Category Archives: Crime

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Another two bite the dust!

If I check the website of The Philadelphia Inquirer in the evening, I can sometimes — certainly not always — find brief stories about murder victims in the City of Brotherly Love:

2 women killed in North Philly shooting

The shooting occurred on the 1900 block of Ridge Avenue.

by Robert Moran | Thursday, November 4, 2021 | 8:10 PM EDT

Two unidentified women were fatally shot Thursday night in North Philadelphia, police said.

The shooting was reported shortly after 7:45 p.m. on the 1900 block of Ridge Avenue. Police arriving at the scene found two women inside a building that was first believed to be a church, but later described as a speakeasy.

The women were pronounced dead by medics at 7:52.

Police said the shooting scene appeared to be outside in front of the building, where they found spent shell casings.

That’s the entire story, and I’d bet euros to eclairs that I won’t be able to find it anywhere on the Inquirer’s website main page on Friday morning. But two more homicides brings the city’s total for 2021 up to at least 466.
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Updated: Friday, November 5, 2021

As I anticipated, the homicide total is 466, and no, there isn’t a single reference to the story concerning the homicide on the main page of the Inquirer’s website, even though the story was updated with more details at 9:39 AM this morning.

Black lives don’t matter in Philadelphia!

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What, does Indianapolis think it’s Chicago?

A brief Associated Press story in The Philadelphia Inquirer caused me to check the Indianapolis Star:

IMPD: Man dead after shooting on Hovey Street in Indianapolis

Brittany Carloni, Indianapolis Star | Hallowe’en, October 31, 2021 | 7:44 AM | 11:05 AM EDT

A man died early Sunday morning after a shooting northeast of downtown Indianapolis, according to police.

The homicide Sunday marks the 213th criminal homicide in Indianapolis this year and 232 overall homicides, according to numbers provided by Indianapolis Police.

The man’s death was originally believed to be the 215th criminal homicide in Indianapolis this year, which would have tied the city’s record in 2020, according to an IndyStar analysis.

Indianapolis Police subsequently sent out a news release Sunday morning that said two previously reported homicides at the 2800 block of Shadeland Avenue on Oct 5 were reclassified.

IMPD has reclassified five criminal homicides in the last week.

There’s more at the original.

The address of the homicide, 3227 Hovey Street,[1]Unlike many newspapers which give only the block number, the Star printed the exact address. isn’t some jammed together rowhome like the City of Brotherly Love, but what appears to be a single family starter home in a neighborhood of the same type. Zillow tells me that it’s a 2 bedroom, 836 ft² house worth $66,500.

Naturally, I did the math. 213 criminal homicides in 304 days works out to a projected 256 homicides for the year. The 2020 census put the city’s population at 887,642, which would make the projected homicide rate at 28.80 per 100,000. 2020 set the city’s record at 215, for the entire year, which worked out to a homicide rate of ‘just’ 24.22 per 100,000.

As of October 29, 674 people had been murdered in Chicago. With a population of 2,746,388, and 815 ‘projected’ homicides for 2021, the Windy City’s murder rate works out to 29.68 per 100,000, so Indianapolis is still behind. Philadelphia, naturally, says, “Hold my beer!” and checks in at 34.36 per 100,000, while St Louis, at an astounding 64.10, just laughs and calls them all pikers.

It will surprise exactly no one that, in 2020, homicide victims in Indianapolis were mostly black males. The chart at the left, from Fox 59 News, does not separate out the thirty homicides which were listed as not criminal, but shows that 65.31% were black males, and another 9.80% were black females. That’s 75.11% of all homicides in the city were of black victims . . . among a population that is only 28.55% black.

I get it: to some on the left, math is raaaaacist, so using math to point out a huge racial disparity will be denounced as racist as well.  But, in the end, facts are facts, and it’s time that someone asks why black lives don’t matter to other black people.

