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Self-cleaning oven

When last we reported on it, Lexington had seen 28 homicides in 2021, the last on September 3rd. Lexington’s 29th murder happened early this morning:

    Update: Man dies after shooting at Lexington apartment complex

    By Christopher Leach | Updated: October 5, 2021 | 4:37 PM EDT

    A 23-year-old man died shortly after he was found shot at a Lexington apartment complex early Tuesday, according to police.

    Jayontai McCann of Lexington died at the University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital at 5:17 a.m., according to the Fayette County coroner.

Jayontai McCann.

The report doesn’t have much information in it. Just before 4:00 AM, the Lexington Police Department received a call about a man being assaulted behind the Liberty Heights Apartments. When officers arrived, they found the victim, who had been shot multiple times. It’s almost a sick joke to note that the police stated that they were investigating the case of a victim shot “multiple times” as a homicide.

Also see: Paul Mirengoff on Powerline, Wokeness kills.

Twenty-nine homicides in 278 days equals one every 9½ days. Due to fractions, the exact number works out to 38 homicides for the year. With 29 murders, Lexington is just one behind the then record of 30, set in 2019, but, of course, the record was broken again, with 34 in 2020. With a population of 324,604 according to the 2020 census, the city’s homicide rate in 2020 worked out to 10.474 per 100,000 population. If Lexington hits 38 homicides, the way the numbers work out, that would be a jump to 11.707 per 100,000, hardly on a par with Chicago or Philadelphia, but bad enough.

However, let’s tell the whole truth here.

    Suspect arrested for shooting that injured EKU player

    By Echo Gamel | July 24, 2019

    LEXINGTON, KY. (WTVQ) – Police announce an arrest in a shooting last month in Lexington that left an Eastern Kentucky Football player injured.

    The Lexington Police Department says 21-year-old Jayontai McCann is facing charges for the shooting on June 23 near Two Keys Tavern.

    According to officers, two men got into a fight then one went to his car to get a gun and shot the other man.

    The victim was later identified as Cameron Catron, a player on the EKU football team.

    McCann is charged with assault, possession of a handgun by convicted felon, and tampering with physical evidence.

The Lexington Herald-Leader reported[1]The Herald-Leader actually printed Mr McCann’s mugshot in that story, but it was before the silly McClatchy Mugshot Policy was written.:

    According to court records, McCann was on probation at the time of the shooting after pleading guilty in August. He was charged with cocaine possession and attempted evidence tampering. His prison sentence and jail sentence on the two charges were suspended and he was given probation for two years.

    He had previously been charged with other drug and gun crimes and pleaded guilty in some instances.

The obvious question is: why was Mr McCann out on the streets Tuesday morning? He had been a previously convicted felon, and had a suspended sentence hanging over his head. He should have been locked up for the two years of his suspended sentence, even before facing charges for shooting Mr Cameron.

Did law enforcement do Mr McCann any favors by treating him leniently? If he had been in prison, where he should have been, he would (probably) be alive today. By letting him loose, loose to return to whatever life he led before, law enforcement left him out to become stone-cold graveyard dead.

The odds are pretty good that, if and when the Lexington Police figure out who murdered Mr McCann, we’ll discover that he, too, had a rap sheet and could, and should, have been in jail himself early Tuesday morning.

The Urban Dictionary defines a “self-cleaning oven” as:

    when a criminal becomes the victim of a crime because he victimized someone at an earlier time; in other words, karma comes back on the criminal, the problem takes care of itself without the need for police or legal intervention. In theory, eventually all crime should diminish because of this theory, the oven should clean itself.

    “Man, that banger got shot because he jacked those same dudes last week…it’s okay because now his crew will roll back on them…they don’t want to make a police report, it’s a self-cleaning oven.”

On one of my favorite television shows, Blue Bloods, it’s called a public service homicide.

It is, however, possible that Mr McCann was turning his life around, and whatever his past crimes, he didn’t deserve to die. But bad lives can lead to bad ends, whether he was turning his life around or not.

References

References
↑1 The Herald-Leader actually printed Mr McCann’s mugshot in that story, but it was before the silly McClatchy Mugshot Policy was written.
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Kroger and masks Local Kroger didn't require masks during worst of the Δ outbreak, so why now?

This sign was posted beside the outer doors at the Kroger on the Eastern Bypass in Richmond, Kentucky, on October 5, 2021.

We reported, on August 10th, that the Kroger Company KR: (%) had updated its mask policy:

    Our current mask guidance requires unvaccinated associates to wear masks and requests that unvaccinated customers wear masks when in our stores and facilities. In light of the Delta variant and updated CDC recommendations, we strongly encourage all individuals, including those who are vaccinated, to wear a mask when in our stores and facilities. We will continue to abide by all state and local mandates and encourage all Americans to get vaccinated, including our associates.

