Tag Archives: #BlackLivesMatter

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What, does Indianapolis think it’s Chicago?

A brief Associated Press story in The Philadelphia Inquirer caused me to check the Indianapolis Star:

IMPD: Man dead after shooting on Hovey Street in Indianapolis

Brittany Carloni, Indianapolis Star | Hallowe’en, October 31, 2021 | 7:44 AM | 11:05 AM EDT

A man died early Sunday morning after a shooting northeast of downtown Indianapolis, according to police.

The homicide Sunday marks the 213th criminal homicide in Indianapolis this year and 232 overall homicides, according to numbers provided by Indianapolis Police.

The man’s death was originally believed to be the 215th criminal homicide in Indianapolis this year, which would have tied the city’s record in 2020, according to an IndyStar analysis.

Indianapolis Police subsequently sent out a news release Sunday morning that said two previously reported homicides at the 2800 block of Shadeland Avenue on Oct 5 were reclassified.

IMPD has reclassified five criminal homicides in the last week.

There’s more at the original.

The address of the homicide, 3227 Hovey Street,[1]Unlike many newspapers which give only the block number, the Star printed the exact address. isn’t some jammed together rowhome like the City of Brotherly Love, but what appears to be a single family starter home in a neighborhood of the same type. Zillow tells me that it’s a 2 bedroom, 836 ft² house worth $66,500.

Naturally, I did the math. 213 criminal homicides in 304 days works out to a projected 256 homicides for the year. The 2020 census put the city’s population at 887,642, which would make the projected homicide rate at 28.80 per 100,000. 2020 set the city’s record at 215, for the entire year, which worked out to a homicide rate of ‘just’ 24.22 per 100,000.

As of October 29, 674 people had been murdered in Chicago. With a population of 2,746,388, and 815 ‘projected’ homicides for 2021, the Windy City’s murder rate works out to 29.68 per 100,000, so Indianapolis is still behind. Philadelphia, naturally, says, “Hold my beer!” and checks in at 34.36 per 100,000, while St Louis, at an astounding 64.10, just laughs and calls them all pikers.

It will surprise exactly no one that, in 2020, homicide victims in Indianapolis were mostly black males. The chart at the left, from Fox 59 News, does not separate out the thirty homicides which were listed as not criminal, but shows that 65.31% were black males, and another 9.80% were black females. That’s 75.11% of all homicides in the city were of black victims . . . among a population that is only 28.55% black.

I get it: to some on the left, math is raaaaacist, so using math to point out a huge racial disparity will be denounced as racist as well.  But, in the end, facts are facts, and it’s time that someone asks why black lives don’t matter to other black people.

References

References
↑1 Unlike many newspapers which give only the block number, the Star printed the exact address.
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Black lives don’t matter in St Louis! "The truth is not always a pleasant thing." -- General 'Buck' Turgidson

Tishaura Jones, the Mayor of St Louis, Missouri, is very, very worried about “gun violence.” “Gun violence” is the euphemism that the left use to describe people shooting and killing each other, without blaming bad people, but blaming inanimate objects, as though firearms simply levitate and fire at people all by themselves. From CNN:

Gunshots rang out as St. Louis mayor was discussing gun violence prevention. She didn’t flinch

By Raja Razek and Jennifer Feldman, CNN | Saturday, October 30, 2021 | Updated: 5:43 EDT

Tishaura Jones, from her campaign website.

Gunshots rang out Friday as St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones was discussing gun violence prevention during a news conference — and she did not flinch.“My son and I fall asleep to the lullaby of gunshots in the distance every night,” Jones said, responding to a question on whether she felt safe. “It’s a part of my life now and that shouldn’t be.”

Before the news conference, Jones and Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas were participating in a roundtable on how gun violence is affecting their cities.

Lucas later shared Jones’ sentiments regarding the prevalence of gun violence.

“The sound of gunshots is a regular occurrence in too many areas of my city as well; something I grew to know from youth. Today’s shots reminded us of the reality so many of our sisters, brothers, and babies face each day and the need for change,” Lucas wrote in a tweet.

National gun violence rates were 30% higher during a 13-month pandemic period when compared with the same period the year before, a study published last week in the journal Scientific Reports showed.

“We found a strong association between the Covid-19 pandemic time frame and an increase in gun violence in the U.S. compared to the pre-pandemic period,” wrote the authors from Penn State College of Medicine.

There’s more at the original, but I would also note that the lawlessness following the death of George Floyd, on May 25, 2020, also occurred during the same time frame. How the study ‘corrected’ for that factor is not explained.

However, if there is a “strong association” between the COVID-19 pandemic time frame and an increase in “gun violence”, might we not conclude that the lockdowns and other measures ordered by people like Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) led to that increase in “gun violence”? When you have some people thrown out of work, and others forced to work while wearing masks and under a continual drumbeat of fear, when you have people barred from visiting extended family, churches closed, weddings cancelled, are you not ripping at the entire fabric of society?

