Category Archives: Culture

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Does The Philadelphia Inquirer really want to excuse juvenile crime?

As we reported on Ash Wednesday, The Philadelphia Inquirer gave OpEd space to three Montclair State University ‘academics,’ in which they argued that the barins of teenagers are not fully matured by age 18, and that they should usually be treated as juveniles for several more years, to give them a chance for rehabilitation. Well, it was just a day later, that the newspaper gave more OpEd space, for two more activists to make the same point:

Locking teens up won’t make our city safer. It will have the opposite effect, and here’s why.

When young people commit nonviolent offenses, they should be able to learn from and make amends for their poor choices. We hope our new police commissioner knows this.

by Donna Cooper and Anton Moore, For The Inquirer | Thursday, February 15, 2024 | 6:00 AM EST

While it is incredibly welcome news that gun deaths in Philadelphia decreased in 2023 from the peaks of the COVID-19 years, there is so much work that needs to be done to prevent people — especially our young people — from going down the path that leads to violence.

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s selection of Kevin Bethel as police commissioner is a good one because — as the former chief of school safety — he has the right mindset and experience to invest in our children. Commissioner Bethel recognizes that the brain isn’t fully developed until a person’s mid-20s, which means young people make reckless decisions at 16, 17, and 18 years old that they would likely never make in adulthood. When those reckless decisions are nonviolent offenses, it is undeniably better to give children and teens the structure to learn from and make amends for their poor choices, not lock them up.

One obvious point: juveniles who are incarcerated are not out on the streets able to commit further crimes.

We have hope that Bethel understands this. He successfully led an expansion of the Philadelphia Police Department’s school-based diversion program, which responds to low-level misbehavior — like marijuana possession or bringing scissors to school — by linking kids to supportive services, instead of arresting them. These alternatives include academic support and mentoring to identify reasons why kids may be acting out. Since 2013, arrests in Philadelphia public schools have gone down by over 90%. (Bethel’s diversion program began in the 2014-15 academic year.) Youth in the program were also less likely to be suspended or arrested within five years after they went through the program than those students who were arrested at school.

We need to bring this same approach of diversion over arrest to the community.

Uhhh, the problem isn’t teens bringing scissors or pot to school; those things don’t get teens arrested on Philly’s streets. The problems are theft, destruction of private property, carjackings, shootings, fatal beatings, crimes which have identifiable victims.

Further down:

And yet, too many people assume that the only solution to stop youth crime is to lock children up long term.

While there are times when detaining teenagers is warranted, it cannot be the first and only response if we really want to end violence, because it doesn’t address the reasons so many kids are committing crimes in the first place.

Actually, it can. The criminal who is incarcerated or not incarcerated is not the only one who is learning a lesson here. The criminal, teenaged or otherwise, who is not incarcerated, who is treated as leniently as Curtis Wallace, Jr, was, learns the lesson that he’ll always get cut a break; that’s not a lesson the article authors have contemplated.

But it’s also the people around the malefactor who learn a lesson, the lesson being either that, hey, Curtis got busted, but was let go, so I’ll get let off, too, or the lesson that, dang, Curtis got busted and drew ten years in the state pen. The teenaged delinquents the authors contemplate getting whatever services and education that they expect might get that, were they to get their way, but the kids around the leniently treated criminal won’t; they’ll only see that their buddy got away with it.

Philadelphia needs to invest in a full array of services, including prevention and community-based services, to stop the cycle of arrest and incarceration. And we have the funds to do it: A recent economic analysis of the Philadelphia juvenile justice system showed an estimated $17 million in unspent funds each year — money that could be invested in evidence-based solutions that actually reduce crime by helping young people understand how to make better choices and make amends with those they’ve harmed.

And there we have it! The authors were very careful not to use the term “restorative justice,” that leftist prosecutors like Larry Krasner and Pamela Price like to employ, but that’s what “make amends with those they’ve harmed” means. And every place the George Soros-sponsored liberal prosecutors have taken power, crime rates have soared. The lessons of leniency have been well learned, as people with bad intentions have learned that they’ve less to fear than before. Even in the semi-deranged brains of the criminals, cost-benefit calculations are made, even if in forms we wouldn’t necessarily see as reasonable.

