Category Archives: Culture

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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.

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The useful dead

Five people were murdered, with another 18 wounded, in a mass shooting in a Colorado Springs nightclub which catered primarily to homosexuals, and it’s a crisis unlike any we’ve ever seen before! Horrors! A mass shooting! “LGBTQI+ people are under attack! They’re not safe!”

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg is a homosexual male, so naturally this is on his radar, just like it is for all of the left who will never let a “crisis” go to waste.

In the meantime, as of 11:59 PL EST on Monday, November 21st, 464 people had poured out their life’s blood in the mean streets of the City of Brotherly Love, and nobody says a damned thing, because the vast majority of the victims, and of their killers, are black. According to the Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard, out of 2,746 fatal shootings in the city from 2015 through November 18, 2022, 2,114, or 76.79%, of the victims were black males, with another 153 (5.56%) being black females. That’s 82.35% of all fatal shooting victims over an almost eight-year period being black, in a city which is only, when Hispanics are counted as a separate category, 38.3% non-Hispanic black.

Hispanic males were the victims in 282 fatal shootings (10.24%), while 31 (1.13%) Hispanic females were shot to death. Using the formulation so loved by The Philadelphia Inquirer, that means that “Black and brown” people were the victims in 93.72% of all fatal shootings, and, other than when an “innocent” is killed, nobody really cares.

And while to-date homicides are actually down 6.45% from 2021’s record-shattering numbers, shootings are up, 1.16%. The Philadelphia Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy, of getting shooting victims into patrol cars and rushing them to the hospital rather than waiting on an ambulance appears to have had a significant effect in reducing the percentage of those shot expiring.

I guess that I have to give Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw credit for something, anyway, though I don’t give her credit for much.

But I have to ask: why are the five people killed in Colorado Springs more important than the 464 slaughtered in Philly? For every person killed in that nightclub, 93 were murdered in Philly!

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Crazy People Are Dangerous: No Motive Yet in Colorado Springs Shooting

Of course, the nightclub gunman can be demonized as someone who hated homosexuals — despite the fact he had a previous criminal incident which had nothing to do with them — and will be charged with a “hate crime”, while the Philly killers are mostly indistinguishable from their victims as far as race or ethnic group is concerned; there are no political points to be gained by demonizing the people who killed them. For the left, the nightclub victims are somehow deader than the people slaughtered in Philadelphia.  At the very least, they are far more useful dead than ordinary people in Philly.

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I suppose that it is much easier to be a ‘progressive’ when you don’t look at the facts

One would think that an actual Philadelphian, even if she’s lived there only a few years, would have a better grasp on the facts in the City of Brotherly Love, but when that Philadelphian is named Amanda Marcotte, you’d be very, very wrong.

Hours before it was announced that Democrats have won a majority in the state House for the first time in 17 years, the lame duck legislature in Pennsylvania made its last stand for MAGA by impeaching Larry Krasner, the district attorney in Philadelphia. While understandably unknown to most people outside Pennsylvania, Krasner has become a favorite punching bag in right-wing media, for his anti-racist and progressive views on fighting crime. Republicans paint him as “soft on crime” and blame him for the rise in gun violence in Philadelphia, even though a likelier culprit is the lax statewide gun laws passed by Republicans.

As always, Miss Marcotte doesn’t look more deeply into the question. Pennsylvania law states is that no subordinate governmental unit may impose firearms control restrictions stronger than those under state law. Thus, while there might be a couple of tiny tweaks in there, the City of Brotherly Love is under the same firearms laws as the rest of the Commonwealth.

I lived in Jim Thorpe for 15 years, and during those 15 years we had two murders in Carbon County, one in 2004 and another in 2006. If there was another one, I never heard of it, and I did search through the data, which is, regrettably, by township and borough in the county, and found only the two mentioned. And, as I recall, neither involved a firearm!

So, if the problem is the Commonwealth’s firearms control laws, why are the homicide rates so very, very different in Philly?

I previously wrote that in 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.

It got worse last year: with 562 homicides in Philly, out of 1027 total for Pennsylvania, 54.72% of all homicides in the Keystone State occurred in Philadelphia. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, was second, with 123 killings, 11.98% of the state’s total, but only 9.52% of Pennsylvania’s population.

The other 65 counties, with 78.11% of the state’s total population, had 33.30% of total murders. It should also be noted that in comparing 2018 with 2021, the homicide rate for the 65 counties which are not Philadelphia and Allegheny (where Pittsburgh is), barely increased, from 3.38 per 100,000 population, to 3.42, a 1.12% rise, in Philadelphia it jumped from 22.31 to 35.53 per 100,000 population, a 59.21% increase.

For some reason, a reason Miss Marcotte did not choose to explore, Philadelphia is simply different from the rest of Pennsylvania, at least in terms of its crime rate. Pennsylvanians in the rest of the Commonwealth are not shooting and killing each other at nearly the rate seen in Philly. Of course, to have investigated that more deeply would have been to ruin Miss Marcotte’s entire point.

As we noted on Friday, there’s more to the story. Under Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, Philly’s tremendous homicide rate was brought down dramatically. Sorted by total homicides for the year, five of the six deadliest years from 2007 through this year were under the terms of Mayor Jim Kenney and District Attorney Krasner. When Mr Kenney  had Mr Williams as his DA, murders were significantly lower.