References

References
↑1 Unlike many newspapers which give only the block number, the Star printed the exact address.
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Black lives don’t matter in St Louis! "The truth is not always a pleasant thing." -- General 'Buck' Turgidson

Tishaura Jones, the Mayor of St Louis, Missouri, is very, very worried about “gun violence.” “Gun violence” is the euphemism that the left use to describe people shooting and killing each other, without blaming bad people, but blaming inanimate objects, as though firearms simply levitate and fire at people all by themselves. From CNN:

Gunshots rang out as St. Louis mayor was discussing gun violence prevention. She didn’t flinch

By Raja Razek and Jennifer Feldman, CNN | Saturday, October 30, 2021 | Updated: 5:43 EDT

Tishaura Jones, from her campaign website.

Gunshots rang out Friday as St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones was discussing gun violence prevention during a news conference — and she did not flinch.“My son and I fall asleep to the lullaby of gunshots in the distance every night,” Jones said, responding to a question on whether she felt safe. “It’s a part of my life now and that shouldn’t be.”

Before the news conference, Jones and Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas were participating in a roundtable on how gun violence is affecting their cities.

Lucas later shared Jones’ sentiments regarding the prevalence of gun violence.

“The sound of gunshots is a regular occurrence in too many areas of my city as well; something I grew to know from youth. Today’s shots reminded us of the reality so many of our sisters, brothers, and babies face each day and the need for change,” Lucas wrote in a tweet.

National gun violence rates were 30% higher during a 13-month pandemic period when compared with the same period the year before, a study published last week in the journal Scientific Reports showed.

“We found a strong association between the Covid-19 pandemic time frame and an increase in gun violence in the U.S. compared to the pre-pandemic period,” wrote the authors from Penn State College of Medicine.

There’s more at the original, but I would also note that the lawlessness following the death of George Floyd, on May 25, 2020, also occurred during the same time frame. How the study ‘corrected’ for that factor is not explained.

However, if there is a “strong association” between the COVID-19 pandemic time frame and an increase in “gun violence”, might we not conclude that the lockdowns and other measures ordered by people like Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) led to that increase in “gun violence”? When you have some people thrown out of work, and others forced to work while wearing masks and under a continual drumbeat of fear, when you have people barred from visiting extended family, churches closed, weddings cancelled, are you not ripping at the entire fabric of society?

But there’s more, and it takes an [insert slang term for the rectum here] like me to mention it. While we have noted the skyrocketing homicide rates in our major cities, Mayor Jones’ St Louis provides data most cities do not; the St Louis Metropolitan Police Department breaks down homicides by race. The chart at the left, reproduced by this author from the SLMPD figures, shows that, as of October 29th, 149 out of 161 total murder victims in the Gateway City were black; that’s 92.55%! As far as #BlackLivesMatter is concerned, it seems that black lives don’t matter as far as other black people are concerned, not in St Louis. If Mayor Jones’ “son and (her) fall asleep to the lullaby of gunshots in the distance every night,” maybe it ought to be a problem she recognizes and understands.

The first seven columns of this chart are from the Police Department’s report. The Population column is from the 2020 census figures and the murder rate column is calculated by the current number of homicides, multiplied by 1.20065789, to get homicides in 304 days up to 365, divided by the population, and calculated in the standard fashion, homicides per 100,000 population. The calculations were done via Microsoft Excel functions.

The population figures in the census data I found were not broken down by race and sex, but if we assume that black males make up 49% of the total black population, 63,609, and the annualized number of homicides of black males will wind up at 146 (it works out to 146.480263), black males in St Louis are subject to a homicide rate of 229.53 per 100,000 population! White males, on the other hand, are subject to a homicide rate of ‘just’ 7.78 per 100,000 population.

Mayor Jones got it wrong: the problem in the Gateway City isn’t “gun violence,” but black people, primarily black males, killing each other.

Me? I’m retired, so I can’t be ‘canceled,’ can’t lose my job because someone doesn’t like my political positions. I suppose that some will call this racist, but it’s just simple math; the numbers are the numbers. I could, perhaps, see my website listed as a ‘hate site,’ and lose links that way, but it’s a potential loss I am willing to bear, because I am doing something radical like telling the truth. But, as General ‘Buck’ Turgidson said in Dr Strangelove, “the truth is not always a pleasant thing.” and the left just can’t handle the truth.

