Category Archives: Culture

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Are dog lives more important than humans in Philadelphia?

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page has reported that 62 Philadelphians have been sent untimely to their eternal rewards as of 11:59 PM EST on Monday, February 20th. While that number is lower than the same date in 2021 and 2022, it’s higher than in 2020, which saw 499 ‘official’ homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. And, as we have reported frequently, very few of those killings — other than the fatal shooting of Temple Police Officer Christopher Fitzgerald, allegedly by a privileged punk kid from Bucks County — have received much press coverage from The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and the newspaper of record for the entire area.

Well, this morning, the newspaper I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. showed us just what shootings in the city are really important!

Off-duty FBI agent shoots dog in Center City

The incident occurred Monday evening on the 1500 block of Spruce Street. It was not immediately known if the dog survived.

by Robert Moran | Tuesday, February 21, 2023 | 7:38 AM EST

An off-duty FBI agent shot a dog outside a Center City apartment building Monday, the FBI and Philadelphia police said.

Video posted on social media showed the aftermath of the incident on the sidewalk in front of the Touraine residential high-rise on the 1500 block of Spruce Street.

The special agent was walking a small dog when she encountered at least one other person walking two dogs, according to witnesses. A fight broke out involving the three dogs.

It was not immediately known if the dog that was shot survived. The FBI did not identify the agent.

At the end of the story:

Animal rights organization Revolution Philly is planning to protest the animal shooting in front of FBI headquarters at 10 a.m. Tuesday.

“This woman is a trained professional and a dog owner. Her first reaction shouldn’t be to shoot first,” said Revolution Philly organizer Tiffany Stair in a statement. “This is unacceptable and we are demanding that she be held accountable.”

The entire article, exclusive of the headline, subheading, photos, and byline, was 237 words over nine paragraphs, a lot longer than the usual reports of killings.

Polar Bear, the Great Pyrenees who is trying to move in with us.

We have two dogs ourselves, and a third, a 150 lb Great Pyrenees we have named Polar Bear, who is trying to move in with us. If we didn’t know his actual human, who lives ¾ mile away from us, we’d let him, but his real human loves him. Bear loves our dogs, and us, more than his human. So, yes, to us, the shooting of a dog is a bad, bad thing.

But, radically enough, the idea that a dog was shot, and perhaps killed — that part is as yet unknown — is generating a protest by Revolution Philly, while the 230 reported shooting victims[2]Through February 20, 2023, including 46 fatally shot, plus 16 other murders, have mostly drawn nothing but the sound of crickets in the city, strikes me as a terrible thing.

Murder has simply been normalized in Philadelphia. Yes, Officer Fitzgerald’s senseless murder, by a punk who seemingly thought he was playing Grand Theft Auto in real life, has generated a lot of emotion in Philly, but for the most part, murder victims are mourned by their family and friends, and otherwise dismissed as just the same old, same old.

And why not? The city is governed by Democrats, has been since Harry Truman was President, and it seems as though preserving prenatal infanticide is the most important issue to them. It’s not as though teenagers don’t get that message, that people who are inconvenient can simply be disposed of, and it really isn’t a surprise that teenaged gangbangers and wannabes find life cheap enough that they will shoot people over the least provocation. The Democrats want to ‘explain’ the city’s killing spree as the result of poverty, racism, segregation, and community ‘disinvestment,’ but the 18-year-old white kid who (allegedly) killed Officer Fitzgerald was a privileged kid, living in his mother’s $1.2 million, 15-acre estate in Bucks County, who’d had one previous ‘contact’, a telephoned and internet reported bomb threat that got him one month’s probation in Bucks County, with law enforcement as a juvenile. For whatever reasons there were, his parents — who are now divorced, with a rumored, but unconfirmed by reliable sources, custody dispute — didn’t teach their son respect for life, and now he’s looking at spending the rest of his miserable life behind bars.

The death penalty, to which I am opposed anyway, is off the table: Governor Josh Shapiro (D-PA) has stated that he will not allow any executions to proceed as long as he is in office,[3]In Pennsylvania, the Governor does not have independent authority to commute capital sentences, but can only do so with the recommendation of the state Board of Pardons and Paroles. and District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia) has campaigned on, and vowed, never to seek the death penalty in any capital crimes committed while he is prosecutor. A photo of the alleged killer shows him in custody, leaning back, apparently awaiting questioning, with a posture that says, “What the f(ornicate) did I do? The rest of my life is trashed,” perhaps the best picture from this entire, sad episode. His father and mother — and the mother may be charged with a crime as well, for allegedly picking up her son after he called her for help — are going to have to live with that image, burned into their minds, wondering what they could have done differently.

There’s also a photo of him, as a juvenile, wearing a Biden-Harris t-shirt. Yeah, that’s a way not to rear your children right!

Philadelphia, and many other urban areas as well, are places in which human life has become cheap, and with life being cheap, life is being taken cheaply. When we have politicians telling us that human life before birth can be sucked out and destroyed, because some babies are just plain inconvenient, when we have parents supporting and voting for the politicians who support prenatal infanticide, we’re going to get more punks like the one who murdered Officer Fitzgerald. And we’re also going to get more punks roaming the streets of our major cities who apparently think nothing of blowing away rival gang members or girls that cheated on them or people who resist armed carjacking attempts or just look at them the wrong way.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑2 Through February 20, 2023
↑3 In Pennsylvania, the Governor does not have independent authority to commute capital sentences, but can only do so with the recommendation of the state Board of Pardons and Paroles.
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It’s just so easy for the white liberals in safe neighborhoods to support ‘progressive’ politicians After all, most of the crime happens in other places

My good friend Harrison Finberg — OK, OK, I’ve never actually met him, but we can be good friends on Twitter these days — noted this tweet from Philly First Ward, the Democratic Executive Committee in Philadelphia’s First Ward. We have previously noted the mayoral candidacy of Helen Gym Flaherty,[1]Even though Mrs Flaherty does not respect her husband, attorney Bret Flaherty, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal will not show him a similar disrespect. one of the furthest left of the ever-growing list of hopefuls, whom The Philadelphia Inquirer described as a “longtime activist who is typically aligned with the Democratic Party’s left wing”. Mrs Flaherty’s campaign website is full of the usual ‘progressive’ bromides, but, at least as of this writing, there’s no actual issues page, telling the city’s voters — of which I am not one — what she would actually do, other than those bromides, in office if elected.

