Category Archives: Culture

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Philadelphian Amanda Marcotte is very, very upset that 35 transgender people have been murdered this year, but doesn’t care about 496 killings in her home town

Unless she has moved again, and I missed it — something which is always possible — Salon’s senior politics writer Amanda Marcotte lives in Philadelphia. As of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, December 15th, the City of Brotherly Love had seen 496 homicides officially, and with 110 deaths listed as “suspicious,” the total is doubtlessly well above 500. At least one other homicide occurred on Friday, but the Police Department do not update the homicide statics until Monday morning, so it’s entirely possible that the city will top 500 by then.

Yet, to Miss Marcotte, the important thing is hate crimes!

Republicans want to blame Club Q shooting and other hate crimes, baselessly, on police defunding

During Wednesday’s House hearing, Republicans minimized the role bigotry plays in anti-LGBTQ hate crimes

by Amanda Marcotte | Thursday, December 15, 2022 | 6:00 AM EST

“To the politicians and activists who accuse LGBTQ people of grooming children and being abusers, shame on you.”

During Wednesday’s House Oversight committee hearing on anti-LGBTQ violence, Club Q bartender Michael Anderson was blunt, both about his experiences and whom he holds responsible for the horrific mass shooting he survived. A combination of “inaction on gun reform” and “hate speech,” he said, led to that terrible night last month in Colorado Springs, where he “saw my friend lying on the floor, bleeding out, knowing there was little to no chance of surviving the bullet wound.”

Matthew Haynes, the owner of Club Q, testified that there is a direct line from Republican leaders who reject LGBTQ rights to the five deaths and massive trauma suffered by his customers and staff. Noting that “169 members of Congress” voted against a recently-signed law protecting same-sex marriage, he asked, “Are LGBTQ people not part of your constituency? Do you not represent us? While we wait for you to answer, we are being slaughtered and dehumanized across this country, in communities you took oaths to protect.”

Well, perhaps some of them represent the great majority of their constituents, many of whom do not accept the notion of same-sex ‘marriage.’

There were, as Miss Marcotte cited, five deaths in the Club Q shooting; that’s only 491 fewer than her adopted hometown has seen through her publication date.

Republicans on the Oversight Committee, however, had a different villain in mind to blame — for not just the Club Q shooting, but for the fact that the past two years have seen record levels of fatal violence against trans and gender non-conforming people. They pointed fingers at Democrats, protests against police brutality, and mostly non-existent police defunding.

Well, I followed the link Miss Marcotte gave us, and found this:

Sadly, 2022 has already seen at least 35 transgender people fatally shot or killed by other violent means. We say “at least” because too often these stories go unreported — or misreported. In previous years, the majority of these people were Black and Latinx transgender women.

The 35 transgender people killed? There had been 35 Philadelphians killed by January 23rd — 37, actually — of this year, but their deaths weren’t worth the notice of the political left.

What was I writing about in January of 2022? I was writing about The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far-left columnist Will Bunch, and his hatred not of crime, but of the police! I was writing about Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, and his refusal to seriously enforce the gun control laws the city does have.

The left complain that so many ‘transgender women of color’ have been killed, without wanting to recognize that the majority of them were working as prostitutes, and tricking some frequently intoxicated johns into thinking they were real women.

Even beyond Colorado Springs, there’s little reason to think police “defunding” is shaping crime. As the Center for American Progress reported in July, “Democrat-run cities spend more money on policing than Republican-run cities” and of “the 25 largest cities, 20 saw increases in their police budgets from FY 2019 to FY 2022.” The slogan “defund the police” that was bandied about Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 never really took off with Democratic politicians and certainly hasn’t had much impact on actual police funding. For certain, some cities have attempted to reallocate police funding to prevention services, but in general, those efforts have been overstated in the media coverage given to the “defund the police” movement.

Miss Marcotte claimed that the failure of Colorado Springs to enforce the law against the Club Q shooter for his previous crimes, or use the so-called “red flag” law against him, wasn’t the result of defunding the police problems, without recognizing that while Philadelphia hasn’t defunded the police de jure, being around 600 officers short of authorized staffing levels has done so in a practical sense. Philadelphia is her (adopted) hometown; surely a political junkie like her can’t be unaware of that.