Mr Krasner’s campaign website itself tells people what we already knew: he doesn’t like to lock up criminals:

When Philadelphia voters elected Larry Krasner as its District Attorney in 2017, he promised to end the failed tough-on-crime policies of the past, work to support victims and the community, and hold the powerful accountable. He has kept his promises. It hasn’t been easy. Larry inherited an office committed to incarceration regardless of the cost, even when this policy endangered and devastated our communities.

But in just three years, he has upended the office culture and implemented policies that put people first. Under Larry’s leadership:

  • The county jail population has decreased by 40% and this summer fell to its lowest level since 1985.
  • The amount of time people will spend in prison has dropped by over 18,000 years.
  • Years under probation or parole have decreased by 57% overall, 65% for drug offenses and 70% for property offenses in the most oversupervised big city, Philly, and the second most oversupervised state, Pennsylvania.

A rational observer might just wonder: have Mr Krasner’s ‘progressive’ policies actually worked to reduce violence and crime in the city?

Along with Chicago, New York and other racially diverse cities, Philadelphia has also become central to right-wing media efforts to blame crime on the Black Lives Matter movement. Even in his supposedly “serious” campaign announcement speech Tuesday, Trump made the grotesque claim that “The blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities are cesspools of violent crime.” In reality, the spike in crime in the past couple of years seems largely attributable to the pandemic. Gun sales rose during the lockdown and schools were closed, meaning the streets saw an influx of weapons and bored young people, an almost perfect prescription for rising crime. As the pandemic has begun to recede, homicides have also started to decline.

This is kind of laughable. Were people buying guns to shoot the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as one would expect if such was “largely attributable to the pandemic,” or was it because of the huge increase in the crime rate?

Now, it is true that the number of homicides is down, as I have previously mentioned, but, if the number of murders has decreased a bit, the number of attempted murders has increased: according to the city’s Shooting Victims Database, There were 2,107 shooting victims through November 16th of this year, compared to 2,069 people shot in the City of Brotherly Love through the same date last year. More people are surviving being shot, with much of the credit going to the Philadelphia Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy of quickly putting shooting victims into their patrol cars and taking them to the emergency room rather than waiting on an ambulance.

Again, had Miss Marcotte looked more deeply into the publicly available data, she’d have known that.

Krasner, for his part, is painting the impeachment as a direct attack on the right of Philadelphians to choose their own leaders. “History will harshly judge this anti-democratic, authoritarian effort to erase Philly’s votes — votes by Black, brown and broke people in Philadelphia,” he said in statement.

This impeachment of Krasner sews together two of the biggest and most racist themes that fuel the MAGA movement: A belief that anti-racist movements like Black Lives Matter are to blame for rising crime rates, and a belief that voters in racially diverse urban areas are “frauds” who are “stealing” elections from white conservatives.

While keeping in touch with my Pennsylvania conservative friends, I’ve yet to see any of them state that “anti-racist movements like Black Lives Matter are to blame for rising crime rates”. I’m the one who has been pointing out that, to the left, and especially The Philadelphia Inquirer, black lives don’t matter, not when talking about them might upset progressive politics. And if the impulse to impeach Let ’em Loose Larry is an effort to reduce the tremendous violence rate in Philly, the primary beneficiaries of such efforts would be black Philadelphians!

Miss Marcotte called Philadelphia a “racially diverse cit(y),” which is true enough, but only if you look at the city as a whole. As even the “anti-racist news organization” that is the Inquirer has reported:

  • The eight-county region’s Black-white residential segregation is the fourth highest among the 20 biggest metropolitan areas, as defined by the Census Bureau. The region is the sixth-most segregated between Hispanic and white residents.

  • Among the 30 biggest cities, Philadelphia is second only to Chicago in its level of residential segregation between Black and white residents, according to data from Brown University. Between Hispanic and white residents, it’s the sixth-most segregated.

  • Considering every U.S. county that has at least 10,000 people and a Black population of at least 5%, Philadelphia is more segregated than 94% of them.

  • While residential segregation between Black and white residents has declined nationwide over the last several decades, it’s happened much slower in Philadelphia. The city’s position near the top of rankings of segregated places has stayed almost the same since 1980.

These are things that one would expect a savvy political commentator like Miss Marcotte, who told us in 2019 that her boyfriend and she had moved to South Philly, would actually know something about the city in which she lives. If she actually read what is now her hometown newspaper, she’d have known that Philly’s ‘diversity’ is actually pretty superficial, but, once again, she doesn’t seem to look at these things in any depth. But, then again, to look at the facts in depth would challenge her progressive worldview and politics, and nothing which would do that should be allowed.

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To Solomon Jones, black lives really don’t matter To the left, black lives matter far, far, far less than progressive politics

I have not been exactly enamored of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, a movement started over the wholly justified killing of Michael Brown as he assaulted a police officer. Young Mr Brown had just roughed up a store clerk half his size in the course of a robbery. Several grifting incidents have been recorded concerning the Black Lives Matter organization.

Nevertheless, black lives do matter and should matter, just as all lives do matter and should matter. Yet it is becoming ever-clearer that, to the American left, black lives matter much less to them than do ‘progressive’ policies.

Solomon Jones, from his Twitter biography.