While she says that she will fight “gun violence,” what she doesn’t want to do is fight the criminals who use guns. I guess that’s not much of a surprise, since ‘progressives’ seem to think that guns simply levitate and shoot people all by themselves.

Helen Gym makes it official and launches a run for Philadelphia mayor on a pledge to address gun violence

The now-former Council member and leader of the city’s progressive movement launched her run at the William Way LGBT Community Center in Center City.

by Anna Orso | Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Former City Councilmember Helen Gym announced Wednesday that she will run for Philadelphia mayor on a pledge to address the city’s alarmingly high rate of gun violence, saying, “Everything is at stake right now.”

In remarks to a room of about 350 supporters gathered at the William Way LGBT Community Center, Gym centered her message on public safety, vowing to declare a state of emergency on her first day in office and prioritize improving homicide clearance rates.

I am amused that Mrs Flaherty chose a homosexual ‘Community Center’ as the place in which she announced her long-anticipated candidacy, but that’s probably something of which The Democratic Executive Committee in Philadelphia’s First Ward approves.

But while the longtime activist who is typically aligned with the Democratic Party’s left wing said violence is “destroying our city and our people,” she was far from taking a tough-on-crime tone.

“I will not use this crisis to roll back the clock on civil rights,” she said. “While many people in this race will talk about public safety, let me be clear: Decades of systemic racism and disinvestment brought us to this place.”

Further down:

Gym has opposed tax cuts for businesses and corporations, and has been critical of the Police Department, championing legislation to ban the use of tear gas on protesters and rejecting calls to bring back stop-and-frisk. In 2020, she voted against a planned increase to the Police Department’s budget — along with a majority of Council.

And here’s what Mrs Flaherty tweeted in 2019.

I support reducing the prison population by 50% from 2019 levels, We must center transformative and restorative justice practices in Philadelphia.

Can any policy have failed as badly as District Attorney Larry Krasner’s ‘decarceration’ program has failed the city since then? Murders get the most attention, and yes, they’re down a bit, but shootings, and every non-self-defense shooting is an attempted murder, are up.

So, who are The Democratic Executive Committee in Philadelphia’s First Ward? The First Ward is a gentrifying area, between Wharton and Mifflin Streets north and south, bounded on the west by South Broad Street and running east to the Delaware River. To the left is their group photo from their website, and with only four exceptions, they’re all as white as ceiling paint.

The area? Even a dump fixer-upper like this one is listed for sale for $475,000, though the fixed up row house at 1007 Mifflin Street is listed for $465,000.

It’s pretty typical in today’s urban areas, where the well-to-do whites who aren’t worried about street crime, who aren’t seeing the dead bodies or hearing the gunfire in their neighborhoods can blithely support ‘restorative justice‘ and ‘decarceration‘, because the bad guys who aren’t locked up aren’t in their neighborhoods.

Then again . . . .

Armed Delf-Defense in Dallas

by Robert Stacy McCain | Saturday, February 18, 2023

This happened in December, but the police took a while to complete their investigation and make arrests, so we’re just now getting a detailed account of what happened:

There are a lot of new details about how a recent attempted carjacking of a luxury car went down in an upscale area of Dallas.

Police arrested the three suspects they were looking for, and court documents detail a good lead police had.

One suspect showed up at a hospital with a gunshot wound minutes after the attempted carjacking and shootout last December.

Police say he was shot by a friend of the Maserati owner they were trying to carjack.

Skipping the details of the crime, down to Mr McCain’s conclusion:

This attempted carjacking happened, as they say, “in an upscale area” on the north side of Dallas, which shows that there is no such thing as a “safe” neighborhood in 21st-century America. Who knows what might have happened had it not been for the fact that the Maserati owner’s friend was armed? Permit me to recommend two books by my friend Robert Waters, The Best Defense: True Stories of Intended Victims Who Defended Themselves with a Firearm and Guns Save Lives: True Stories of Americans Defending Their Lives With Firearms.

It is unfortunate that civilization has collapsed to the point that no one is safe unless they’re carrying a pistol, but we must live in the world as it is, rather than that fantasy world where “safe” neighborhoods still exist.

The good, noble, progressive Democrats of Philadelphia’s First Ward might, just might, find the effects of the politicians and policies for which they have voted visiting their own gentrifying streets.

The feelgood story about the three ‘unsuccessful’ carjackers came from Dallas, and there’s always a better chance that Texans will be armed. The good progressive Democrats of the First Ward? The city’s Democratic politicians — and Democrats outregister Republicans in Philly about 7 to 1 — don’t want the public to carry firearms, so it might be less likely that an attempted carjacking on Wharton Street would be met with a prospective victim who was armed. Might as well give up their wheels, and hope the ‘jackers don’t go ahead and shoot you anyway.

References

References
↑1 Even though Mrs Flaherty does not respect her husband, attorney Bret Flaherty, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal will not show him a similar disrespect.
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Killadelphia: Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw has a Department in complete disarray

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page shows 54 homicides through 11:59 PM EST on Monday, February 13th, three more than the previous day, which is actually more than Broad + Liberty’s homicide tracker.