I have more than once mocked Mr Krasner as having a diabolically brilliant plan to get criminals off of Philly’s streets: keep excusing them and excusing them and excusing them until they commit a crime which gets them locked up for life, or, more efficiently, killed. That has been the result in the City of Brotherly Love. The problem with the authors’ OpEd is that they are taking seriously the notion that crime by juveniles should be excused, better to teach them a lesson.

The authors used the appointment of Kevin Bethel as their starting point, and even concluded with an appeal to him concerning ‘diversion’ of arrests to some sort of better program. But the duty of the Police Commissioner is to police the city. Even if the Commissioner believed in such diversion programs, such programs would be the purview of agencies outside of the Police Department.

We’ve actually seen such a ‘program,’ though not really stated formally, before, as the Broward County Sheriff’s Department kept letting Nikolas Cruz go, time after time, for his misdemeanors and even a couple of felonies. The school board did the same thing, keeping him out of the so-called ‘school-to-prison pipeline.’ Thus Mr Cruz had no criminal record, and was legally able to purchase the AR-15 with which he shot up the Margery Stoneman Douglas High School, sending 17 people to their deaths, and wounding 17 others.

He could have been in jail on St Valentine’s Day of 2018, but the leniency of the left kept him free as a bird. That is what such leniency does.

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Why do the credentialed media hide the news? Two police officers and a paramedic murdered, and the professional media are ignoring the story as much as they can

My good internet friend Robert Stacy McCain noted that the local police and credentialed media decided to keep secret the identity of the “suspect” who murdered two police officers and a paramedic on Sunday in the Minneapolis suburb of Burnsville.

Mr McCain noted:

(The alleged suspect) petitioned the court in 2020 to have his gun rights restored, which a judge denied.

However, the Associated Press reported:

The suspect, who officials said had multiple guns and large amounts of ammunition, also died.

Clearly, clearly! this report must be false. Since the (alleged) suspect was legally prohibited from owning or possessing firearms, he couldn’t possibly have had the weapons in question.

The only reasonable answer is that one of the children in the house owned and had the firearms, one of the kids shot the police officers and fireman, and the (alleged) suspect, in nobly trying to shield the children, wound up sacrificing his life.

I started this article early, but put it on the shelf, waiting to see if The Philadelphia Inquirer would update it, but nope, the 8:28 AM EST version of the story is the last one posted. More, it no longer shows on the main page of our nation’s third oldest newspaper, and the newspaper of record for the sixth largest city, and seventh largest metropolitan area in our country. And a site search for Shannon Gooden, made at 4:50 PM EST, the (alleged) suspect, returned nothing connected with this story.

Mr McCain, and many others, have wondered why the credentialed media kept the name, and thus the photo, of the (alleged) suspect under wraps, and many have suggested that it is because Mr Gooden is black, and that had he been a MAGA hat wearing white male, his name and image would have been all over the news. Perhaps that’s true, though there’s at least the possibility that the police were waiting until Mr Gooden’s family had been notified.

But it wasn’t just the Inky which never updated a story to identify Mr Gooden. A Google search for Shannon Gooden, conducted at 5:10 PM EST, returned only one national news source, CBS News, with the story on the first page. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Duluth News-Tribune, both had stories, but they’re local news sources, not national.

Two police officers and a fireman working as a paramedic, murdered, and this story is being quickly memory-holed.

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After six second chances, a Philadelphia thug does something which gets him stone-cold graveyard dead.

As we noted almost two years ago, when the Philadelphia Police Department tried to keep the identity of a police officer involved in a shooting which killed a common criminal, because then-Commissioner Danielle Outlaw claimed that the officer’s personal safety was at risk, The Philadelphia Inquirer put together its sources, and identified and published the identity of the officer.

Well, oops, they did it again!

Police are investigating a traffic stop that ended with an injured officer and fatally shot driver

A police officer shot Curtis Wallace Jr. on the Adams Avenue Bridge in Crescentville after he allegedly hit the officer with his car.

by Ellie Rushing | Friday, February 16, 2024 | 12:56 PM EST

Curtis Wallace, Jr, from a 2022 mugshot, via WTAE.

Philadelphia police on Friday continued to investigate an attempted traffic stop Thursday night that authorities said led to an officer being struck by a car, then pinned against a wall by the vehicle, before the officer shot and fatally wounded the driver.

