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This is what ‘Social Justice’ law enforcement gets us

The Philadelphia Police Department Current Crime Statistics page, which is only updated on weekdays, tells us that, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, October 25th, there have been 399 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. That’s a 40.99% increase over the same date in 2019, and 2019 saw the most homicides in Philly since 2007. That’s 399 homicides on the 299th day of the year. We had previously noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer took no notice of murders in the black community, and at least as of 11:05 AM, the Inquirer’s website main page showed no articles noting the bloody weekend in the city.

Maybe the editors are waiting to break the 400 killings mark?

Doing the math, 399 homicides in 299 days equals 1.334 per day, up from 1.324 just ten days ago. As the weather cools down, homicide rates normally drop somewhat, but not in Philadelphia. With 67 days remaining in 2020, 89 more homicides would be expected if the current rate continues, for a total of 488, just shy of the second place number of 489 in 1989. I suppose that breaking the record of 505 in 1990 is out of reach by now, but with District Attorney Larry Krasner giving petty criminals slaps on the wrist — if even that much — the thugs are out on the street, able to escalate to bigger crimes, who knows, maybe they can break the record.

Mr Krasner’s Twitter page has his self-declared bio: “District Attorney Larry Krasner fights for equal justice for the great people of Philadelphia. A fair and effective criminal justice system makes us safer.” With city homicides increasing every year that he has been in office — 353 in 2018, up from 315 the previous year, then 356 in 2019, not a terribly big jump, and now 399 so far in 2020, with slightly over two months left to go — how, I have to ask, has the “effective criminal justice system” under the District Attorney made the city “safer”?

I’ve harped about Mr Krasner’s idiocy often enough that it doesn’t bear repeating. So, this time, I’ll quote from his Wikipedia biography:

Lawrence Samuel Krasner (born March 30, 1961) is an American lawyer serving as the 26th District Attorney of Philadelphia.[1] Elected to the position in 2017, Krasner campaigned on a platform to reform elements of the criminal justice system, including to reduce incarceration, and took office in January 2018.

During his tenure, Krasner has sought to spearhead criminal justice reform by ending bail payments for low-level offenders, reducing supervision for parolees, and seeking more lenient sentences for certain crimes.[2] Prior to his government service, Krasner had a 30-year career as a criminal defense and civil rights attorney and public defender. He aggressively pursued police misconduct.[3] . . .

Krasner’s representation of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Philadelphia members led many to call him an “anti-establishment” candidate during his 2017 primary campaign for the Democratic nomination.[10][11] He campaigned against existing policies that had resulted in disproportionately high numbers of minority males being jailed and proposed other reforms in criminal justice.[12] Krasner was a featured speaker at the 2017 People’s Summit.[13].  .  .  .

Shortly before the candidacy announcement, John McNesby, president of Lodge 5 of the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police, derided Krasner’s eventually successful run as “hilarious.” McNesby opposed Krasner’s promise to refuse to prosecute defendants whose detainments were illegally performed so arresting officers could earn overtime pay as well as his history of suing police officers who perpetrated corruption and brutality.[16] Krasner received no major newspaper endorsements.[1] Less than three weeks before the primary, a political action committee supporting Krasner’s campaign received a $1.45 million contribution from billionaire George Soros.[17].  .  .  .

In his first week in office, Krasner fired 31 prosecutors from the District Attorney’s Office, including both junior and career supervisory staff. Up to one-third of the homicide prosecutors in the office were dismissed. Those fired represented nearly a 10% reduction in the number of Philadelphia assistant district attorneys.[25][26]

In February 2018, Krasner announced that law enforcement would no longer pursue criminal charges against those caught with marijuana possession.[27] That same month, Krasner instructed prosecutors to stop seeking cash bail for those accused of some misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies.[28] Krasner said that it was unfair to keep people in detention simply because they could not afford bail.[28] He also announced that the DA’s office had filed a lawsuit against a number of pharmaceutical companies for their role in the city’s opioid epidemic.[27] Krasner instructed prosecutors to stop charging sex workers who had fewer than three convictions.[29]

In March 2018, it was reported that Krasner’s staffers were working on creating a sentence review unit–the first of its kind in the country–to review past cases and sentences, and seek re-sentencing in cases when individuals were given unduly harsh punishments.[30] That same month, Krasner instructed prosecutors to reduce sentence lengths to defendants making pleas, refuse to bring certain low-level charges, and publicly explain their reasoning for pursuing expensive incarcerations to taxpayers footing the bills.[31] He said,

“Fiscal responsibility is a justice issue, and it is an urgent justice issue. A dollar spent on incarceration should be worth it. Otherwise, that dollar may be better spent on addiction treatment, on public education, on policing and on other types of activity that make us all safer.”[32]

In 2018, some judges rejected the reduced sentences which Krasner’s prosecutors had sought for juveniles who had previously been sentenced to life in prison.[33] In June 2018, Krasner made an unprecedented request for a comprehensive list of police officers who had lied while on duty, used excessive force, racially profiled, or violated civil rights, an unprecedented move in order to spotlight dishonest police officers and check their future courtroom testimony.[34]

In 2019, Krasner filed a motion in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania to declare capital punishment in Pennsylvania unconstitutional. He claimed the death penalty was illegal in the state because of the ban on cruel and unusual punishment in the Pennsylvania Constitution, citing the high turnover rates of convictions by appeals, the racially biased number of sentences given to black and Hispanic defendants, and the large number of convictions overturned due to ineffective counsel.[35]

Following the fatal shooting of Philadelphia police officer James O’Connor IV, Krasner faced criticism from William McSwain, a federal prosecutor appointed by Donald Trump.[36] McSwain, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, blamed the shooting on a prosecutorial discretion decision by Krasner’s office to drop drug charges against suspected killer Hassan Elliott. While on probation for a gun possession charge, Elliott was arrested again on January 29, 2019, for cocaine possession and was released on his own recognizance. Nearly a week later on February 6, Elliott took part in the fatal shooting of Tyrone Tyree. Krasner’s office dropped drug charges after Elliott failed to appear in court, choosing to approve an arrest warrant for Tyree’s murder instead.[36] On March 13, as part of a SWAT unit carrying out an arrest warrant, O’Connor was fatally shot and Elliott was charged. Prosecutor spokeswoman Jane Roh responded to criticism by stating that the office believed murder to be a more serious crime than drug possession and charged Elliott accordingly.[37] On the night of O’Connor’s death, John McNesby ordered activist police to form a human chain at Temple University Hospital entrance to prevent Krasner from entering.[37]

In July 2020, Krasner’s office charged Philadelphia SWAT officer Richard P. Nicoletti with simple assault, reckless endangerment, official oppression, and possession of an instrument of crime. Video footage taken during the George Floyd protests showed that Nicoletti pepper sprayed three kneeling protesters. He pulled down the mask of one woman before spraying her in the face, he sprayed another woman at point blank range, and sprayed a man numerous times in the face while he laid on the ground.[38]

Simply put, Mr Krasner, who hated the police from the beginning, installed a form of ‘social justice’ law enforcement; he was tougher on the police than he was on criminals. He was oh-so-concerned that “disproportionately high numbers of minority males” were charged, convicted and incarcerated, without ever thinking to consider that perhaps, just perhaps, “disproportionately high numbers of minority males” were the ones committing crimes.