As we previously reported, there was a decline in the rate of homicides in Philadelphia that began last November, and that had continued into early this year, but the number of killings had begun to exceed the 2020 total, and 2020 finished with an ‘official’ 499 murders. Now the total, while lower than in 2021 and 2022, is 20.0% higher than 2020. It’s a bit too early to derive any strong statistical trends, because even though this winter has been mild, homicides normally increase significantly in the summer.

Naturally, The Philadelphia Inquirer didn’t have any stories on these on their website main page, but on their specific crime page I was able to find Hit-and-run drivers killed two people after the Super Bowl and 4 dead, 5 injured in shootings during a violent (Saturday) overnight in Philly.

From the 2023 Mummer’s Parade in Philadelphia. Click to enlarge.

But the Inky did note the disarray in Commissioner Danielle Outlaw’s Police Department. Yes, a very large grain of salt has to be taken with this, given that the newspaper and its Editorial Board absotively, posilutely hate the police, there’s nothing I’ve seen which tells me that their reporting is false.

Lacking accountability, some Philly cops follow checkered path to high-ranking positions | Editorial

Apparently, one way to get ahead in the Philadelphia Police Department is to first get fired. No wonder some officers act as if they are above the law.

by The Editorial Board | St Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2023 | 6:00 AM EST

As Philadelphia endures record numbers of shootings and murders, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw implemented a second department shake-up in less than a year, which included promoting several dozen officers and transferring others.

Whether her actions result in safer streets remains to be seen. Given some of the officers who were commended, let’s hold the applause for now.

One of the promoted officers was fired in 2020 after allegedly supervising a meeting where officers were instructed to falsify reports in drug cases. He was also accused of attacking a female officer, hurling racist insults, and hiding information from the District Attorney’s Office. Last year, an arbitrator found the officer’s dismissal violated policy and reinstated him with back pay.

A second officer who was promoted had been dismissed in 2013 after he was charged with aggravated assault and stalking his girlfriend. The charges were dropped after a witness failed to appear in court, and the officer was reinstated.

A third officer who was promoted had been suspended for three days in 2011 after he lost his gun. Three years later, he was suspended for six days after improperly releasing three shooting suspects without questioning them, confiscating their weapons, or entering their information into police records.

Further down:

The message to many who are already wary of the police — as well as to many young officers learning the ropes — is that apparently, one way to get ahead in the Philadelphia Police Department is to first get fired. For that, you can thank the Fraternal Order of Police, which protects all cops, even the rotten apples.

Indeed, when it comes to being a Philly cop, fired rarely means fired. About 70% of officers disciplined in incidents from 2011 to 2019 had their cases overturned or reduced, The Inquirer found.

Of course, the Inky loves unions, at least unions other than the FOP and their own News Guild of Greater Philadelphia. The police officers’ union is doing what a union is supposed to do, protect its members. If the Philadelphia Police Department has been disciplining or firing officers without proper procedure, that’s on the Department and the city.

But promoting such officers? That doesn’t look so good. This is the Commissioner’s second top brass reorganization in half a year.

Then there’s this:

Eight more Philly cops were benched amid widening probe into a city antiviolence program

The officers’ guns were taken after an Inquirer investigation found they were improperly paid $76,000 in city funds to coach boxing. Children of police also got thousands of dollars to participate.

by Max Marin, Samantha Melamed, and Jeremy Roebuck | St Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2023 | 6:00 AM EST

Eight Philadelphia police officers have been placed on restricted duty and stripped of their service weapons — and the FBI is investigating — after an Inquirer report revealed that the officers had improperly received tens of thousands of dollars in city antiviolence grant money.

A police spokesperson confirmed the reassignments of the officers as well as a civilian police staffer. Together with a police captain who resigned last week, they pocketed more than $75,000 from a $392,000 city grant issued to Epiphany Fellowship Church for a program called Guns Down Gloves Up, city records show. City employees are not allowed to be paid from such grants.

The captain who resigned? He was scheduled to be another of the officers promoted, but resigned over other issues, including chronic absenteeism. Why would Commissioner Outlaw plan on promoting a district captain who was frequently absent? Did she not know that he was offnot on duty a lot?

In addition, children and relatives of police officers collected at least one third of funds paid to participants in the youth boxing program — more than $5,000 in prepaid debit cards, records obtained by The Inquirer show.

The program, according to its grant application, was supposed to use those debit cards to attract young people in North Philadelphia’s 19121 zip code who are at risk of becoming involved in gun violence, thereby improving police-community relations in the neighborhood. Yet, public records indicate that several of those teens and young adults reside in Delaware County or in the city’s Mount Airy neighborhood.

The program made its first payments in December of 2021, which was almost two years into Commissioner Outlaw’s watch. And she is responsible for whatever happens on her watch.

The Commissioner serves at the pleasure of the Mayor, and Mayor Jim Kenney, who brought Miss Outlaw in from the left coast in February of 2020, will be out of office at the end of the year, and Commissioner Outlaw will be out with him; none of the serious mayoral candidates will want to retain a police commissioner with her record.

The Philadelphia Police Department is in obvious disarray, with shake-ups, suspensions, firings, and a failure of the Commissioner to have her officers’ backs. She is hardly the only failed Philadelphia official, but she’s certainly very prominent among the failures.

There was, of course, very little reason to think that she’d actually be a success. When she was hired to be Police Chief in Portland, Oregon, this fawning tribute was written about her by Oregon Public Broadcasting, including this tell-tale line:

“She is the personification … [of] a current 21st-century mindset in police and policing in the community,” said Derald Walker, president of Cascadia Behavioral Health. . . . .

“When she left the room, there was an audible collective sigh that represented an incredible impression,” Walker said. “I think it’s going to be very hard to see her negatively, and for those people who have an ax to grind with police, to vilify her.”