But there’s more, and it takes an [insert slang term for the rectum here] like me to mention it. While we have noted the skyrocketing homicide rates in our major cities, Mayor Jones’ St Louis provides data most cities do not; the St Louis Metropolitan Police Department breaks down homicides by race. The chart at the left, reproduced by this author from the SLMPD figures, shows that, as of October 29th, 149 out of 161 total murder victims in the Gateway City were black; that’s 92.55%! As far as #BlackLivesMatter is concerned, it seems that black lives don’t matter as far as other black people are concerned, not in St Louis. If Mayor Jones’ “son and (her) fall asleep to the lullaby of gunshots in the distance every night,” maybe it ought to be a problem she recognizes and understands.

The first seven columns of this chart are from the Police Department’s report. The Population column is from the 2020 census figures and the murder rate column is calculated by the current number of homicides, multiplied by 1.20065789, to get homicides in 304 days up to 365, divided by the population, and calculated in the standard fashion, homicides per 100,000 population. The calculations were done via Microsoft Excel functions.

The population figures in the census data I found were not broken down by race and sex, but if we assume that black males make up 49% of the total black population, 63,609, and the annualized number of homicides of black males will wind up at 146 (it works out to 146.480263), black males in St Louis are subject to a homicide rate of 229.53 per 100,000 population! White males, on the other hand, are subject to a homicide rate of ‘just’ 7.78 per 100,000 population.

Mayor Jones got it wrong: the problem in the Gateway City isn’t “gun violence,” but black people, primarily black males, killing each other.

Me? I’m retired, so I can’t be ‘canceled,’ can’t lose my job because someone doesn’t like my political positions. I suppose that some will call this racist, but it’s just simple math; the numbers are the numbers. I could, perhaps, see my website listed as a ‘hate site,’ and lose links that way, but it’s a potential loss I am willing to bear, because I am doing something radical like telling the truth. But, as General ‘Buck’ Turgidson said in Dr Strangelove, “the truth is not always a pleasant thing.” and the left just can’t handle the truth.

The homicide rate is a huge problem, but the left pretending that it’s just “gun violence,” that the availability of guns is the problem, ignore the disparity in “gun violence” between the races. If it was simply the availability of firearms, then the homicide rates between the races should be almost identical; St Louis shows that those rates are widely, widely different.

You cannot address a problem if you are unwilling to properly identify the problem, and the problem is that there is something in the urban black culture in the Gateway City which leads to violent behavior. We’re not allowed to say that, of course, because it is massively politically incorrect, but it is true nevertheless.

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The Patricians like Will Bunch really don’t understand reality

It was the photo accompanying the column by The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch that really caught my eye. Mr Bunch, very much a leftist who has “some strong opinions about what’s happening in America around social injustice, income inequality and the government,” according to his own Inquirer biography blurb, lamented that so many of the #BlackLivesMatter demonstrators of 2020 were well-off white people:

Black Lives Matter marches of 2020 were surprisingly white and educated. Is that why results have been so mediocre?

We’ve never seen anything like the George Floyd protests that gained momentum 16 months ago — but that could be exactly why progress has stalled.

By Will Bunch | Thursday, October 14, 2021

Megan McNamara (right), 19, of Wayne, walks up Lancaster Avenue during The Main Line for Black Lives protest in Wayne, Pa. on June 4, 2020. David Maialetti, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer. Click to enlarge.

George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020. Over the next weeks, as the world watched the video of his death, the reaction was stunning and without precedent. Literally millions who saw the images of Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck felt it was impossible to remain silent.

But what was most remarkable about the June 2020 marches was how far they spread beyond Minneapolis and other big cities with histories of police brutality. In Norfolk, Nebraska, a small overwhelmingly white town of 24,000, some 300 people gathered on a street corner to voice their outrage. A march in a city with similar demographics — Sioux City, Iowa — triggered a confrontation with pepper-spraying police. In the Philadelphia suburbs, thousands of mostly white people — some pushing babies in strollers — marched down Lancaster Avenue through affluent Main Line suburbs, carrying signs like “White Silence is Violence.”

“I was shocked to see so many white kids out here,” Walter Wiggins — a 67-year-old Black man who’d been attending protest marches in his native D.C. since his parents took him to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington — told the New York Times, at a protest that researchers confirmed was majority white. “Back then, it was just Black folks.”

That remarkable spring, the same phrase was on many people’s lips: The world had never seen anything quite like this. And yet, more than 16 months later, the world also hasn’t seen dramatic changes from a global protest movement in which it is estimated some 15 to 26 million Americans took part by marching in solidarity.

Emphases in the original, and there’s much more if you follow the embedded link.

Normally, I don’t include photos from the Inquirer, due to copyright concerns, but this one, I believe, is an exception under Fair Use standards. It is just wildly amusing that Mr Bunch, or, more probably, an editor, selected a photo not just of white marchers, but of a red-headed, extremely fair white woman, showing off plenty of skin on that warm June day, to illustrate Mr Bunch’s point about so many BLM marchers being white. 🙂

Mr Bunch is disappointed that few of the radical police reform measures were passed, and that while some police department budgets were cut, most departments not only had their budgets restored, but “budgets for traditional policing are actually increasing.”

Why? Well, one reason might be that the homicide rate in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia continues to skyrocket. As of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, October 14th, the Philadelphia Police Department reported that there had been 435 murders in the City of Brotherly Love, tied for the eighth highest year on record, with 2½ months, 78 days, left in the year. The city is seeing an average of 1.5157 homicides per day, which, if that average holds, works out to 553 dead bodies littering Philly’s mean streets in 2021.

