Sometimes things strike me as just pegging the Irony Meter. The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Editorial Board of which endorsed District Attorney Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner for re-election, uncritically published a story about some Philly day campers receiving training about how to stop blood loss from people who’ve been shot in the city’s mean streets:
Sign of the times: At this Philly day camp, teens learned “stop the bleed” training for gunshot victims
With gun violence rising in Philadelphia, 50 city youth got practical training and stop-the-bleed kits at a one-day camp.
by Kristen A Graham | Friday, July 22, 2022 | 4:58 PM EDT
Alyssa Heiser hopes she never has to use the things she learned Friday, but she’ll sleep a little better knowing she’s prepared.
If someone gets shot, the 17-year-old said, she’ll remember the stop-the-bleed steps she picked at a one-day camp held at Ben Franklin High School on Friday: Call 911, apply pressure with hands, pack the wound and press down, and apply a tourniquet.
“I’m in a neighborhood where robberies, shootings, murders happen all the time,” said Heiser, who lives in Frankford. “Little kids are getting shot, people just out watching fireworks are getting shot. The way things in our city are happening, we all need this.”
Heiser and about 50 other youths participated in a gun-violence prevention and de-escalation day camp sponsored by Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity in conjunction with the Philadelphia Police Department.
The idea sprung from work that Christopher Stith, the fraternity’s regional director of social action, had been doing. During a Phi Beta Sigma town hall on gun violence held earlier this year, most of the talk centered on the way violence effects young people.; Stith had developed the “Sigma Self-Defense Series,” lessons in de-escalation and self protection.
There’s more at the original.
There were 315 homicides in Philly in 2017, the year in which Mr Krasner campaigned for, and won, the office of District Attorney. In his first year in office, that rose to 353, then 356, then 499, and in 2021, set the city’s all-time record of 562. So far this year, the City of Brotherly Love is seeing an average of 1.5149 murders per day, a pace which, if maintained, would see 553 murders in 2022, fewer than last year, but well ahead of the 500 homicides in second place, a record set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990.
Of course, it’s not just homicides. Somehow, the Philadelphia Police Department got the homicide numbers wrong for this year, which is dumb because the source for this document is the same one which reported 297 homicides as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, July 17th, and had 304 listed for the same date in 2021.
More, it shows a 6.64% increase, from 2,199 to 2,345, in shooting “incidents”, and 4.56% increase in shooting victims, from 1,249 to 1,306. I suppose that the difference between 2,345 and 1,306 means that there have been 1,039 reports of shootings in which no one was struck.
It does report a large increase in robberies, both involving a firearm and not, and increases in every property crime listed.
Now, in the midst of a heat wave, assaults by three ‘unruly’ teenaged girls on Thursday, which led to vandalism, has now led the city to drain the pool and close it for the rest of the season. City Parks and Recreation said that the pool was closed due to concerns for the safety of staff and visitors, and that this pool, in the crime-ridden Kensington section, has had many problems, including multiple break-ins after hours. The Parks Department did not say that the staff had all just up and quit, or refused to work at that pool again, but the city has had a serious shortage of lifeguards for the pools, and opened only 50 of the 65 pools in the city.
The last Republican mayor of Philadelphia left office when Harry Truman was still President of the United States. Perhaps, just perhaps, the policies of the Democrats who have run the city for the last 70 years just don’t work very well.