Translation: Mr Walker thought that the incoming Police Chief wouldn’t offend the people who already didn’t like the police, then he thought her someone who would soft-peddle enforcement of the law.

Well, soft-peddling law enforcement just plain doesn’t work! And Miss Outlaw’s tenure as Commissioner has been an utter, utter failure, with officers leaving in droves, the Department hundreds of officers undermanned, and enough of a lax atmosphere that some officers think that it really doesn’t matter if they cheat the taxpayers.

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The left tell us that they support racial integration, but they really do not

We have previously noted how the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer told us that the violence problem in the City of Brotherly Love is due to the internal segregation of what is, overall, a very ‘diverse’ city. However, the Inky has also been very wary of gentrification.

What is gentrification?

Gentrification is the process of changing the character of a neighborhood through the influx of more affluent residents and businesses.[1]“Gentrification”. Dictionary.com.Lees, Slater & Wyly 2010[page needed] define gentrification as “the transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city to a … Continue reading It is a common and controversial topic in urban politics and planning. Gentrification often increases the economic value of a neighborhood, but the resulting demographic displacement may itself become a major social issue. Gentrification often shifts a neighborhood’s racial or ethnic composition and average household income by developing new, more expensive housing and businesses in a gentrified architectural style and extending and improving resources that had not been previously accessible.[2]West, Allyn (5 March 2020). “Baffled City: Exploring the architecture of gentrification”. Texas Observer. Archived from the original on 22 June 2020. Retrieved 21 June 2020., [3][3]Harrison, Sally; Jacobs, Andrew (2016). “Gentrification and the Heterogeneous City: Finding a Role for Design”. The Plan. 1 (2). doi:10.15274/tpj.2016.01.02.03.

The gentrification process is typically the result of increasing attraction to an area by people with higher incomes spilling over from neighboring cities, towns, or neighborhoods. Further steps are increased investments in a community and the related infrastructure by real estate development businesses, local government, or community activists and resulting economic development, increased attraction of business, and lower crime rates. In addition to these potential benefits, gentrification can lead to population migration and displacement. However, some view the fear of displacement, which dominates the debate about gentrification, as hindering discussion about genuine progressive approaches to distribute the benefits of urban redevelopment strategies.

While Philadelphia and the Inquirer haven’t been so blatant as to say so directly, the liberal city of Lexington[4]Fayette County was one of only two counties, out of 120 total in the Bluegrass State, to be carried by Joe Biden in the 2020 election. has. As we have previously noted, Lexington said, directly, that it was concerned about gentrification, and, “Most new owners being more affluent and differing from the traditional residents in terms of race or ethnicity.” The city was concerned about white people moving into heavily black neighborhoods.[5]Though there is a neighborhood called Little Mexico in the area around Alexandria Drive north of Versailles Road, Lexington’s Hispanic population are not large enough to really dominate larger … Continue reading

Now comes The Washington Post, weighing in on the same subject:

White people have flocked back to city centers — and transformed them

In the past decade, the White population increased significantly in urban cores across the country, bringing changes both sweeping and intimate

By Tara Bahrampour, Marissa J. Lang, and Ted Mellnik | Monday, February 6, 2023 | 8:02 AM EST

In the 20th century, “White flight” transformed many American cities as White people moved in droves from urban centers to the suburbs.

In the last decade, that exodus kicked into reverse.

The White population increased between 2010 and 2020 in hundreds of neighborhoods at the center of many large cities, even as it declined almost everywhere else in the country. This influx, which in some cases began before 2010 but has accelerated and expanded, has brought about new upheavals, making some of the country’s biggest urban cores feel increasingly unrecognizable to longtime Black, Hispanic and Asian residents.

Some remember when they or their families were forced to live in certain inner-city neighborhoods, restricted by economics or racial covenants from moving to the leafy suburbs. Now many wonder how much integration is really happening between old and new neighbors — and whether there is still room for them in the neighborhoods they call home.

The Supreme Court ruled that racial covenants cannot be enforced by state courts back in 1948[6]Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948), and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made them illegal. The Post is trying to blame something which has been wholly illegal for over half a century.

Using census data from 2010 and 2020 on population totals by race and ethnicity, The Washington Post identified nearly 800 neighborhood-size tracts across the nation with the highest White population gains. In these neighborhoods, located mostly at the center of major urban areas, the total number of White residents increased by over half a million, while the number of Black residents declined by 196,000 and the number of Hispanic residents fell by 45,000. The Asian population declined in traditional Chinatown neighborhoods close to downtown in cities such as Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia.

Wouldn’t that be called racial integration?

Racial integration is something the left will always say they support. The ‘gentrifiers,’ usually white couples, sometimes with children, are choosing to spend their own money to fix up previously distressed housing, but are concomitantly choosing to live next door to neighbors who are frequently not white. Wouldn’t these be white people who are very much not racist? Shouldn’t these be the people the left laud rather than lament?

Further down, in a section on New Orleans:

Spurred on by climate catastrophes, new development and a booming short-term rental industry, gentrification has remade the Big Easy and displaced thousands of Black families, a population that has been shrinking for more than 20 years.

In a city where the very culture is bound to African American tradition, the threat of erasure extends beyond the physical.

“Cultural annihilation is very real here,” said Cheryl Robichaux Austin, 68, executive director of the Greater Tremé Consortium, a neighborhood-based advocacy and community equity nonprofit. “It’s slowly decaying, and we see it … every day in the neighborhood. We see it when the city has special events and we don’t see Black bands, how there are all these White folks playing in the second line now. Things you never used to see before.”

How can you read that as anything other than a lament that white people have moved into the neighborhood, and are participating in the neighborhood?

Those “displaced” black families? They had to go somewhere, right?