There are two kinds of crimes: crimes of evidence and crimes of reporting. If a man rapes a woman on the streets of Philadelphia, as far as the police are concerned, if it wasn’t reported, it didn’t happen. It is commonly assumed that most rapes go unreported, with some guesstimates being as high as 90% not reported. Crimes like robbery might go unreported if the victims do not trust the police or think it will do any good, or are fearful of revenge by the criminals. When your city is stuck with a District Attorney like Mr Krasner, who doesn’t believe in prosecuting criminals, or sentencing them harshly when they are prosecuted and convicted, what reason is there to report that you were robbed?

But murder is different: it is a crime of evidence. It isn’t easy to dispose of a dead body in a way that it won’t be found, especially if you haven’t carefully planned things. You’re looking at 100 to 300 pounds of dead meat, bone and fat, and something which will put off a strong and nasty odor after very little time. The vast majority of dead bodies get found.

Of course, in Philadelphia, a whole lot of murders are open and in public: drive up or drive by shootings, essentially public executions, in which the shooters are only concerned with escape, not hiding the fact that someone was killed.

So when I read that most crime had decreased in Philadelphia, I just flat don’t believe it. Murder isn’t normally an entry-level crime; guys who shoot other people have usually been bad guys before that. And if they’ve been bad guys before that, Mr Krasner doesn’t really believe in getting them locked up for long anyway.

So, when we note that 77.86% of fatal shootings in the city since 2015 were of black males and another 5.01% of black females, (as of October 22, 2020), and know that 88.5% of black homicide victims were killed by black assailants, it becomes pretty obvious that, at least when it comes to murder in Murder City, USA, the killings are by a “disproportionately high numbers of minority males.”

But the esteemed Mr Krasner appears to want to have none of that! He’s more concerned with not having racial disparate numbers of minority members convicted as criminals than he is of helping to make the city safer.

This is what happens when “social justice” is one of your driving motivations. The police and the prosecutors need to just find, apprehend, try and convict offenders regardless of racial considerations.  When you don’t do that, you wind up with, well, with Philadelphia.
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We need to stop pretending that #BlackLivesMatter . . . . . . because in the City of Brotherly Love, it's very apparent that they don't.

The Current Crime Statistics released by the Philadelphia Police Department note that, as of 11:59 PM EDT on October 21st, 391 souls had been sent to their eternal rewards. That isn’t the record, of course, but 2007 is the base year on the Current Crime Statistics website, and that was the number of people killed that year in Philly. This year has now matched that total . . . with 71 days left in the year.

The math is simple: 391 people killed in 295 days so far equals 1.325 people killed every single day. With 71 days left in the year, at that rate the city should see another 94 people sent to their deaths before the ball drops in New York City.

391 + 94 = 485.

That would not be a new record; 1990 holds that dubious honor with 505, killings, and 1989 comes in second with 489, but 485 would be solidly in third place!

According to the Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard, since 2015, 6,129 shooting victims in the city had been black males; that’s 75.59% of them. Another 518 (6.39%) were black females. 1,102 of the shootings, 77.77%, which were fatal were of black males; while black females added another 72, or 5.08%.

I have noted previously that the Philadelphia media aren’t overly concerned with murder victims anymore, unless the victim is a cute little white girl. I suppose that’s reasonable, because the killing of white women is pretty rare: since 2015, only 15 white women were shot to death, 1.06% of the total. Sixty-two white males were killed in that same time frame, 4.38%. A black woman is more likely to be murdered than a white male in the City of Brotherly Love.

At least as of 4:30 PM, The Philadelphia Inquirer hadn’t noted this ‘milestone’ in city killings, but it sure had a big story, from yesterday, still up on the main page:

‘We’re not going to disappear’

Philadelphia Black Lives Matter activists say they’re building the movement beyond protests — they’re confronting the disparities that put people in the criminal justice system in the first place

by Oona Goodin-Smith, Anna Orso and Raishad Hardnett | October 21, 2020

For the umpteenth time this year, they assembled under the ivory glow of Philadelphia City Hall, cardboard signs and megaphones in hand. The air was crisper than when they began the crusade for George Floyd 116 days prior, but the unrelenting chant from the crowd in September was familiar.

“Say her name, Breonna Taylor.”

“Is my brother next?” one woman’s sign read. “This isn’t change,” declared another. “This system has got to go down!” a demonstrator yelled to the crowd.

For activists like Christopher Bowman, protesting is only the beginning.

“The final step is just community advancement,” said Bowman, a Philadelphia teacher who was teargassed and detained on I-676 in June and inspired to cofound I Will Breathe, an organization fighting racial injustice.

The #BlackLivesMatter activists are very, very worried about the cops:

After Philadelphia’s summer of protests against police brutality and systemic racism, activists are moving into a new season. They’re sustaining momentum by expanding their objectives and establishing their own community group model, working in the neighborhoods they want the city to invest in.

But the numbers say that the police aren’t the black community’s problem in Philly. Using the same site, and selecting for “Officer Involved,” we find 23 such shootings in 2015 and 2016, dropping to 13, 12, 9 and 8 (so far) in subsequent years. (The site does not correct for fatal vs non-fatal in this option.)

Eight officer involved shootings thus far in 2020, out of 1,684, which is 0.475% of the total.

The problem isn’t police brutality; it’s brutality within the black community, because the vast majority of the black people in our cities who are murdered are murdered by other black people.

“Our solutions live within ourselves and not within the system,” said YahNé Ndgo, a core organizer with Black Lives Matter Philly. As she sees it, activists are themselves building programming that’s “making a positive difference in our community.”

“We’re not being antipolice. We’re being antiviolence and pro-health and pro-community,” she said. “And [others] will see that we’re building toward all those things and not seeking to remove something and leave a vacuum, but to replace something that is not healthy for our community.”

Some activists spent the summer calling for police abolition, while others believe policing should remain, but have ideas for reform. Across the city, dozens of groups — new and established — protested, and each had unique priorities.

Are there no mirrors in the black community in Philadelphia? The problem isn’t the police, but the members of their own communities. But no one is willing to say that, because, why, that could sound raaaaacist.

Well, the #BlackLivesMatter protesters got what they wanted, even before this year’s protests, with the election of Democrat Larry Krasner as District Attorney. When the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer, surprisingly, endorsed Republican Beth Grossman over Democrat Larry Krasner for District Attorney. Daniel Denvir waxed wroth:

The Philadelphia Inquirer just endorsed mass incarceration

by Daniel Denvir | October 17, 2017

In May, Philadelphians went to the polls and made history, voting by a large margin to back civil rights attorney Larry Krasner in the city’s Democratic primary for district attorney. On Sunday, residents awoke to find that the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial board had endorsed Krasner’s Republican opponent, Beth Grossman, a former top prosecutor in the District Attorney’s Office.

Krasner rallied Philadelphians to an upstart, radical campaign calling for an end to the era of mass incarceration and impunity for police misconduct. The city’s struggling paper of record endorsed a candidate who presided over a nationally infamous civil asset forfeiture program through which prosecutors seized homes and other property from city residents, oftentimes poor and working-class, black and Latino. At least, the editorial gushed, she has “a welcome hesitancy to go for the death penalty.”

Philadelphians want change. The Inquirer board ploddingly declared itself for the enervating cause of defending an intolerable status quo that will most likely be defeated on election day.