According to the sign, Kroger had gone from “request(ing)” that unvaccinated customers wear masks to “requiring” unvaccinated visitors to wear masks, while still saying, “Masks strongly encouraged for fully vaccinated individuals.

But there was another sign, on the inner doorway, maybe twenty feet from the outer doors:

    Achtung! Attention! Mask required! To stop the spread of the virus, Kroger requires all customers and associates to wear a mask while in our stores.

    Thank you for shopping with us today.

I chose to obey the outer sign, and, being fully vaccinated, I declined their ‘strong encouragement’ to wear a mask. As a guesstimate, about 20% of the shoppers I saw inside were not wearing masks.

So, why did this particular branch of Kroger put up these signs? New COVID-19 cases have been declining in the Bluegrass State, and, thanks to the Republican-controlled General Assembly, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) cannot impose one. This particular branch hadn’t had any signs like this up for months, including during the worst of the ‘Delta’ variant cases. Perhaps the manager got her hand smacked by the corporate office?

At least the store was not attempting to enforce this stupid requirement. It is their private property, so they can impose any restrictions they wish. But I am a free individual, and if they start enforcing this policy, I am free to take my business elsewhere, and I will.

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They can’t handle the truth! Philly Inquirer won't tell you that city's murder rate is higher than Chicago's!

This site has been hard on The Philadelphia Inquirer and how that august newspaper pretty much ignores the homicides in its hometown unless the victim is an innocent, someone already of note, or a cute little white girl. In a city in which the vast majority of murder victims are black, you wouldn’t expect that “anti-racist news organization” to have that kind of skewed coverage, would you?

Screen capture of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, at 8:15 AM EDT on Tuesday, October 5, 2021. Click to enlarge.

Well, another innocent person was killed, and the Inquirer is all over it, as we noted on Monday.

    Nursing assistant gunned down by coworker at Jefferson Hospital left behind three children

    The Elkins Park homeowner was also a part-time barber whose “legacy was his kids.”

    by Marina Affo and Juliana Feliciano Reyes | Monday, October 4, 2021

    Anrae James used to tell his younger brother Armond, “If you treat people nice, you’ll always be blessed.” Armond looked up to his brother always and knew he could count on him being present, no matter the endeavor, he said.

    Now the phrase will serve as part of James’ legacy and a bittersweet reminder for all who loved him.

    The 43-year-old nursing assistant and part-time barber, whom many called Rae, was identified by his family on Monday as the victim in an early morning shooting at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. Those who knew him described him as a “family man” who worked two jobs to support his three kids and a jokester with a talent for bringing people together around his barber’s chair.

    “One of the best [barbers] in Uptown,” said his friend Lyndell Mason. “That’s what we called him.”

There’s much more at the original, most of it telling readers what a great guy Mr James was; it was at least as much a human interest story as a crime report. The importance that the Inquirer gave to this story is contained in a footnote to it:

    Staff writers Barbara Laker, Chris Palmer, Anna Orso, and Rob Tornoe contributed to this article.

That’s six reporters covering the story, and two more, Jason Laughlin and Erin McCarthy, wrote and contributed to another article, Jefferson shooting is the latest example of workplace violence in health care: Health-care workers said the threat of violence is a too common part of their professional lives.

But Mr James was not the only person murdered on Monday. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page noted, as of 8:35 AM on Tuesday, October 5th, that 420 souls had been sent early to their eternal rewards, two more than the previous report, but I could find nothing at all in the inquirer about it.

Over the last 28 days, which excludes the Labor Day holiday weekend, 57 people have been murdered in Philly, 57 people in four weeks, or 2.0357 per day, and the Inquirer paid almost no attention to it. The city is up to 1.516 homicides per day for the year, meaning that, if that rate continues, 553 or 554 — the actual calculation is 553.430 — people will spill out their blood in the city’s mean streets.

If the last four weeks’ average was maintained, that would mean 179 more homicides, for a total of 599, but surely, surely! that rate won’t be maintained!

Will it?

On Friday, December 11, 2020, Helen Ubiñas published an article in the Inquirer entitled “What do you know about the Philadelphians killed by guns this year? At least know their names.”

    The last time we published the names of those lost to gun violence, in early July, nearly 200 people had been fatally shot in the city.

    Just weeks before the end of 2020, that number doubled. More than 400 people gunned down.

    By the time you read this, there will only be more.

    Even in a “normal” year, most of their stories would never be told.

    At best they’d be reduced to a handful of lines in a media alert:

    “A 21-year-old Black male was shot one time in the head. He was transported to Temple University Hospital and was pronounced at 8:12 p.m. The scene is being held, no weapon recovered and no arrest.”

    That’s it. An entire life ending in a paragraph that may never make the daily newspaper.