“You have minorities who are looking for more affordable housing, so they’re moving out to the suburbs,” said Derek Hyra, a professor of urban policy at American University.

Oh, so black families are moving out into the purportedly lily-white suburbs, the places to where white city residents fled? Wouldn’t that, too, be integration?

When the left tell you that they are all for integration, ignore the big statement, and look further down, into what else they say, what else they write. It’s a long article, something only newspapers can do, something that really doesn’t work in television. The theme is that formerly mostly segregated black or Asian neighborhoods were good things, due to the cultures which grew up within them. All that you have to do is change the descriptions to white neighborhoods, and readers would be screaming that that’s raaaaacist, you can’t be trying to protect the whiteness of white neighborhoods.

And the American left can’t even see it, can’t even understand what they have written and what they want.

References

References
↑1 “Gentrification”. Dictionary.com.Lees, Slater & Wyly 2010[page needed] define gentrification as “the transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city to a middle class residential and/or commercial use”.
↑2 West, Allyn (5 March 2020). “Baffled City: Exploring the architecture of gentrification”. Texas Observer. Archived from the original on 22 June 2020. Retrieved 21 June 2020.
↑3 Harrison, Sally; Jacobs, Andrew (2016). “Gentrification and the Heterogeneous City: Finding a Role for Design”. The Plan. 1 (2). doi:10.15274/tpj.2016.01.02.03.
↑4 Fayette County was one of only two counties, out of 120 total in the Bluegrass State, to be carried by Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
↑5 Though there is a neighborhood called Little Mexico in the area around Alexandria Drive north of Versailles Road, Lexington’s Hispanic population are not large enough to really dominate larger neighborhoods.
↑6 Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948)
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Why is Lexington hiding this?

Rigoberto Vasquez-Barradas, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

We previously reported on the arrest of Rigoberto Vasquez-Barradas, charged with fetal homicide in the first degree, a capital offense under KRS §507A.020, for allegedly kicking a woman who was 18-weeks pregnant thrice in the stomach, along with other forms of assault.

Mr Vasquez-Barradas was arrested on Friday, January 20, 2023, which was 2½ weeks, or 17 days ago. According to the Fayette County Detention Center, Mr Vasquez-Barradas is still behind bars, facing the same charges as we detailed in our previous story, though it now states that he “can post property bond” to meet his $300,000 bail.

The Lexington city government has a rather sketchy record of posting information in a timely manner, but after 17 days have passed, the Lexington Police Department’s Homicide Investigations Page still does not show the fetal homicide Mr Vasquez-Barradas allegedly committed. That the suspect is still behind bars, or so the Fayette County Detention Center records show as of 1:00 PM EST,> and still charged with fetal homicide, tells us that yes, it’s still considered a murder, but the city, for some reason, does not show it as one.

So, I have to ask: does the city, in which the public officials all support abortion, simply not wish to state that a fetal homicide under state law is actually a homicide?

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Killadelphia

We have previously reported a decline in the rate of homicides in Philadelphia that began last November, and that had continued into early this year. But a bloody weekend in the City of Brotherly Love has led to the Philadelphia Police Department now reporting 41 murders in the city through 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, February 5th, and that, while lower than 2021 and 2022, is now higher than the same day in 2020, a year in which the city finished with an “official’ 499 murders.

Official murders, that is!

On January 4, 2021, I posted the article, “Killadelphia reaches the milestone: I didn’t think they’d make it, but they did: 502 homicides in 2020.” That soon went out of date, because the Philadelphia Police Department changed the figure on their Current Crime Statistics page to 499 homicides in 2020. I couldn’t prove that they had initially reported 502 killings; it was something that I remembered, but in a truly rookie mistake, I failed to consider that the political powers that be, including Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, a political appointee of Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia), not an officer who rose up in the ranks of the PPD, might not want that number to break 500, and the previous record of 500 set under Mayor Wilson Goode (D-Philadelphia) of the MOVE bombing fame, during the crack cocaine wars of 1990.

Well, if I made that mistake, someone obviously smarter than me did not. I got a tweet from NDJinPhilly with the screenshot I failed to get, so I consider that confirmation of my earlier stories.

The website Broad + Liberty has been keeping its own running track of city homicides, and they actually show two fewer murders — than do the Police, 39 murders plus one ‘suspicious’ death. B+L currently shows 40 homicides, but the 40th killing they show is listed as having occurred early this morning, not on the 5th. But I have to wonder: are B+L’s data being restricted, or has Commissioner Danielle Outlaw decided that she might as well have her department report more honestly now that somebody is counting?

The first five weeks of the year don’t really provide a good average daily number of killings; the warmer weather of late spring and summer get into the real averages. And 2020 was the year of the unfortunate death of methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled career-criminal George Floyd in custody, leading to the “Black Lives Matter” riots in many of our cities, including Philadelphia. That probably inflated the number of killings in Philly that year, but I’d note that the number of murders in the city was significantly higher in both subsequent years.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page had no stories at all about the weekend’s killings[1]Access3ed at 10:10 AM EST on Monday, February 6th. — though it naturally included a four-day-old OpEd piece once again supporting open homosexuality — while the specific crime page showed two stories about three of the murders. Given that the Philadelphia Police Department acknowledged five more homicides than in its previous report, ending on Groundhog Day, one would think that two more deaths would have been noted. I suppose that tells us just what is more important to the editors of the Inquirer.

References

References
↑1 Access3ed at 10:10 AM EST on Monday, February 6th.
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Yet another tragedy in Philadelphia

No, this isn’t about homicides in the City of Brotherly Love, though Broad + Liberty has counted 39 as of this writing. No, this is about a horrible, awful, doubtlessly racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic tragedy that has gotten major play in the very #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 Philadelphia Inquirer!