But points for consistency: Grossman is the second candidate for top prosecutor the paper has endorsed who has also been backed by the city’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #5, an unapologetically reactionary officers union headed by a man who recently called Black Lives Matter protesters “a pack of wild animals.” That first FOP-backed candidate the Inquirer endorsed was Rich Negrin, one of Krasner’s primary opponents. Oddly, the board’s praise for Negrin included a note that the “criminal justice pendulum has been swinging in a new direction for some time, away from ‘tough on crime,’” but failed to mention that it was Krasner’s insurgent, movement-based campaign that had swung the primary field to the left.

After a few more paragraphs of such drivel, Mr Denvir wrote:

In reality, the board’s rationale is a pretext to protect an office that has long prized convictions and lengthy sentences regardless of the costs or whether the outcomes comport with any sense of justice. The Inquirer praises Grossman for her career going “after drug dealers, gunslingers, thieves, and blighters” and her “passion for defending the rights of crime victims.” Not a word about mass incarceration. To editorialize in favor of such a brutal status quo is an insult to the Philadelphians on whose behalf the board purports to be writing.

Well, Mr Denvir got his wish: Larry Krasner won the election. And rather than Mrs Grossman going “after drug dealers, gunslingers, thieves, and blighters,” the City of Brotherly Love has a District Attorney who does not do that, who fired a whole slew of veteran prosecutors upon taking office, and who certainly doesn’t believe in “mass incarceration.”

The result? In 2018, Mr Krasner’s first year in office, city homicides jumped from 315 to 353, a 12.06% increase. The following year, homicides held almost steady, rising to 356, but so far this year, 391 people have been murdered in Philadelphia, a 39.64% increase over the same day  last year.

The cost of Mr Krasner’s victory, and the policies Mr Denvir wanted to see put in place, has been written in blood. Philadelphia has seen more murders, many more murders than New York City, which has more than five times Philly’s population.

Philadelphia’s daily average inmate population was 6,409 when Mr Krasner took office, and was down to 4,849 on August 31, 2019. That’s the end, sort of, of ‘mass incarceration,’ but it sure hasn’t resulted in less violence on the city’s streets. The problem isn’t mass incarceration; the problem is that not enough criminals are incarcerated.

Black lives don’t matter, at least not in Philadelphia, because the black community apparently does not care enough about them to address the problem within itself.

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What Are Mayor Jim Kenney and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw Doing About Open Air Drug Markets in Philly?

According to Wikipedia, the Philadelphia Badlands

 is a section of North Philadelphia and Lower Northeast Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, that is known for an abundance of open-air recreational drug markets and drug-related violence. It has amorphous and somewhat disputed boundaries, but is generally agreed to include the 25th police district.

Usually, it is widely understood to be an area between Kensington Avenue to the east and Broad Street to the west, and between Hunting Park Avenue to the north and York Street to the south, mostly coinciding with the neighborhoods of Fairhill, Glenwood, Hunting Park, Harrowgate, Stanton, North Central, West Kensington, Hartranft, and Kensington.

The term “The Badlands” was popularized in part by the novel Third and Indiana by then Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Steve Lopez. The neighborhood also was featured in several episodes of ABC’s Nightline. The intersection of 3rd Street and Indiana Avenue was listed number two in a 2007 list of the city’s top ten drug corners according to an article by Philadelphia Weekly reporter Steve Volk.

The term Badlands was first used by Lt. John Gallo, who headed the East Division Narcotics Task Force. Its use spread, with many people attempting to take credit for the moniker. It was Gallo’s work along with ASAC Billy Retton that worked about a dozen long-term investigations in the 25th and 26th Police Districts that preceded “Operation Sunrise”. Ted Koppel, Geraldo Rivera, 20/20 and 48 Hours all rode with Gallo at one time or another, and it was during this time that Gallo was able to make the name stick.

I wrote yesterday about the open-air drug market publicized by The Philadelphia Inquirer. I had thought that maybe, just maybe, the publicity would push Commissioner Danielle Outlaw and the Philadelphia Police to raid the place, to arrest the drug dealers — and hopefully the addicts as well, but I really didn’t expect that — and seize the illegal drugs and guns found there.

So, at 11:40 AM EDT this morning, I did Google searches for police raid drug market and police raid drug market Philadelphia. I found a few stories about law enforcement raids in Missouri and even incompetent Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago:

Feds bust open-air drug market in Humboldt Park, charging 18

Undercover agents allegedly made about 80 purchases from the market during a year-long investigation dubbed “Operation Monticello’s Revenge.”

By David Struett @dstru312 | July 20, 2020 | 5:58 PM CDT

The feds have charged 18 men who allegedly worked at an open-air drug market in Humboldt Park, where undercover agents allegedly made about 80 purchases during a year-long investigation dubbed “Operation Monticello’s Revenge.”

Most of the men were arrested last week on charges of federal drug conspiracy in connection to the drug market in the 1000 block of North Monticello Avenue, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago announced Monday.

According to a criminal complaint, Sam Howard and Kelvin Franklin worked as street-level managers of the market, coordinating the sale of fentanyl-laced heroin, and personally sold drugs to undercover officers more than a dozen times each.

Oops! Sorry, it was federal agents, not the Chicago Police who did that; no credit goes to Mayor Lightfoot.

In Philly? I found this story about a police raid on drug markets . . . last February. Then there was another raid in April:

Police Arrest 60 Buyers/Dealers in Massive Drug Sweep in Philadelphia; Release Mugshots and Names

by: iradioal | started: 04/04/15 8:30 am | updated: 04/04/15 8:30 am

Philadelphia Police have arrested 60 people and seized two dozen vehicles in a massive drug sweep in Fairhill on Thursday. The department’s east division set up in multiple locations in the 25th district near the intersections of Waterloo and West Cambria streets, North Front and West Cambria streets, North Swanson and East Somerset streets, Rosehill and East Cambria streets, and East Tusculum and East Somerset streets. Those arrested ranged in age from 17 to 67. Forty were alleged buyers and twenty were alleged sellers. Out of those arrested about 35% are from the suburbs who came to the neighborhood’s open air drug markets looking to buy or sell a variety of drugs including pills, heroin, crack cocaine and marijuana.

Philadelphia Police Insp. Melvin Singleton wants to close down the drug market and dissuade anyone from coming to the 25th district (which also includes North Philly, Feltonville, Fairhill, and Hunting Park). “If you think it’s a good idea to come to Philadelphia to buy drugs…if you think it’s a good idea to come to Philadelphia to sell drugs, you will be arrested. Your vehicle will be confiscated.” The police say these kind of arrest operations will continue around the city.

The area raided today was only blocks away from other drug hot beds in neighboring Kensington. Neighbors want to see the entire area cleaned up so that children can walk to school, people can feel safe on their own blocks, and the streets no longer are occupied by dealers selling and addicts getting high.

There was even a major raid just before last Christmas in the Fairhill and Kensington neighborhoods, including Allegheny Avenue, mentioned in yesterday’s Inquirer article. But nothing yesterday.

The Philadelphia Badlands exist because the city government and law enforcement allow them to exist. Crime ridden neighborhoods exist because law enforcement doesn’t shut them down. Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg cleaned up New York City with a harsh attitude toward crime and the ‘broken windows’ policing philosophy, but Philadelphia never followed suit, and that’s why the Badlands exists. George Soros poured over a million dollars into getting an anti-police, anti-law enforcement District Attorney, Larry Krasner, elected, and that’s what Philadelphia got: a contracted, weakened Police Department and a soaring crime rate.