The homicide rate is a huge problem, but the left pretending that it’s just “gun violence,” that the availability of guns is the problem, ignore the disparity in “gun violence” between the races. If it was simply the availability of firearms, then the homicide rates between the races should be almost identical; St Louis shows that those rates are widely, widely different.

You cannot address a problem if you are unwilling to properly identify the problem, and the problem is that there is something in the urban black culture in the Gateway City which leads to violent behavior. We’re not allowed to say that, of course, because it is massively politically incorrect, but it is true nevertheless.

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And another one bites the dust! Lexington's 32nd murder

It was only three days ago that we reported:

    It was just ten days ago that we reported that Lexington had tied it’s then-record of 30 homicides recorded in 2019, a record rewritten with 34 killings in 2020. Alas! that number 30 didn’t last for long. The Lexington Herald-Leader reported a 9:50 PM Monday assault in the Victorian Square Parking Garage at 350 West Short Street, in which one man died at the scene from his injuries. A suspect was taken to the hospital with unspecified injuries.

And now, homicide number 32 has occurred:

    Teen shot, found dead inside flipped vehicle near Lexington Cemetery. Name released.

    By Christopher Leach | October 29, 2021 | 7:31 AM EDT | Updated: 7:44 AM EDT

    A teenager in Lexington is dead after being found with a gunshot wound inside a flipped vehicle on Price Road Thursday night, according to Lexington police.

    Sergio Villarados, 17, died from a gunshot wound at 9:24 p.m. Thursday, per the Fayette County coroner. His death was a homicide, marking the 32nd killing in Lexington this year.

    The call first came in at 8:51 p.m. about a single-vehicle car crash on Price Road, which is adjacent to the Suburban Mobile Home Park and the Lexington Cemetery, according to Lt. Chris Van Brackel. Upon arrival, officers found Villarados and another person inside the flipped vehicle.

Sergio Villarados. Photo by Alvis Villarau.

A second person was found in the wrecked vehicle, also with a gunshot wound, but one not considered life threatening, and was transported to the hospital.

Immediately prior to the crash, police had responded to a shots fired call on Breathitt Avenue, which is only 6 minutes away from Price Road, though the Lexington Police Department is not certain that the incidents are related.

Thirty-two homicides in 301 days works out to a pace which would have 38.80 homicides for the year. At the current pace of a murder every ten days, the city could pass the record of 34 by the end of November.

WLEX-TV, Channel 18, reports that the other passenger was a 19-year-old woman. No other details were reported.

    His mother, Alvis Villarau, tells us through a relative translating from Spanish that her son was a hard-working young man and a senior at Dunbar High School who loved playing soccer.

    “He was a really good young man,” she said. “He didn’t do anything wrong to no one. He always liked playing soccer.”

Kind of makes you wonder: if he did nothing wrong to anyone, why was he shot?

I think I’m getting cynical.

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How does a lie become the truth?

Well, maybe I got it wrong. Maybe when I said that the credentialed media don’t (usually) print out-and-out lies, but show their bias in their editorial decisions about what stories to cover, and what to ignore, I was forgetting The Philadelphia Inquirer.

We had previously noted the shooting death of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes, who was sitting in a parked, and possibly disabled, Chrysler PT Cruiser, with five other people, including other students assigned to E W Rhodes School, just after 9:00 AM on Friday, October 8, 2021, at the intersection of North Judson and West Clearfield Streets in North Philadelphia. The Rhodes Elementary School website notes that “All students must be in homerooms by 8:45 am each day.”

I pointed out to the Inquirer, and to reporter Anna Orso specifically, that young Mr Stokes was clearly not on his way to school, not if he was sitting in a parked car many blocks away; Miss Orso didn’t like it, but the fact that she responded means that she saw the notification.

People at the Inquirer know that young Mr Stokes was not on his way to class that day. But the lie was repeated again, on Thursday:

    Philly schools will pay community members to keep kids safe on their way to and from school amid gun violence crisis

    “There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not outraged by the acts of violence going on throughout the city of Philadelphia,” said Superintendent William R. Hite Jr.

    by Kristen A. Graham | Thursday, October 28, 2021

    The Philadelphia School District will spend close to a million dollars over the next three years to station members of the community in targeted communities in an effort to keep children safe on their way to and from schools.