As Philly gathers in bars to watch the Super Bowl, another reminder for the LGBTQ community of the lack of lesbian bars

Lesbian sports fans who want to watch the game in community are scrambling to find spaces that are affirming and feel safe.

by Massarah Mikati | Saturday, February 4, 2023

The Toasted Walnut, November 2020, via Google Maps. The homeless guy on his ass in front of the place probably didn’t help business much. Click to enlarge.

Leona Thomas made her way to the middle of the dance floor.Eighties music pulsed through the air, the dance floor full of women moving with it. Large TV screens — or at least, what was considered a big TV screen in 1985 — wrapped around the room, so the fans there could watch the Super Bowl without having to sacrifice dancing.

Thomas was a teen coming out, and the former Gatsby’s in Cherry Hill was one of the first lesbian bars she visited in the process. It was a space that not only welcomed her but wrapped her authentic self with acceptance. A space that normalized being queer. And a space that felt safe — especially to watch the Super Bowl.

Fast-forward 40 years, and the lesbian bar scene has dropped from 200 nationally to fewer than 25 today, according to the Lesbian Bar Project. In Philadelphia, that number has been zero since Toasted Walnut, its last lesbian bar and a popular place to watch the Eagles in their last Super Bowl, closed in 2021. Which leaves the question: Now that the Eagles have made it to the Super Bowl again, where will the lesbian community be able to comfortably cheer on the Birds?

There’s more at the link.

Naturally, I followed the internal link to the story about Toasted Walnut closing, and discovered what I expected from a story in a homosexual-supporting city like Philly: it wasn’t somehow hounded out of business, but, the closing in the spring of 2021 seems to have been one due to economic and business reasons. While the story didn’t mention it specifically, it included another link which said:

The Toasted Walnut, a lesbian bar in Philadelphia’s Gayborhood that was refuge to queer women for the past five years, will close for good, according to Billy Penn. Run by the former manager of Sisters — another lesbian bar that closed in Philly in 2013 — the Toasted Walnut was a staple for the lesbian community at its home on 13th and Walnut. The bar had been hibernating since November, but with additional financial pressure, it will no longer be able to reopen.

Toasted Walnut’s owner Denise Cohen tells Billy Penn that the pandemic made it especially challenging to keep the lights on, but that her own personal health problems have made it impossible. Cohen began going blind in her left eye in 2019 as a result of diabetes, then was diagnosed with uterine cancer at the end of 2020. Meanwhile, Cohen says her landlords wouldn’t meet at the negotiating table regarding the rent at the bar, which Cohen says costs $11,000 a month. With the additional costs for her healthcare, it would have been too much of a hardship to keep open. Cohen’s community has organized a GoFundMe to help pay for her healthcare.

Translation: in a city in which the Democratic leadership kept COVID-19 restrictions both stricter and longer-lasting than most, the Toasted Walnut was an economic casualty just like hundreds of others. But, as you might have guessed, that wasn’t really the reason the original article cited:

There are myriad reasons why lesbian bars have dwindled over the years, many rooted in gender disparities and economic barriers that women and nonbinary people face.

So, according to the author, Massarah Mikati, who “cover(s) what makes Philadelphia great: our communities of color,” it’s not that the Walnut drew too few customers, who spent enough money, to succeed economically, but that “gender disparities” and “economic barriers” shut the place down. Miss Mikati didn’t even mention that a huge number of bars, restaurants and other businesses which depended on a sufficient volume of in traffic failed during the panicdemic — no, that’s not a typographical error; panic is exactly how I see the restrictions imposed — failed.

The Walnut was located at 1316 Walnut Street, which is Philly’s Center City neighborhood, a block and a half from the Walnut-Locust Street SEPTA subway station, and there are two SEPTA bus stops within a block. There’s plenty of public transportation, and the area is about as safe as any in Philly. But the Lesbian Bar Project stated that “in the 1980s, there were roughly 200 Lesbian Bars in the United States. Today, there are fewer than 25.” Could it possibly be that a lesbian bar just isn’t a particularly strong business model?

The real thrust of Miss Mikati’s article was a lament that there aren’t “spaces” in which there are few, if any, men present, “spaces” in which non-heterosexual women can really feel “safe.” Were it more about economics, I’d probably not have written about it, but the author’s entire piece is a subtle lament, trying to convey the feeling that lesbians, in a very homosexual-supportive city, are somehow being deprived of something they deserve, when it’s really just simple economics.

IF another lesbian bar springs up in Philly, I really won’t care. It will face the same problems as any bar or restaurant, the problem of making money.

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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Killadelphia: Not as bad as last year!

January is over, and we have the final numbers from the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page: the city officially admits to 30 homicides for January, a major improvement over January of the previous three years. If the current rate of killings is maintained throughout the year, that would put Philly on track for 353 murders for 2023.

However, the website Broad + Liberty, following its exposé concerning how the official numbers have dramatically undercounted killings, has a different number. Broad + Liberty has been keeping a running track of homicides and suspicious deaths in the City of Brotherly Love, including documenting with official police press releases.

B + L have counted 33 homicides, plus one suspicious death. Yeah, that’s still significantly lower than the last three years, but it’s 10% higher than the city admits.

As always, there’s more. The city’s official shooting victims database has documented 141 shootings in January. That’s an improvement over January of 2022, in which the same site recorded 166 shootings, a 15.06 decline in shootings, which is a far lower decline than the 31.82% decline in the official homicide numbers. Either the city is getting better at keeping people who have been wounded by gunfire from dying, or the gang-bangers have become even worse shots than usual; both could be true.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer really, really, really hates the police!

We have noted previously that The Philadelphia Inquirer declines to publish the photographs of people accused of crimes. But when the accused are cops, even cops against whom police-hating District Attorney Larry Krasner cannot get convictions? Yup, the Inquirer will publish their photos!

