightly, to 277 in Mayor Kenney’s first year, by the following year the numbers were above 300 again, at 315, 353, 356, and then last year’s whopping 499.

District Attorney Krasner, one of the George Soros-funded stooges who took office in some of our major cities with the explicit promise to reduce prosecutions, tried to tell people that yes, crimes with firearms had increased, but other crimes were down. That, of course, was bovine feces.

This is where the Inquirer truthfully reports the statistics, but never questions them. Murder is not normally an entry-level crime.

There are two different types of crime, crimes of evidence, and crimes of reporting. Murder is a crime of evidence, because it leaves a dead body, and dead bodies get found. It’s hard to dispose of 100 to 300 pounds of dead and decaying flesh and bone and muscle and fat unless someone has carefully planned how to do it.

But assaults, or robberies, or rapes? Assaults and rapes can be crimes of evidence, if the victim goes to the hospital for treatment. But if the victims is not seriously enough injured to seek medical care, or if the rape victim chooses not to report it, then those crimes become crimes of reporting, and if they are not reported to the police, then as far as the police are concerned, as far as the statistics measure, the crimes never happened. Yet, while the statistics vary, it seems that fewer than half of all “violent victimization” are reported to the police, and rape appears to be the least reported crime. According to the survey, only 32.5% or rapes or sexual assaults were reported in 2015, and that dropped to 23.2% the following year.[1]See Table 4. In a city, in communities, in which the vast majority of crimes which are known about go unsolved, why would people who are already distrustful of the police, people who have low expectations that the crimes will actually be solved, even bother reporting the crimes? Why would residential burglaries be down 22% but non-residential burglaries up 15%? Same crime, just different targets, but different conditions for the owners. Commercial owners who find their businesses burgled[2]Though “burglarize” is apparently a real word now, I refuse to use it. have a far greater possibility of getting an insurance recovery, while residents do not, so of course the victims of commercial burglaries are more likely to report the crimes. Residential burglaries? With so many unsolved crimes, and distrust of the police high, reporting such a crime must seem mostly useless to people.

And in the City of Brotherly Love, both Mr Krasner, and the nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper, have been working as hard as they can to undermine the police!

Of course, all of the politicians, all of the politically correct, want to talk about “gun violence,” as though those inanimate objects somehow levitate and shoot people all by themselves, all to push stricter gun control laws. In their own stories, the Inquirer noted that Latif Williams, the (alleged) killer of Samuel Collington, was a juvenile, with a criminal record, and could not be legally carrying a gun . . . but he was. They reported that Donavan Crawford, charged with the murder of Sykea Patton, was “charged overnight with murder and multiple counts of illegally carrying a gun.” Somehow, some way, the highly educated and experienced editors and reporters for the Inquirer never noticed that the people committing crimes with guns are almost never holders of firearms permits, almost never carrying firearms legally, and, shockingly enough, aren’t that interested in obeying the law in the first place.

This is the problem that the left simply cannot see, because they are unwilling to see it. It is not a matter of guns, but the people using the guns. Since the people using guns to kill others are disproportionately black, to admit that it’s the people who are the problem is to recognize that homicide in our major cities is primarily a black problem, and that the #woke[3]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading just cannot do.

But if you cannot admit what the problem is, you can never hope to solve the problem. And the left, including Mayor Kenney, including Commissioner Outlaw, would rather ignore the truth than deal with the truth.

References

References
↑1 See Table 4.
↑2 Though “burglarize” is apparently a real word now, I refuse to use it.
↑3 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Some (mostly) good news

We have mentioned the case of Cody Allen Arnett before. Mr Arnett was treated leniently by the Kentucky Parole Board, and released well before his previous sentences were up. Despite having five prior violent felony convictions on his record, the parole board recommended him for early release. On June 26, 2018, he was granted parole, and scheduled for release on August 1, 2018, for a conviction on August 7, 2015 for robbery, for which he was sentenced to consecutive five-year sentences.

On September 23, 2018, he broke into the dorm apartment of Georgetown College student Ava Stokes[1]Though the media normally do not disclose rape victims’ identities, Miss Stokes has gone public with her story. and raped her, repeatedly, at knife point. He eventually got careless, and Miss Stokes was able to seize the knife from him, and she stabbed him several times. Fleeing the scene, he was quickly apprehended.

In July of this year, he was finally convicted, and the jury recommended six consecutive life sentences.