But she can be aware of the fact that she just doesn’t care about the crime which isn’t politically useful for the Democrats. She is appalled that Republicans in the state House of Representatives impeached District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), due to his let ’em loose attitude when it comes to criminals and the city’s homicide rate, blaming it instead on Pennsylvania’s not-terribly-strict gun control laws, but she never did anything really radical like look at the numbers behind those laws. It was about Mr Krasner and “his anti-racist and progressive views on fighting crime,” without looking at the fact that crime has gotten worse, not better. She whined about the National Rifle Association standing up for our Second Amendment rights, after eight people were murdered in Buffalo and another ten in Boulder, blaming it on, you guessed it, evil white men:

The grim reality is that the entire nation is in the thrall to a minority of extremely insecure mostly white men who, drunk on decades of NRA-fueled propaganda, have decided that having the ability to commit mass murder at a moment’s notice is a crucial component of maintaining their manhood against the ever-encroaching threats from de-gendered Potato Heads and lady video game players. Most of these men claim exoneration because they don’t personally grab one of their many overpriced killing machines to lay waste to a grocery store or high school. Grotesquely, some even use these mass shootings to indulge in public fantasies about how they would totally stop an active shooter, though somehow they never seem to actually get around to doing it. But ultimately, they’ve become complacent in the face of mass murder from decades of being told by right-wing media that there’s a binary choice between preventing murder and watching Michelle Obama personally run off with their testicles in her handbag. Worse, the right has cultivated an overall suspicion of the very concept of concern for the lives of others at all.

On the day she published that, March 23, 2021, 111 Philadelphians had bled out their life’s blood so far that year in the city’s mean streets, the vast majority of them black, and the vast majority of their (too few) known killers also being black. Unless my math is very, very wrong, 111 killed in Philly, in her adopted hometown, is a larger number than the 18 victims she mentioned. While not in the daily homicide totals, the Philadelphia Shootings Victims Dashboard takes the information from the city’s Shootings Victims Database, and has noted that, from the beginning of 2015 through Thursday, December 15th, out of 2,779 fatal shootings in the city, 2,129, or 76.61%, were black males, with another 154, 5.54%, being black females.

Think about that: of 2,779 homicides by firearm in Philadelphia, blacks were the victims 2,283 times, 81.15%, in a city in which only 38.3% of the population are non-Hispanic black. And while Philly doesn’t make the statistics by race easy, St Louis does. Out of 191 recorded homicides reported on December 18, 2022, 170, or 89.01%, of the victims were black. Of the 141 identified suspects, 135, or 95.74%, are black.

According to the Census Bureau, only 44.8% of the city’s population are black.

What am I to think other than, when it comes to Miss Marcotte, and just as I have said about The Philadelphia Inquirer, black lives just don’t matter, not unless they are somehow politically useful to the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading left.

Robert Stacy McCain just published an article on his site, Crime is not just a statistic, adapted from The American Spectator, No Safety in Chicago: A daylight robbery highlights danger in urban crime wave. Somehow, some way, we evil reich-wing white males are actually concerned with the huge crime rate in our major cities, about black people being killed in the virtually normalized gang, oops, sorry, cliques of young men[2]We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes … Continue reading shootings, while for the oh-so-noble left, those things are normalized and ignored, because they just aren’t politically useful for the left.

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated during normal business hours, Monday through Friday, so the last ‘official’ report was 496 homicides as of the end of Thursday. I’ve already heard of two more, and I’m wondering: will the city hit 500 when the statistics are published again on Monday?

The left don’t like conservatives using the crime statistics for political gain, but conservatives can use the crime statistics that way for one reason, and one reason only: what the left have been doing simply has not worked. But for the left to admit that they have not worked is to challenge their entire mindset, their entire political philosophy.

So, they do the only thing that they can: they hide their heads in the sand and deny reality. For the left, they’d rather keep their governing philosophy, and if that means ignoring over 500 homicides a year in Philly, well that’s just what they’ll do.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

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

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

↑2 We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups.”
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Killadelphia With over 100 "suspicious" deaths recorded, the real numbers could be much higher than the official ones

We had previously noted that, despite the occurrence of a documented murder, the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page numbers hadn’t moved.

Now we are informed that it had been a computer glitch, which has now been fixed, and the update is a big one: eight new homicides reported. The First Street Journal had reported, on December 7th, that there was a statistical possibility, at the margin of error, that Philadelphia had an outside chance of finishing the year with fewer than 500 homicides. That didn’t last long, and by the 12th, it had vanished, as the city was on a clear path to between 509 and 516 homicides.