Of course, Miss Ubiñas got it slightly wrong: the Inquirer no longer specifies the race of victims. I have inferred that this was the result of a deliberate editorial decision, but it could just as easily be that the Philadelphia Police no longer report that information to the paper.

Perhaps I should be kinder to the Inquirer. After all, with 420 homicides so far, tied for the 13th bloodiest year in history, even with 88 days remaining in 2021, if the newspaper covered every murder, it might be my-eyes-glazed-over boring.

But it is also misleading journalism. Yeah, everybody knows that Philadelphia is a bloody town, but if the Inquirer’s coverage is the measure, that carnage seems to be just, well, unimportant. The Inquirer likes to concentrate on “gun violence,” as though those inanimate objects somehow levitate and shoot people completely independently of some bad person pulling the trigger. When publisher Elizabeth Hughes told us that her newspaper was “Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime,” she was telling us, inter alia, that the Inquirer would not report something really radical like, oh, the truth.

And the truth needs to be told. Due to news coverage, we often see Chicago as our most murderous city, and in the sheer body count, it’s pretty awful. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, 624 people have been murdered in the Windy City so far this year.

But homicide rates are calculated correcting for population, and Chicago’s population of 2,746,388is more than a million people more than Philly’s 1,603,797. Chicago’s annualized homicide rate[1]The annualized homicide rate was calculated by taking the number of current homicides, dividing by the number of days elapsed in the year, 277, and multiplying by 365, to get the projected number of … Continue reading is 29.930 per 100,000 population, while Philadelphia’s is 34.481 per 100,000! Philadelphia is worse than Chicago, but you won’t find that reported in the nation’s third oldest newspaper!

It was absolutely reasonable for the Inquirer to report on the murder of Anrae James. But the newspaper failing to cover, other than in the briefest of ways, if at all, of the vast majority of the other 419 people who spilled their blood in the city’s streets, is journolism[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading, not journalism, because it obscures the truth, for political reasons.

References

References
↑1 The annualized homicide rate was calculated by taking the number of current homicides, dividing by the number of days elapsed in the year, 277, and multiplying by 365, to get the projected number of murders at the current daily rate, then dividing that number by the population in hundreds of thousands.
↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity.
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Many states have ‘decriminalized’ marijuana; now Trevor Burrus wants to legalize smack No slippery slope there, huh?

When I comment on Patterico’s Pontifications, I use the ‘handle’ “The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana,” because one of the site authors is named Dana and I have to distinguish myself from her, but recreational pharmaceuticals is where I depart from libertarianism, for one reason, and one reason only. My darling bride — of 42 years, 4 months, and 15 days — was a pediatric nurse, and she has told me, many times, that she has never seen a case of child abuse — and they have to be hospitalization-serious enough for her to have seen them — in which drug and/or, usually and, alcohol abuse was not a factor. Since the vast majority of adults wind up, at some point, responsible for the care of children, legalizing drugs is a huge risk factor.

    Legalize heroin to save lives

    Our infatuation with prohibition, and our unease with drug use, is killing tens of thousands every year.

    by Trevor Burrus[1]Trevor Burrus is a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor‐in‐chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. | Monday, October 4, 2021

    With 93,000 dead last year, America’s overdose crisis has reached new heights. Deaths were up 29% over 2019, which exceeded the expectations of many who anticipated a significant increase. More Americans die each year of overdoses than died in any war except the Civil War and World War II. Tragically, prohibition is the primary cause of these deaths, and we could save tens of thousands of lives next year if we legalized drugs, especially opiates.

    Over the past decade, fentanyl has been the primary cause of overdoses, and prohibition is the main reason it has become so common in our drug supply. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is around 100 times more potent than heroin. Although it varies between users, the lethal dose of fentanyl is about three milligrams, which is just a few dozen grains. Users are increasingly unknowingly consuming drugs tainted with fentanyl, and their normal dose suddenly becomes lethal.

    Prohibition caused this fentanyl-overdose epidemic for the same reason that those who smuggle alcohol into a sporting event prefer flasks to a 12-pack. When a substance has to be smuggled, the smuggler prefers the highest potency, smallest version. During alcohol prohibition, beer and wine almost disappeared from the market. And while spirits accounted for about 40% of alcohol sales before prohibition, that jumped to 90% after. The price of beer also rose an estimated 700%.

    This is called the iron law of prohibition, and it works against the most optimistic goals of prohibitionists. Crack down on smuggling at the border and you won’t decrease the number of users, you’ll just increase the potency of the drug. Compulsive drug users aren’t suddenly “cured” by a lack of supply because prohibition primarily changes the nature of the drug supply, not whether the drug is available.