While the Police Department’s figures do not break down the victims by race, The Philadelphia Tribune, a publication for the city’s black community, reported that, in 2020, black victims accounted for about 86% of the city’s 499 homicide victims, and 84% of the 2,236 shootings. If there has been a serious uptick in the number of white victims this year, the Inquirer hasn’t reported on it.

The visceral, extreme reactions to the Floyd video, which inspired the rallying cry of “Defund the Police” amplified by a news media that prefers shorthand over nuance, ran into more complicated views on crime and law enforcement in the neighborhoods where — unlike for many of the marchers — policing is a day-to-day issue. Ground Zero has been Minneapolis itself, where in the immediate aftermath a supposedly veto-proof majority of city councilors pledged to end policing as we know it, to be replaced by a new department of public safety.

That hasn’t happened, in part because of pushback from middle-class Black homeowners concerned about rising crime. Last month, the Minnesota Poll of city residents found that while police reform is generally popular, a whopping 75% of Black Minneapolis voters do not want to see fewer police officers (the comparable number for white voters is 51%).

That’s hardly a surprise:

Surge in Minneapolis violence includes over 900 rounds fired from automatic weapons in 2021

by Jay Kolls | September 30, 2021 | 8:39 PM CDT | Updated: 10:21 PM CDT

The Minneapolis Police Department updated the Minneapolis City Council with new violent crime statistics Thursday, and the numbers show violent crime — including gun crimes — has continued to rise throughout the first three quarters of 2021.

Scott Wolfert, an MPD crime analyst, told city council members that 503 people have been injured by gunfire so far this year, which is an increase of 26% over last year. Homicides are up 16%, robberies are up 5% and aggravated assaults are up 2.6%, but the biggest surge has been the number of rounds fired by automatic weapons.

“So far, in 2021, there have been 78 ShotSpotter activations of automatic weapons with 935 rounds detected,” Wolfert said. “Compared to this same time in 2020, there were just five activations for automatic weapons and only 42 rounds fired through the end of September.”

Wolfert said the total number of detected gunshots fired so far this year is 20,611 — which is a 28% increase from 2020. And, Wolfert said, there have been 355 carjackings, up 35% from this time last year.

There have been 75 homicides in Minneapolis through October 15th, a city of 429,954, and puts the city on pace for 95 murders for the year. At the current pace, the city would see a homicide rate of 22.10 per 100,000 population . . . a rate which makes Philadelphia laugh, and say, “Hold my beer!”

Philly’s homicide rate stands at 34.49 per 100,000!

North Water Street near Clearfield Street, Google Maps streetview.

This is North Water Street, near East Clearfield Street in North Philadelphia, and if you click on the image to enlarge it, you’ll see how some Philadelphians have to live, with their rowhouses barred in, to protect themselves from intruders and thieves. Mr Bunch noted how the BLM protesters were overwhelmingly white, and overwhelmingly college-educated. The simple fact is that the BLM protesters mostly did not live where the crime problems are most serious, and it’s easy to be for fewer police when your contact with the police is almost exclusively in getting a speeding ticket rather than reporting a robbery, a break-in, or a shooting.

Mr Bunch concluded:

But the crisis that inspired the George Floyd protests — U.S. killings by police officers — has hardly abated. The Washington Post tracker of such deaths shows 654 so far in 2021, at a pace only slightly lower than previous years. After 16 months, it seems reasonable to ask: If the largest protest in American history only barely moved the needle, what on earth would?

Really, 654? As of October 15th, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, there have been 639 homicides in the Windy City alone, and Chicago’s homicide rate of 29.93 per 100,000 population is lower than Philadelphia’s.

Mr Bunch, who to judge by his Inquirer photograph, is very much a white man himself, laments that so many of the BLM protesters of 2020 were white, and wonders if that has contributed to the lack of movement toward their professed goals. But it also points out that Mr Bunch is himself quite probably very insulated from the way most black Philadelphians live their lives. A 1981 graduate of Ivy League Brown University, he’s lived the elitist’s urban dream, ten years a reporter for New York Newsday, and, for the past 26 years, with the Inquirer/Philadelphia Daily News. I don’t know his address, and wouldn’t publish it if I did, but it seems unlikely that he lives in Kensington or Strawberry Mansion or any of the other combat zones of the City of Brotherly Love.

We have noted it so many times: black lives really don’t matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer, given that the newspaper barely reports on them when a black person is killed. We have previously noted what I called the racism of the Inquirer, and have noted, many times, that unless a murder victim is an ‘innocent‘, someone already of note, or a cute little white girl, the editors of the Inquirer don’t care, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the murder of a young black man in Philadelphia is not news.

It’s easy to be a liberal when, to paraphrase the words of Robert E Howard, your life isn’t nailed to your spine, and, unless he has chosen to live near 52nd Street in West Philadelphia, Mr Bunch’s life clearly is not. If he did, he would be gobsmacked by the reality that working-class Philadelphians, white and Hispanic and black and Asian live with, every day. He just might have a different perspective if he lived and moved among the people he claims to champion.

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A stunning lack of perspective

Well, perhaps not that stunning after all.