We’re so far into the year now, December 15th having been the 349th day of the year, that one or two homicides don’t move the statistics much, but eight homicides in four days? That has moved the average daily killings number up to 1.4212, which puts the city on pace for 519 killings, 518.7393 to be more precise.

There’s more. There had been a seeming downturn after Hallowe’en, and that was what had made me hopeful that the city might, just might, finish under 500. But now there have been 51 homicides in the 45 days since October 31st, 1.3333 per day, and that works out to 18.13333 for the sixteen days remaining in the year, or a total of 514.

Two ways of calculating the trends, and the projected numbers are drawing ever closer. However, the Christmas holidays always seem to be big ones for killings — Peace on Earth, and all of that — and during the last 16 days of 2021, there had been 27 homicides. If the City of Brotherly Love hit that pace again, Philly would finish with 523 murders.

Retired Philadelphia Police Sergeant Mark Fusetti reported that, according to his sources, there have also been 110 “suspicious” and 76 “other” deaths recorded by the Philly Police Department. While there are supposedly no bodies attached to the 76 “other” cases, there are to the 110 “suspicious” ones. Some of the suspicious may be self-defense claims that have not yet been assigned that status, and would not be part of the homicide numbers, but others could be actual murders, but ones which the police have not yet developed sufficient evidence to call them such. Now that Ben Mannes of Broad + Liberty has broken the story of the large number of suspicious deaths — a story that our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper has thus far ignored — one wonders if, as those suspicious deaths get reclassified, will they be added to the ‘official’ homicide totals?

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Killadelphia What, did somebody recover from being dead?

We have already noted that there are questions concerning the homicide numbers in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page reported that there had been 488 murders as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, December 11th.

At 9:21 AM EST on Monday, December 12th, Stevee Keeley of Fox 29 News tweeted:

Identity & age of Philadelphia’s 489th homicide victim in 2022 still not known yet to @phillypolice A 16 year old was shot twice in same shooting incident in Northeast Philadelphia 3:46am @FOX29philly.

Mr Keeley’s tweet included an image of the police press release.

So, a male of unknown age was pronounced dead at the scene, and another person was shot there, yet no weapon was recovered, nor was anyone arrested. Obviously a firearm was used, and just as obviously, someone fled the scene.

So, when I checked the Current Crime Statistics page this morning, I expected to see at least 489 homicides. Maybe I’m not the greatest mathematician around, but 488 + 1 = 489, right?

Well, apparently not, because the Philadelphia Police Department are now reporting that there were 488 homicides through 11:59 PM EST on Monday, December 12th. What, did somebody recover from being dead?

Is it any wonder that some people have no confidence at all in the city’s statistics?

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw is on her way out. A political appointee of Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia), following stints in Oakland, California, and as Chief of Police in Portland, Oregon, and supposedly once considered to have become Police Commissioner of New York City, when Mr Kenney’s term is over at the end of next year, Miss Outlaw is almost certainly out as well. With 499 murders in the city in 2020, her first year — and remember: 502 was the number first reported, and then scaled back — followed by 562 in 2021, and almost certainly between 509 and 516, good for second place all-time this year, it’s difficult to see any of Philly’s mayoral candidates wanting to keep her around. Former Councilwoman Helen Gym Flaherty, the furthest left, and therefore most probable winner of the Democratic primary, is an ally of District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Mr Krasner and Miss Outlaw do not exactly get along. Even if another Democrat wins the primary — and no Republican has ever won a direct mayoral election in Philadelphia — they are all looking at how Let ’em Loose Larry has won by a landslide in his election.

In other words, Miss Outlaw’s got to go.

This is the time, with only a year left in office, for the Commissioner to do something really radical and tell the truth. If she’s going to have to leave anyway, she could at least do so honestly.

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Why would anyone want to become a cop these days?

Following the unfortunate death of methamphetamine-and-fentanyl crazed drug addict and previously convicted felon George Floyd while he was resisting a legitimate arrest in Minneapolis, the left went wild, and “Defund the Police“, as though the problem wasn’t crime, but people being arrested for committing crimes. This stupid notion was popular with the street agitators, and thus some Democratic politicians took up the call, but it wound up fading from sight reasonably quickly, as sensible people — meaning, in this case: those not out in antifa demonstrations — soundly defeated a police reorganization proposal in Minneapolis.