Former Philly cop Carl Holmes’ sexual assault case has been tossed out of court

Prosecutors moved to withdraw charges after saying they’d been unable to get a key witness to appear at Holmes’ trial.

by Chris Palmer | Tuesday, January 31, 2023 | 1:59 PM EST

The criminal case against former Philadelphia Police commander Carl Holmes, who had been accused of sexually assaulting women at work, effectively collapsed Tuesday when a key accuser failed to show up to testify at trial.

The photo to the right is actually a screenshot from the Inquirer story, including the newspaper’s caption. I included it this was as documentation that yes, it was in there. The Inky’s image is linked here, and you can click on the photo to enlarge it.

We noted last October how the newspaper had published photos of former law enforcement officers accused of crimes.

Assistant District Attorney Clarke Beljean said at a brief hearing that prosecutors and detectives had taken extensive steps in recent days to find the witness and persuade her to come to court. They’d even asked a judge to issue a bench warrant Monday, when the trial had been scheduled to begin.

But none of those efforts was successful. And without the woman’s testimony, Beljean said, “I cannot put on a case.”

The charges connected to that witness — Michele Vandegrift, who said Holmes sexually assaulted her in his office in 2007 — were the only offenses still standing against Holmes, who had been charged in 2019 with assaulting two other subordinates. The cases connected to those witnesses had already fallen apart in court due to questions about their credibility or availability to testify.

Holmes, 57, who has denied the allegations, showed little reaction as prosecutors moved to withdraw the latest charges. He and his lawyer, Gregory Pagano, declined to comment as they left the courtroom.

Further down:

Holmes was once one of the Police Department’s highest-ranking commanders, a chief inspector who spent nearly three decades on the force and was also a lawyer. But during his career, he had been publicly accused of sexually assaulting women he worked with — allegations detailed extensively by The Inquirer and the Daily News.

Note how that’s phrased: article author Chris Palmer has written it in a way to imply that yes, Mr Holmes is guilty, guilty, guilty, the newspaper has documented it, and that the only problem is that witnesses won’t cooperate. Common Pleas Court Judge Shanese Johnson told the prosecutors, “She’s no longer interested in being part of this case. She’s ducking you.”

When I tried the story’s internal link, several times around 3:20 PM EST, I kept getting “Internal server error.”

In 2019, District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office accused Holmes of crimes including attempted sexual assault and indecent assault following a grand jury investigation. At the time, Krasner said he believed the investigation showed that powerful men in the Police Department had operated with “impunity,” particularly if they were accused of wrongdoing by women. But Krasner said his office would not shy away from prosecuting cases even if he believed they had been “mishandled” in the past.

And here the Inquirer shows us how much they love Mr Krasner — they endorsed him for re-election in 2021 — and how they love the George Soros-sponsored defense attorney who is now District Attorney’s attacks on the police.

There’s a significant amount of information in the original about how the purported witnesses have refused to come forward.

But there’s more in today’s Inquirer to show how much the editors hate the police:

Without systemic change, police killings will continue | Editorial

Political leaders and police departments should be able to balance the need to combat crime with the need to address racial inequality.

by The Editorial Board | Tuesday, January 31, 2023 | 5:00 AM EST

The sickening video of Tyre Nichols being beaten to death by five Memphis, Tenn., police officers is yet another reminder of how departments across the country have failed to address systemic police brutality.

From George Floyd to Freddie Gray to Michael Brown to Eric Garner, and every harrowing death in between, we have been here before. We have heard the cries for help, from “I can’t breathe” to “I’m just trying to go home,” and we have watched the videos of cold-blooded murder by cops, often over minor incidents.

Each time, there is a call for police reform. Each time, nothing seems to change.

Perhaps even more horrifying is that for every recorded spectacle of a senseless killing, hundreds of other murders at the hands of police go unnoticed. Police officers shot and killed a record 1,096 people in 2022, according to a database maintained by the Washington Post.

More than 1,096 people were murdered in 2022 in Chicago and Philadelphia alone, but the editors of the Inquirer don’t seem to care much about them. The newspaper rarely reports much at all about the killings in Philly, and almost never tells readers about arrests or convictions of killers unless the killings were somehow more noticeable than usual, such as the Roxborough High School shooting. We have detailed, many times, how the newspaper scrubs the race of both victims and accused criminals from the stories they do cover.

The editorial, which reads like it was written by the Inky’s most wild-eyed ‘progressive’ columnist, Will Bunch, continued:

There is some cautious optimism in seeing the five Memphis police officers fired and charged with second-degree murder and other crimes. But would the justice have been as swift if the officers were white?

Given that Mr Bunch the Editorial Board mentioned, further down, the George Floyd case in Minneapolis, it’s obvious that they do know that white police officers have been charged, tried, and convicted previously, so why the snarky bit of race-baiting?

There is no denying the racially biased culture that is embedded in policing. It goes without saying that the disproportionate number of people killed by police are Black.

What the editorial does not note is that a “disproportionate number” of criminals are black.

While the calls to “defund the police” may have been ill-phrased, the need to reevaluate and possibly redirect law enforcement funding hasn’t gone away. However, a pandemic-driven rise in shootings and crimes — along with Republican attacks — led to pushback. As public opinion shifted, so did the political will to address systemic racial inequality.

In the end, funding actually increased in most police departments, including in Philadelphia. In fact, with shootings and murders near records, none of the candidates in the upcoming mayoral primary has proposed to reduce police funding.