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong tells us how tears came to her eyes as she witnessed a Black Lives Matter demonstration in remembrance of the death of addled drug user and convicted felon, George Floyd:

    Tears came to my eyes during a visit to a West Mount Airy neighborhood

    Each night, residents walk to one of four corners at the intersection of Emlen Street and West Mount Airy Avenue and stand for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in memory of George Floyd.

    by Jenice Armstrong | Monday, October 11, 2021

    People think I’m so tough, but I cried at work on Thursday.

    I didn’t break into the ugly cry, thankfully, but a few tears fell. I was in West Mount Airy, visiting a neighborhood where for the last year, residents have been coming out each night and standing in silence for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, marking how long a murderous Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck.

    Dozens participated each night during the summer of 2020, in the aftermath of the killing of the unarmed Black man. Lately the numbers have been down. Still, at least a handful of residents emerge from their homes just before 8 each evening and walk to the corners at the intersection of Emlen Street and West Mount Airy Avenue for the observance.

    The evening I was there last week, something else was afoot that led to even more participants: Twice in less than a week, a Black family had been the target of vandalism. First, someone smashed the windshield of their parked car with a rock. Days later, another rock came crashing through a window on their enclosed front porch.

    “An incident like this is unusual in Mt. Airy and is a reminder that there are still people who are unfriendly to anti-racism and that even our peaceful, diverse neighborhood is not insulated from divisiveness, fear and hatred,” Keely McCarthy wrote me in an email.

There’s more at the original, including two photos showing the public out holding Black Lives Matter signs.

But let’s tell the truth here: black lives don’t matter, at least not to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which only reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love is an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl is the victim. We noted, on Saturday, the killing of a 13-year-old boy sitting in a car with “several others” at the intersection of North Judson and West Clearfield Streets, in what the Philadelphia Police and the Inquirer will not say was a targeted hit, but of course, it was. Someone shooting at least ten rounds at a parked car full of people isn’t exactly an accident.

While law enforcement has not released the identity of the victim, The Philadelphia Tribune, a publication for the city’s black community, noted that, in 2020, black victims accounted for about 86% of the city’s 499 homicide victims, and 84% of the 2,236 shootings; non-Hispanic black Americans make up only about 38% of the city’s population. In all probability, on that corner, in that neighborhood, the 13-year-old victim was black.

And now there’s this:

Let’s just stop with the subtitle: the victim, sitting in a parked car after 9:00 AM, was not on his way to school; the E Washington Rhodes School website states “Breakfast will be served from 8:15 am to 8:45 am each day. All students must be in homerooms by 8:45 am each day.” The victim was more than 15 minutes late, and not making any move to get to school, which was eleven blocks away at 2900 West Clearfield Street. The shooting intersection is in the middle of the 2300 block of West Clearfield.

    A 15-year-old was shot in the leg in North Philadelphia on Sunday night as he was leaving a vigil for a 13-year-old boy who was killed Friday morning, police said.

    At least 10 shots were fired just before 7 p.m. Sunday on the 2600 block of North 22nd Street, where dozens of people had gathered to release blue and white balloons in remembrance of a boy who was fatally shot Friday just blocks from his school.

    The 15-year-old shot Sunday was struck in the left calf and hospitalized at Temple University Hospital in stable condition, police said. No one was arrested in connection with the shooting, which took place just outside the Cecil B. Moore Recreation Center. Police said it’s unknown if the two shootings are related.

There’s more at the original, but one thing is absolutely true: with each day that passes, the good people of the City of Brotherly Love, and the #woke[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 … Continue reading journolists[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 of The Philadelphia Inquirer prove that black lives don’t matter, don’t matter much at all. If the shooting on Friday was a targeted attack, then the one at the vigil on Sunday was as well. “At least ten shots” rang out at a vigil for the murder victim, and if the shooter displayed the gang bangers’ notoriously poor accuracy with bullets, it was very accurate in sending the intended message: whatever beef the gang had with the victim, or perhaps someone else sitting in that parked, and possibly disabled,[3]Police Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said some neighbors said the car had been parked on the block for “quite awhile,” so it was not clear if any of the people inside had been able to drive it. vehicle, thinking anything good or nice about the victim was not allowed thinking.

Perhaps the Sunday shooter was trying to knock off one of the people sitting in that car but who wasn’t hurt.

I have to ask: what good are the few dozen people in Mt Airy doing, holding up signs and gathering for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in the memory of a career criminal like George Floyd, rather than working to make Philly’s streets safe for the black, and white, and Hispanic, and Asian, people still alive in that city? Don’t tell me how horrible it is that Mr Floyd died while being restrained by a white policeman when nobody gives a damn about the hundreds of people spilling out their blood in the city’s mean streets.

——————————

Update: Tuesday, October 12, 2021 | 8:30 AM EDT

The last referenced story has already disappeared from the Inquirer’s website main page, though truly important stories like this one about a British golf ball remain up and how the paper’s deputy food editor described an egg sandwich as his only comfort food while deciding to ‘come out’ as homosexual. How does revealing to its readership one of the paper’s writers sexual orientation outweigh the murders in the city, and why do we even need to know about it? If he is going to be reviewing a restaurant, why should it be important for anyone who doesn’t know or interact with him personally to know with whom he sleeps?