And thus I come to Solomon Jones, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the author of “Ten Lives Ten Demands: Life and Death Stories and a Black Activistʼs Blueprint for Racial Justice.” He also has a radio show weekdays from 7 to 10 AM on WURD 900 AM. The amazon.com description of his book states what it concerns:

Told through the powerful stories of Black lives that were ravaged by racism, this manifesto holds 10 demands to rectify racial injustice

Told through his perspective as an activist, acclaimed commentator Solomon Jones tells the stories of real people whose lives and deaths pushed the Black Lives Matter movement forward. He explains how each act of violence was incited by specific instances of structural racism, and details concrete and actionable strategies to address crimes committed by our “justice” system.

These stories and strategies are a critical resource for social justice activists looking to further their anti-racist education. These 10 demands form an actionable plan that is necessary to repair our racist past, change the racist present, and bring justice to the future:

  1. George Floyd: Pay financial reparations to Black communities that have been damaged by legalized racism.
  2. Michael Brown: Use consent decrees to reform police departments that demonstrate a “pattern or practice” of racism and police brutality.
  3. Hassan Bennett: Offer compensation for all those who are wrongfully imprisoned.
  4. Breonna Taylor: Require functioning body cameras and ban no-knock warrants.
  5. Eric Garner: All police disciplinary and dismissal records must be made public.
  6. Alton Sterling: Change federal law to allow prosecution of flagrant lawbreakers within police departments.
  7. Tamir Rice: Use independent prosecutors to eliminate prosecutorial conflicts of interest.
  8. Trayvon Martin: Eliminate stand-your-ground laws.
  9. Deborah Danner: Defund the police and move funds to trained social workers, mental health professionals, and conflict resolution specialists.
  10. Sandra Bland: End racial profiling.

It seems that Mr Jones has picked from a list of mostly bad people — Tamir Rice was just a kid, but a kid playing with a realistic-looking toy gun about whom a civilian called the police with a “man with a gun” report — on which to base his ‘ten demands. Mr Jones’ ninth demand is very specific about his goal: to reduce law enforcement.

However, it is Mr Jones’ Inquirer column of Friday which tells us just how much he values progressive politics over black lives:

What was Larry Krasner’s biggest offense? Correctly calling out a racist criminal justice system.

While Pa. lawmakers blame the district attorney for the increase in gun violence in Philadelphia, I suspect their true motive is to punish him as a white man who challenged a biased power structure.

by Solomon Jones | Thursday, November 17, 2022

The Republican-led Pennsylvania House has approved articles of Impeachment against Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, and while the Republicans claim the impeachment is about Krasner’s failure to stop gun violence, I’m convinced that it’s about his attempt to address racism.

Sadly for Mr Jones’ argument, the homicide rate in Philadelphia has soared since Mr Krasner, an anti-police defense attorney sponsored by a big campaign contribution from George Soros, became District Attorney. Since taking office on New Year’s Day of 2018, the number of homicides recorded in the City of Brotherly Love jumped from 315 the previous year to 353, then 356, then 499, and to 562 in 2021. Through Thursday, November 17th, the 2022 homicide total stands at 461, a 5.53% decrease from the same day last year, but one which is still on track to see 524 murders for the year, easily good for second-place all time in Philly.

However, if the number of murders has decreased a bit, the number of attempted murders has increased: according to the city’s Shooting Victims Database, There were 2,107 shooting victims through November 16th of this year, compared to 2,069 people shot in the City of Brotherly Love through the same date last year.

Since and including 2015, black males in the city have been the victims of 10,010 fatal and non-fatal shootings, a whopping 74.01% of all victims, with an even 1,000, or 7.39%, being black females. There have been 1,384 (10.23%) Hispanic males and 188 (1.39%) Hispanic females. For us evil white folks, there were ‘just’ 598 males (4.42%) and 131 (0.97%) females shot. While Mr Jones believes that the opposition to Mr Krasner is “about his attempt to address racism,” the effect, if removal of the District Attorney helped to reduce shootings and killings, would be to reduce the number of black victims. Wouldn’t Mr Jones like to see fewer black Philadelphians shot and killed? Or is it that, like The Philadelphia Inquirer for which he writes, that black lives really don’t matter, at least not as much as reinforcing progressive politics?

While state legislators publicly seek to blame Krasner for the increase in gun violence in Philadelphia, I suspect their true motive is to punish him as a racial traitor. Krasner, you see, is a white man who had the temerity to challenge a racist criminal justice system that routinely puts innocent Black people in jail. In the eyes of the individuals and institutions that thrive on the current power structure, Krasner has challenged racism itself, and for that, he must be punished.

Among the admittedly smaller circle of friends with whom I deal, I still cannot, over 69½ years of my life, a significant portion of which, 43 years, has been spent living in the South, ever remember a white person refer to another white person as a “racial traitor.”

In a city where the death penalty was once the order of the day under prosecutors like Lynne Abraham, Krasner has brought significant change. He has exonerated the wrongly convicted, eschewed the testimony of crooked cops, and charged police officers who have killed unarmed citizens from Philadelphia’s poorest, most marginalized communities.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, there have been only three executions in Pennsylvania since the restoration of capital punishment, all last century, only one of which was for a crime committed in Philadelphia. All three men executed were white, and all three were “volunteers,” meaning that they had voluntarily dropped all of their appeals to just go ahead and get it over.