As of 11:59 PM EDT yesterday, 276 homicides were recorded in the City of Brotherly Love. That’s a 31% increase over the same day last year, more than the entire year’s murder totals in 2013 and 2014, and just one fewer than the entire year total for 2016.¹

In 230 days, Philadelphia has seen 276 homicides. That’s 1.2 murders per day. With 136 days remaining, if the average holds, that’s an additional 163 homicides, for a projected total of 439 people. There were 280 people murdered in 2015, Mayor Michael Nutter’s and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey’s last full year in office; if their regime could get the murder rate down, as it did, then the blame has to fall on Mayor Kenney, DA Krasner and Commissioner Outlaw.

Well, who knows? Perhaps Commissioner Outlaw is planning a big raid in the Badlands, now that the Inquirer has publicized the problems, and it’s just taking a few days to get the planning and organization done. Mayor Kenney might be very incensed, since the photos in the Inquirer showed the junkies not wearing facemasks!

But the drug raids of the past haven’t done anything; they got a few bad guys off the streets, recovered some drugs and cash and weapons, but all of that is back in place now. Philadelphia needs the law enforcement raids, yes, and a lot more funding for the Police Department, but what it really needs is a change of attitude among the city leadership, a no nonsense, zero tolerance attitude toward crime, toward all crime, and toward illegal drugs. Mayor Kenney was re-elected in 2019, so he still has 3½ years remaining.² He was just great at raising a ‘sugary drink tax,’ to take a bigger bite out of a Big Gulp, but on making Philly safer, not so much.

District Attorney Krasner was elected in 2017, meaning he won’t face the voters until 2021. Wikipedia noted of Mr Krasner:

In his first week in office, Mr Krasner fired 31 prosecutors from the District Attorney’s Office, including both junior and career supervisory staff. Up to one-third of the homicide prosecutors in the office were dismissed. Those fired represented nearly a 10% reduction in the number of Philadelphia assistant district attorneys.

In February 2018, Krasner announced that law enforcement would no longer pursue criminal charges against those caught with marijuana possession. That same month, Krasner instructed prosecutors to stop seeking cash bail for those accused of some misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. Krasner said that it was unfair to keep people in detention simply because they could not afford bail. He also announced that the DA’s office had filed a lawsuit against a number of pharmaceutical companies for their role in the city’s opioid epidemic. Krasner instructed prosecutors to stop charging sex workers who had fewer than three convictions.

In March 2018, it was reported that Krasner’s staffers were working on creating a sentence review unit–the first of its kind in the country–to review past cases and sentences, and seek re-sentencing in cases when individuals were given unduly harsh punishments. Also in March 2018, it was reported that Krasner instructed prosecutors to: “Offer shorter prison sentences in plea deals. Decline certain classes of criminal charges. And explain, on the record, why taxpayers should fork over thousands of dollars per year to incarcerate people.” He said,

Fiscal responsibility is a justice issue, and it is an urgent justice issue. A dollar spent on incarceration should be worth it. Otherwise, that dollar may be better spent on addiction treatment, on public education, on policing and on other types of activity that make us all safer.

The statistics seem to indicate that the esteemed Mr Krasner’s policies have not made Philadelphians safer. But that’s what happens when you put a social justice warrior in office.

You might ask: why do I care? After all, I don’t live in Philadelphia, and I moved out of Pennsylvania entirely three years ago. I don’t vote in Pennsylvania and I don’t pay taxes to the Keystone State.

But I worked in the Philadelphia area, traveling all around the city and the suburbs doing quality control work for a ready-mixed concrete company. Even after I left that position and started working further north, I picked up a copy of The Philadelphia Inquirer every day on my way to work.³ Philly is the city in which the Continental Congress met, in which our Declaration of Independence was signed. I want to see good for the city, but good isn’t happening there.

Now, Philadelphia is a warning, a warning for all who love our country, who want to see good for the United States, a warning as to what can and will happen if “progressives” and their cockamamie ideas achieve governing power. Philadelphia is an experiment in liberal and lax government, an experiment gone horribly wrong. I want to publicize what is happening there, to hopefully help others to step back, and see what a nightmare it has become.
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¹ – The statistics in yesterday’s report from the Philadelphia Police were 261 murders; since there wasn’t a 15-man massacre yesterday, I have to assume that a significant update in the statistics occurred in the postings.
² – This being his second consecutive term, Mr Kenney is term limited out.
³ – The men at the plant always complained, saying that I should have picked up the Allentown Morning Call instead, because it was closer to local news for them.
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Please visit my Red State story archive for more of my articles.
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The lunatics are running the asylum The New York Times surrenders to the 'woke'

Those of us who pay attention to the media have been aware of the turmoil in Times Square. Most amusing is the fact that the New York Post has to report on The New York Times.

The Gray Lady’s convulsions continue.

Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson says she’s dismayed by the troubles surrounding the New York Times op-ed section, particularly the departure of its editor James Bennet after he published a commentary by a U.S. senator calling for military force to quell riots.

“I don’t think that James Bennet should have been forced out at The Times,” Abramson told The Post, adding she “felt terrible” about it.

“He and I worked together in the Washington Bureau of the Times and I think he is one of the great journalists of our time. So I was very sad to see him pushed out,” Abramson said.

Abramson, who led the Times newsroom from September 2011 to May 2014, expressed sympathy for Bari Weiss, who shockingly resigned from the op-ed desk this week in a blistering open letter to publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Weiss said she’d been bullied and criticized by a Twitter-obsessed Times culture increasingly intolerant of any ideas outside its progressive, leftist orthodoxy.

There’s more at the original.

We have previously noted the ‘turmoil’ at the Times, and that, just a few days later, editorial page editor James Bennet was fired resigned, and deputy editorial page editor James Dao was demoted reassigned to the newsroom. We noted Bari Weiss Twitter thread that “The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same.” A few days later, Miss Weiss was gone, too.

And, of course, we noted how the Gray Lady retained young reporter Ali Watkins, even though she had been sleeping with one of her sources, though the Times at least tried the fig-leaf cover of reassigning her to a different beat.

Well, there is a rather simple solution. Get rid of your child staffers!

Miss Weiss noted, in her resignation letter, that:

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

Miss Weiss used the terms “unlawful discrimination” and “hostile work environment” in her letter, something which should have immediately alerted the Times management and its attorneys that there is a huge potential legal problem. Assuming that Miss Weiss’ allegations are true, the Times maintained and paid for an internal chat system which some employees used to harass, on the basis of religion and ethnicity, another employee, to the extent that it forced the employee to resign. How is that not a firing offense?

At the very least, the Times ought to research and discipline all employees who created the hostile work environment, and specify that inter-company communications systems may only be used for professional communications.

But it’s worse than that: The editors of The New York Times quickly surrendered to the woke in its newsroom:

New York Times Says Senator’s Op-Ed Did Not Meet Standards

After a staff uproar, The Times says the editing process was “rushed.” Senator Tom Cotton’s “Send In the Troops” essay is now under review.

By Marc Tracy, Rachel Abrams and Edmund Lee | June 4, 2020

Executives at The New York Times scrambled on Thursday to address the concerns of employees and readers who were angered by the newspaper’s publication of an opinion essay by a United States senator calling for the federal government to send the military to suppress protests against police violence in American cities.