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page was finally updated after the long holiday weekend,[4]Only government employees get Columbus Day Indigenous People’s Day off. and, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Monday, October 11, 2021, 431 souls have been sent untimely to their eternal rewards. 431 Philadelphians murdered in 284 days works out to 1.5176 per day, and if that rate holds constant for the rest of the year, 554 people will bleed out their lives’ blood in the city’s mean streets.

The city has already seen its eleventh highest homicide total ever, with 81 days remaining in this bloody year. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw have already presided over the city’s second bloodiest year, missing tying the record by just one dead body, and now they are on track to not just break the record set in 1990, the depths of the crack cocaine wars, but shatter it, decimate it, blow it out of the water by more than 10%, and nobody at the nation’s third oldest newspaper gives a damn.

References

References
↑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 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.
↑3 Police Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said some neighbors said the car had been parked on the block for “quite awhile,” so it was not clear if any of the people inside had been able to drive it.
↑4 Only government employees get Columbus Day Indigenous People’s Day off.
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They can’t handle the truth!

The Friday morning report from the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page shows the city on the edge of another milestone: with 299 souls sent early to their eternal rewards, the 300th murder will almost certainly happen sometime today, but the PPD only updates the site on weekdays; we will (probably) not get the totals until Monday morning. As of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, the city was seeing 1.5255 homicides per day, on pace for 557 for 2021, a number which is actually down slightly.

We have previously noted how some residents in Philadelphia have, in effect, put themselves in jail, by barring up their row homes to protect themselves from the bad guys who roam their streets. The image to the right, which the reader can enlarge by clicking on it, shows four row homes, out of six, in which the residents have caged themselves in at night.

Now comes Jabari K. Jones, the President of the West Philadelphia Corridor Collaborative, telling us of the effect that “gun violence” is having upon black business owners in the City of Brotherly Love:

    West Philly business owners have lost faith in the City to keep them safe

    I have spoken to countless West Philadelphia business owners who would love to be open longer each day, but they choose to close at nightfall because they have no confidence they will be safe.

    by Jabari Jones | July 14, 2021 | 9:00 AM EDT

    Visit one of our historic commercial corridors in West Philadelphia or any predominantly diverse community after sundown, and the sight is the same: silver shutter gates, dark storefronts, and empty businesses that have closed for the day.

    Now, on that same day, visit Center City after dark. Bars and restaurants are thriving, people of all ages stroll by storefronts, and everyone is open for business.

    The reason for the difference? Public safety.

    I have spoken to countless West Philadelphia business owners who would love to be open longer each day, but they choose to close at nightfall because they have no confidence in the City of Philadelphia to keep them or their patrons safe from the rising tide of gun violence.

    In the last two months, a Dunkin’ Donuts manager in North Philly was murdered as she was opening the store at dawn, and West Philadelphia fashion designer Sircarr Johnson, Jr. was shot and killed when his cookout was sprayed with over 100 rounds.

    According to the Pew Charitable Trust, only 2.5% of Philly businesses have Black owners, even though Black people represent nearly 44% of city residents. But data from the West Philadelphia Corridor Collaborative show that, on certain corridors in West Philly, Black people own a majority of businesses. A stroll through Center City, however, shows mostly larger corporate stores and white-owned businesses. For years, business and city officials have studied why the city’s racial demographics aren’t reflected in business ownership, and why BIPOC-owned businesses fail at higher rates.

There’s more at the original, and I’d really like to republish it all, but that would be plagiarism, and exceed Title 17 U.S.C., §107 “Fair use” standards. Briefly, Mr Jones tells the reader that “white-owned businesses” in Center City have several more hours per day in which they can be open, meaning several more hours per day in which they can sell their goods and services, and make money. I’d encourage people to follow the link and read the whole thing.

Nevertheless, Mr Jones still danced around the real issue. While pointing out that the economic damage was heavily skewed to black-owned businesses, in heavily black neighborhoods, he could not bring himself to point out that the city’s “gun violence” problem is a black “gun violence” problem. The black shooters aren’t just wounding and killing people, but black-owned businesses as well.

The next day came Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, with a similar sense of denial of reality:

    There’s nothing more progressive than stopping city kids from getting shot

    Progressives need to understand what’s behind rising city homicides and develop plans to reduce shootings — without yesterday’s police abuses.

    by Will Bunch | July 15, 2021

    The easiest part of writing this column was the beginning — finding the most up-to-date examples of the gun violence in Philadelphia that has steadily risen since the start of the pandemic and has lately spiked again, in the long hot summer of 2021.

    Just hours earlier — at 1 a.m. on an unseasonably muggy Thursday morning — a man bounded onto SEPTA’s Nite Owl bus on Broad Street near Chestnut, in the beating heart of Center City, and started shooting, critically wounding a 29-year-old man and utterly terrifying the 15 other passengers onboard. Just a few hours earlier, a car chase in the city’s Logan section had ended with a gunman from one car shooting and wounding two teenagers, aged 19 and just 14, from the other car after it had crashed into an SUV with four occupants. At roughly the same time in West Philadelphia, an unrelated shooting wounded a 15-year-old and 13-year-old.