But, of course, attacks on the legitimacy of the police continue, from shakedown lawsuits in Detroit to the George Soros-sponsored, cop-hating defense lawyer serving as Philadelphia’s District Attorney Larry Krasner trying to put police officers doing their duty in jail, Philadelphia didn’t actually defund the police, per se, but the effect of the city’s policies has been to do just that: as we have previously noted, the Philadelphia Police Department is nearly 600 officers understrength from its authorized full strength of 6,380, with around 800 more expected to retire within the next four years. Police Academy classes have not kept up with officer attrition. And really, who’d want to become a Philly cop when the Police Commissioner won’t support you and the DA is trying to throw you in jail?

Well, it’s not just Philly! From The New York Times:

N.Y.P.D. Officers Leave in Droves for Better Pay in Smaller Towns

This year has seen the highest number of resignations in two decades.

By Chelsia Rose Marcius | Friday, December 9, 2022

Earlier this year, the chief of police in Aurora, Colo., needed to find a few dozen officers to join his force.

The chief, Dan Oates, was 50 officers short to patrol Aurora, a city of roughly 400,000 people just east of Denver. But he knew limiting his search to Colorado would not be enough: Like many other leaders in law enforcement, he has found that fewer people these days want to be cops.

So Chief Oates and his team began to seek recruits at agencies where they believed pay and morale were low. They settled on New York City, and in August, he flew about 1,800 miles to meet with New York Police Department officers. He convinced 14 of them to move out west.

“I feel bad raiding my home agency,” said Chief Oates, who once served as a deputy chief in New York City. “But frankly it’s a cutthroat environment right now among police chiefs to recruit talent, and we all desperately need it.”

The departure of those officers was no anomaly. The New York Police Department, with about 34,000 officers, has seen more resignations this year than at any time in the past two decades as other agencies have become more aggressive in recruiting from its ranks.

Through November, about 1,225 officers resigned before even reaching five years of service, according to New York City Police Pension Fund statistics obtained by The New York Times. Many left for other New York State agencies or police departments outside the state.

There’s a lot more at the original, but the numbers are pretty stark.

Chief Oates, who retired this week, said the officers he recruited from New York were partially lured by better pay. The starting salary at the Aurora Police Department is about $65,000 in an area where the average monthly rent is approximately $1,750 and the average home sale price is about $624,000, according to an August report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Incoming officers with four or more years on the job can earn a salary of around $100,000. Aurora also gives incentives to those who transfer from other departments, including a signing bonus of up to $10,000 and a $5,000 relocation bonus.

That is more money than officers make in New York City, where the median sales price for a home is $810,000 and the average monthly rent is about $4,500. The starting salary at the Police Department is $42,500, according to the most recent contract between the agency and the officer’s union. After three and a half years of service, officers can earn a salary of $47,000, and $85,292 after five and a half.

Even foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia pays its police officers more: $59,795 annual salary while a Recruit in the Academy, with a raise to $63,945 upon graduation and joining the PPD. Philly is a lot less expensive a city in which to live than New York: housing costs less, taxes are lower, and they can get Wawa coffee to drink as well!

But if the pay is higher, it also means putting up with open air drug markets in Kensington and having to patrol the Philadelphia Badlands.

As we noted on Thursday, when Philly had an official — whatever “official” means in Philadelphia — 499 homicides in 2020, neighboring Upper Darby Township had 10. With a population of 85,681 according to the 2020 census, that means that Upper Darby had a homicide rate of 11.67 per 100,000 population, while Philly’s that same year was 31.11 . . . and that paled before the 2021 homicide rate. Even directly adjacent to Philadelphia, smaller towns are safer.

Aurora, Colorado, which poached officers from the NYPD? With a population of 386,261 according to the 2020 census, the city saw 38 homicides that year, for as homicide rate of 9.84 per 100,000. Why wouldn’t a former NYPD cop, or Philadelphia Police officer, prefer to work there, where the pay is better and the crime rate a lot lower?

Yes, police pay is unacceptably low in New York City, and the left-leaning city council isn’t going raise it that much. But the real problem is that the big cities in the east — and not a few in the west — just plain hate cops! Why would anyone want to work in a place where the public spit on your shadow, if not your shoes?

The far left wanted to defund the police, and while they didn’t get it de jure, it has been achieved de facto: with major city police departments being hundreds of officers undermanned — Baltimore is 420 officers short staffed — what the left wanted has been achieved: fewer dedicated police officers to enforce the law.

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Progressives can’t see the forest because of all the trees

According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, there have been 473 people murdered in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, December 1st. So, about what was District Attorney Larry Krasner worried on Thursday?