Family identified the man who died as 36-year-old Curtis Wallace Jr. And while police declined to name the officer involved, multiple law enforcement sources identified him as 38-year-old Marckenson Smith, an eight-year veteran of the force.

So, when the Usual Suspects protest against this incident — they’ve even protested the police shooting of a thug who had shot an officer.

And, no, of course the Inquirer didn’t provide Mr Wallace’s old mugshot, but it didn’t take much searching to find it.

The incident began around 7 p.m. Thursday, when Smith attempted to pull over a white Ford Lincoln sedan at Roosevelt Boulevard and F Street in Crescentville, Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said outside Einstein Medical Center Thursday night.

Bethel did not say what prompted the traffic stop, and a department spokesman on Friday said that remains part of the investigation.

You can follow the link to the newspaper’s original, to read the details which have been published. To me, the interesting part is toward the end of Miss Rushing’s story:

Records show (Mr Wallace) has a history of prior arrests and run-ins with the law.

In March 2015, records show he pleaded guilty to theft and receiving stolen property, and was sentenced to two years’ probation. Later that year in December, he was charged with aggravated assault after police said he broke into a house, beat a man with a metal pipe, dragged him out of the property, and threatened to kill him. Wallace pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 1½ months to a year in jail, plus two years’ probation, and was released on time served.

Really? What kind of sweetheart plea deal was he given? Under Title 18 §2702, aggravated assault is, depending on a couple of circumstances, either a First-degree or Second-degree felony, which under Title 18 §106 has a sentence of over ten years (b)(2) for First-degree, or a maximum of ten years (b)(3) for a Second-degree felony conviction. Yet Mr Wallace released on time served in jail awaiting trial. This was after he was already on probation.

He continued to violate this probation over the years, records show. In early 2019, he was charged with indecent assault, violating a protective order, and strangulation, but the charges were later dismissed for reasons that were not immediately clear.

Most recently, in January 2022, he was convicted of theft and conspiracy for breaking into a woman’s car and stealing her computer, $900 cash, and Burberry coat, records show. He was sentenced to up to 23 months in jail, plus 30 months probation, though he was immediately paroled and ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution.

Just a few months later, he was arrested and charged with orchestrating a catalytic converter theft ring in Allegheny County. Records show he pleaded guilty to theft and was sentenced to one year probation.

Mr Wallace appears to have spent much of his past few years on probation, but, despite continual violations, never had his probation revoked and sent to prison. It’s obvious that previous probation sentences, previous second and third and fourth and fifth and sixth chances, didn’t turn Mr Wallace to the straight and narrow, didn’t get him to reform his life and become a law-abiding citizen.

Instead, he got let go and leniently treated, and shown just about every courtesy possible, right up until he did something which put him on a slab in the morgue. I have previously joked that that was District Attorney Larry Krasner’s — though the Allegheny County event is not on Mr Krasner — brilliant policy to reduce crime by releasing criminals until they do something which gets them off the streets permanently.

Perhaps my joking isn’t all that much of a joke. But if Mr Wallace had been treated according to the laws passed by the Commonwealth’s elected representatives, who (supposedly) reflect the will of the people, he’d be alive today, alive behind bars, but at least able to look forward to getting out at some point.

He won’t be getting out of that pine box.

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Stupidity x Stupidity = Stupidity²

When your Wikipedia biography page has a section “Other Names,” you know that there’s already a problem. We have mentioned the lovely Rachel Dolezal only thrice previously on The First Street Journal, and then only in mockery.

The white woman born Rachel Anne Dolezal, to two white parents, in very white Montana — 88.9% white, but just 0.6% black in 2020 census — tried, initially successfully, as black to obtain a position as president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, from 2014 until June 2015, when she resigned in the midst of controversy over her racial identity. Subsequent idiocy followed, and Miss Dolezal, in 2017, released a memoir on her racial identity titled In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World. She has, in effect, acknowledged that she is a white woman, but that she identifies as black, which makes just about as much sense as former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Will Thomas identifying as a woman named “Lea.”

In that Other Names listing, we find that Miss Dolezal now identifies as Nkechi Amare Diallo, and, as bad people usually do, she has gotten herself in more trouble.

Ex-Spokane NAACP leader loses Arizona teaching job over OnlyFans account

By Karu F. Daniels | St Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2024 | 7:27 PM PST

Nkechi Diallo, the Montana-born white woman formerly known as Rachel Dolezal — who was infamously exposed for attempting to pass as Black — has been fired from her teaching job following the exposure of her OnlyFans account.