    Based on a Chicago program, Philadelphia’s plan will start at four high schools: Lincoln, Motivation, Sayre and Roxborough, and expand to others. The “Safe Path” program will pay trusted community members and equip them with radios and bright, reflective vests to serve as eyes and ears — not to take physical action against anyone armed with a gun. Kevin Bethel, the district’s chief of school safety, said he wants Safe Path operational before the end of the school year.

    “I can no longer sit back and wait for volunteers while I see in some of our corridors the issues we’re having,” Bethel said. Details on what the groups will be paid and how they can apply will be shared soon, he said.

    The news comes amid a gun violence crisis that has affected schools across the city. This month, a shooting outside Lincoln just after dismissal killed a 66-year-old and gravely wounded a 16-year-old, and a 13-year-old seventh grader was killed on his way to classes at Rhodes Elementary.

There’s more at the original, but there it is, the claim that the “13-year-old seventh grader” was “on his way to classes,” and the embedded link goes to Miss Orso’s very sympathetic story about young Mr Stokes.

That’s not just a lie, but it is a deliberate lie.

Let’s face it: The First Street Journal doesn’t reach many people, far, far, far fewer than the Inquirer, and the continued pushing by that #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, “anti-racist” newspaper is going to keep on and keep on reporting something that they know isn’t true until it becomes the ‘truth.’

But, let me give credit where credit is due, to Miss Orso. She may not have liked what I wrote, but in her next article on the subject, she got it right:

    Philadelphia police are searching for a man wanted in the shooting of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes

    Police say Shafeeq Lewis, 29, of North Philadelphia, fired a dozen shots into a parked car, killing the boy who was just blocks from his school.

    by Anna Orso | October 27, 2021

    Shafeeq Lewis, photo by Philadelphia Police Department.

    Philadelphia police are searching for a 29-year-old man who they say fatally shot a 13-year-old boy just blocks away from his school earlier this month, officials said Wednesday.

    Authorities say Shafeeq Lewis, of North Philadelphia, fired a dozen shots into a car that was parked on the 3100 block of North Judson Street about 9 a.m. on Oct. 8. Six young people were sitting in the vehicle and police said one of the shots struck 13-year-old Marcus Stokes in the chest. He was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he died of his injuries.

    Detectives obtained surveillance footage capturing the sound of gunshots, then a man dressed in dark clothing running from the scene. Deputy Police Commissioner Ben Naish said investigators believe Lewis was the man fleeing, and they obtained an arrest warrant on murder charges last week.

    Lewis remains at large, and investigators have not determined a motive.

There’s more at the original, but “just blocks from his school” is an accurate statement. I would like to think that my oh-so-mean tweets caused Miss Orso to look at how she was writing things, but I really have no idea.

I placed the mugshot of Shafeeq Lewis in the body of the Miss Orso’s article, but that picture was not on the Inquirer’s website. Rather, it was in this story from Channel 10, the NBC owned-and-operated affiliate in the City of Brotherly Love. Mr Lewis has several distinctive tattoos on his neck and face, and it’s obvious from the fact that the Philadelphia Police already had mugshots of Mr Lewis that he had come to their attention previously.

The Channel 10 story states that all of the people in the vehicle were minors, and were wounded.

So, what were the six kids doing in that car? Smoking pot? Handsy sex? Discussing the prospects for the Eagles or 76ers? None of the stories in the Philadelphia media have told us that, nor have the police released any suspected motive for the shooting, nor does anyone know if Mr Stokes, individually, was the (alleged) gunman’s target.

The Inquirer likes human interest stories, and when someone is murdered in the city, if the victim is an ‘innocent,’ the paper just loves that! But, as brilliant as I am, as careful a reader as I am, I doubt that I’m the only one who noticed that the initial stories on the shooting didn’t quite match up with the facts.