Advocates sound alarm on murders of transgender women in Philadelphia

Fox 29 News | Thursday, December 1, 2022 | 5:57 PM EST

PHILADELPHIA – Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner was among a group of LGBTQ activists who spoke about a troubling trend of deadly violence against trans women in the city over the recent years.

Investigators say on Thanksgiving morning, Sharee “Diamond” Jackson-McDonald – a transgender woman – was found shot to death inside a Germantown apartment. The murder of Jackson-McDonald was the 35 killing of a transgender or gender-non-conforming person in the United States this year.

Because I’m including the video from Fox 29 News, the rest is below the fold. I will warn the reader in advance: this is not politically correct in the slightest, and if that offends you, stop reading now. Continue reading →

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#HelenGym Flaherty wants to do for all of Philadelphia what Larry Krasner has done for law enforcement

The City of Brotherly Love finished the 11th month of the year with 472 homicides, 38 fewer than the total on November 30, 2021, a 7.45% decrease. That’s the good news, though 472 murders can hardly be considered as anything good.  That’s still 1.4132 per day, for a projected 515.81 for the year. Yet, as we have previously noted, homicides have been falling this fall — pun very much intended — and have been nothing like the surge seen between Labor Day and New Year’s Eve in 2021.

With 445 homicides at the end of Hallowe’en, there have been slightly less than one murder per day for November, actually 0.9 per day. If that rate continued through December, it works out to 27.9 more killings in 2022, which would put the city at ‘only’ 500 murders for the year, perhaps even 499 or 498, depending upon the vagaries of chance and just pure, dumb luck. That would leave 1990’s old record of an even 500 homicides in second place.

We did note, at the beginning of the month, that the city had initially posted 2020 as seeing 502 murders, something which, alas!, I failed to screen capture for documentation . . . but fortunately another person did not. I do not know, but I strongly suspect that someone in the city government did not want the number of murders to reach 500, and it was close enough for the city to push the number down somehow, by moving some to 2021, or by perhaps reclassifying three deaths as ‘suspicious’ rather than homicides. Thus, I have little real confidence that 2020 ended below 499, but, of course, I can’t prove it. Nevertheless, if 2022 can finish with just 500, or perhaps even a couple fewer homicides, that would be something of a victory.

However, the city is still seeing more shootings than last year, 2,154 so far in 2022, versus 2,144 through the end of November last year. It’s not that the gang-bangers, oops, I’m sorry, “cliques of young men”[1]We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes … Continue reading, aren’t just as violent, but that they’re poorer shots, and the Philadelphia Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy of putting shooting victims into patrol cars and taking them to the emergency rooms themselves, rather than waiting for an ambulance, along with even more hard-earned experience dealing with gunshot wounds, may have reduced the death toll somewhat.

Now comes former city councilwoman Helen Gym Flaherty[2]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., who wants to reverse that:

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 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.”

There’s more at the original.

Naturally, I went to Mrs Flaherty’s campaign website, to see how she had addressed the issues . . . and found out that she hadn’t; there was no specific “issues” page. Thus, we are left with secondary sources as to what she would do as Mayor.

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, including Green.

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. A Twitter friend who goes by the handle Over Salted Pretzel — and really, there’s no such thing as an over salted pretzel, though there are certainly under salted ones — did a lot of the research, and has the graphs here.

Mrs Flaherty apparently wants to move Mr Krasner’s policies into City Hall as well.

It may be smart politics: despite the huge increase in murders, the vast majority of them in Philadelphia’s “black and brown” neighborhoods — and Philly is our second most internally segregated large city, so there really are segregated “black and brown” neighborhoods — Mr Krasner was re-elected in 2021, with his greatest support coming from those areas of the city. As Mrs Flaherty appears to be running on the same things as Mr Krasner has, and to the left of the other candidates, she might very well win the Democratic primary, which, in Philly, is virtually the same thing as winning the election.

There are really only two possibilities:

  • The candidate truly believes the things she has said in the past, which proves that she is just boneheadedly stupid; or
  • The candidate knows that those policies not only do not work, but are actively harmful, but she doesn’t care because she thinks they’ll win her votes, in which case she is actively evil.

You can choose for yourself which one you believe is correct.

References

References
↑1 We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups“
↑2 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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Let ’em loose Larry Krasner doesn’t like it when police officers aren’t in jail

We have previously noted the hostility of the George Soros-sponsored defense lawyer who has become Philadelphia’s District Attorney, Larry Krasner, when it comes to police officers. Simply put, he hates their guts.