James Bennet, the editor in charge of the opinion section, said in a meeting with staff members late in the day that he had not read the essay before it was published. Shortly afterward, The Times issued a statement saying the essay fell short of the newspaper’s standards.

And here comes the money line:

“We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication,” Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman, said in a statement. “This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short-term and long-term changes, to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.”

There you have it: Not only are the editors going to ‘expand’ their fact-checking of other people’s opinions, but they are going to reduce the number of outside opinion pieces they publish.

It was a matter of safety, don’t you know!

The new York Times is the most respected newspaper in the country, with a reputation for seriousness, sobriety, and maturity. But by surrendering to the “woke,”¹ the Times is surrendering to silliness, drunkenness and immaturity. The Gray Lady has repainted herself with the rainbow.²

The only way for the Times to regain its seriousness is to get rid of the unserious people. Just fire them all, and hire sensible reporters and writers to replace them. When your staff are significantly composed of people sympathetic with antifa and the crazies who set up the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, they are too far gone and too lacking in sane judgement to be working for you. Let them serve coffee at a Starbucks or something, and hire some of the good reporters out there, some of whom have lost their jobs due to industry downsizing, who have demonstrated some common sense.

A hint for the Times: the #woke and #BlackLivesMatter and #CancelCulture aren’t your customers in the first place! Those people get their news from television and internet click bait.
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¹ – From Wikipedia:

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

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
² – Yes, by using the rainbow, I am mocking the “LGBT+” movement, which I consider to be scientifically unsound, morally wrong and culturally stupid. Every bird, every reptile, and every mammal on earth can distinguish between males and females of their own species, but the LGBTQ+ movement have lost that ability.
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What would the left see as going too far?

I often wonder: among those who support the various state governors’ and city mayors’ actions curtailing our constitutional rights to fight the spread of COVID-19, is there any step they could take that they would consider a step too far?

  • A Louisville judge has ordered a man who has been exposed to — the article did not specify ‘tested positive for — COVID-19 be fitted with ankle monitors, the type used to track some criminals and sex offenders on parole, but who has refused to self-quarantine. Two other Louisville residents who live in homes with someone who has tested positive are under similar ankle monitoring, including one who tested negative.
  • Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) has had a hotline set up for informants neighbors to snitch on people non-compliant with his orders. Mr Beshear has also ordered that anyone entering the Commonwealth from neighboring states to self-quarantine for fourteen days, placed an armed deputy to enforce house arrest outside the home of a Nelson County man who tested positive but refused to self-quarantine, and ordered the state police to photograph license plates in church parking lots to see which parishioners are violating his orders suspending church services.
  • The state police in Pennsylvania are enforcing Governor Tom Wolf’s (D-PA) stay-at-home orders by citing a woman for ‘taking a drive’ for no ‘approved’ purpose.
  • The Philadelphia Police, whom the appropriately-named Commissioner Danielle Outlaw has ordered not to pursue petty crimes during the coronavirus emergency, pulled a man not wearing a mask off a SEPTA bus after he refused to debark.
  • Mayor Bill de Blasio (D-New York City) has stated that “the city could shut down certain places of worship if people continued to violate the state’s stay-at-home mandates and continue congregating for religious services there,” and that if religious leaders to not obey his orders, city officials “will take additional action up to the point of fines and potentially closing the building permanently.”
  • Governor Phil Murphy (D-NJ) stated that the police will break up any big parties and that the party-givers will be heavily fined.
  • Governor Gina Raimondo (D-RI) ordered the police to stop anyone with New York plates for questioning, and sent police and the National Guard “going door-to-door” in coastal communities, asking people if they’ve been to New York and requesting their contact information.
  • The sheriff of Wake County, North Carolina, ordered his department to stop processing background checks for new applications to purchase firearms.
  • Tarrant County, Texas, Commissioners, the majority of whom are Republicans, set fines and a jail term for up to 180 days for anyone who violates their emergency orders.
  • Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) issued ‘stay-at-home’ orders and banned “outdoor gatherings of any kind will be allowed unless they are related to essential businesses like food or medicine.”

These things are all violations of our First Amendment-guaranteed right of peaceable assembly and free exercise of religion, our Fourth Amendment-guaranteed right to be secure in body and property from government intrusion absent due process and a warrant, and our Fifth- and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees against deprivation of liberty and property absent due process of law.

Given that the majority seem to be cheering these authoritarian actions, these suspensions of our constitutional rights, because they are supposedly necessary, by elected state and municipal officials, I have to ask: just what would be a step too far even for the supporters of such actions?

  • An example: If someone said on social media, in response to Governor Beshear’s order that those entering the state must self-quarantine, “This is why we have the Second Amendment,” — note that I expressed that in terms which do not constitute a direct threat against anybody — would the left believe Mr Beshear went too far if he sent the state police to search the man’s house for weapons?
  • A nurse posted on Twitter that she quit her job because the hospital didn’t have enough Personal protective Equipment (PPE) and she was being exposed to COVID-19 patients, would the supporters say the governor of her state went too far if he said she could not resign and ordered her back to work?
  • If a state had too many people under self-quarantine orders to be able to enforce such against them, could the state then round up those people and place them in ‘camps’ where they could be monitored by guards?
  • If someone who had been exposed to the virus refused to be tested and refused to self-quarantine, could the state force him to be tested, and incarcerated until the test results came back, and keep him incarcerated or under house arrest for two weeks if the results came back positive?

Other scenarios could be constructed.

If we assume that those who support the actions of the various officials are intelligent people, concerned about our constitutional rights but believing that the protection of society somehow outweighs them, they must have some idea of what would be a step too far. I, for one, am interested in how such people think.

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COVID-19: It is our Constitution which is at the greatest risk of death

I have been critical of the illegal and unconstitutional actions some of our nation’s governors and mayors have taken during the COVID-19 crisis, who believe that they can use the COVID-19 emergency to violate the Constitution, but Mayor Bill deBlasio (NSDAP-New York City) takes first prize in the fascist authoritarian derby:

NYC may close churches, synagogues that don’t comply with coronavirus orders, de Blasio warns

By Vandana Rambaran | Fox News | May 29, 2020

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio warned Friday that the city could shut down certain places of worship if people continued to violate the state’s stay-at-home mandates and continue congregating for religious services there.

“A small number of religious communities, specific churches and specific synagogues are unfortunately not paying attention to this guidance even though it’s so widespread,” de Blasio, a Democrat, said at a news conference on the coronavirus outbreak.

City officials have continued to work rigorously to control the spread of COVID-19 as cases climbed over 1,000 on Sunday despite statewide closures of schools and non-essential businesses.

His Dishonor said:

No faith tradition endorses anything that endangers the members of that faith. So, the NYPD, Fire Department, Buildings Department, and everyone has been instructed that if they see worship services going on, they will go to the officials of that congregation, they’ll inform them they need to stop the services and disperse. If that does not happen, they will take additional action up to the point of fines and potentially closing the building permanently.

The First Amendment to the Constitution specifies:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Fourteenth Amendment has been used by the Supreme Court to ‘incorporate’ the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, to include state and local government action. Yet His Dishonor would prohibit the free exercise of religion, the way that some others have attempted to abridge the right of the people peaceably to assemble.

These idiotic mayors, and Mr deBlasio is but one of those who believes he has the right to be an authoritarian dictator, need to be slapped down, slapped down hard. They think that they are saving lives, but what they are doing is killing our constitutional rights. If we surrender them, ‘temporarily,’ because it’s an ’emergency,’ who can know when the next ’emergency’ will see them surrendered again.