According to the Arizona Daily Star, the disgraced ex-NAACP Spokane chapter leader had served as a $19-an-hour after-school instructor at the Catalina Foothills Unified School District in Tucson, Ariz., since August 2023. She also worked as a teacher through the school’s contracted substitute provider, Educational Services Inc.

School officials said they only learned about Diallo’s activity on the NSFW platform after local station KVOA reported on Tuesday that explicit photos had been inexplicably shared on public websites such as Reddit.

“We only learned of Ms. Nkechi Diallo‘s OnlyFans social media posts yesterday afternoon,” district spokesperson Julie Farbarik wrote in an emailed statement Wednesday to the outlet. “Her posts are contrary to our district’s ‘Use of Social Media by District Employees’ policy and our staff ethics policy. She is no longer employed by the Catalina Foothills School District.”

The school district’s policy reportedly stipulates that employees are prohibited from communicating on social media in an unprofessional manner that would significantly harm their “work-related reputation.”

Only Fans is a subscription-based internet company, through which people — mostly women — can produce their own pornography, and sell subscriptions to which other people — mostly male — can masturbate vicariously copulate. It is no secret that school systems don’t like it when teachers produce this stuff. As we reported last September, St Clair, Missouri, High School teacher Brianna Coppage lost her job when her Only Fans porn page was discovered.

Coppage said she joined the direct-to-subscribers website OnlyFans over the summer to supplement her teaching salary.

She taught English to freshmen and sophomores and made about $42,000 last year, according to the Post-Dispatch public pay database. She said she’s earned an additional $8,000 to $10,000 per month performing on OnlyFans.

Mrs Coppage is at least reasonably pretty; how Miss Dolezal could have made much money on only fans is a mystery.

There’s a point at which I have to shake my head over this stupidity. Let’s face it: there’s tons of porn, more than even the most obsessed of incels could ever peruse, available for free on the internet, but there are people who have been willing to pay money, which normally involves a traceable credit card transaction, to look at naked, or sometimes explicit sexual performance photos and movies, of women with whom they will never get to copulate on the internet.

It is, in a way, the perfect plural marriage: men stupid enough to pay for this s(tuff) and women desperate enough to put out this material, seemingly without realizing that it will eventually affect their real lives and will still be out there when they are sixty-something grandparents, or preparing to marry — in real life — that normal guy who seems so perfect to them.

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Very compassionate academics want “juvenile” definitions extended beyond age 18, so they can let violent twenty-somethings be “reformed” I say that, if you kill someone, you should never, ever get out of prison

What is adulthood? In one way, our Constitution specifies adulthood, with the Twenty-sixth Amendment:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Much of the impetus for this came from the Vietnam war, in which 18-and-19-year-olds could be and were drafted and sent to fight in Southeast Asia, but most states had set their voting ages at 21. Growing up in Kentucky, I did have that then-rare privilege of being able to register to vote at 18, as both Georgia and the Bluegrass State had previously lowered their voting ages to 18, but it barely made a difference: the only election in which I was able to vote as an 18-year-old when such wasn’t available in all of the other states was the May primary in 1971. 🙂

Nevertheless, adulthood has had different definitions throughout time, for different purposes. The ages of consent for sex vary across our country, set by the states, not the federal government, and several of them specify 16 or 17 as the age of consent. And, in our then older, wider Western civilization, most people were married by age 16, if not earlier. Eleanor of Aquitaine, for example, was first married at age 13, and such was in no way unusual in the twelfth century. Her eldest son, Henry the Young King, was married at age 17, though his father, King Henry II, waited until the ripe, old age of 19 to marry Eleanor! Marriage at an age in which girls were still in puberty was considered a societally and religiously practical thing, as it kept illegitimacy down.

And now come Tina M. Zottoli, an associate professor in the department of psychology and director of the Legal Decision Making Lab at Montclair State University, Tarika Daftary-Kapur, a professor of justice studies at the same school, and Kim Echevarria, a doctoral student in the department of psychology there. Though they say nothing about ages of consent for sex, or to be able to vote, they are very, very upset that 18-year-olds are being held responsible as adults for breaking the law:

An 18-year-old is not an adult, brain science shows. The criminal justice system is failing our kids.