Mr Krasner has charged three officers with murder from three separate incidents. On November 17th, we noted that while the District Attorney’s Office was able to get a manslaughter conviction against former officer Eric Ruch, though he was acquitted of the third-degree murder charge Mr Krasner sought, but Common Pleas Court Judge Barbara McDermott sentenced Mr Ruch to just 11½ to 23 months in jail, well below the state advisory minimum of 3½ years.

Mr Krasner waxed wroth:

DA Larry Krasner seeks a tougher sentence for convicted cop Eric Ruch

by Craig R McCoy | Tuesday, November 29, 2022

District Attorney Larry Krasner has asked a Common Pleas Court judge to reconsider the sentence she gave a former Philadelphia police officer who shot and killed an unarmed man, saying it was too lenient and appeared to blame the victim.

Krasner filed the motion with a persistent nemesis, Common Pleas Court Judge Barbara McDermott, criticizing her decision to sentence former officer Eric Ruch, 34, to 11½ to 23 months in county jail last month after a jury convicted him of voluntary manslaughter. It was the first such conviction for an on-duty police killing in at least 50 years.

Under advisory state sentencing guidelines — which judges don’t have to follow — Ruch faced a minimum sentence of 3½ years, Krasner pointed out during a news conference Tuesday at the District Attorney’s Office.

Because McDermott’s sentence was under two years, state law mandates that Ruch serve his time in the Philadelphia prison system, rather than in the far-flung and grimmer archipelago of state prison system. It also meant that McDermott, and not the state Parole Board, retains control over whether to grant him early parole.

Mr Krasner’s petition is unlikely to result in a stricter sentence, not only because judges in the Keystone State have fairly wide discretion, but because it seems that the DA’s Office went out of its way to piss off Judge McDermott:

In a 17-page appeals motion, prosecutors wrote that McDermott “improperly and excessively blamed the victim in this case.”

The ‘victim,’ 25-year-old Dennis Plowden, Jr, led police on a high-speed chase that ended when he plowed — yes, pun intended — into parked cars in the Olney section of Philadelphia. After Mr Plowden emerged from the car, he sat down, and, believing that he was using his right hand to pull a weapon, Officer Ruch fired, striking him in the hand and head. Judge McDermott did state that Mr Plowden caused the entire incident, and yes, she blamed him.

Of course, to Mr Krasner, people fleeing the police are never at fault.

McDermott and Krasner have also been at odds in another one of the cases the district attorney has brought against a former police officer. She presided over the murder case against ex-officer Ryan Pownall.

In that role, McDermott rejected Krasner’s attempt to limit the grounds on which Pownall’s defense lawyers could argue that police have a legal right to shoot suspects. Her decision was affirmed this summer by the state Supreme Court.

Note that important part: Judge McDermott’s decision was upheld by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court! She was right, and Mr Krasner was wrong.

Three months after that, McDermott tossed out Pownall’s case entirely. She said Krasner’s prosecutors had bungled the grand jury process that led to Pownall’s being charged.

Mr Krasner could appeal to Superior Court, but he’d have a tough time winning there. Judge McDermott could grant an early parole to Mr Ruch, and, as noted in a previous story:

McDermott suggested she would have let Ruch, 34, walk out of court with no prison time would it not diminish the severity of the voluntary manslaughter charge, which calls for a minimum of 4½ years in prison, according to state sentencing guidelines.

I’d hope that Judge McDermott would grant that early parole to Mr Ruch, though any time served lower than nine months, the time possible to earn good behavior credits, would be problematic.

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What punishment is too harsh for child molesters?

Good writers know that they need to have good opening paragraphs to entice the reader to continue on, and Washington Post reviewer Peter Marks sure nailed that one!

Take a deep breath and try to ruminate calmly on the position playwright Bruce Norris takes in his scintillating new play, “Downstate”: that the punishments inflicted on some pedophiles are so harsh and unrelenting as to be inhumane.

The obvious question for the reader quickly becomes: is any punishment for pedophiles harsh enough and unrelenting enough to be unjustified? I read the rest, because I wanted to see Mr Marks’ answer:

‘Downstate’ is a play about pedophiles. It’s also brilliant.