Apparently we have learned nothing from history, nothing. In 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg, at the urging of Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler, issued a decree suspending the freedom of speech and of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, and the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications. Warrants for house searches and orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property were also made less difficult to get, all because of the ’emergency’ of the Reichstag fire. Scream “Emergency, emergency!” and it seems that you can get anything passed, in 1933 Germany, and 2020 America.

It wasn’t long after, slightly less than a month actually, that the Reichstag and Reichsrat passed the Enabling Act, which allowed the cabinet, technically, but the Reichs Chancellor, in practice, to issue decrees which had the full force of parliamentary-passed law, making Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship legal and official.  In the United States, in 2020, we haven’t even taken that step, but are allowing governors and mayors to get away with ruling by decree, and they are doing so to almost universal praise by the very people on whose rights they are trampling.

It is incredible, really. The left have been screaming that President Trump is a fascist and a dictator ever since November 9, 2016, but they are meekly accepting dictatorial actions and authority by several Democratic governors and mayors. Sadly, a few Republican executives have done the same things.

Der Führer’s dictatorship was a popular one.  He took strong steps to fight the Depression, dramatically cutting unemployment (though workers’ rights were greatly curtailed), he ended what the people saw as the injustice of the Versailles Treaty, put on the spectacular show of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and incorporated Austria and part of Czechoslovakia into the Reich, all without war. Oh, certain people didn’t like it: homosexuals, Gypsies and, most of all, the Jews, but the vast majority of the public were not homosexuals or Gypsies or Jews, and much of the public helped the Nazi regime by pointing out who the ‘undesirables’ were.

And the authoritarianism of our mayors and governors seems to be popular here as well. There are 1,600+ responses to Governor Phil Purphy’s (NSDAP-NJ) tweet, in which he said,

NO CORONA PARTIES. They’re illegal, dangerous, and stupid. We will crash your party. You will pay a big fine. And we will name & shame you until EVERYONE gets this message into their heads,

and the vast majority were positive. It had 71,200+ “likes” on Twitter, and idiots like Vanessa Shives responding:

Dear @GovMurphy  why can’t you just arrest them so they have a criminal record that follows them for the rest of their lives?

In Kentucky, we have been treated to the spectacle of fawning adoration of Governor Andy Beshear (NSDAP-KY), who had ordered the virtual house arrest, enforced by armed guards, of a COVID-19 positive man who refused to self-quarantine.

Gun grabbers like Governor Murphy, Tom Wolf (NSDAP-PA) and John Carney (NSDAP-DE) included gun stores in their ‘non-essential’ business closure orders, trying to restrict people’s Second Amendment rights, though the latter two eventually backed off.

This will not end well. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, so many have surrendered essential liberty in the hopes of some temporary security from COVID-19. Dr Franklin was literally risking his life to sign the Declaration of Independence, while Americans today are mostly risking far less. While potentially deadly, most of those who do contract COVID-19 survive it, though uncomfortably for a couple of weeks.

The greater risk of death is to our constitutional rights, not because the Constitution has changed, but because so many have proven so willing to surrender their rights.

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Déjà Vu All Over Again

Early 2016 is reborn! From The New York Times:

No, Not Sanders, Not Ever

He is not a liberal, he’s the end of liberalism.

By David Brooks | Opinion Columnist | February 27, 2020

A few months ago, I wrote a column saying I would vote for Elizabeth Warren over Donald Trump. I may not agree with some of her policies, but culture is more important than politics. She does not spread moral rot the way Trump does.

Now I have to decide if I’d support Bernie Sanders over Trump.

We all start from personal experience. I covered the Soviet Union in its final decrepit years. The Soviet and allied regimes had already slaughtered 20 million people through things like mass executions and intentional famines. Those regimes were slave states. They enslaved whole peoples and took away the right to say what they wanted, live where they wanted and harvest the fruits of their labor.

And yet every day we find more old quotes from Sanders apologizing for this sort of slave regime, whether in the Soviet Union, Cuba or Nicaragua. He excused the Nicaraguan communists when they took away the civil liberties of their citizens. He’s still making excuses for Castro.

To sympathize with these revolutions in the 1920s was acceptable, given their original high ideals. To do so after the Hitler-Stalin pact, or in the 1950s, is appalling. To do so in the 1980s is morally unfathomable.

There’s much more at the link.

David Brooks is yet another of the conservative #NeverTrumpers, and while liberals like Bari Weiss, a fellow Times opinion writer, and others have been spreading Mr Brooks’ message, much of the left have no use for him.

Mr Brooks wrote a similar article in March of 2016, with virtually the same title, “No, Not Trump, Not Ever.” His complain then, as now, is less about the individual than it is about populism.

Populism is a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups, but nothing in that definition naturally pushes it to the right or the left. Being an “us against them”, plebeians versus patricians type of philosophy, populism is somewhat defined by whom the elites happen to be. In 2016, for Donald Trump’s voters, as well as the Brexiteers, it was the liberal political establishment, while, in the same year, for the #BernieBros, it was capitalism and the economic elites.

The two articles by Mr Brooks are not mirror images of each other. In the newer, he claims that Mr Sanders is more revolutionary than he claims to be, and that his partisans are so disgusted with the system that they want to tear it down.

A liberal sees inequality and tries to reduce it. A populist sees remorseless class war and believes in concentrated power to crush the enemy.

Four years previously, he wrote:

Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else.

In the older article, the author, noting Mr Trump’s stunning, unexpected electoral success, is explicit in his contempt for the American voters:

The voters have spoken.

In convincing fashion, Republican voters seem to be selecting Donald Trump as their nominee. And in a democracy, victory has legitimacy to it. Voters are rarely wise but are usually sensible. They understand their own problems. And so deference is generally paid to the candidate who wins.

And deference is being paid. Gov. Rick Scott of Florida is urging Republicans to coalesce around Trump. Pundits are coming out with their “What We Can Learn” commentaries. Those commentaries are built on a hidden respect for the outcome, that this is a rejection of a Republicanism that wasn’t working and it points in some better direction.

The question is: Should deference be paid to this victor? Should we bow down to the judgment of these voters?

He was less dismissive, explicitly, in the newer article, but it remains implied:

There is a specter haunting the world — corrosive populisms of right and left. These populisms grow out of real problems but are the wrong answers to them. For the past century, liberal Democrats from F.D.R. to Barack Obama knew how to beat back threats from the populist left. They knew how to defend the legitimacy of our system, even while reforming it.

Mr Brooks’ argument boils down to one simple thing, the old Wizard of Id cartoon in which the town crier yells, “The peasants are revolting,” to which the king replies, “You can say that again.”

Mr Brooks, whose net worth is estimated at $9 million, is definitely not one of the peasants. His political instincts are at least moderately conservative, but he was perfectly fine with 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, saying that she was determined, industrious even though somewhat unimaginative. To him, Mrs Clinton, though she’d doubtlessly have been further to the left than he would have liked, would still be a safe muddle at least somewhat close to the middle. For the patricians, a muddle in the middle is just what they want. It keeps them nice and safe and protects their status. Had he been in the Continental Congress on July 2, 1776, when Congress officially declared our independence, he would have voted against it.

But Mr Brooks, in his rhetorical question asking whether the judgement of the voters should be respected, at least recognized part of the problem:

Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how (Trump voters) would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.