There’s a lot more at the original, but the basis of Mr Burrus’ article is that making the supply of heroin illegal doesn’t make the availability of illegal drugs non-existent, but simply that it channels them into criminal ventures, and that making heroin illegal has simply encouraged the abuse of fentanyl, which is 100 times more potent than heroin, and fentanyl is so potent that even a slight miscalculation can be lethal. Drug smugglers only have to bring in one percent of the previous mass, which makes things much easier for them.

But it isn’t just heroin he wants to legalize:

    Whatever system we choose, legalizing heroin and fentanyl will immediately save lives. Street opiates are tainted and of uncertain potency, but pharmaceutical-grade opiates are perfectly safe to take in the proper amount. Doctors and nurses inject dangerous opiates into patients thousands of times per day, and they do it with confidence because they know what drug they are administering and how much to give. Recreational heroin users are capable of doing the same thing. After all, it’s their life.

Sorry, but I don’t equate the precision with which doctors and nurses can measure and administer prescribed pharmaceuticals with the capabilities of junkies. Mr Burrus himself noted, as quoted above, just how small a miscalculation would be lethal when it comes to fentanyl. There is no such thing as a responsible drug addict. The author undermined his own argument.

Mr Burrus’ concerns are not mine: he wants to make the world safer for junkies, make life easier for them; if he has any concern for the children for whom they are ultimately responsible, he didn’t include it in his OpEd.

Over the past couple of decades, we have seen several states ‘decriminalize’ the use of marijuana. ‘It’s not as bad as alcohol,’ they say, as though that’s somehow a point in their favor. I’ve seen, we’ve all seen, too many stoners to think it’s a wise idea, and now that that one drug is being decriminalized, we’re seeing calls for others to be decriminalized — and in Mr Burrus’ argument, completely legalized — as well. But the stoners can’t hold jobs, any more than alcoholics can, because it eventually gets to them. In my career in the ready-mixed concrete industry, I couldn’t even tell you how many drivers we lost because they used drugs. Given that there is no test for current intoxication for any of the recreational drugs other than alcohol, a driver can have an accident, have to take the whizz quiz, and show up ‘hot’ for marijuana or something else, even if he isn’t currently under the influence. The last thing we need is employees using legal drugs who are going to test positive for their use even when not under the influence, because if a driver rams another vehicle or runs over a worker or pedestrian, and he tests positive, the company will be sued into penury for allowing a driver who used such drugs behind the wheel of 36 tons of rolling death.

My home state of Kentucky leads the nation in one unfortunate category: we have the highest percentage of children being reared not by their parents but their grandparents, and drug addiction is almost always the reason for this. My nephew, who used to be an EMT in Lee County, Kentucky, has told me that the majority of his calls were for drug overdoses or other drug related problems. Legal or illegal, drug addicts cannot responsibly care for children, or be relied on to use contraception responsibly. Anything that encourages the use of recreational drugs encourages more poverty.

Were God to tap me on the shoulder and say, “OK, Dana, you get my power to change one thing,” I wouldn’t hesitate in my action: I would change the human brain to be immune to the effects of recreational drugs and alcohol.

We need to not only not legalize recreational drugs, not only keep the laws against them in place, but treat drug users and drug dealers far more harshly. Selling drugs should never be pled down to misdemeanors, but prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and the sentences should be life in prison without the possibility of parole. Drug use has to be punished as well, seriously enough that it’s a serious deterrent, and seriously enough that people know that the one strike they might get will be the last leniency they get.

References

References
↑1 Trevor Burrus is a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor‐in‐chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review.
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The blood keeps flowing in the City of Brotherly Love

The blood keeps flowing in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page listed, as of 9:45 AM EDT on Monday, October 4, 2021, 418 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love, as of 11:59 PM EDT on October 3rd. 418 ÷ 276 days of the year = 1.5145 per day, x 365 = 552.79 murders projected for the entire year.

Trouble is, since the end of the Labor Day weekend, there have been 55 homicides in the past 27 days, 2.037 per day. If that rate continued over the remaining 89 days of the year, that would be another 181 murders, for a total of 599 for the year!

With 89 days left in the year, the city has moved up from its 16th deadliest year to 14th.

    Nursing assistant killed by coworker at Jefferson University Hospital, two Philadelphia police officers shot

    The victim was a 43-year-old man who worked as a certified nursing assistant. The suspect, 55, fled the scene in a U-Haul van and ended up in a shootout with Philadelphia police officers in Parkside.

    by Rob Tornoe and Anna Orso | Monday, October 4, 2021

    A certified nursing assistant at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Center City was shot and killed by a coworker early Monday morning, according to police.

    The suspect — a 55-year-old man, also a nursing assistant — then fled the scene in a U-Haul van and ended up in a shootout with Philadelphia police officers in the city’s Parkside section. Two officers were shot, and the suspect — who police said was wearing body armor and carrying multiple weapons — was shot and apprehended by police.