The criminal justice system must stop considering teenagers as adults, and offer more chances for rehabilitation to people in their late teens and early 20s.

by Tina M. Zottoli, Tarika Daftary-Kapur, and and Kim Echevarria, For The Inquirer | Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2024 | 7:00 AM EST

In November, the state of Texas executed Brent Brewer for a homicide he committed in 1990, when he was 19 years old. If Brewer had committed the crime a day shy of his 18th birthday, he would be alive today. In fact, he might even be free.

That’s how much difference a day can make.

The authors go on to tell us that:

In 2005, the Supreme Court of the United States abolished the death penalty for people whose crimes were committed before age 18. Then, between 2010 and 2016, the court tightly restricted the cases for which a youth could receive a sentence of life without opportunity for parole. As a result, the number of people serving sentences of life without parole for crimes they committed as teenagers dropped from 2,300 in 2016 to fewer than 1,500 in 2020.

But you know what the three academics don’t tell us? They don’t give readers the name of Robert Laminack. Mr Laminack got his death sentence in 1990, at the hands of Mr Brewer. Mr Brewer has now been sent to his eternal reward, and, on this Ash Wednesday, a committed Catholic like me can at least hope that he repented of his sins and sought absolution for them, that his eternal reward might not be Hell.

As our regular readers, both of them, know, I am opposed to capital punishment; I wish that Mr Brewer had not been executed. However, one almost throwaway sentence from the authors really annoys me:

In fact, he might even be free.

Well, yes, he might, but whether still behind bars, or released from prison, Mr Laminack would still be stone-cold graveyard dead. The authors, who couldn’t even bring themselves to name Mr Brewer’s victim, seemingly don’t care about that. As we previously reported, 17-year-and-363-day old Quadir Humphrey has been charged with the apparently-senseless murder if 16-year-old Tyshaun Welles, when he (allegedly) fired almost randomly into a crowd at the Philadelphia City Hall SEPTA subway station. The three academics wrote, ” The court further acknowledged — correctly — that youth who commit crimes can be rehabilitated.”

Well, young Mr Humphrey wasn’t rehabilitated, despite being in custody, twice, on June 4, 2021 on a gun charge, and again on March 4, 2023, on a stolen car charge, neither of which had been adjudicated on the day that he (allegedly) shot Mr Welles. Even if charged and prosecuted as an adult, Mr Humphrey, if convicted, cannot be sentenced to either death or life without parole, but Mr Welles will still be dead. That, to paraphrase the three academics, is how much difference two days can make.

Our work following juvenile homicide offenders released from sentences of life without parole in Philadelphia shows that the court got the science right. Among the first 174 released, only six (or 3.4%) were rearrested within an average two-year follow-up, and only two (or 1.1%) were convicted, both for minor offenses. In comparison, the two-year rearrest rate for homicide offenders nationally is 30%.

Like Brewer, some of the individuals in our study had originally been sentenced to death. But unlike Brewer, they had not yet turned 18 when they committed their crimes, so they were given a chance to show us that they could change.

Those paragraphs fall under the category of lies, damned lies, and statistics! From the City Controller’s office, on January 15, 2022:

The increase in gun violence coincided with other concerning gun-related trends. As gun violence surged over the last six years, clearance rates — the share of cases solved by the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) — for homicides and non-fatal shootings declined. In 2020, just 37% of fatal shootings were cleared by the PPD. At the same time, the number of individuals arrested for illegal gun possession increased by more than 100% between 2015 and 2020. While gun possession arrests have drastically increased, conviction rates — the share of cases prosecuted by the District Attorney’s Office (DAO) that result in conviction — for gun possession declined. Between 2015 and 2020, the share of illegal gun possession cases resulting in conviction fell from 65% to 42%. . . . .

In 2015, clearance rates for non-fatal shootings were already low at 27%. As non-fatal shooting victims increased by more than 80% from 2015 to 2020, clearance rates continued to decline. The clearance rate reached a low point in 2020, when only 19% of non-fatal shooting incidents were cleared by the PPD. This clearance rate translates to nearly 1,500 non-fatal shooting incidents for which no arrest was made in 2020.

So, when the three academics tell us that the arrest and conviction rates were low in the City of Brotherly Love, they are basing their claims on statistics from a crippled Police Department under the thankfully-departed, failed Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, and the refusal of the George Soros-sponsored, police-hating and criminal-loving District Attorney Larry Krasner to seriously prosecute some crimes, including gun crimes.