No, his cronies and he were not “socially intermingled” with Mr Trump’s supporters, as the dismissive attitude of the coasties expressed by the term “flyover country” so potently demonstrated. As I noted on September 6, 2016, Heather Long, now of The Washington Post but then for CNN Money, reported that “Most Americans think unemployment is a lot higher than 5%. Americans think the economy is in far worse shape than it is.”

The U.S. unemployment rate is only 4.9%, but 57% of Americans believe it’s a lot higher than that, according to a new survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

The general public has “extremely little factual knowledge” about the job market and labor force, Rutgers found.

It’s another example of how experts on Wall Street and in Washington see the economy differently than the regular Joe. Many of the nation’s top economic experts say that America is “near full employment.” The unemployment rate has actually been at or below 5% for almost a year — millions of people have found jobs in what is the best period of hiring since the late 1990s.

But regular people appear to have their doubts about how healthy America’s employment picture is. Nearly a third of those survey by Rutgers believe unemployment is actually at 9%, or higher.

I pointed out than that while the ‘official’ U-3 unemployment rate was 4.9%, the U-6 unemployment rate for August, 2016 was 9.7%,¹ not too far off of the ‘common people’s’ estimate that it was “9%, or higher.”

The esteemed Mr Brooks may have recognized his disconnect with the commoners in flyover country, at least back in 2016, but that doesn’t seem to have changed his vision: he really cannot see, cannot understand, what the voters are thinking and feeling.

In this, President Trump ought to be very concerned. It has been reported that Senator Sanders is the opponent most Republicans want to win the nomination, believing that the kooky commie would be the easiest to beat, but remember, Mrs Clinton wanted Mr Trump to win the GOP nomination in 2016, thinking that he would be the easiest candidate for her to defeat. These things don’t always work out the way people expect.
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¹ – U-6 unemployment is defined as “Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force. Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.

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Hold them accountable!

The case of Hugo Villanueva-Morales has made the news. Mr Villanueva-Morales and Javier Alatorre, 23, are the suspects in the Tequila KC bar mass shooting in Kansas City, Kansas. Mr Alatorre has been apprehended and charged with four counts of murder, but Mr Villanueva-Morales is still at large. In the shooting, Mr Villanueva-Morales had, allegedly, been kicked out of the bar, left, got Mr Alatorre, and the two then returned to the bar and started shooting.

The mass shooting hasn’t attracted quite as much attention from the gun control press, possibly because the motive wasn’t some form of white supremacy but an intoxicated rage, and, I have to wonder, because the alleged perpetrators aren’t evil white men.

It also turns out that Mr Villanueva-Morales is a previously convicted felon, so he was in violation of gun control laws already, simply by having a weapon. And he shouldn’t have been able to commit the crime at all, because he should have already been in jail. From the Kansas City Star:

Judge gave KCK mass shooting suspect probation last year instead of 9 years in prison

By Katie Bernard | October 9, 2019 | 12:03 PM

More than a year before Hugo Villanueva-Morales allegedly walked into a packed Kansas City, Kansas, bar and began shooting, a Leavenworth judge had given him probation instead of nine years in prison.

In doing so the judge, who made news earlier this year for another controversial sentencing decision, departed from state sentencing guidelines over the objections of prosecutors.

Further down:

More than a year ago, in August 2018, Villanueva-Morales pleaded guilty to trafficking contraband in the Lansing Correctional Facility, where he was serving time for a 2011 aggravated robbery in Wyandotte County.

Trafficking contraband in prison is a charge that can carry more than nine years in prison.

Leavenworth Judge Michael Gibbens instead sentenced him to two years of probation because he “accepted responsibility” according to court documents.

Prosecutors opposed the decision.

“We did argue for prison,” said County Attorney Todd Thompson. “But there’s no way anyone could foresee this horrific tragedy from a possession of synthetic marijuana case in prison.”

Gibbens did not respond to The Star’s request for comment.

Gibbens is the same judge who made national news earlier this year when he reduced the sentence of a convicted sex offender because he said the 13 and 14-year-old girls who were victims in the abuse were actually “aggressors.”

The Star’s story has more on Mr Villanueva-Morales’ rap sheet, but that’s not necessary for this article. The alleged perpetrator is the same kind of bad dude we far too frequently read about, and an idiotic judge, who had the opportunity to keep Mr Villanueva-Morales locked up swallowed some sob story and gave him probation, in effect turning him lose on the streets of Kansas City, Kansas.

The article noted that the Kansas state legislature, following Judge Gibbens decision in the child molestation case, changed the law to disallow judges from reducing sentences on sex crimes against minors just because the children might have been willing participants. But no disciplinary action was taken against the judge, because even though he is boneheadedly stupid, he apparently broke no laws.

And that’s the problem: public servants in the lawful performance of their duties are not accountable for the consequences of their actions. But, make no mistake about it: if Messrs Villanueva-Morales and Alatorre actually are the killers, then Judge Gibbens is just as responsible for Everardo Meza, 29, Alfredo Calderon Jr., 29, Francisco Garcia Anaya, 34, and Martin Rodriguez-Gonzalez, 58 being stone-cold graveyard dead as the shooters! If Messrs Villanueva-Morales and Alatorre are convicted of this crime, Judge Gibbens should be right there with them, sharing the same prison cell.

He won’t, of course, because he was simply exercising his judgement in the performance of his duties, but his terrible judgement left four people dead and five others wounded. He should be publicly shamed, shunned by everyone who knows him, and driven from the bench. People should refuse to do business with him. Pickets should be set up outside of his home. The families of the victims should try to sue him, personally, into penury and homelessness, and while such a lawsuit probably wouldn’t work, it would expose him to more ridicule and public shaming, and cost him a good deal of money in legal fees.

We need to hold public officials accountable for the consequences of their decisions. Law enforcement officers who let illegal immigrants go rather than turning them over to ICE should he be held personally and criminally liable for any further crimes committed by those illegals. Judges who let off hardened criminals with light, or no, sentences upon conviction, should he held personally, and criminally, liable for crimes committed by the thugs they had the power to send to prison, but did not.

Hold them accountable!

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Once Again, The New York Times Opines Against First Amendment Protections . . . For Wrongthinkers

In 1971, President Richard Nixon sought a restraining order to prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from printing more of the so-called “Pentagon Papers,” technically the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, a classified history and assessment of American policy and operations in the Vietnam war. The Times and the Post fought the injunctions in court, the Times winning in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). The Times was all about the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press.

Well, that was then, and this is now:

Free Speech Is Killing Us

Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?

By Andrew Marantz¹ | October 4, 2019 | 6:01 AM EDT

There has never been a bright line between word and deed. Yet for years, the founders of Facebook and Twitter and 4chan and Reddit — along with the consumers obsessed with these products, and the investors who stood to profit from them — tried to pretend that the noxious speech prevalent on those platforms wouldn’t metastasize into physical violence. In the early years of this decade, back when people associated social media with Barack Obama or the Arab Spring, Twitter executives referred to their company as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” Sticks and stones and assault rifles could hurt us, but the internet was surely only a force for progress.

No one believes that anymore. Not after the social-media-fueled campaigns of Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump; not after the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va.; not after the massacres in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and a Walmart in a majority-Hispanic part of El Paso. The Christchurch shooter, like so many of his ilk, had spent years on social media trying to advance the cause of white power. But these posts, he eventually decided, were not enough; now it was “time to make a real life effort post.” He murdered 52 people.