Perhaps I was wrong; perhaps Miss Orso didn’t share with others in the newsroom the issue I raised, and that’s why Kristen Graham, the reporter for the first cited story didn’t think twice about writing that young Mr Stokes was simply on his way to school. But I suspect that if the newspaper is trying to make out Mr Stokes as a completely innocent victim of “gun violence,” it might not work.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

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

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Hold them accountable! The Loudoun County school officials who covered up a rape all need to go to jail

I had actually ignored this story for awhile, figuring that Robert Stacy McCain would include it in his ‘Violence Against Women’ series, but, alas! he’s been working on other things. From Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion:

“Why Didn’t Anybody Tell Us?”: Angry Loudoun County Students Stage Walk Outs Over Sexual Assaults in Their Schools

Every student that participated in today’s walkouts should take their activism directly to the next school board meeting and demand answers and mass resignations.

Posted by Teri Christoph | Tuesday, October 26, 2021 | 07:00 PM

Students in Loudoun County have had enough. They’ve endured lockdowns, distance learning, all-day masking, and attempts to teach them a radicalized curriculum, all while their county’s partisan and inept school board declared war on their parents and failed to keep schools safe.

What finally moved the students to action, though, was the revelation that one of their own — and possibly two — was sexually assaulted inside a school, the very place kids should feel safe and secure. To make matters worse, the superintendent, Scott Ziegler, failed to inform parents and students that attacks had taken place, thus jeopardizing every student in the county.

Today, hundreds of Loudoun County students walked out of their classrooms, protesting the treatment of the victims, the victims’ families, and the student bodies of every high school, who were kept in the dark about the danger looming in their schools.

There’s more at the original.

Why didn’t the school inform the students what had happened? A couple of reasons spring to mind:

  1. The school administration were afraid that, if the rapes were made known to the students, some students might have administered a ‘hands on’ lesson to the rapist. Even if the administration didn’t reveal the identity of the rapist, once the ‘incidents’ had become known about, there’s no way that the identity of the perpetrator would not have become known.
  2. The rapes were perpetrated by a male student who may have been claiming to be a ‘transgender’ girl.

Heaven forfend, we can’t have the students or the public in general know that a student assigned male at birth but identifying as a girl[1]Regular readers of this site will realize that I formulated that description mockingly. Sex is not ‘assigned’ at birth, but determined at conception, and no amount of drugs, hormones or … Continue reading  committed these crimes. After all, that might lead to discrimination against the ‘transgendered,’ and that would be wrong!

Reports in the credentialed media have played down the transgender angle. In the article noting the rapist’s conviction, all we get is:

`The victim was assaulted in a women’s restroom at Stone Bridge High School by a male allegedly wearing a skirt.

One of the main arguments among conservatives, though not an argument I have chosen to make, is that males claiming to be female are doing so to gain access to female-only public restrooms and locker rooms, for voyeuristic purposes, and possible even for sexual assault. The Loudoun County case reinforces the arguments of conservatives that biological males should not be treated as females for such purposes, and the left cannot have that!

Would other students have beaten the crap out of administered a ‘hands on’ lesson to the perpetrator? Perhaps they would have, but that possibility could easily have been avoided had the school district done the right thing and removed the perpetrator from school entirely. But the school district’s actions, to ‘protect the rights’ of the rapist, and a possibly ‘transgendered’ student, resulted in a second girl getting raped.

The article concluded:

Every student that participated in today’s walkouts should take their activism directly to the next school board meeting and demand answers and mass resignations. This isn’t about petty partisan politics anymore, it’s about safety.

Yes, but that’s not enough. In the Keystone State, former Pennsylvania State University President Graham Spanier, Athletic Director Tim Curley, and Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, all went to jail — albeit not for long sentences — for child endangerment and other charges in the Jerry Sandusky case, because they failed to call the police to report Mr Sandusky’s rape of a young boy when informed about it.

Loudoun County did worse. Mr Sandusky was, at least, banned from the Penn State athletic facilities, but in Virginia, the school district simply transferred the rapist to another school, where he was free to rape again. I’ll put it bluntly: every member of the school board and administration who was aware of the first rape, and allowed the perpetrator to simply be transferred, needs to be criminally charged and sent to prison! Hold them accountable for their actions!