More, the authors restricted their statistical study to “an average two-year follow up,” something which is not only a short period of time, but one which, if they described it accurately in their article in the Inquirer, was shorter than two years in some cases.

The authors indicated their bias in their own linked (supposedly) academic study, when they stated:

Moreover, in light of the growing recognition that addressing the incarceration epidemic will necessitate re-evaluation of long-term prison sentences for individuals who were convicted of violent offenses, these outcome data have implications far beyond just those that pertain to the resentencing and release of juvenile lifers.[1]Resentencing of Juvenile Lifers: The Philadelphia Experience, page 1 of the report, page 2 of the .pdf file.

On page 3 of the document, the authors refer to the “crisis of mass incarceration,”[2]ibid, page 3 of the report, page 4 of the .pdf file. as though mass incarceration is a problem, rather than not enough people being incarcerated, for not a long enough period of time.

Considering that the overwhelming majority of individuals who commit crime — even serious crime—“age out” of criminal behavior, the societal benefits of continued incarceration are called into question, especially in comparison with the costs.[3]ibid, page 3 of the report, page 4 of the .pdf file.

There is a huge problem with the study. The authors are speaking, in the quoted parts above, about offenders previously sentenced to life, or what they have referred to as “virtual life,” by which they mean sentences of 50 or more years, studied in a re-sentencing project, but drawing inferences on juvenile offenders whom they hope to receive much shorter sentences. As they stated previously:

A subset of 38 cases were considered for resentencing by both the prior and current administrations. The average sentence offered in these cases by the prior administration (District Attorney Seth Williams) was 38.8 years; under Krasner, the average offer in these cases was 27.6 years. Across all cases, this difference equates to an additional reduction of 394 years.[4]ibid, page 2 of the report, page 3 of the .pdf file.

An offender really can “age out” of prime criminal activity years, after he has spent 38.8 years, or even 27.6 years, behind bars, but the type of lenient treatment the authors like and want to see continued under Mr Krasner when it comes to juveniles, does not lead to any ‘aging out’.

On page 6 of the report, page 7 of the .pdf file, the authors note that all of the juvenile offenders resentenced following a life sentence were murderers,, meaning that their victims are dead, never again to draw another breath of life. They noted that 38% of them were convicted of Second degree murder, felony murder, which means a homicide committed during the commission of another felony, robbery (78%, home invasion (16%), and “drug-related” offenses (6%), but does not require that the convicted be the one who actually pulled the trigger. The verbiage is such that the reader could infer that none of the 38% were the ones who pulled the trigger, but the charge of First-degree murder in Pennsylvania requires premeditation, not just the adrenaline-fueled, split-second reaction involved in a felony.

In their Inquirer OpEd, the authors concluded:

Of course, whenever a line is drawn, there will be errors at the margins. But if we, as a nation, continue to maintain the most severe of criminal sanctions — the death penalty, and life without parole — and if we justify these sanctions partly on the basis that they ought to be reserved for people who cannot be reformed, we must acknowledge that the dividing line between 17 and 18 years mistakenly classifies far too many young people as irredeemable.

And therein lies the assumption which destroys their entire article: “if we justify these sanctions partly on the basis that they ought to be reserved for people who cannot be reformed.” Not just no, but Hell no! When the result of the crime is that someone else is killed, we should not be looking at whether or not his killer can or cannot be reformed, but the fact that someone’s life was taken from him, and that the killer should not be released until the dead person comes back to life.

References

References
↑1 Resentencing of Juvenile Lifers: The Philadelphia Experience, page 1 of the report, page 2 of the .pdf file.
↑2 ibid, page 3 of the report, page 4 of the .pdf file.
↑3 ibid, page 3 of the report, page 4 of the .pdf file.
↑4 ibid, page 2 of the report, page 3 of the .pdf file.
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CNN reporter Barbie Latza Nadeau accidentally tells the truth, though I’m sure she is appalled by it

I spotted this following story thanks to a tweet from William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove. Mr Teach noted that CNN seemed far more concerned that an alleged gang rape of a 13-year-old girl in Sicily would benefit conservative politicians — called the “far-right” by CNN — than they were about the fact that a young teenager was raped!