Lynne Abraham was succeeded in office by Seth Williams. Like both Mrs Abraham and Mr Krasner, Mr Williams is a Democrat, but, unlike them, he is black. Somehow, I have a difficult time considering Mr Williams as someone who was supporting a racist system.

Mr Williams, who had legal problems of his own and was forced to resign in 2017, was part of the top three in law enforcement in Philadelphia, along with Mayor Michael Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, all of whom were black. And under those three men, the numbers of homicides dropped significantly. Does Mr Jones believe that those three black men were somehow racists, somehow prejudiced against blacks?

But, while all Democrats, they were just liberal Democrats, not ‘progressives,’ and not men who saw everything through some ‘racial justice’ lens.

There are several more paragraphs in Mr Jones’ original, and I have already quoted more of his column than with which I am comfortable, even though Fair Use standards allow such when fisking an article. Suffice it to say that Mr Jones uses the formulation “Black, brown and progressive” several times because his point is really a simple one: it’s racist to try to overturn the votes of minority citizens. Unhappily, I concluded a while ago that the voters of Philadelphia will, if he runs again in 2025, once again return Mr Krasner to office by a landslide margin, because his policies of not enforcing the law, of letting the less serious crimes go unpunished, is what a majority of the city’s voters really want. A homicide rate that has doubled from what it was under Messrs Nutter, Williams and Ramsey is apparently a price that the progressives are willing to pay to have fewer gang-bangers and wannabes locked up for rape, robbery and assault.

The only conclusion to which I have been able to come is that, in Philadelphia, black lives really don’t matter, not to Mr Krasner, nor to Mr Jones, nor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, nor to most of the voters.

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Let ’em Loose Larry wants to lock up police officers The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to make it about race

Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner, the anti-police defense attorney who was elected District Attorney for Philadelphia thanks in large part to the huge donation from George Soros, explicitly believes in “decarceration,” saying on his campaign website:

When Philadelphia voters elected Larry Krasner as its District Attorney in 2017, he promised to end the failed tough-on-crime policies of the past, work to support victims and the community, and hold the powerful accountable. He has kept his promises. It hasn’t been easy. Larry inherited an office committed to incarceration regardless of the cost, even when this policy endangered and devastated our communities.

But in just three years, he has upended the office culture and implemented policies that put people first. Under Larry’s leadership:

  • The county jail population has decreased by 40% and this summer fell to its lowest level since 1985.
  • The amount of time people will spend in prison has dropped by over 18,000 years.
  • Years under probation or parole have decreased by 57% overall, 65% for drug offenses and 70% for property offenses in the most oversupervised big city, Philly, and the second most oversupervised state, Pennsylvania.

Keeping people out of prison has been Mr Krasner’s goal, except, of course, if the person in question is a police officer. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Ex-Philly police officer sentenced to 11½ to 23 months in prison in landmark fatal shooting case

Eric Ruch was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the killing of Dennis Plowden Jr. in 2017.

by Max Marin | Thursday, November 17, 2022 | 4:05 PM EST

Eric Ruch, Jr, photo by Philadelphia Police Department, published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 17, 2022.

A former Philadelphia police officer was sentenced Thursday to 11½ to 23 months in prison for the 2017 fatal shooting of Dennis Plowden Jr., a conviction prosecutors called the first for an on-duty killing in recent city history. But the penalty fell years below the minimum state sentencing guidelines for the voluntary manslaughter conviction that a jury handed Eric Ruch in September, leading Plowden’s family members and criminal justice reform advocates to say he got a sweetheart deal. District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office said convictions on identical charges have yielded 5½-to-11-year sentences on average since he took office in 2018.

In sentencing Ruch, Common Pleas Court Judge Barbara McDermott said that he had demonstrated good behavior since he was charged two years ago and she believed a longer sentence would not offer him rehabilitation.

”Nothing he is going to do in prison is going to make him a better person,” McDermott said to a courtroom packed with family, friends, and colleagues of Ruch and Plowden.

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.

Naturally, Mr Plowden’s family “expressed sharp disappointment” that the sentence was as light as it was, and the distinguished Mr Krasner was displeased.

McDermott said the sentence came with parole eligibility and carried no financial penalties. A spokesperson for Krasner said the office is “reviewing options” and has 30 days to appeal the sentence to the Superior Court.

In a statement, Krasner noted that the Pennsylvania Sentencing Commission recommendations allow a judge to reduce a sentence by one year below the minimum recommendation. “This sentence falls far below state guidelines,” he said.

In other words, Let ’em Loose Larry doesn’t want to let former Officer Ruch loose! KYW News Radio’s Kristen Johanson reported that the District Attorney’s Office, in what is phrased as a personal statement from Mr Krasner, will “be reviewing” their options to try to get Mr Ruch locked up longer.

In September, a jury found Ruch guilty of voluntary manslaughter for shooting and killing Plowden, a 25-year-old who was in the process of surrendering to officers following a high-speed car chase in the Ogontz neighborhood. Over the course of a five-day trial, witnesses said Plowden emerged from his crashed vehicle in a daze and was on the ground in a seated position when Ruch fired a single shot at his head. The bullet tore through Plowden’s left hand before entering his skull — a hand he was raising to surrender, prosecutors argued.