Bruce Norris’s off-Broadway work is tough stuff, questioning how society treats those convicted of heinous acts.

by Peter Marks | Wednesday, November 23, 2022 | 1:26 PM EST

NEW YORK — Take a deep breath and try to ruminate calmly on the position playwright Bruce Norris takes in his scintillating new play, “Downstate”: that the punishments inflicted on some pedophiles are so harsh and unrelenting as to be inhumane.

Are you still reading? It’s almost impossible to broad-brush the perspective at the heart of this impeccably acted drama without sounding as if one is advocating some extraordinary level of consideration for individuals who have committed unspeakable crimes. And yet Norris proposes a variation on this proposition at off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons: He is questioning what degree of compassion should society fairly hold out to those who have served their time for sexual abuse, assault or rape.

Obviously, I cannot quote the entire 949-word review, but with Mr Marks describing the crimes as “unspeakable,” the obvious question becomes: are any punishments for “unspeakable” crimes themselves unspeakable?

“Downstate,” directed with exceptional astuteness by Pam MacKinnon, seizes on our reflexive response to these crimes and shifts our emotional focus to the perpetrators. Living together in a group home in downstate Illinois, their movements monitored electronically (and their windows broken by irate vandals), four men of diverse age and backgrounds eke out marginal existences in menial jobs and managed routines. The house is like an island whose shores are washed with waves of contempt. Any protest or request is treated by their harried caseworker Ivy (played with brittle cynicism by Susanna Guzmán) as that of a passenger in steerage daring to ask for a clean blanket.

Norris, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Clybourne Park,” a bracingly funny play about race and gentrification inspired by “A Raisin in the Sun,” goes here for another societal jugular. And his provocative efforts result in one of the best theater evenings of the year. (Its pre-covid premiere occurred in 2018 at Steppenwolf Theatre in Norris’s hometown, Chicago.)

He’s loaded the dice to some degree in “Downstate,” as the predators who’ve completed their prison terms are depicted not as monsters but rather as complicated, troubled souls. Felix (Eddie Torres) is a taciturn loner, keeping to himself in a screened-off alcove. Gio (Glenn Davis) is a smarmy operator with a job at a local office supply superstore. Dee (K. Todd Freeman) is a clearheaded ex-stage performer who is fiercely protective of the oldest resident, wheelchair-bound Fred (Francis Guinan), a onetime piano teacher of serene disposition.

Here’s the problem: if Mr Norris’ play depicts the predators “not as monsters but rather as complicated, troubled souls,” does that not beg the question: can such people be both monsters and troubled souls? It’s obvious to me that those with pedophilic tendencies are “troubled souls,” men who ought to be wishing that they had some other inclination, any other inclination, because they have to know that engaging in their sexual preference is fraught with the risk of being caught and locked up. I’d like to think that, perhaps deep down, they might even realize the harm they are causing to their victims, but if any do, the actual offenders don’t seem to see that as problem enough not to commit their crimes.

There’s no sweeping under the threadbare rug in “Downstate” of the heinous offenses for which the men have been severely punished. We learn about what each of them has done, and we are in effect asked to judge for ourselves what magnitude of ongoing torment each deserves. It develops here as an agonizing moral question, one that our retributive correctional culture would rather not have to debate.

I was living in the Keystone State when the revelations of the crimes of former Penn State University assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky were revealed. The testimony came out in dribs and drabs, but most people were persuaded. When former graduate assistant Mike McQueary testified that he heard a “skin-on-skin smacking sound”, as he walked in and caught Mr Sandusky anally raping a young boy, a boy who had his “hands up on the wall” to brace himself, everyone knew what that meant: to put it bluntly, not only was Mr Sandusky sodomizing a boy around 10-years-old, but he was doing it vigorously. Pennsylvanians were, as Mr Marks put it, “judging for (themselves) what magnitude of ongoing torment (Mr Sandusky) deserve(d).” If anyone I knew thought that the former coach was being treated too harshly, none of them ever expressed that to me.

Scranton attorney Kathleen Kane made her 2012 campaign for state Attorney General based in part on criticism that then-Governor Tom Corbett (R-PA) had acted too slowly when he was Attorney General in bringing the case against Mr Sandusky, and she “received more votes than President Obama or Senator (Bob) Casey did in Pennsylvania during the 2012 elections; her total number of votes was then the fourth highest of any politician in Pennsylvania electoral history.”[1]Considering that Mrs Kane’s personal legal problems all came from her being Attorney General, she probably wishes she’d never run that race.