    Man sentenced to life in prison in 2018 rape of a Georgetown College student

    by Jeremy Chisenhall | Tuesday, December 7, 2021 | 11:00 AM EST

    A man convicted of raping a Georgetown College student was sentenced Monday to life in prison, according to prosecutors.

    Cody A. Arnett, 36, was sentenced after a jury convicted him of rape, sodomy, burglary, evidence tampering and being a persistent felony offender earlier this year, according to court records. Arnett was accused of sexually assaulting a woman inside a Georgetown College residence hall on Sept. 23, 2018. He threatened her with a knife during the assault, according to court records.

    The jury recommended that Arnett be sentenced to six consecutive life sentences for his crimes, according to court records. But state law doesn’t allow for judges to impose life sentences consecutively. Commonwealth’s Attorney Sharon Muse Johnson said the jury’s recommendation of six life sentences should indicate to the parole board that Arnett shouldn’t be released.

    “The day Arnett’s sentence ends Ava’s begins,” Muse Johnson told the jury, according to a news release. “The day he is released her life is over.” Muse Johnson said Arnett was a danger to the community and “has more than earned a life sentence.”

There’s more at the original.

Sadly, Kentucky state law is such that Mr Arnett will be eligible for parole after serving twenty years. His most recent parole showed just how well he had been rehabilitated! Prosecutors are saying that they believe the jury’s recommendation for a sentence, even though it was outside of state law, will persuade a future Parole Board never to grant him a release. Mr Arnett is 36 years old; he could, in theory, be released when he is just 56.

What does the state Parole Board say about itself, its members, and its mission:

    Welcome to the Kentucky Parole Board

    The Kentucky Parole Board consists of diverse, experienced, and committed professionals who are honored to serve the citizens of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Public safety is paramount to the parole board.

    The mission of the Kentucky Parole Board is to make decisions that maintain a delicate balance between public safety, victim rights, reintegration of the offender and recidivism. We will achieve this important balance by application of our core values of knowledge, experience and integrity.

If “public safety is paramount to the parole board,” why are they trying to “maintain a delicate balance between public safety, victim rights, reintegration of the offender and recidivism”? Their own self-description is internally contradictory.

If you look at the brief biographies of the Parole Board members, you will see that all have advanced degrees and multiple years of experience in law enforcement, yet somehow, some way, the Parole Board could not figure out that releasing a man with five prior violent felony convictions was not a very good idea.[2]Most of the current members were not on the Parole Board when Mr Arnett was approved for release in May of 2018. But it doesn’t take a law degree, or a masters, or even a baccalaureate degree to figure out that Mr Arnett should not have been released even a day earlier than his maximum sentence.

    All board members as well as additional support staff are members of the Association of Paroling Authorities International (APAI) and continuously utilize resources through APAI as well as the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) to enhance knowledge and expertise with regards to criminal justice and the parole process. The goal is to utilize research and evidence based practices in order to keep Kentucky on the cutting edge with advances in the field.

The best “evidence based practices” would be to keep the bad guys locked up! Our problem is not ‘mass incarceration,’ but that not enough people have been locked up, for not a long enough time. And we need to start holding parole board members accountable for the crimes and damages caused by criminals they have released early.

References

References
↑1 Though the media normally do not disclose rape victims’ identities, Miss Stokes has gone public with her story.
↑2 Most of the current members were not on the Parole Board when Mr Arnett was approved for release in May of 2018.
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Killadelphia It's not just that the raw number of homicides is increasing; the rate of killings has increased as well

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated Monday through Friday, during normal business hours, so when last I saw it, the police had indicated that there had been 513 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, December 2nd. This morning, that number had jumped to 521 killings as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, December 6th.

That’s eight homicides in three days!

Forget the “long, hot summer” when it comes to murder in Philly. As of the end of Labor Day, September 6th, the 249th day of the year, Philly had seen 363 homicides. 363 ÷ 249 = 1.4578 homicides per day × 365 days in the year = 532.1084 homicides projected for the year.

Well, that was then, and this is now. 521 homicides ÷ 339th day of the year = 1.5369 killings per day, × 365 = 560.9587 projected murders.

But it gets worse. Labor Day is the ‘traditional end of summer’, even if it’s not autumn astronomically. Since the end of Labor Day, there have been 158 killings, in just 90 days. That works out to 1.7556 murders per day. If that rate is maintained through the end of the year, that’s another 45.6444 souls sent untimely to their eternal rewards, for a projected 567 dead bodies littering the city’s mean streets.