    The victim, 43, was pronounced dead shortly after he was shot at the hospital.

    Police are investigating a connection between the two coworkers. They did not identify either man Monday morning.

There’s more at the original, but Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw stated that her department and she believe it was an intentional, targeted killing, though the reason for it was not yet known. Given that the shooter had multiple weapons and body armor, it was clearly planned.

    One of the police officers was shot in the elbow and is in critical but stable condition. The other was shot in the nose and is in stable condition. Outlaw said the two officers that were shot have been on the police force less than six years.

For having shot two police officers, even though not fatally, District Attorney will probably offer the suspect a lenient plea bargain arrangement.

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The internet is forever . . . and so is stupidity. Journolists attempt to control the language to influence people's thinking

As regular readers — both of them — of The First Street Journal know, I have a tendency to do screen captures of things I suspect might be deleted. As Travis Lyles, “the first official Instagram Editor at The Washington Post,” now knows, the internet is forever.

    Washington Post adds ‘pregnant individuals’ to style guide

    by Luke Gentile, Social Media Producer | October 1, 2021 | 4:51 PM

    When referring to pregnancy, the Washington Post will strive to be more inclusive and use the term “pregnant individuals,” according to a Twitter post that has since been made private by the publication’s Instagram editor.

    “While biology dictates who can become pregnant, it does not always reflect gender identity,” the style manual reads. “If we say pregnant women, we exclude those who are transgender and nonbinary.”

    However, writers can’t use “pregnant individual” as a blanket term, as that would be at the expense of women who are already a marginalized group, according to the style guide.

    “If you are dealing with a situation in which you know the people identify as women , then you can appropriately use the phrase pregnant woman or pregnant women,” the directive stated. “In other situations, to be more inclusive, use pregnant women and other pregnant individuals.”

The Washington Examiner then included the screenshot of Mr Lyles Instagram post:

Washington Examiner screen capture of Travis Lyles’ Instagram post. Click to enlarge.

There’s more at the original.

So, what is the Washington Examiner? Originally a tabloid-sized daily in the nation’s capital, now a weekly publication and conservative website, it has been around for sixteen years now. Like The Washington Times, it originally hoped to supplant the post, but never did. Wikipedia has questioned its journalism, but at least here, Luke Gentile, the site’s social media producer, had the documentation.

Also see: Abigail Shrier, via Bari Weiss: Top Trans Doctors Blow the Whistle on ‘Sloppy’ Care

Conservatives routinely mock what journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading have been using as politically correct terminology, but it’s more than just political correctness at work here. It is a leftist attempt to normalize transgenderism, to normalize the cockamamie notion that, in the words of the Kinks, girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

We have previously noted how the left have been trying this, even altering a quote from liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the ACLU having to apologize for such obvious stupidity.

Even Mr Lyles recognized the biology, saying, “While biology dictates who can become pregnant, it does not always reflect gender identity,” a statement which attempts to decouple the as-long-as-we-have-had-language associations between man and male, woman and female. The control of language is the control of ideas, something the left well know, and something we must resist to preserve the common sense of millennia of known human language and history. The left are attempting to prey on conservatives’ sense of courtesy against us, to get conservatives, and everyone else, used to the idea of transgenderism as somehow being normal and acceptable, as a way to undermine our thinking and our ideology.

It’s simple: it is better to be discourteous than suborned.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Killadelphia

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page reported that the City of Brotherly Love — and yes, I have been using that title sarcastically for a long time — has suffered through 412 homicides as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, September 30th. 412 murders ÷ 273 days = 1.509157509157509 killings per day x 365 days = 550.8425 homicides projected for the year.

The 2020 census reported that 1,603,797 live in Philly. With 499 homicides in 2020, that gives the city a homicide rate of 31.11 per 100,000 population. With a guesstimated 2021 population of 1,607,667, and the city on track for 551 murders, the city’s homicide rate has jumped to 34.27 per 100,000 population.

Former Mayor Michael Nutter produced a chart of Philadelphia homicides per year from 1960 through 2020. It was rather self-serving, as he added the name of the Mayor of Philadelphia, given that it showed there were fewer homicides per year under his regime than under other recent mayors, but, in fact, there was no year in which murders reached the 400 mark under Mr Nutter and his Police Commissioner, Charles Ramsey. I have reproduced the chart for all of the years with 400 or more homicides, and sorted it by the number of killings. Note that with 412 killings, 2021 is 16th out of 18 years with more than 400 homicides, having passed 1994 and 2006, and there are still three full months left in the year!

Since the end of the Labor Day weekend, 24 days ago, there have been 49 murders reported in Philadelphia, or 2.0417 per day. If that rate continues for just one more week, the total would jump to 426, jumping up five more spots.