More, they should all be, individually, sued into penury. Their actions allowed a second girl to be raped! The school board and administration personnel are all adults, and are all responsible for the safety of students. The now-convicted rapist is only 15 years old, so he’ll receive a juvenile sentence. Knowing how northern Virginia has been ruined by the influx of federal government workers, a slap on the wrist would not surprise me.

But at least the adults can be prosecuted as adults, and face adult time in prison. It is only by holding people like them accountable for their actions that we can deter other officials from doing the same things.

References

References
↑1 Regular readers of this site will realize that I formulated that description mockingly. Sex is not ‘assigned’ at birth, but determined at conception, and no amount of drugs, hormones or surgical interventions can change a person’s sex.
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Lexington is on pace for 38 homicides for 2021, which would easily break the record. The city has already seen 31 murders, which is good for second place all time, with 67 days left in the year

It was just ten days ago that we reported that Lexington had tied it’s then-record of 30 homicides recorded in 2019, a record rewritten with 34 killings in 2020. Alas! that number 30 didn’t last for long. The Lexington Herald-Leader reported a 9:50 PM Monday assault in the Victorian Square Parking Garage at 350 West Short Street, in which one man died at the scene from his injuries. A suspect was taken to the hospital with unspecified injuries.

    Benjamin William Call, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

    Victim’s name released. Man faces murder charge after fatal Lexington garage assault

    By Christopher Leach | October 26, 2021 | 7:37 AM EDT | Updated 11:43 AM EDT

    A man was killed after being assaulted in a downtown Lexington parking garage Monday night, according to Lexington police.

    John Tyler Abner, 31, was pronounced dead on scene due to blunt-trauma injuries sustained from the assault, according to the Fayette County coroner.

    Police have charged Benjamin Call, 39, with murder. Call is currently being held at the Fayette County Detention Center.

There’s more at the original; the Lexington Police believe that the victim and his (alleged) assailant knew each other prior to the assault.

The mugshot published here was, of course, not published by the Herald-Leader, but, as is our policy, The First Street Journal does publish such photos. The mugshot was from the Fayette County Detention Center, and is freely available as a matter of public record. It was available to the newspaper had the editors chosen to use it.

This is not Mr Call’s first brush with the law, given that the Detention Center had a previous mugshot of him, dated August 25, 2015.

This is the city’s first homicide of the year that was not committed with a firearm.
____________________________

Update: 7:20 PM EDT

It isn’t just The First Street Journal which publishes these mugshots. WLEX-TV, Channel 18, the Lexington NBC affiliate station, not only has the story, complete with mugshot available on their website, but ran the story, complete with mugshot, on the air at approximately 7:04 PM EDT.

The Herald-Leader’s idiotic mugshot policy — which is dictated to them by McClatchy Company, which owns the paper — doesn’t keep the mugshots of offenders charged with crimes off the internet, but simply withholds information from their subscribers, from people who are paying for their service.

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Killadelphia Black lives really don't matter in Philadelphia, or to The Philadelphia Inquirer

I noted, in a tweet Thursday morning, that under Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, Philadelphia’s 443 homicides as of 11:59 PM Wednesday put the city in fifth place, all time, for homicides in the year, and there were still 72 days remaining in 2021.

Well, the move into fourth place didn’t take long:

    Three men killed, four people wounded, including a 14-year-old boy, in separate shootings in Philly

    The fatal shootings occurred in West Oak Lane and North Philadelphia.

    by Robert Moran | Thursday, October 21, 2021 | 8:49 PM EDT

    Three men were killed and four other people, including a 14-year-old boy, were wounded in separate shootings late Thursday in Philadelphia, police said.

    Around 3:45 p.m., a 25-year-old man was on the 1500 block of West 65th Avenue in West Oak Lane when he was shot once in the neck. He was pronounced dead at the scene by medics. Police said they recovered a gun and had a person in custody.

    About 5:50 p.m., a 28-year-old man was on the 900 block of Cambridge Street in North Philadelphia when he was shot several times in his torso. He was transported to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 6:22.