    Go back to the night before, or the night before that, and you’ll find similarly grim stories: Philadelphia teenagers — their names, along with their stories and their humanity, rarely identified — wounded or even killed by the latest burst of gunfire. Of the more than 1,200 people shot so far in Philadelphia in a year that’s barely half over, more than 100 have been children. With 297 people murdered so far, there’s a more than decent chance that the so-called City of Brotherly Love will pass its all-time homicide record of 500 back in 1990. This is a human-rights crisis in America’s sixth-largest — and founding — city.

    And yet, as many conservatives and mainstream-media contrarian types have been so quick to point out, rising murder rates — occurring right now in most American big cities — haven’t been a front-burner for the political left in 2021. Indeed, there’s been a habit, at least on social media, of tsk-tsking the problem by pointing to “if it bleeds, it leads” media sensationalism (a real thing) or noting that overall crime rates, including the violent crime category, haven’t really spiked and remain near historical lows. This seems prompted by fears that making urban gun violence a top-tier issue will both hurt the movement against social injustices like police brutality and mass incarceration, and also distract from other issues on the progressive to-do list.

I have to give Mr Bunch credit here: whether he realized it or not, he told the truth: many credentialed media sources fear telling the truth, because the truth goes against the liberal narrative. We have previously noted, many times, that the Inquirer doesn’t bother to report on murders in Philadelphia unless the victim is an innocent, like Christine Lupo, a “somebody,” like a local high school basketball player, or a cute little white girl, like the 2,782 site search results for Rian Thal. For the Inquirer to actually tell the truth would be for that publisher-directed “anti-racist news organization” to undermine its political direction.

Mr Bunch called “mass incarceration” a “social injustice,” yet had Delaware Superior Court Judge Vivian L. Medinilla been perhaps a little less concerned with “mass incarceration,” Christine Lugo and several other people in Philly and New Castle County, Delaware would almost certainly still be alive today. Mr Jones, in his column, had noted Jovaun Patterson was given a sweetheart plea deal, dropping an attempted murder charge, for shooting and permanently crippling a West Philly shop owner, 3½ to 10 years,[1]Perhaps they should be satisfied with what they got, given that, in 8,500 Philadelphia shootings since 2015, suspects have been charged in 1 out of 5 cases and convicted in just 9%. by District Attorney Larry Krasner, whom the Inquirer incredibly endorsed for re-election. Mr Bunch, and in part Mr Jones, didn’t want to see the one program which actually does reduce shootings and killings: keeping the bad guys locked up, for as long as the law allows.

Let’s tell the truth here: in a city that is only 42.13% black, according to the Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard, 75.53% of all shooting victims are black males, and another 6.72% are black females; 82.25% of all victims are black. Just 4.06% are white males, with 0.86% being white women.

If the problem is the availability of firearms, as the Inquirer so often tells us, why aren’t white people, 40.66% of the city’s population, shooting and killing each other at rates similar to blacks?

If you don’t tell the truth to yourself about the problem, you can never solve the problem! And the truth is that there is something in the urban black culture in the City of Brotherly Love — and let’s be honest here, in other large cities as well — which tells young black men that shooting each other is acceptable behavior.[2]The Inquirer has reported that, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males.” There’s … Continue reading The killing of Sircarr Johnson, Jr, which the Inquirer did cover because he was a ‘somebody,’ had the shooters fire off more than 100 rounds toward a crowd at a cook-out, about as indiscriminate a killing action as one can imagine.

The Inquirer doesn’t report the truth because the #woke[3]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 … Continue reading there can’t handle the truth.

References

References
↑1 Perhaps they should be satisfied with what they got, given that, in 8,500 Philadelphia shootings since 2015, suspects have been charged in 1 out of 5 cases and convicted in just 9%.
↑2 The Inquirer has reported that, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males.” There’s something wryly amusing that the Inquirer follows the Associated Press stylebook change, in which the AP noted that they would capitalize “black” in reference to race, but not “white,” and in this case, the writers capitalized “black” but not “brown”. As per our stylebook, we do not capitalize ‘colors’ when referring to race.
↑3 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.
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Killadelphia The killers are playing catch up; The Philadelphia Inquirer is not

It was just yesterday that we noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t seem to pay much notice to the murders of young black males in the City of Brotherly Love. I pointed out, in the footnote, that with 287 homicides in 188 days (as of 11:59 PM on July 7th) equaled 1.5266 homicides per day, projecting a total of 557 for the year.

Well, it looks like the city’s thugs realized that they weren’t quite meeting their quota, because after two straight days of the Philadelphia Police Department reporting only one homicide, the gang bangers caught up: the Current Crime Statistics page shows 291 killings as of 11:59 PM on July 8th. 291 ÷ 189 days in the year, = 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year.

The Inquirer? Digging into several pages of their website at 8:30 AM — now at 4:42 PM, current update — this morning, I couldn’t find a single story, not so much as what Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas called a “handful of lines in a media alert,” although it’s possible I just didn’t dig into the right place.

Nevertheless, the editors and journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ 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 … Continue reading at the Inquirer didn’t think that four homicides yesterday was worth noting on the website’s main page, where readers had a chance of spotting such.