That the editors of the Times considered this an important article is demonstrated by the title graphic, a bit more ornate than is typical:

It was spread full sized across the screen, taking up both the width and depth of my fairly large-sized monitor. This was a can’t-not-notice display, something the editors use to grab your attention.

Mr Marantz, the author, continued:

Having spent the past few years embedding as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into national policy, I no longer have any doubt that the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood.

The question is where this leaves us. Noxious speech is causing tangible harm. Yet this fact implies a question so uncomfortable that many of us go to great lengths to avoid asking it. Namely, what should we — the government, private companies or individual citizens — be doing about it?

He has now made the argument of speech causing tangible harm, pretty much the opposite argument made by the Times in 1971, when the government claimed a “clear and present danger” in publishing the Pentagon Papers. Speech, at least the unregulated speech of “trolls and bigots and propagandists,” has caused direct harm, and, of course, he argued that free speech, in the form of “social-media-fueled campaigns,” helped elect right-wing leaders Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, and, of course, the evil Donald Trump. No wonder Mr Marantz is appalled!

The author’s bias is apparent in so many ways. The speech he decries is all from the right side of the political spectrum. Not a word was published against the speech of Antifa, which has led to violence from the far left in this country. There was no criticism of speech by those supporting the socialist regime in Nicaragua or advocating the same socialism which led to totalitarianism and as many as 100 million deaths in the old Soviet Union, in Communist China, in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and North Korea. No, he was concerned that a social media campaign helped elect Donald Trump!

Mr Marantz, while exercising his First Amendment rights, clearly does not like the unregulated speech of others:

After one of the 8chan-inspired massacres — I can’t even remember which one, if I’m being honest — I struck up a conversation with a stranger at a coffee shop. We talked about how bewildering it was to be alive at a time when viral ideas can slide so precipitously into terror. Then I wondered what steps should be taken. Immediately, our conversation ran aground. “No steps,” he said. “What exactly do you have in mind? Thought police?” He told me that he was a leftist, but he considered his opinion about free speech to be a matter of settled bipartisan consensus.

I imagined the same conversation, remixed slightly. What if, instead of talking about memes, we’d been talking about guns? What if I’d invoked the ubiquity of combat weapons in civilian life and the absence of background checks, and he’d responded with a shrug? Nothing to be done. Ever heard of the Second Amendment?

So, he believes that it is a problem, is out of character, for a self-identified “leftist” to support freedom of speech? We did learn about his feelings concerning our rights under the Second Amendment; is it any wonder that conservatives don’t trust leftists?

Using “free speech” as a cop-out is just as intellectually dishonest and just as morally bankrupt. For one thing, the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies. Even the most creative reader of the Constitution will not find a provision guaranteeing Richard Spencer a Twitter account. But even if you see social media platforms as something more akin to a public utility, not all speech is protected under the First Amendment anyway. Libel, incitement of violence and child pornography are all forms of speech. Yet we censor all of them, and no one calls it the death knell of the Enlightenment.

No, actually. We punish the consequences of such speech, but we do not censor it. We do not have all speech going through government-controlled channels to nip such things in the bud before they ever hit people’s computer screens, but we can punish people for causing harm by speech. But perhaps that government-controlled channel is what he wants:

Congress could fund, for example, a national campaign to promote news literacy, or it could invest heavily in library programming. It could build a robust public media in the mold of the BBC. It could rethink Section 230 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — the rule that essentially allows Facebook and YouTube to get away with (glorification of) murder. If Congress wanted to get really ambitious, it could fund a rival to compete with Facebook or Google, the way the Postal Service competes with FedEx and U.P.S.

Facebook and YouTube get away with the glorification of murder? Might as well mention Hollywood, and the body count racked up by Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s Terminator series, Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo movies and, let’s be honest, every action-adventure movie ever made. Heck, even the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings movies were filled with death and destruction, albeit that it was mostly orcs and goblins who bit the dust therein.

But I digress. Mr Marantz apparently sees some great good in a government-controlled social media network, forgetting, perhaps, the old Russian saying, В Правде нет новостей, и в Известиях нет правды.² Government organs of information are controlled by the government, and if the BBC is mostly innocuous, it isn’t completely. Given how the British have criminalized certain speech, something happening in the United States as well, perhaps Mr Marantz might remember just who is President. Perhaps had such existed when Barack Obama was President, the government could have censored all of the information about Hillary Clinton and gotten her elected President, which would have made Mr Marantz happier, but Donald Trump is President now, and might be for the next 5¼ years. I’m guessing that he wouldn’t like an official social media channel controlled by conservatives.

Free speech is a bedrock value in this country. But it isn’t the only one. Like all values, it must be held in tension with others, such as equality, safety and robust democratic participation. Speech should be protected, all things being equal. But what about speech that’s designed to drive a woman out of her workplace or to bully a teenager into suicide or to drive a democracy toward totalitarianism? Navigating these trade-offs is thorny, as trade-offs among core principles always are. But that doesn’t mean we can avoid navigating them at all.

Those first two examples already have legal problems, in that they aren’t subject to prior censorship, but the speakers can be held liable for illegal actions.

The third, “drive a democracy toward totalitarianism?” That is what bothers Mr Marantz, given that he seems to believe that was what happened in 2016. I could argue that it is the policies enunciated by the various Democratic candidates, which include confiscation of some firearms, and restrictions on personal actions and vehicles with the “Green New Deal” proposals; why shouldn’t those be censored?

Mr Marantz suggested that it needn’t be the government, that private companies could “ban inflammatory accounts, take down graphic videos, even rewrite their terms of service.” That’s something they already do, far too much, with a decided tendency to censor conservatives much more than the left. Twitter bans “deadnaming” and “misgendering”, not allowing any discussion of whether the ‘transgendered’ really are the sex they claim to be rather than their biological sex — something The New York Times gave Parker Malloy space to claim actually promotes freedom of speech³ — and Mr Marantz himself noted, with some apparent glee, that two far-right speakers, Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos, “have been permanently banned from all major (social media) platforms.”

The notion of banning “egregious actors” on the left?  That got no support, or even mention, by Mr Marantz.

Mr Marantz’s totalitarian impulses were evident in his concluding paragraph:

In one of our conversations, (John A. Powell, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley) compared harmful speech to carbon pollution: People are allowed to drive cars. But the government can regulate greenhouse emissions, the private sector can transition to renewable energy sources, civic groups can promote public transportation and cities can build sea walls to prepare for rising ocean levels. We could choose to reduce all of that to a simple dictate: Everyone should be allowed to drive a car, and that’s that. But doing so wouldn’t stop the waters from rising around us.

The philosophy of the left is the impulse to control, to control everybody. It’s supposedly all for our own good, of course, so we couldn’t possibly object to that.

The New York Times has a long and distinguished record of being champions for First Amendment protections and freedoms . . . for itself. For other people? Not so much. The editors of the Times appear to believe in the freedom of speech for those who rightthink, but for those who commit the thoughtcrime of wrongthink, well, they don’t really deserve to be able to speak, do they? After all, it’s harmful to our civil society!
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¹ – Andrew Marantz (@AndrewMarantz) is a staff writer for The New Yorker. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.”
² – There is no news in Pravda, and no truth in Izvestia.
³ – Parker Malloy is a male claiming that he is female.
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