An alleged gang rape shocks Italy, and provides fodder for an ascendant far right

By Barbie Latza Nadeau, CNN | Sunday, February 11, 2024 | Updated: 5:27 AM EST

Rome CNN — Italy has been shaken by the alleged gang rape of a 13-year-old girl in front of her boyfriend in a public park in the Sicilian city of Catania, the latest in a string of shocking sexual attacks in the country.

The case is reminiscent of two alleged gang rapes last summer. A group of seven men and teenage boys between the ages of 15 and 18 are currently on trial for the alleged rape of a 19-year-old girl in Palermo in August.

Weeks later nine young men were arrested and charged with allegedly raping two cousins aged 10 and 12 near Naples and broadcasting the attack live on social media. They, too, are facing trial.

Last month’s alleged gang rape in Catania has become not only a symbol of violence against women in the country, but a cause célèbre for Italy’s far-right government. The seven suspected perpetrators were all Egyptian migrants, three of them under the age of 18, Catania police confirmed to CNN.

There’s more at the original.

As we previously reported, a ‘migrant’ from Venezuela has been arrested for trying to shoot an New York City Police Officer, and wounding a tourist in Times Square. Neither the United States as a whole, or New York more specifically, has a “far-right” government to which to tie that crime, and somehow, some way, CNN didn’t cover the story of the arrest of Jesus Alejandro Rivas-Figueroa at all, or at least a site search for Rivas-Figueroa conducted at 12:55 PM EST this morning returned no stories on the subject.

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, came to power in September 2022 on an anti-immigration platform, but her efforts to curb irregular migration into the country have so far been unsuccessful.

How interesting that CNN reporter Barbie Latza Nadeau characterized Prime Minister Meloni and her government as “far-right,” and then linked an article which said, among other things, “She was nowhere near as far-right as some had feared, and the multilingual career politician was at ease with global world leaders.” 🙂 Perhaps if she had been more stringently “far-right” Italy would have been more successful in intercepting and turning around the ‘migrants’ boats.

The CNN writer then had a several paragraph section beginning with, “Italy has long struggled with the problem of gender-based violence,” even as she noted that the parliament has passed measures to more greatly criminalize such.

The legislation was inspired by the case of Giulia Cecchettin, a 22-year-old woman murdered by an ex-boyfriend. She was one of 118 femicides in Italy last year. In 2022, women were the victims of 91% of homicides committed by family members, partners or former partners, according to the European Data Journalism Network.

“Violence against women is a phenomenon that’s more or less present in all countries, caused by structural causes like the disparity between men and women, stereotypes and prejudices,” Elena Biaggioni, vice president of D.i.Re, a national association that coordinates anti-violence centers and women’s shelters, said last June.

Speaking at a protest after a pregnant woman was allegedly stabbed to death by her partner, she added: “But of course in countries where there’s a macho culture and sexism is stronger, like Italy, this violence is justified in a different way.”

Yet in the latest case, officials have centered their attention on the background of the alleged perpetrators.

So, are you convinced yet that this is not really a problem of the illegal immigrants, but Italy, and wicked Italian men in general? It’s not the fault of the illegal immigrants, but the problem is that “officials” who have focused on the “background of the alleged perpetrators.” That’s pretty clearly what Miss Nadeau wants you to believe. But next comes the money line, though I doubt that the CNN writer realized it:

The judge investigating the most recent case, Carlo Umberto Cannella, said the suspects were likely to reoffend because they were not “accustomed to civilization.”

Absolutely right! Islamic ‘civilization,’ if you can call it civilization at all, simply is nothing like Western civilization, and Judge Cannella told the truth. Islamic ‘civilization’ has produced, in the 21st century, an Iran which jails and occasionally beats to death women who don’t properly wear a headscarf, an Afghanistan where girls cannot be educated past the sixth grade, women are forced to wear head-to-toe burkas, and must be accompanied by a responsible male if they leave the home. Islamic ‘civilization’ has produced Hamas, which used murder and deliberate rape to terrorize Israeli civilians, and Da’ish, which throws homosexuals off of tall buildings.

They are not Westerners, and if we try to think of them as Westerners or expect them to behave as Westerners, we are deceiving ourselves and endangering actually civilized people.

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Killadelphia: A public service homicide? One bad guy dead, another in jail

Jahsir Walke mug shot, via Steve Keeley, Fox29 News.

