Category Archives: Culture

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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.

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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.