That jury had acquitted Mr Ruch of the more serious charge of third-degree murder. In charging Mr Ruch with third-degree murder, the District Attorney’s Office was saying that the officer was motivated by malice, and a wanton disregard for the danger to life posed by his action.

Ruch and five other officers, including his former partner, testified that they thought Plowden was reaching with his right hand for a gun while on the ground, and that Ruch feared his life when he pulled the trigger. “The hand you can’t see is the hand that can hurt you,” the former officer testified.

But Plowden didn’t have a gun on him. Officers disputed their department’s own crime scene sketch that showed Ruch had cover behind police cars when he shot Plowden. And witnesses — even though some agreed Plowden’s right hand was concealed when Ruch fired — acknowledged that the man was dazed and defenseless at the time of the fatal shot.

Now comes the bias of the Inquirer:

Police originally said Plowden, who was Black, was driving a 2013 Hyundai sedan that was connected to a murder investigation. They later determined that he had no connection to the case, and prosecutors questioned whether Ruch even knew about the wanted vehicle when he initiated the stop.

The Inky only rarely publishes photos of accused or convicted criminals, but, as shown, and linked, above, the newspaper published the photo of Mr Ruch. You are supposed to note that the former officer is white. And in the paragraph above, they want you to know that Mr Plowden was black. The Inquirer, which publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes stated is an “anti-racist news organization,” wants to make sure you see a racial angle in this story!

There would have been no shooting had Mr Plowden not fled the police in the first place.

Judge McDermott clearly believed that the former officer did not really deserve to go to jail for what was a mistaken judgement in the field, in the heat of the moment, facing a suspect who had led police on a high-speed chase. Left unexplained in the Inquirer article was why Mr Plowden fled in the first place.

According to the previous story in the Inquirer, former Officer Ruch was convicted on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, and was taken into custody at that point. This means that Mr Ruch has already served 57 days of his 11½ to 23 month sentence. This means, that if Judge McDermott’s sentence is upheld, he could be released from jail as early as September 7, 2024. I’d note here that former Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathlee Kane, sentenced to 10 to 23 months for perjury, official oppression and some other offenses, was released two months early for good behavior. Mr Ruch could get out even earlier than September of next year if he keeps his nose clean in jail. I hope he does.

As we have previously noted, the Philadelphia Police Department is undermanned by hundreds of officers, and the situation is only going to get worse. Mr Krasner, who absolutely hates police officers, is doing his best to make the Philadelphia Police Department less attractive to potential recruits, by letting them know that he’ll do everything he can to get hem convicted and imprisoned, something he does not want to do for actual criminals.

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Do the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer have no mirrors in their homes? The newspaper is far, far, far more concerned with the killings of cute little white girls

I know, I know, I’ve said it before: to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes declared to be an “anti-racist news organization,” black lives really don’t matter.

Now, the Editorial Board are shocked, shocked! that a mass shooting in crime-ridden Kensington, over a week ago, has been greeted with perfunctory remarks, but mostly just shrugs.

A mass shooting must never be business as usual

After nine people were shot in Kensington, the ho-hum response sends a message that City Hall doesn’t care.

by The Editorial Board | Tuesday, November 15, 2022

There was a time when a mass shooting in Philadelphia would be cause for both alarm and action. But after nine people were shot in Kensington a little over a week ago, barely anyone batted an eye.

Maybe since the mass shooting was in Kensington — one of our city’s long-forgotten and grievously underserved communities — it was somehow deemed OK.

Yet what happened was absolutely horrific. Three or four people jumped out of a car on a busy Saturday night and sprayed at least 40 bullets into a crowd near the entrance to the Market-Frankford Line on Allegheny Avenue.

Police and rescue personnel swarmed in. Bloodied bodies were scooped up and rushed to the hospital. No arrests have been made. Mayor Jim Kenney issued a formulaic tweet decrying the grisly events and sending thoughts to the impacted families.

There’s more at the original. But you know what isn’t in the Inquirer, either on its website main page or specific crime page?[1]As of 8:30 AM EST. Anything, anything at all about the murder documented in Fox 29’s Steve Keeley via tweet.

The mass shooting the Editorial Board mentioned was bad, but no one actually died in it; gang-bangers, oops, sorry, “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families”[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 can fire off lots and lots of rounds, but are simply horrible marksmen.

But a 53-year-old black man was not just shot, but killed, was deliberately murdered at the intersection of North 50th Street and Westminster Avenue, and the Inky doesn’t care enough about it to have even a paragraph on it.

North 50th Street and Westminster Avenue, via Google Maps, July 2019. Click to enlarge.

Of course, that intersection, while not exactly the worst in Philly, isn’t exactly the greatest place to live, either. 5002 Westminster Avenue is currently for sale, for a whopping $95,000, in a zillow.com listing which says the three bedroom, two bath, 1170 ft² townhouse “needs some work,” and doesn’t include any photos. Another listing, for 5030 Westminster Avenue, shows a three bedroom, one bath, 1,256 ft² rowhome for sale listed at $135,000, and the few photos there shows a residence which has been at least partially fixed up.

And while the murder of a local, of a Philadelphian, didn’t make the paper, this story was on their website:

Idaho police: No suspect in slaying of 4 college students

Police in the college town of Moscow, Idaho, say they have not identified a suspect or found a weapon in the weekend slayings of four University of Idaho students in a rental house near campus

by Rebecca Boone and Nicholas K Geranios, Associated Press | Wednesday, November 16, 2022

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Police in the college town of Moscow said Wednesday they have not identified a suspect or found a weapon in the weekend slayings of four University of Idaho students in a rental house near campus.