Why? Because black lives don’t matter to the editors and staff of The Philadelphia Inquirer! Oh, they matter if taken by a white police officer, matter a very great deal, but when one black thug kills another black thug, which is what the vast majority of the city’s homicides are, it just doesn’t fit Teh Narrative that the “anti-racist news organization” wants to tell. Maybe it’s time for me to break out that Philadelphia Enquirer[2]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. logo once more.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ 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.
↑2 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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Killadelphia The not-so-subtle racism of an "anti-racist news organization"

As of 11:59 PM on Sunday, May 16th, there had been 196 homicides in Philadelphia. That having been the 136th day of the year, that worked out to 1.441 murders per day in the City of Brotherly Love, putting Philly on pace for 526 killings for 2021, if the average held.

That was a month ago. According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, as of the end of Tuesday, June 15th, the city hit what could wryly be called a milestone, it’s 250th murder. The math is pretty bad: 250 homicides ÷ 166 days = 1.506 per day, × 365 = 549.70 murders for the year. The evil, reich-wing Donald Trump has been out of office for just five days short of five months now, the very liberal, opposed to mass incarceration District Attorney Larry Krasner has been renominated, the pandemic restrictions have (mostly) been lifted, and Philly’s murder rate is increasing.

The city’s homicide record was 500, set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990; 2020 saw Philly win the silver medal, with 499. But if the current rate continues, and there’s no sign that it won’t, 550 bodies in the city’s mean streets will break the record by a solid ten percent. Yet, at least as of 3:15 PM, there wasn’t a single story on The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page about the three killings overnight, or the ‘milestone’ having been reached, though there was an important story on how the strategic use of wallpaper remains popular in area homes.

Another statistic: 250 homicides thus far in 2021 have eclipsed the entire year’s totals of 246 in 2013 and 248 in 2014, when Michael Nutter was Mayor, Charles Ramsey Police Commissioner and Seth Williams was District Attorney.[1]Seth Williams was convicted on one count of receiving bribes, so he isn’t exactly spotless, but his record as District Attorney was sound. Last year’s 499 homicides exceeded those two years’ total killings. Whatever Jim Kenney, Danielle Outlaw and Larry Krasner, whom the Inquirer actually endorsed for renomination, have been doing has not worked.

#BlackLivesMatter, we are told, and Elizabeth Hughes, the publisher of the Inquirer, has said that her goal is to make the newspaper “an anti-racist news organization,” but, as far as I can tell, black lives don’t matter to the Inquirer. It seems that the only stories the paper publishes are small police blotter reports, usually not on the website main page, unless the victim is an innocent, like Christine Lupo, a “somebody,” like a local high school basketball player, or a cute little white girl, like the 2,782 site search results for Rian Thal.

The vast majority of homicide victims in Philadelphia are black, but when one black gang banger kills another black gang banger, it isn’t really news anymore, not to the Inquirer. Instead, the paper paid more attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s four separate stories; how many do the mostly black victims get?

It does not matter what Miss Hughes says about her goals, and it does not matter that the newspaper has its first Hispanic Executive Editor in Gabriel Escobar; the paper’s coverage shows us what they consider newsworthy. And black lives wasted are simply not newsworthy.

References

References
↑1 Seth Williams was convicted on one count of receiving bribes, so he isn’t exactly spotless, but his record as District Attorney was sound.
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Black lives don’t matter in Minneapolis

We have spent a considerable amount of bandwidth on the murder epidemic in Philadelphia, but it isn’t only the City of Brotherly Love in which this has happened. From The Wall Street Journal:

A Year After George Floyd’s Murder, It’s ‘Open Season’ in Minneapolis

Homicides have more than doubled in a year. Three children have been shot in the past month.

By Heather Mac Donald | May 24, 2021 | 5:56 PM EDT

Al Sharpton and civil-rights attorney Benjamin Crump led a march in downtown Minneapolis Sunday in advance of the first anniversary of George Floyd’s death on May 25. Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of Floyd’s murder last month.

What? The Reverend Al Sharpton, at a racially-charged event? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked!

It ought to be a maxim: if the Reverend Sharpton is at an event, whatever side he is promoting is the wrong one!

Messrs. Sharpton and Crump didn’t visit North Memorial Health Hospital, where two recent victims of a yearlong explosion of violence in Minneapolis are on life support. On April 30 Ladavionne Garrett Jr., 10, was riding in a car with his parents when a gunman opened fire. A bullet pierced Ladavionne’s head; doctors put him in a medically induced coma and removed part of his skull to relieve swelling on the brain. On May 15, 9-year-old Trinity Ottoson-Smith was jumping on a trampoline at a friend’s house when bullets fired from a passing car struck her in the head. She is also in critical condition at North Memorial, in the room next to Ladavionne’s.

Nineteen children in Minneapolis have been shot this year, an increase of 171% over the same period in 2020. Their relatives wonder where the protesters are. “Why ain’t nobody mad about a 10-year-old, my grandson, fighting for his life?” asked Sharrie Jennings, Ladavionne’s grandmother, at a May 17 mayoral event. “Because a cop didn’t shoot him, is that why?” Ms. Jennings warned of “a deadly summer” for kids if the mayor and police chief don’t “step up.” Later that day, Aniya Allen, 6, was caught in a shootout between rival gangs while in her mother’s car. Aniya died on May 19.