Yeah, the political moves to try to ‘defund the police’ mostly went nowhere, certainly not in Philadelphia where officially reported homicides jumped from 356 to 499 in 2020, and them up to 562 in 2021. The public responded with a huge surge in applications to carry firearms, because they saw the Wild West show into which the City of Brotherly Love had descended. And while the Philadelphia Police Department didn’t see a formal reduction in funding, the fact that Philadelphia is nearly 600 officers undermanned from its authorized full strength of 6,380, with around 800 more expected to retire within the next four years means that the Police Department has been defunded in a de facto sense.

The embedded link is to an Inquirer story; the editors already knew about the short staffing.

(M)ore departments need to increase de-escalation training and require fellow officers to intervene to stop abuse and report excess force.

This was perhaps the funniest part of all, because in his own column, Mr Bunch wrote:

Honor Tyre Nichols: Stop ATL’s dumb ‘Cop City’

Atlanta’s $90M project destroying a forest to train repressive cops needs to die

by Will Bunch | Tuesday, January 31, 2023

The lead story on CNN and other news outlets on Monday morning — after a weekend in which America struggled to process the utter senselessness of a Memphis cop beating that killed 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, an unarmed Black man — was that calls for “police reform” are again accelerating.

The headline struck me as — to use a phrase that normally makes me cringe — “fake news.” Those calls had been much louder and more forceful after a Minneapolis cop murdered George Floyd in 2020, and yet only a scattered hodgepodge of local-level reforms have even been attempted. Talk that President Joe Biden and Congress will revive a stalled federal bill to curb police brutality crashes into the blue wall of an inevitable filibuster by Senate Republicans. The nation’s weariness was reflected last weekend in relatively small protests, compared to the millions who marched nearly three years ago.

Yes, all of that boldface is in Mr Bunch’s original. I left it in to provide a greater example of the childishness of his writing.

Is it wrong of me to suspect that the distinguished Mr Bunch regrets that the “relatively small protests” this past weekend were small and peaceful, as opposed to the 2020 riots with their arson and destruction? Of course, the Inky fired forced the resignation of Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski over the headline “Buildings Matter, Too” on an article lamenting the destruction of property by the rioters in Philly, so maybe the #woke there — at least the ones left at that dying newspaper — do want another summer of fire and hate.

But if American leaders are serious in claiming that things are truly going to be different this time — that we are finally going to begin dismantling a deeply entrenched and militarized police-state culture that is drenched in white supremacy and treats Black and brown communities like occupation zones — then I know exactly where this project can start.

In the city that gave the world Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — Atlanta, Georgia.

There, of all places, law-enforcement leaders backed by the business and political establishment are using brute force and now demagogic false claims of “domestic terrorism” to impose a $90 million monument to everything that is wrong about police culture in America: a massive training center that will scar a vital urban forest with a mock city where cops will learn to put down unrest after the inevitable next Tyre Nichols or George Floyd.

The source cited by Mr Bunch in his embedded link under “domestic terrorism” states that, “One man was fatally shot by police in the confrontation after he opened fire and wounded a state trooper, authorities said.”

Wouldn’t a police training center include the lessons of the George Floyd and Tyre Nichols incidents? Wouldn’t trainers be stressing that when force is needed, it must be the minimum force required to make an arrest, and to de-escalate situations so that officers will not face criminal charges?

Well, not to Mr Bunch, given his “train repressive cops” secondary title.

But the rot of the Cop City plan runs deeper than the repeating history of Riotsville or the facility’s location near the former site of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, which was marred during its 20th-century run by racialized violence. Indeed, the plan for Cop City almost reads as if that new ChatGPT AI tool was asked to “describe a project that epitomizes everything wrong with modern America,” since it seeks to train Atlanta’s militarized police force at a facility that would take down irreplaceable forest wetlands that protect against climate change.

It would be wiser if Mr Bunch actually checked his sources. When your source is Teen Vogua, a real journalist — as opposed to a journolist[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 — would check other sources.[2]One reason I use primarily credentialed media sources which run to the liberal side of the political spectrum is so that what I write can’t be criticized as stemming from evil reich-wing … Continue reading

“(V)ital urban forest”? “(I)rreplaceable forest wetlands”, huh? Robert Stacy McCain is a native of Atlanta, and knows something about the Peachtree State:

Being a native of Atlanta, let me tell you something about Georgia, in case you’re not familiar with the area. It’s hot and humid, which means that all manner of plant life grows with astonishing rapidity there. The house where I grew up in Douglas County had a chain-link fence around the backyard, and every summer one of my chores was to go out and cut the honeysuckle vines off that fence. If you didn’t cut those vines off — and it was tedious work, trust me — the whole fence would be covered in vines. The ditch down by the road? Oh, the hours spent with a slingblade cuttting back the brush and briars that sprang up relentlessly there! And the pine forest up the hill across the road? Oh, just 40 or 50 years earlier, that had all been farmland, until the bottom fell out of the cotton market. Stop farming your property for just a few years, and next thing you know, what used to be a pasture becomes a tangled forest — and that, my friends, is what happened to the old Atlanta Prison Farm.

A sling blade.

Reckon all those out-of-town hippies camping out in what they’ve dubbed “The Atlanta Forest” never handled a slingblade in their whole lives, and they sure as hell don’t realize that this “forest” only dates back to the 1960s or so, when the inmates stopped cultivating the property. Now it’s a tangled mess of briars and vines and oaks and pines and, if you’re a damned tree-hugging fool from Pittsburgh or someplace, maybe it seems like a South American rain forest or something, but it’s just what happens to any property in Georgia that’s gone untended for a while.

Not just Georgia; it happens in eastern Kentucky as well. I see it all around me. Mr McCain included that picture of the area, and it’s more weeded and tangled than a forest. But Mr Bunch has never been able to see the trees because the ‘forest’ is in the way.

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 One reason I use primarily credentialed media sources which run to the liberal side of the political spectrum is so that what I write can’t be criticized as stemming from evil reich-wing conservatives.