Yeah, I’m something of a number’s geek on this subject, but I’m also a writer, and there have been so many murders in Philadelphia that I’ve been struggling to come up with different words to use, to avoid redundancy in my prose. Perhaps that explains why The Philadelphia Inquirer has nothing on their website main page, at least as of 10:15 AM EST, not a single thing, on the eight killings over the past three days.

In reality, the editors of the Inquirer don’t want to hear about homicide in the city, not in any nitty-gritty way. I submitted the article Being taught about white privilege, by The Philadelphia Inquirer, to the newspaper as a prospective OpEd piece on Friday, December 3rd, and though I did not really expect them to print it, I did hope that maybe, just maybe, upon reading it, the editors would realize just how biased they’ve been on the reporting of the carnage in the city’s streets.[1]At least as of 10:15 AM this morning, I have neither been contacted nor received a rejection email from the Inquirer.

The American Free News Network did print it.

Of course, the Inquirer is concerned about homicide, in macro terms:

In that last one, the Editorial Board noted just how concerned they are that #BlackLivesMatter, because pregnant black women are five times more likely than white women to terminate their pregnancies. Nothing quite says black lives matter than wanting to see them being snuffed out before birth!

But none of it makes sense. In their own stories, the Inquirer noted that Latif Williams, the (alleged) killer of Samuel Collington, was a juvenile, with a criminal record, and could not be legally carrying a gun . . . but he was. They reported that Donavan Crawford, charged with the murder of Sykea Patton, was “charged overnight with murder and multiple counts of illegally carrying a gun.” Somehow, some way, the highly educated and experience editors and reporters for our nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper never noticed that the people committing crimes with guns are almost never holders of firearms permits, almost never carrying firearms legally, and, shocking, I know, aren’t that interested in obeying the law in the first place.

This is the problem that the left simply cannot see, because they are unwilling to see it. It is not a matter of guns, but the people using the guns. Since the people using guns to kill others are disproportionately black, to admit that it’s the people who are the problem is to recognize that homicide in our major cities is primarily a black problem, and that the #woke[2]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 just cannot do.

But if you cannot admit what the problem is, you can never hope to solve the problem. And the left would rather ignore the truth than deal with the truth.

References

References
↑1 At least as of 10:15 AM this morning, I have neither been contacted nor received a rejection email from the Inquirer.
↑2 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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For The New York Times, some news is just not fit to print!

From the Encyclopedia Britannica:

    On August 18, 1896, (Adolph Simon) Ochs acquired control of the financially faltering New York Times, again with borrowed money ($75,000). To set his paper apart from its more sensational competitors, Ochs adopted the slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print” (first used October 25, 1896) and insisted on reportage that lived up to that promise. Despite an early shortage of capital, he refused advertisements that he considered dishonest or in poor taste. In 1898, when sales were low and expenses unusually high, he probably saved The New York Times by cutting its price from three cents to one cent. He thereby attracted many readers who previously had bought the more sensational penny papers, especially the New York World and the Journal. By 1900 Ochs was able to purchase a controlling interest in The New York Times.

In its long and august history, the Times, through many editors and publishers, was our newspaper of record, printing many things that the government opposed, and winning its right to publish the so-called Pentagon Papers, despite the attempt by the Nixon Administration to prohibit such.

But now? The Times reported on the stabbing murder of Columbia University graduate student Davide Giri, but left out a lot of detail.

    Columbia University Student Dies in Stabbing Near Campus

    The graduate student, Davide Giri, was fatally stabbed near the Manhattan campus on Thursday night. A man has been arrested and charged with murder, the police said.

    By Troy Closson and Lola Fadulu | Friday, December 3, 2021

    A graduate student at Columbia University died and another man was wounded after the two were stabbed in Upper Manhattan on Thursday night, the police and college officials said.

    The student, Davide Giri, was traveling home from soccer practice just before 11 p.m. when he was stabbed in the abdomen about two blocks from his apartment building, the police and friends said. He was taken to an area hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

    The police arrested Vincent Pinkney, 25, of Manhattan, in the attacks and charged him on Friday with murder, attempted murder, assault, attempted assault and three counts of criminal possession of a weapon. He had been found in Central Park, and the police said that he had been menacing a third man with a knife.

