KYW-TV, Channel 3, the CBS owned-and-operated station in Philadelphia, reported on a prayer vigil for slain Police Officer John Pawlowski held Saturday:

Loved Ones Hold Prayer Vigil For Philadelphia Police Officer Killed In Line Of Duty

By CBS3 Staff | February 12, 2022 | 10:11 PM EST

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — Loved ones are remembering a Philadelphia Police officer killed in the line of duty 13 years ago. They held a prayer vigil Saturday for officer John Pawlowski.

He was shot at Broad and Olney Streets 13 years ago on Sunday.

Officer Pawlowski was responding to a dispute between a cab driver and a man with a weapon. He was just 25 years old when he was killed.

There’s more at the original, but if the “anti-racist” Philadelphia Inquirer covered it, a site search for John Pawlowski didn’t reveal it, though I’m certain that a memorial service for a white police officer killed by a black previously convicted felon had nothing, nothing at all, to do with that editorial decision.

Officer Pawlowski was killed when he approached Rasheed Scrugs, a convicted felon, who had been threatening Emmanuel Cesar, 32, a Haitian immigrant who had been in Philadelphia for six years at the time, and who knew Mr Scrugs as a fellow “hack” – unlicensed cabbies who use their own cars and vie for fares near the SEPTA transit station at Broad Street and Olney Avenue.

But on the night of February 13, 2009, Cesar testified, Scrugs was on foot and angry. He said Scrugs came up to him on the northeast corner of the intersection, grabbed his shirt by the neck and demanded to know how much money he had made that day.

“I said, ‘I’m not telling you that,'” Scrugs testified, and said Scrugs responded by slamming him back against the security grate of a closed store several times.

Cesar said he got loose and began walking across Broad to get away and Scrugs followed, yelling, “You better not be calling the cops. If you call the cops I’ll shoot you and the cops.”

When the officers approaching Mr Scrugs ordered him to remove his hands from his pockets, he instead fired a handgun concealed in his pocket, striking Officer Pawlowski.

Mr Scrugs:

had been arrested nine times for crimes including robbery, car theft, weapons offenses and drugs, according to police and court records.

He was convicted of a 1997 armed robbery and sentenced to five to 10 years in prison. He was released in 2002, but he violated his parole in 2004 and was sent back to prison for an additional year.

Why not back to prison for the entire rest of his sentence?

Even if Mr Scrugs had been locked up for the maximum of ten years, he’d still have been out at the time he murdered Officer Pawlowski. That he had not in any way been reformed, simply not caught, is attested to by the fact he was carrying a six-shot, .357-caliber revolver, a felony for a previously convicted felon, and police found 19 packets of crack cocaine in his pockets when he was arrested; that’s felony distribution weight. He was apparently high on PCP at the time.

This guy was, as then-Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey called him, a “A career criminal,” “Cold-blooded killer,” and “Unsalvageable.”

Lynne Abraham, then the District Attorney, and her office put Mr Scrugs on trial for capital murder. Mr Scrugs changed his plea to guilty on the first day of the trial, leaving his attorneys to ask the jury to sentence him to life in prison without the possibility of parole, rather than the death penalty. They told the jury what a poor, poor soul Mr Scrugs was, how he’d shown remorse, had ‘troubled formative years, had an IQ of just 80, and might have been brain damaged from years of using PCP, or ‘angel dust.’ The jury deadlocked on the penalty phase, which left Common Pleas Court Judge Renee Cardwell Hughes no choice but to sentence Mr Scrugs to life without the possibility of parole. Officer Pawlowski’s family was distraught that he wasn’t sentenced to death, but it really doesn’t matter: other than three men who voluntarily gave up their appeals, no one has been executed in the Keystone State since the 1960s.

One thing is obvious: while Mr Scrugs would not have been on parole or probation from his previous conviction at the time he killed Officer Pawlowski, if he had been treated more seriously by District Attorney Abraham for his previous offenses, he could, and should have been in jail for longer than he was. Remember, Lewis Jordan, a.k.a. John Lewis, had been treated leniently by the office of then-District Attorney Lynne Abraham, and was out on the street when he could, and should, have been in jail. On October 31, 2007, Philadelphia Police Officer Charles Cassidy walked into a Dunkin’ Donuts, the scene of a previous robbery, to check on it, just as Mr Jordan was attempting to rob the place; Mr Jorden shot Officer Cassidy in the head, killing him. Had law enforcement treated Mr Jordan seriously, rather than dropping the charges if he’d attend drug counseling courses, he would have been in jail, and Officer Cassidy would have gone home to his wife that Hallowe’en.

