Screen capture of tweet from Danielle Outlaw. Click on image to go to original.

The main page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website was rather amusing on Thursday morning. The Inquirer referred to an article from just before the end of last year, on a date when the city recorded its 555^th homicide, on its way to the record of 562 for 2021,^[1]It’s early in the year, but things haven’t gotten any better. As of 11:59 PM EST on Wednesday, January 12th, there had been 20 homicides reported by the Philadelphia Police Department, up … Continue reading which told us, “Philly ranks No. 3 on a list of trendy and affordable cities: The Realtor.com report cited Philadelphia’s culture, history, and “quaint” neighborhoods.” I suppose that, based on median home prices and major urban amenities, it is. We’ve noted how aging hipster — can you really be a hipster at age 44? — Amanda Marcotte sang the praises of her new South Philadelphia neighborhood, saying that “Philly’s food scene is the hotness,” but if she’s ever written more about her new hometown, I’ve missed it. The Inquirer article touted the city’s “world-class food scene, and its many small businesses, shops and nightlife, walkability, and something-for-everyone offerings as reasons the city deserves its ‘trendy’ title.”

Yet, on Wednesday evening, the seemingly-appropriately named Police Commissioner for the City of Philadelphia, Danielle Outlaw, has tweeted out her advice to victims of carjackings. While there are some reasonable safety tips, one, “Make it a habit to start your car and drive away immediately,” is horrible: your engine needs a few seconds to pump the motor oil from the oil pan through the engine, so starting the engine and driving away immediately increases the wear-and-tear on it. But the Commissioner’s main advice was simply that, if someone attempts to steal your car, let him.

“Your vehicle can be replaced. You are irreplaceable!” the Commissioner tells Philadelphians, which is true enough, in the abstract sense, but for the people who live in the city’s more crime-ridden neighborhoods, their insurance might not replace that vehicle; having their car stolen means having no car, not just the inconvenience of having to get Flo from Progressive buy you a new one. Philadelphia has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, but so many of the city’s liberals are wholly insulated from it.

Of course, many of the comments on the Commissioner’s tweet were along the lines of this one, “Buy a legal firearm, get you concealed carry permit. When these thugs attempt to ‘jack you, introduce them to your two friends, Smith & Wesson,” but let’s tell the truth here: if you had a legally-possessed weapon, and you used it against a carjacker in Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner would charge you for defending your property with deadly force. If you did the city a favor and insured that yours was the last vehicle that the carjacker attempted to steal, Mr Krasner would charge you with murder.

However, the two points I’ve mentioned, Philly’s trendiness and its awful homicide rate, are easily explained by one simple fact: as the Inquirer itself reported, less than three months ago, “Philly remains one of the most racially segregated cities in America: People from different racial and ethnic groups live in different neighborhoods, and the pace of desegregation has slowed.” Miss Marcotte and her ‘partner,’ Marc Faletti, can walk around South Philly in reasonable safety and security, and enjoy the food scene:

Our South Philly neighborhood, on the other hand, is a blast for those who spend way too much of their income on dining out. Local breweries are abundant, as well as experimental restaurants like Bing Bing, which serves a modern American spin on dim sum. And unlike New York, where you often have to travel an hour by subway to find good places to find more traditional Mexican or Asian cuisines, we’re in walking distance of one of the best taquerias on the East Coast and a tiny but magnificent Indonesian place.

For vegetarians like myself, Philadelphia’s restaurant scene is particularly amazing. It’s not just the nearly limitless number of excellent vegan restaurants, either. Nearly every place you eat out at here has a substantial number of vegetarian or vegan dishes, in contrast to New York, where some restaurants don’t even bother.

It’s no skin off her nose, but not that far away, in West Philadelphia,^[2]West Philadelpha and South Philadelphia are not separate cities, but simply the names of neighborhoods and areas. Philadelphia has a lot of named neighborhoods. trying that is an attempt at avoiding darker corners, the open ends of alleys, and where some black residents are opposing physical improvements to sidewalks and streets because that might bring more white people into the neighborhood.

Miss Marcotte, and Inquirer urbanism writer Michaelle Bond can write about the trendiness of Philadelphia, because they have insulated themselves from the grittier neighborhoods, they have segregated themselves away from most of the city’s crime.

Commissioner Outlaw needn’t have bothered with her tweet: the areas in which carjackings are more likely to occur already know what they need to do, and the less crime ridden neighborhoods, which are, to be brutally frank about it, the whiter neighborhoods, where the liberals and the #woke don’t see the crime close up, can close their eyes to the things happening in Kensington and Strawberry Mansion.