Authorities continue to believe the attack was targeted but walked back a previous statement that there was no threat to the public.

“Investigators are working to follow up on all the leads and identify a person of interest,” Moscow Police Chief James Fry said at a news conference. “We do not have a suspect at this time, and that individual is still out there. We cannot say that there is no threat to the community.”

“We need to be aware of our surroundings,” Fry said.

Idaho murder victims, via CNN. Click to enlarge.

There’s more at the original, but the Inquirer published 582 words, exclusive of the headlines and bylines, about the murders of four college students 2,574 miles away. I have to wonder: is there anything, anything at all, which would lead the Inky to give that much space to four murdered students in Idaho, and none to a 53-year-old Philadelphian?

I’ve said it before: the Inquirer really is much more concerned about the killings of cute little white girls.

So, why was there so little real concern about the ‘mass shooting’ in Kensington? Perhaps the Editorial Board need to look in their own mirrors, because the newspaper they run doesn’t really care about shootings and murders in the heavily minority areas — Philadelphia is very racially and ethnically segregated internally — of their own city, and it shouldn’t take a 69-year-old white former Pennsylvanian now living 600 miles away to notice it.

References

References
↑1 As of 8:30 AM EST.
↑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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Missing the elephant in the room Sociology professors Kelsy Burke and Emily Kazyak manage to miss the most important datum in their attack on Republicans

Sometimes the credentialed media send out computer information which tells readers that an article is biased even before you read it. From The Washington Post:

Americans’ support for transgender rights has declined. Here’s why.

The culture war over transgender rights is part of a fight over competing notions of gender and sexuality, including issues like abortion and sex education

Analysis by Kelsy Burke and Emily Kazyak | Tuesday, November 8, 2022 | 7:00 AM EST

During the 2022 midterm election campaign, Republican public officials targeted transgender rights in what NPR and other news media have called the new front in the culture wars. Last month’s Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey appears to offer confirmation, finding increased polarization on all measures of LGBTQ rights. In particular, Americans’ support for transgender rights has declined.

The article headline isn’t too terribly biased, but if you look at the tab for the page, the article title was, as first saved on the computer, “Why do Republicans attack transgender rights?” And the url for the article is https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/08/ transgender-republican-evangelical-bathrooms/. You can get around the Post’s paywall and read the article for free on the Microsoft network, but the msn.com version does not show the tab change; that can only be seen at the Post’s original.

Clearly, an editor at the Post changed the title the authors submitted electronically from Lincoln, Nebraska.[1]Article headlines in newspapers are normally written by an editor, so this isn’t anything abnormal.

Then there is the Post’s biography of the article authors, as shown in the screen capture to the right. Let’s face it: when sensible people see that one of the authors is an “associate professor of sociology and women’s and gender studies,” their eyes roll.

Take one measure: whether laws should require transgender people to use bathrooms that correspond to their sex assigned at birth, not their current gender identity. In 2016, only 35 percent of all Americans favored these “bathroom bills,” the first of which was proposed that year in North Carolina. In 2022, after numerous other states proposed similar laws, the number of Americans supporting them rose to 52 percent.

I always laugh when I see the phrase “sex assigned at birth.” No, sex is determined at conception, by whether the sperm cell which fertilizes the egg is carrying an X or a Y chromosome. This is something we’ve known for 100 years.

People chuckled when they read that His Majesty King Henry VIII blamed his wives for having girls rather than boys, because we now know that it is the father, not the mother, who actually determines the sex of the offspring.

But today? Today the silliness of the left is that sex is somehow “assigned” at birth, rather than recognized at birth. Good heavens, think of all of the troubles good King Henry could have avoided if he’d simply “assigned” Mary and Elizabeth as boys.

While I do wonder whether the Post has a stylebook preference or mandete for “sex assigned at birth” as a phrase, it’s very obvious that the good professors who wrote the article would have used it regardless; it is used several times throughout the article, and the transgender activists prefer it, because it makes it sound as though sex is something other than biologically determined and unchangeable.

The jump was especially pronounced for White evangelicals and Republicans. In 2016, only 41 percent of White evangelicals and 44 percent of Republicans supported the requirement that transgender people use bathrooms that aligned with their sex assigned at birth. By 2022, that number doubled to 86 percent and 87 percent, respectively.

Other groups also increased their opposition to transgender rights, but the rise was less dramatic for Democrats and Americans who are unaffiliated with religion. Only 27 percent of Democrats favored bathroom bills in 2016, compared with 31 percent in 2022. Among nonreligious respondents, support for requiring transgender people to use the bathroom that aligns with their sex assigned at birth increased from 21 percent in 2016 to 34 percent in 2022.

In other words, as people became more educated on the subject, they realized the silliness of transgenderism.

These numbers suggest that transgender issues are increasingly being lived out in polarizing ways among Americans — in other words, that the “culture wars” narrative holds true. As sociologists, we have sought to dig deeper than the quantitative findings to understand why Americans hold such diverging beliefs.