Minneapolis homicides between Jan. 1 and last week were up 108% compared with the same period in 2020; shootings were up 153%, and carjackings 222%. The crime increase began after Floyd’s death and has never let up. Nor has the assault on law enforcement that began with the arson destruction of the Third Precinct building on May 28, 2020. Officers are routinely punched, kicked and hit with projectiles. There was a near-riot in downtown Minneapolis in the early hours of May 22 following a shootout among club patrons. Two people were killed in that shootout and eight wounded. Responding officers called for backup across the Twin Cities at what the department called an “exceptionally chaotic scene.” The previous weekend, officers were maced, and pelted with rocks and debris while trying to disperse disorderly crowds.

After Floyd’s death, the Minneapolis City Council called for abolishing the police department and replacing it with a “new transformative model for cultivating safety.” Abolition didn’t happen, but “some folks” in the community got the message anyway that “they have a sort of open season on their enemies,” said Alicia Smith, the executive director of the Corcoran Neighborhood Organization.

As lawless as Minneapolis has become, it is hardly atypical. Drive-by shootings and homicides jumped nationwide during and after the Floyd riots. Homicides rose 50% in Chicago in 2020, 46% in New York City, and 38% in Los Angeles. The U.S. saw the largest annual percentage increase in homicides in recorded history in 2020. That increase has continued in 2021. The number of shooting victims in Chicago was up 43% in the first three months of 2021 compared with the same period in 2020. Through May 16, the number of shooting victims in New York City is up 78.6% over a year ago. In the Bronx, the number is up 165.7%.

Pikers! Bush league!

According to the Minneapolis Police Department’s Crime Statistics page, Minneapolis has seen 34 homicides between January 1, 2021 and May 30, 2021. With a population of 420,324, the city is a third again larger than St Louis, yet the Gateway City has more than twice the number of murders at 76. Philadelphia, with 1.579 million souls, 3.76 times Minneapolis’ population, doesn’t have 3.76 times as many homicides, 124, but almost twice as many, at least 212. th” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>The Chicago Tribune’s Tracking Chicago homicide victims page had the Windy City with 227 murders as of Tuesday, May 18th, up from 191 on the same date in 2020, a mere 18.85% increase.[1]The Tribune’s page states that it will be updated weekly, but the scheduled update for Wednesday, May 26th, hadn’t been posted as of 3:30 PM EDT on Sunday, May 30th. We previously noted … Continue reading

Minneapolis’ rate of increase has been what has been noted: 34 homicides to date this year, versus 18 on the same day last year, is an 88.89% increase, while Philadelphia’s is a mere uptick. While the police data did not break it down by race, but the Minneapolis Star-Tribune noted, on May 29th:

Coming a few days before a particularly violent weekend, and in the wake of the shootings of three young Minneapolis children, the Police Department report detailed the city’s 2021 crime surge up to that point.

There had been 187 shootings in Minneapolis since Jan. 1 — two-and-a-half times the pace of gunplay in the same period a year earlier.

And 87% of the victims were Black.

Blacks make up only 19.19% of Minneapolis residents.

Of course, the evil reich-wing Donald Trump left office on January 20, 2021, while the great unifier, Joe Biden, who was going to make everything sweetness and light, is now President of the United States, and with the statistics of virtually every violent crime — rape is the exception — climbing in Minneapolis, mostly since Mr Biden took office, I suppose the left can’t blame this on President Trump.

Minneapolis is a Democratic city; the municipal government is, and long has been, run by Democrats. St Louis? Run by Democrats. Philadelphia? The last Republican mayor left office in 1952! The major cities in which we are seeing this huge spike in murder rates are all run by Democrats, and the Democrats have been giving to the Black Lives Matter protesters much of what they have wanted.

But as the distraught grandmother of 10-year-old Ladavionne Garrett, Jr., noted, nobody is upset that he was shot in the head, because he wasn’t shot by a policeman. When a black person is killed by a white police officer, the Reverend Sharpton is right there, ready with his outrage, ready to make whatever political, and monetary, capital he can out of it. Black Lives Matter, we are all told.

But when black people are gunned down by other black people, often times over trivial things, all we hear are the crickets. Their black lives don’t matter.

References

References
↑1 The Tribune’s page states that it will be updated weekly, but the scheduled update for Wednesday, May 26th, hadn’t been posted as of 3:30 PM EDT on Sunday, May 30th. We previously noted Alden Global Capital’s takeover of Tribune Publishing, a newspaper group which includes the Chicago Tribune, completed on Monday, May 24th, and I have to wonder: did that takeover somehow impact the Tribune’s maintenance of that page?
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Black lives don’t matter in St Louis

St Louis is our most murderous city. As of last night, there had been 76 homicides in the Gateway City . . . and 71 of the victims were black. St Louis is ‘only’ 45.3% black, but comprise 93.4% of the city’s murder victims. Of the 32 murders of blacks in St Louis, all 32 suspects are black.

St Louis population is 308,000, with roughly 139,000 blacks and 136 whites. Calculating out the figures to give a projected homicide total for the year, we find 7.44 whites murdered, and 176 blacks. That works out to a homicide rate of 5.48 per 100,000 population for whites, and 126.61 per 100,000 population for blacks.

But that isn’t really reported, because black lives don’t matter, not unless they are taken by a white police officer, because black-on-black homicide doesn’t fit Teh Narrative.