Then there’s this:

    Philly’s top cop says she and DA Krasner ‘just don’t agree’ on how to reduce shootings

    “Fundamentally, there are very key disconnects there,” Outlaw said, “as far as which crimes we prioritize, and who believes what are the main drivers of the violent crime that we’re seeing.”

    by Anna Orso | September 30, 2021

    Philadelphia’s top law enforcement officials don’t agree on which crimes they should prioritize while seeking to address the city’s record-setting gun violence crisis, a notable disconnect made public yet again this week.

    The Philadelphia Police Department is focused on arresting people for dealing drugs and illegally carrying guns, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said this week, but top brass don’t see the District Attorney’s Office prioritizing the prosecution of those crimes.

    During a biweekly news conference with Mayor Jim Kenney on Wednesday, the city’s top cop said she and reform-minded District Attorney Larry Krasner “just don’t agree” on whether illegal gun and narcotics charges can reduce violent crime, making it hard to progress in slowing the bloodshed.

    ”Fundamentally, there are very key disconnects there, as far as which crimes we prioritize, and who believes what are the main drivers of the violent crime that we’re seeing,” Outlaw said.

    Jane Roh, a spokesperson for Krasner’s office, said violent crimes “have always been the top priorities” and said all law enforcement should be squarely focused on shooting and homicide investigations. She pointed to low clearance rates, saying that so far this year, police have made arrests in just 29% of homicides and 15% of nonfatal shootings.

    “No public official should be defending that, much less spinning it,” she said in a statement. “Our communities and our neighbors who have been wounded or killed by gun violence deserve real leadership and action.”

There’s more at the original, but both are right: the Commissioner should not be throwing shade at the District Attorney when their clearance rates are so low, but the DA’s office should not be minimizing arrests for dealing drugs and illegally carrying firearms, because drug dealers and gang bangers are the number one perpetrators of shootings. Mr Krasner, whom The Philadelphia Inquirer actually endorsed for renomination, has more of a history of letting thugs go free so that they can then go out and murder people:

    In June 2018, Maalik Jackson-Wallace was arrested on a Frankford street and charged with carrying a concealed gun without a license and a gram of marijuana. It was his first arrest.

    The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office recommended the Frankford man for a court diversionary program called Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition (ARD) that put him on two years’ probation. His record could have been expunged if he had successfully completed the program.

    But Jackson-Wallace, 24, was arrested again on gun-possession charges in March in Bridesburg. He was released from jail after a judge granted a defense motion for unsecured bail. And on June 13, he was arrested a third time — charged with murder in a shooting two days earlier in Frankford that killed a 26-year-old man.

It seems that in his eagerness to keep Mr Jackson-Wallace out of jail, the District Attorney did him no favors. Instead of a potential sentence from 2½ to 7 years in the clink, Mr Jackson-Wallace faced the rest of his miserable life behind bars.

It’s true enough that the city’s police are not closing homicide cases at a satisfactory rate, but there are homicide cases which would not have occurred at all if Mr Krasner were more interested in locking up the bad guys than he is at attacking the police.

The left have, for years, decried “mass incarceration,” but lenient law enforcement has proven to be a bad idea even for the criminals. We have previously noted how John Lewis, AKA Lewis Jordan, who slew Philadelphia Police Officer Charles Cassidy, and Nikolas Cruz, accused of the mass murders at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, were given every possible break. Had they been in jail at the time they committed their murders, yeah, they might have served a year or three, but Mr Jordan wouldn’t be on death row today, looking at spending the rest of his miserable life in prison, and Mr Cruz wouldn’t have the same kind of sentence looking him dead in the eye.

Are Messrs Jordan and Cruz somehow better off today because lenient law enforcement kept them out of jail? Is Andrew Brown, with his 180-page-long rap sheet, better off today because, despite many criminal convictions, he was out of jail the day he decided to start a gunfight with several Pasquotank County, North Carolina, deputies trying to serve a couple of warrants? Was 21-year-old Hasan Elliot better off on that Friday the 13th when he should have been in jail, and would have been in jail had not Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office declined to have him locked up on a serious parole violation, and he had a shootout with police?

Treating the petty criminals seriously is better for everyone in the long run. It’s better for society, as it gets the bad guys off the street, and lowers the overall crime rate, and it’s better for the criminals themselves, because when they are locked up for crimes that leave them with hope of eventually getting out of prison, they don’t have as much time on the streets, usually in their prime crime committing ages, they are likely to commit the big crimes which will have them locked up for the rest of their miserable lives.

And so, after finishing 2020 in second place all time for homicides, the thugs of Philadelphia have basically said, “Hold my beer,” and are looking to not just break, but completely shatter the record number of murders.