The article continues with their findings based on surveys, and they tell us the obvious: being conservative, Republican and religious makes you more likely not to accept the arguments of transgenderism. I’ll omit that for this article, because I cannot simply copy-and-paste the whole thing; that would be plagiarism, and you can read it yourself. However, while they want to blame people who are “politically conservative” and “White evangelicals”, they somehow never mentioned the most obvious and glaring bit of news about transgender people that people saw: the case of University of Pennsylvania swimmer Will Thomas, a male who claimed to be a woman named “Lia”, and went from being ranked #562 when competing as a male his first three years, to #1 as a female his senior season. Mr Thomas absolutely destroyed the real female competitors at the Zippy Invitational in Akron, Ohio. While some people are surely sympathetic to Mr Thomas psychological plight — it has to be traumatic to actually believe that you should be a different sex — he also awoke people who may not have paid much attention to transgenderism that this was a male, who had been a male athlete and gone through male puberty, and was simply different from real women.

You didn’t have to listen to Republican messages to realize that something was horribly wrong with the Will Thomas story.

Their politically liberal bias — and no, I do not claim to be unbiased myself — is blatantly obvious in their concluding paragraph:

Though these findings obviously relate to transgender people, they implicate cisgender people, too. The culture war over transgender rights is part of a war over competing notions of gender and sexuality, and how those should be regulated in the social world. Thus, in 2022, we have observed simultaneous political attacks on transgender people, reproductive freedoms, and sex education. Americans are divided because we have fundamentally different vantage points over whose identities deserve protection and which experiences are to be prioritized and believed.

Yeah, we get it: this was a biased article, listed as an “analysis” rather than an OpEd piece, and the conclusion, along with the original title, was meant to attack Republicans. But leaving out the huge input of the “Lia” Thomas story pretty much invalidates the authors’ conclusions. If, as the authors began, “Republican public officials targeted transgender rights in what NPR and other news media have called the new front in the culture wars,” such ‘targeting’ bore political fruit because Mr Thomas so thoroughly fertilized the ground.

References

References
↑1 Article headlines in newspapers are normally written by an editor, so this isn’t anything abnormal.
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Ho hum! Another mass shooting in Philadelphia It was just Kensington, so who really cares?

It was August 17, 2020, when The Philadelphia Inquirer published the article “Even the pandemic doesn’t slow down Philadelphia’s drug markets: It’s unclear why COVID-19 hasn’t had much effect on Philadelphia’s drug market. But that’s not to say the drug supply here is or was predictable, even before the pandemic.” The article included a photo of what appears to be a young male shooting up — his back is to the camera — out in public, in broad daylight, on Kensington Avenue, right by the SEPTA train station. The street, one of Philly’s thoroughfares, is shown as being littered with trash. I noted that I was waiting for news that Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw organized a major sweep to clear the area, at least temporarily, of the drug dealers and junkies infesting the area, but I never heard of one.

After shooting in Kensington, some accuse city leaders of not doing enough to improve area’s conditions

Five people were critically wounded in an attack one political leader called the latest example of Philadelphia’s failure to address the depths of Kensington’s public health catastrophes.

by Ellie Rushing | Sunday, November 6, 2022

A shooting of nine people overnight in Kensington, a section of Philadelphia beset by gun violence and an open-air drug market, renewed community leaders’ criticisms of city leadership and heightened calls for a plan to address the neighborhood’s compounding crises.

The shooting Saturday near the intersection of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, ground zero for the city’s opioid epidemic, left all of the victims seriously wounded after police said at least three people jumped out of a car and fired more than 40 shots into a crowd shortly before 10:45 p.m. Eight men and one woman, ranging in age from 23 to 40, were struck and taken to Temple University Hospital.

Four of the men remained in critical condition as of Sunday evening, police said.

No arrests have been made and no weapons were recovered. Additional details were scarce, including what may have motivated the shooting.

Screen capture from The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 19, 2022.

I would say that the motivation is obvious: one gang clique 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 put out a hit on another clique of young men, and the police simply need to figure out which clique was targeted and which clique was responsible. It’s quite possible that not all of the people wounded were among the specifically targeted, and that even none of the wounded were among the targeted clique; these fine but misunderstood young gentlemen apparently accept that there will be some collateral damage as they set out on their missions.[2]Will Bunch, the Inquirer’s most off-the-wall leftist columnist, wrote: These twin blows came at the very end of a brutal autumn in which the right’s unified messaging — in so many ways the … Continue reading

Actually, I feel kind of sorry for Inquirer reporter Ellie Rushing. Her byline is on so many of the crime stories in the newspaper that it’s got to be at least a little bit depressing!

As we have previously noted, the Philadelphia Police Department believe that three of the teenaged suspects in the Roxborough High School shooting murdered another young man the previous day.

There is no neighborhood as burdened by shootings as Kensington, a section of the city plagued by an open-air drug market and high rates of deep poverty. Along the Kensington-Allegheny corridor, there are sprawling homeless encampments, and people in addiction openly use drugs.

Law enforcement officials have said dealers sell heroin, crack, and other drugs on more than 80 blocks in the neighborhood.

If the police know of these drug sale areas, why aren’t they sweeping through and arresting the dealers? Oh, that’s right:

Law enforcement officials say they cannot arrest their way out of the crises there.

They could at least try, since the city is apparently not doing anything else to solve the problems.