The way that Mr Marks puts it is interesting: he states that the perpetrators already “have been severely punished,” but how many people would say that any punishment shorter than life without the possibility of parole is severe enough? Mr Sandusky was sentenced to the statutory minimum of sixty years in prison; he will be eligible for parole no earlier than October 9, 2042, when he will be 98 years old. I never heard of anyone saying that he was sentenced too harshly.

Mr Marks goes on to describe a meeting between “Fred,” the wheelchair bound offended, and “Andy,” one of his victims who arrives seeking some kind of ‘closure’ over having been molested.

Fred’s loss of mobility came about after he was set upon and beaten brutally in prison. Context is all, for as Andy stumbles through a recitation of his psychic pain and suffering, we have the physical evidence of the price that Fred has already paid. Norris’s juxtaposition in this regard feels cheap. There was a way, I think, to acknowledge the damage that’s been done to Andy without judgmentally minimizing it.

How many of us would really think that a sex offender, especially a child molester, being beaten severely enough to wind up in a wheelchair is a bad thing?

The bad thing, as I see it, is that child molesters ever get out of prison. At around the same time, also in Pennsylvania, in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, the Rev Edward Avery, 69, was allowed to plead guilty to “involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and conspiracy to endanger the welfare of a child”, and sentenced to a whopping 2½ to 5 years in prison. Former priest James Brennan, whose first trial ended in a hung jury, then pleaded no contest to simple assault before a retrial, and received two years probation. Monsignor William Lynn was charged with child endangerment for moving accused priests around, but not of any sexual abuse himself, and got the more stringent sentence of 3 to 6 years in prison; he served 33 months before his conviction was overturned due to the law being incorrectly applied.

Mr Marks concluded that there will be a lot of potential playgoers who will simply not like it, due to the subject matter. While I am not averse to examining the thoughts and motivations of child molesters, to try to figure out what could possibly make them tick, the fundamental concept that child molesters do get released is offensive enough.

References

References
↑1 Considering that Mrs Kane’s personal legal problems all came from her being Attorney General, she probably wishes she’d never run that race.
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Killadelphia Things aren't as bad as last year, but they're sure not good

The weekend is over, and we’ve finally got the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page updated reliably. The news, though certainly bad enough, is a lot less bad than last year. Homicides are down 6.56% from the same date last year, and while a murder rate of 1.4199 per day (470 ÷ 331) works out to 518.2779 homicides for the year, that’s not only lower than last year by a significant amount, but lower than the 534.2928 the numbers at the end of October projected.

The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer noted the numbers, in a kind of weird way:

As of Tuesday, there have been 465 homicides in our city. All but 30 have been fatal shootings. The tally of the nonfatal kind, the kind that can leave physical and emotional scars that last a lifetime, stands at 1,688.

That includes four Overbrook High School students who were shot Wednesday morning after the West Philadelphia school let out early for Thanksgiving.

If we stay under last year’s record of 506 shooting deaths, it may be a victory of luck — an inch to the left, an inch to the right — or of the talented professionals at our overworked trauma centers. Either way, Philadelphians will be left holding their breath, wondering what next year will bring.

I notice that the police-hating Editorial Board gave no credit to the Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy of loading shooting victims into the initial patrol car on the scene and rushing them directly to the hospital rather than waiting for an ambulance. I can’t say that I find that surprising at all.

Looking at those numbers, there were 506 out of 562 total homicides in Philly last year, meaning that 56 murders, 9.96%, were committed by other means. This year, according to the Inky’s statistics, only 30 homicides, 6.45%, were committed with something other than a gun.

The numbers work out to 1.3344 shooting deaths per day, 487.0399 for the year, so the “inch to the left” argument tells me that the Editorial Board didn’t bother to actually do the math, but that’s another thing I don’t find a surprise.

Of course, even with the reduction in total homicides anticipated, it still means that the law enforcement team of Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia), District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw will have supervised five of the six bloodiest years since 2007. The only years Mr Kenney had that weren’t at the top of the chart was when Mr Krasner was not District Attorney, but I’m certain, certain! that that has nothing, nothing at all, to do with it.

The Census Bureau guesstimated Philadelphia’s population, as of July 2021, to be 1,576,251, a drop from the 2020 census figure of 1,603,797. Using those numbers, Philly had a homicide rate of 31.11 per 100,000 population in 2020, and 35.65 in 2021. Using 2021’s population guesstimate, and a projected homicide total of 518, the 2022 numbers work out to 32.86 per 100,000, but that’s provisional. It’s an improvement over last year, but certainly nothing about which to brag.