There are three more months in 2021, and at the current annual rate, the gang bangers are poised to break the city’s murder record on Thanksgiving day. Lenience in law enforcement has not worked, and the price that has been paid is measured in the blood on Philly’s streets.

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Murder in Lexington

We have expended considerable bandwidth reporting on the homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love, which has seen 408 homicides in 272 days, an even 1.500 homicides per say, for a projected total for the year, assuming the current rate remains constant, of 548 souls sent untimely to their eternal rewards.

But what about Lexington, Kentucky, the closest large city to me, and where I lived from 1971 through 1984. According to the Lexington Police Department, there have been 28 murders in the city thus far in 2021, 28 in nine months of the year. If the rate continues, the city would be projected to see 37 homicides for the entire year. Compared to Philadelphia’s current 408, that doesn’t sound like much, but when you consider that 2019 set a city record with 30, which was then topped by 34 killings in 2020, it’s a lot.

Of course, like so many other places, the bad guys are lousy shots. All 28 homicides so far were committed by firearms, which makes the relationship with the city’s reported shootings a tight one. Thus far, the police have reported 101 non-fatal shootings. Looks like the bad guys manage to actually kill their intended targets 21.71% of the time![1]With the last reported shooting being on September 19th, the LPD is a bit behind on keeping the data up to date. The Herald-Leader reported a shooting as having occurred “just be fore … Continue reading

The Lexington Police Department keeps statistics strangely. The shootings data include the race of the victims while the homicide chart does not. Of the 101 shootings reported as of September 19th, 77 of the victims were black, 16 were white, and 8 were listed as Hispanic. According to the 2020 Census, the city’s population was 323,152, and was 74.9% white, 14.6% black, 7.2% Hispanic and 3.8% bi- or multi-racial; the white, black and multi-racial percentages include Hispanics, and while the figures note that 71.0% are non-Hispanic white, the figures do not report the non-Hispanic black percentage.

So, with black Lexingtonians being 14.6% of the population, why have they been the victims in 76.24% of the shootings? And why does the city not show the information on how many murder victims were black? I suspect that it is, in the words of the Sacramento Bee, such would be “perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.”

Sadly, the Lexington Police Department hasn’t been doing too well in solving the homicides. In only 11 of the 28 killings has a suspect been identified. That’s a clearance rate of 39.29%. They did better in 2020, with arrests in 28 out of 34 murders, one of which only resulted in arrests this week.

Lexington’s homicide rate in 2020 was 10.52 per 100,000 population, which doesn’t in any way compare to Philadelphia’s but it’s still way too high. With a guesstimated 2021 population of 324,604, if the city does see that projected 37 homicides, it would mean that the homicide ticked up to 11.40 per 100,000. That’s not a good thing.

References

References
↑1 With the last reported shooting being on September 19th, the LPD is a bit behind on keeping the data up to date. The Herald-Leader reported a shooting as having occurred “just be fore midnight” on Tuesday, September 21st.
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Another priestly problem

I’m betting that The Philadelphia Inquirer slipped up!

In 2018, the Inquirer reported on Monsignor Joseph McLoone and his resignation following revelations of “inappropriate” relationships with adults:

    Downingtown pastor resigns after ‘inappropriate’ expenses, relationships

    Monsignor Joseph McLoone, the pastor of St. Joseph Parish in Downingtown, allegedly spent $1,500 from a secret parish bank account on “inappropriate” relationships with adults.

    by David Gambacorta and John Smith | April 15, 2018

    Seven years ago, Msgr. Joseph McLoone was dispatched to Downingtown with a tall task: to try to stabilize St. Joseph Parish, a Catholic community left shell-shocked after its pastor was charged with protecting priests who preyed on children across the region.

    In time, McLoone, a Philadelphia native, proved to be a popular figure at the church, which, with about 4,700 families, is among the largest in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

    But this weekend, St. Joseph parishioners learned that his tenure had come to a shocking end. The archdiocese announced that McLoone, 55, had resigned – less than two months after he went on an indefinite leave of absence – amid an investigation into financial improprieties and inappropriate “relationships with adults” that violated archdiocesan standards. . . . .

    McLoone told archdiocesan officials that he spent approximately $1,500 on “personal expenses of an inappropriate nature,” according to Gavin. “Those expenses were related to relationships with adults that represent a violation of the Standards of Ministerial Behavior and Boundaries established by the archdiocese.”

There’s more at the original, but it never specified what “inappropriate relationships with adults” was carefully worded to not let readers know with which adults the Monsignor had his inappropriate relationships.

    A former Chester County pastor was spared prison time after admitting to stealing from a Catholic church

    Msgr. Joseph McLoone was sentenced to five years of probation for the theft.

    by Vinny Vella | October 1, 2021

    A former Downingtown pastor pleaded guilty this week to stealing $30,000 from his parish to pad his salary, fund vacations to the Jersey Shore and finance his secret romances.