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw tweeted:

In other words, the Commissioner knows that the people of that neighborhood, and the city in general, do not believe that the Philadelphia Police Department really care about Kensington. Given that the Inquirer can report that drugs are being sold openly on “more than 80 blocks” there, and the police aren’t doing anything about it, what other impression would people have?

Of course, if the police did make a bunch of drug busts, District Attorney would refuse to prosecute the arrested seriously.

Miss Rushing wrote about the frustrations of Philly’s worst, most crime-ridden neighborhood, without showing any understanding about her subject. Kensington is the way it is not because of poverty, but because of the culture in that area, a culture which says that it’s perfectly fine to go out and blast away at your perceived enemies. Eastern Kentucky is just as poor, if not poorer, than Kensington, but while there is certainly crime here, and Kentucky’s firearms law are less restrictive than Pennsylvania’s, we don’t have the mass shootings or rampant killings seen in the City of Brotherly Love.

Miss Rushing was one of the Inquirer writers who told us that there were no gangs in Philadelphia, just those “cliques of young men”, and if she didn’t write those specific words herself, her name is still on it, demonstrating for us that those writers, Jessica Griffin, Ximena Conde, and Chris Palmer along with Miss Rushing, are simply in denial of what is going on in their fair city.

That, or they actually do know the truth, but are unwilling, or unable due to their editors’ dictates, to actually say it out loud.

The “city leaders” from Miss Rushing’s headlines really can’t do much to “improve (Kensington’s) conditions” because the people there are responsible for them. Yes, many of them are poor, but that doesn’t mean that they have to use drugs or tolerate drug use among others. The area’s open-air drug markets exist because the residents of Kensington allow them to exist. The filthy homeless camps and junkies strung out and laying wasted in the middle of the sidewalks exist because the neighborhood allow them to exist. The area is full of crime because the people who know who committed the crimes won’t tell the police, so crime continues, and gets worse, because there are few consequences.

Kensington’s consequences are the fault of Kensington’s people. The “city leaders” cannot change that; only the people themselves, hopefully encouraged by church pastors, block captains, and the mothers in the area concerned about their children, can change things.

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 Will Bunch, the Inquirer’s most off-the-wall leftist columnist, wrote:

These twin blows came at the very end of a brutal autumn in which the right’s unified messaging — in so many ways the Powell Memo brought to life — is embraced by the icons of mainstream media like the New York Times, Washington Post or NPR. The fearmongering over cherry-picked crime stats or supposed migrant caravans, or an emphasis on high inflation over low unemployment, or cheap gas over deadly climate change that’s hatched in conservative think tanks and promulgated on Fox News has proved catnip to journalists so eager to prove their balanced objectivity — that they aren’t in the tank for Biden coming off the Donald Trump nightmare.

With 449 homicides in Philly so far this year, on a pace for 529 for the year, and total shootings at a higher pace this year than last. I’m not sure how “cherry-picked” those crime statistics are. The Inky’s writers seem to be living in denial.
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Maybe Larry Krasner ought to consider the possibility that not all of the juveniles he treats leniently will turn out to be good guys?

Given that the Philadelphia Police Department already had mugshots of the fine young men who committed the Roxborough High School shooting, the following story from The Philadelphia Inquirer isn’t that much of a surprise. Since juvenile records are normally sealed, we’ll probably never get the story as to for what those young gentlemen were first arrested, unless some good person who can get access to those records leaks the information.

Three teens suspected in the Roxborough shooting committed another murder the day before, police say

Police believe three of the teens responsible for the Roxborough High School shooting committed a separate, unrelated fatal shooting the day before.

by Ellie Rushing and Chris Palmer | Friday, November 4, 2022 | 9:43 AM EDT

Three of the teens accused of shooting five young football players, killing one, outside Roxborough High School in September are expected to be charged with murder in connection with another fatal shooting the day before, police said Friday.

Troy Fletcher, 15, and Zyhied Jones, 17, could face the new murder charges as early as Friday afternoon for the killing of 19-year-old Tahmir Jones in North Philadelphia on Sept. 26, said Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore.

Police also expect to charge Dayron Burney-Thorne, 16, who is wanted in the Roxborough case but remains a fugitive, with an additional murder charge once he is caught.

Around 2 p.m. on Sept. 26, police say, Tahmir Jones was walking in front of his father’s home on the 600 block of North 13th Street when three shooters jumped out of a car and shot him more than 20 times. He was rushed to Jefferson Hospital, where he died a short time later.

Jones had just earned his GED and was working in a construction apprenticeship program, his mother Theresa Guyton has said.

Police stated that the only known connection between the murder of Mr Jones and the Roxborough shootings is the identity of the suspects, and that it is possible that Mr Jones murder was a case of mistaken identity. The Inquirer report stated that shell casings recovered at Roxborough have been forensically linked to three weapons used in “other events.”

It is possible, of course, that the gang members 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 in the Roxborough shootings were using weapons which they had obtained from other street groups in some sort of trade.

Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News reported via Twitter about what was apparently a gun battle in the Frankford neighborhood. By the time was all said and done, over 170 shell casings were found by police.

This is the culture of the combat zones of Philadelphia! 170 or more shell casings found, but “far outnumbered” by orange needle caps.

To fix the violence, you have to fix the drug problem, and the cultural problem that enables people to use drugs, and think that blowing away your enemies, or even just someone who has pissed you off in the moment, is a good idea.

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“