Meet Jahsir Walke, 16, of foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, and you can say goodby to him as well. No, unlike Robert Stacy McCain’s use of a similar line, young Mr Walke has not gone on to his eternal reward, but we can have some real hope that he will disappear into a Pennsylvania state penitentiary, and never see the sun from outside again.

So, what did young Mr Walke do? Well, the first part of the problem is that he is just plain stupid. At just 16 years of age, he thought it was wise and cool and all gangster to walk around carrying a firearm. Oddly enough, the fact that he was violating gun control laws didn’t seem to give him pause, and certainly did not stop him from carrying, something which must surely shock the left.

Mr Keeley posted his notice of the crime at 4:23 PM EST, but, at least as of 8:52 PM, The Philadelphia Inquirer has nothing on the story; I am not surprised.

On Monday, January 29th, officers of the 19th District responded to a “Man with a gun” call at the Martinez Food Market, a corner store bodega at 5453 Master Street, in the Hestonville neighborhood in West Philadelphia. Upon arrival, they found Nafiese McClain, a 19-year-old black male, shot twice. He was transported to Penn Presbyterian Hospital, where he was pronounced dead shortly thereafter.

According to initial reports, Mr McClain entered the bodega and brushed past two young black males, one of whom was Mr Walke, and then assaulted a third black male in the back of the store. Mr Walke then pulled his weapon from the waistband of his pants, and shot Mr McClain twice. This wasn’t some after dark crime, but happened at 1:37 in the afternoon.

Of course, as is the case virtually everywhere these days, it was all caught by a security camera, Mr Walke was identified as the shooter, and a week later he’s behind bars.

So, what do we have? A 19-year-old tough guy treats a couple of teenagers rudely, then starts to pound on a third man, for a thus far unreported reason. Then, one of the two teenaged tough guys pulls out his gun, and sends Mr McClain straight to Hell.

If I was to be cynical, I’d call this a public service homicide. Mr McClain seems to have been a good-for-nothing punk of whom West Philly is well rid, and young Mr Walke another useless consumer of food, water and oxygen, whose disappearance into the state pen can only benefit the decent people in the neighborhood. Being a juvenile, his record is almost certainly sealed, but a 16-year-old carrying? The probability that Mr Walke has a record himself would seem pretty high.

Through Sunday, February 4th, the City of Brotherly Love had seen ‘only’ 27 homicides, down from the 41 on the same date last year. With 35 days having elapsed in the year, the city is seeing fewer than one homicide per day, 0.7714 per day. While even one murder is one too many, in Philly terms, 0.7714 killings per day is pretty good, and the lowest number on this date since 2018. And when we consider the victim and the killer, this just might be a win/win.

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The Freedom of Speech comes with an obligation of responsibility; people are responsible for what they say.

I have always believed in the freedom of speech, that people should be absolutely free to say whatever they wished. But I also believe that the speaker is not somehow immune from the consequences of his speech. The Supreme Court noted that freedom of speech doesn’t extend to yelling, “Fire!” in a crowded theater, or “fighting words,” but both of those incidences are concerns about the consequences of what someone says, causing a stampede in which people are injured, or getting your jaw jacked because you angered someone enough to hit you in the mouth. From USA Today:

Posting ‘Zionists must die’ is awful. But it shouldn’t get student kicked out of college.

Cornell should balance protecting students and campus staff with protecting free speech.

Continue reading →

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We’re not really serious about rape Don't look for complicated answers when there are simple solutions to the problem

We have previously reported on sex crimes against minors in Kentucky, and this morning, the Lexington Herald-Leader continued an investigative effort that began at the end of 2022, with the story “Kentucky’s laws on teacher sexual misconduct are weak. Here’s what needs to change.

Kentucky lawmakers failed to address teacher sex abuse last year. Will they in 2024?

by Beth Musgrave and Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Thursday, February 1, 2024 | 11:00 AM EST | Updated: 11:30 AM EST

Andrew Zaheri, mugshot via Rowan County Detention Center and is a public record.

It started with massages for leg cramps after soccer practice when she was 14.Andrew Zaheri’s attentions to the teenage girl quickly escalated, according to court documents.

No, of course what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal didn’t include Mr Zaheri’s mugshot, but at The First Street Journal we believe such to be public records, and do publish them. Continue reading →