    Msgr. Joseph McLoone, 58, entered the plea to misdemeanor theft charges during a hearing Thursday before Chester County Court Judge Jacqueline C. Cody. He was sentenced to five years of probation, the first nine months of which he will complete under house arrest.

    McLoone, who has been on administrative leave since his resignation from St. Joseph Parish in 2018, must also perform community service and write letters of apology to both the parishioners of St. Joseph and administrators at the Philadelphia archdiocese. . . . .

    He withdrew $4,000 in cash in Ocean City, N.J., authorities said, and spent about $3,000 on men with whom he had sexual relationships. None of them were parishioners, the archdiocese said.

There’s more at the original, but I have included a screen capture from the article, which I accessed at 1:25 PM EDT today, because I do not trust the Inquirer not to edit out the fact that Msgr McLoone’s ‘inappropriate relationships’ were homosexual encounters. You can click on the image to enlarge it. With the #woke leadership of the newspaper, I have to wonder if Vinny Vella, the reporter, won’t get the back of his hand slapped for not only pointing out that the Monsignor was homosexual, but that his article associated Monsignor’s pursuit of homosexual relationships with crime.

    Ken Gavin, a spokesperson for the archdiocese, said in a statement Friday that its leaders “are grateful for the resolution in this matter along with the closure and healing it brings.”

    “Consistent with Archdiocesan policy, the required canonical investigation regarding Monsignor McLoone’s behavior was stayed until law enforcement had completed its work,” Gavin said. “Now that civil authorities have reached a conclusion in this matter, that work will begin.”

I have long said that the problem of rampant homosexuality among Catholic priests means that the Church needs to move to a heterosexual, married priesthood.

The Roman Catholic Church has required perpetual celibacy, and prohibited marriage, for its priests since the Second Lateran Council in 1139; this was reaffirmed at the Council of Trent in 1563.

While that part is common knowledge, less well known is that there are married Catholic priests. In 1980, Pope John Paul II opened a path by which married Episcopal/Anglican priests who converted to Catholicism could serve in the Catholic priesthood. Estimates are that there are about 120 such priests in the United States.

And there are more: the Eastern-Rite Catholic Churches have allowed married priests for several centuries, and in 2014, Pope Francis ended the restriction that married Eastern Catholic could serve only in their home countries.

There were, of course, many married priests in the Roman Catholic Church prior to the Second Lateran Council, including many popes. St Peter, regarded as the first Pope, at least had been married at one point: Matthew 8:14-15 refers to his mother-in-law.

How can there be married Catholic priests, either in the Eastern Rite churches, or in the Latin Rite, converts from Anglicanism and its off-shoot churches? It’s simple: priestly celibacy is a discipline, not a dogma, and disciplines can be changed. The advantages of a celibate priesthood are clear:

  • Celibate priests can give more of their time an attention to their parishes and parishioners, while married men have to devote more of their time and attention to their wives and children.
  • Celibate priests can be more easily transferred to different parishes. Priests are reassigned every five to seven years, on average. Wives frequently have jobs, even careers, while children have friends and school, and transferring a married priest could be much more difficult and disruptive to his family.
  • Celibate priests are easier to house and support. Priests normally live in the rectory, a house for priests normally on church grounds. These buildings are not normally set up to house wives and children. Accommodating married priests would mean a larger home for his family. Considering that Catholic dogma opposes artificial contraception, a married priest could have a very large family to support and house.
  • A celibate priest will normally live on parish grounds, while a married priest might have to live in a house away from the church. This means that the married priest might not be a security guard for his parish.

But, if there are clear advantages to having a celibate priesthood, there is one huge disadvantage: with humans being naturally inclined to mate, the Church is expecting the priest to live an unnatural lifestyle. Human beings need to mate, they need to be married, and the celibacy discipline denies to Catholic priests that most basic normalcy in human life. Even St Paul, who stated that he was celibate, noted that marriage was the natural condition of life. And St Paul also set down the conditions that a man must meet to be a deacon, priest or bishop:

The saying is sure: whoever aspires to the office of bishop desires a noble task. Now a bishop must be above reproach, married only once, temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, an apt teacher, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive and respectful in every way— for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how can he take care of God’s church?

The conditions for priests and deacon are similar. But clearly, St Paul expected those in Holy Orders to mostly be married.

Not every Catholic priest who has broken the law or seriously offended is homosexual, but it sure seems like a lot of them have been. I’m certain that heterosexual priests struggle with celibacy, too. But opening the priesthood to married heterosexual men (mostly) solves the problems: not only will priests not have to struggle with celibacy, but it will open a huge new potential pool of Catholic men as candidates for the priesthood who would not consider it under celibacy rules.