    In a campuswide letter sent on Friday morning, Lee C. Bollinger, the university’s president, identified Mr. Giri, 30, as a student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and expressed sadness over his death.

There’s more at the original, telling us about the victim, and noting that a similar killing had occurred just a few blocks away, when Tessa Majors, a student at Bernard College, was killed during a robbery.

What you won’t find in the original are any details about the (alleged) assailant, Vincent Pinkney. For those, you have to go across the pond, to London’s Daily Mail:

    Gang member, 25, charged in fatal Manhattan stabbing spree that killed Columbia student and wounded Italian tourist has been arrested 11 times since 2012 and was on parole for gang attack

    • Alleged killer Vincent Pinkney, 25, has a lengthy rap sheet and 11 arrests on robbery, assault and other charges
    • He is accused of stabbing a Columbia grad student to death and wounding tourist in mad crime spree
    • Davide Giri, 30, a PhD candidate in computer science at Columbia University, was stabbed to death
    • Italian tourist, Robert Malastina, 27, was wounded in Central Park just 15 minutes after the murder
    • Pinkney was arrested after threatening another man, 29, who was walking in the park with his girlfriend
    • Police said Pinkney, who was out on parole, had 11 prior arrests dating back to 2012
    • The fatal stabbing took place just a block from where Bernard College student Tessa Majors was killed in 2019
    • NYC murders have shot up by 42 per cent since 2019, and overall crime this year is up by more than 3 per cent

    By Keith Griffith and Ronny Reyes | Published: 1:00 EST, 4 December 2021 | Updated: 01:29 EST, 4 December 2021

    The suspect accused of killing a Columbia University grad student and stabbing an Italian tourist in a demented Manhattan crime spree is a career criminal who was out on parole for a gang attack, it has been revealed.

    Vincent Pinkney, 25, was escorted into NPYD Central Booking on Friday night, as hundreds gathered on the South Lawn of Columbia in a vigil for Davide Giri, a PhD candidate in computer science.

    Giri, 30, died around 11pm on Thursday after police say he was stabbed in the stomach by Pinkney, who allegedly went on to wound an Italian tourist, Robert Malastina, 27, outside Central Park before ‘menacing’ another man, 29, with a large kitchen knife as the victim strolled the park with his girlfriend.

    Pinkney is a member of Bloods gang off-shoot, Everybody Killas, who has at least 11 prior arrests dating back to 2012 and was out on parole for a 2015 gang assault, police said.

    He was released from prison in June 2018 after serving a four-year sentence for a brutal attack in which he and three accomplices slashed, punched and kicked a victim in an assault that was caught on camera, according to the New York Post.

    On Friday night, Pinkney was transferred from the 26 Precinct to Central Booking, wearing a white Tyvek jumpsuit.

    The five-foot-five, 140-pound suspect was escorted in handcuffs by two burly NYPD detectives.

    Meanwhile, shocked Columbia students gathered on the school’s central quad for a candlelight vigil honoring Giri a sixth-year doctoral student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

That video of Mr Pinkney’s arrest tells you all that you need to know about why The New York Times found the details about the (alleged) killer not to be news which is fit to print. For 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 in the Times’ newsroom, the ones who forced out liberal columnist Bari Weiss because she just wasn’t #woke enough, the fact that a young, black gang member (allegedly) stabbed to death a white PhD candidate in computer science at an Ivy League college just does not fit Teh Narrative. The leftists who decry ‘mass incarceration’ just can’t deal with the fact that Mr Pinkney should not have been able to stab Mr Giri, because he should have still been behind bars on Thursday night.

I’ve said it before: the problem isn’t mass incarceration, but that not enough people have been incarcerated, for not enough time.

As far as Mr Pinkney is concerned, a 5’5″, 140 lb pipsqueak punk, who (allegedly) proved what a big man he is, he’s looking at spending the rest of his miserable life in prison. If he had been treated more strictly by the state of New York for his past offenses, if he had been given longer sentences for past crimes and still been behind bars last Thursday night, he would still be looking forward to getting out of prison at some point in the future. Yeah, he was stupid Thursday night, almost surely is congenitally stupid, and it would not surprise me if we found out that he was drunk or stoned, but I come around to the fact that those who treated him so leniently in the past — remember: he has eleven previous arrests on his rap sheet — did him no favors.

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.