    The 14-year-old was shot four times at the same location and was taken by police to Temple University Hospital, where he was listed in stable condition. Police reported no arrests in that case.

There’s more at the original.

Three people dead, plus a 21-year-old man shot five times in North Philadelphia, and a 20-year-old woman shot thrice in Hunting Park, listed in critical condition. Anyone want to bet that Mr Moran’s story won’t be found on the main page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website on Friday morning?

This story posted at 9:45 PM EDT on Thursday, October 21st, and will be updated on Friday morning.

————————–

Update! Friday, October 22, 2021

Did someone recover from being dead? The Philadelphia Police Department reported on Thursday that 443 homicides had occurred as of 11:59 PM EDT on Wednesday, October 20th. Robert Moran’s article cited above tells us of three homicides in the city on Thursday, but the morning report from the Police Department this morning states that the homicide total as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday was 445.

It’s possible that one of the previous homicides has now been ruled self-defense, and subtracted from the total, but I do not know.

Nevertheless, 445 is still ‘good’ enough to push 2021 into fourth place all time, with 71 days remaining in the year. At 1.5136 homicides per day, Philadelphia is on pace for 552 homicides for the year. At the current rate, Philly should tie the all time record of 500 in 36 days, on November 26th, appropriately enough, ‘Black Friday.’

A thorough scan of the Inquirer’s website main page at 8:18 AM EDT this morning verified what I had already guessed: neither Mr Moran’s, or anyone else’s story about the reported murders yesterday were visible on the site. Mr Moran’s story is still available at the embedded link in his headline above, but if you just read the Inquirer through its website in the morning, you’d never see it. But, as I’ve said many times before, black lives don’t matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer, unless, of course, they are taken by a white police officer.

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They can’t handle the truth!

Sometimes 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 — and no, that’s not a misspelling — make a mistake and tell the truth, but, not to worry, they correct themselves as quickly as they can!

I spotted it through this oh-so-#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 tweet from WJLA-TV, Channel 7, the ABC affiliate in the Metropolitan Washington, DC, area. It seems that they did something really radical like tell the truth, and then had to change it:

    Capitol Hill neighborhood sees rise in murders, violent crimes

    by Sam Ford | Monday, October 18th 2021

    WASHINGTON (7News) — In the past two weeks in one Capitol Hill neighborhood, there have been two homicides on the same block and at least two carjackings.

    The local ANC (Advisory Neighborhood Commission) Commissioner, Kirsten Oldenburg, Sunday found her living room window had been shot out the night before, presumably during the homicide of a Maryland man in front of her house.

    Oct. 7, around the corner, a flag football game on the Watkins School field ended with one player shooting to death another, after an argument. That was right across the street from DC Council Chairman Phil Mendelson’s home.

    “I’ve lived in the Capitol Hill neighborhood for five years. This is the first time there have been homicides in the immediate neighborhood,” said Mendelson in an interview, “I don’t want to be alarmist, I don’t think the city is more dangerous, but it shows that violent crime can occur anywhere.” . . . .

    A long-time DC resident, Oldenburg said this was the first time her home has been hit by a stray bullet, but she lamented there are some residents in other neighborhoods who worry about stay bullets coming into their homes, “24/7” she said.

There’s more at the original, but there was this gem at the bottom of the story:

Editor’s Note: After reviewing an earlier version of this story, we realized the tone did not accurately reflect our reporting concerning crime. The headline and lede have been updated.

Their offense? They ‘implied’ that “wealthy neighborhoods should have less crime.” But the truth is that wealthy neighborhoods do have less crime, and everybody knows that they have less crime.

And being the [insert slang term for the rectum here] that I am, I’ll continue with the part they really couldn’t say: But the truth is that wealthy white neighborhoods do have less crime, and everybody knows that they have less crime.

WJLA’s editorial management knew that “white” was implied with the term “wealthy neighborhoods”, and that just had to go.

Journalists tell the truth, the unvarnished truth, and let the chips fall where they may; journolists have to massage the message so as not to offend anyone, or disturb liberal notions, or upset the woke.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑2 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.