Treating criminals leniently has a consequence, and the killing of Officer Pawlowski was only one example. Giving these thugs a break too often results in innocent people being killed. Treating Mr Scrugs leniently wound up getting him locked away for the rest of his life; did previous breaks from the District Attorney really wind up doing him a favor?

When we catch the bad guys, we need to lock them up, lock them up for as long as the law allows. Perhaps they will learn a lesson, and perhaps not, but one thing is certain: as long as they are behind bars, they aren’t out on the streets and a menace to the public.

The George Soros-funded District Attorney for Philadelphia, Larry Krasner, doesn’t believe in putting criminals in jail to make the rest of the community safer. He won’t enforce the gun laws unless someone is shot, and he doesn’t want to pursue less important crimes:

This office believes that reform is necessary to focus on the most serious and most violent crime, so that people can be properly held accountable for doing things that are violent, that are vicious, and that tear apart society. We cannot continue to waste resources and time on things that matter less than the truly terrible crisis that we are facing.

He’s so lenient on criminals that state Attorney General Josh Shapiro ran a sting in Philly, with the cooperation of Commissioner Danielle Outlaw and the Philadelphia Police Department that cut Mr Krasner out of the loop.

From Friday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

Family of 6 stabbed in Kensington

One of the victims, a 46-year-old woman, had sustained wounds to her head and neck and was in critical condition

by Rodrigo Torrejón | Friday, February 11, 2022

A family of six were stabbed in a Kensington home early Friday morning, with the suspect in custody soon after the violent attacks, according to a report.

Shortly after 4 a.m. Friday, police received a call of a stabbing on the 3000 block of North Front Street, 6ABC reported. When officers arrived, they found six members of a family suffering from stab wounds. The victims ranged in age from 26 to 46.

Normally, the Inquirer does not specify the specific house in which the crime occurred, but a photo with the article clearly shows the address as being 3027 North Front Street.

One of the victims, a 46-year-old woman, had sustained wounds to her head and neck and was in critical condition. Police said she was the mother of some of the other family members, 6ABC reported.

Police arrested a 29-year-old man a few blocks away from the house, covered in blood and with cuts on the inside of his hands, according to the report. Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small said some of the family members identified the man as the suspect.

The WPVI-TV report specified that the ‘suspect’ is a family member who lived in the home, something the Inquirer story did not include.

With all of the murders in the City of Brotherly Love, a crime in which six people were stabbed, but none fatally — though, with one victim in critical condition, a fatality is possible — seems almost pedestrian. But, as is my wont, I checked Google Maps street scenes to check out the neighborhood.

What did I find? Three of the first four rowhouses on the ‘odd’ side of the street had barricades in their front porches with metal bars. Across the street, four out of the first seven row houses show metal bars. Further up the ‘odd’ side, nine houses in a row, beginning with 3033, have barred in their front porches. Since the Google Maps survey was done 2¼ years ago, more residents may have added physical barriers since then. District Attorney Krasner might not believe that putting criminals behind bars makes Philadelphia safer, but the embattled residents of the 3000 block of North Front Street, in the crime-ridden Kensington area, are so afraid of crime that they’ve put themselves behind bars, for their own protection.

Just what does it say when people have to put themselves in jail, to protect themselves from the criminals who aren’t behind bars?

President Joe Biden’s ‘plan’ to provide free crack pipes to addicts fell apart:

Good news. Biden’s HHS is no longer funding crack pipes.

But make no mistake: yesterday’s change in policy is because HHS got caught. pic.twitter.com/s7nW1mN3GS

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) February 10, 2022

But on the same day, The Philadelphia Inquirer published this gem:

Philly’s journey to a supervised injection site spans years as overdose rates soar

Five years since officials announced their support for a site, efforts to open one have been mired in controversy and legal battles.

by Aubrey Whelan and Jeremy Roebuck | Thursday, February 10, 2022

In 2017, Philadelphia was on track to see a record-breaking overdose death toll. Calls were growing to open a supervised injection site, where people can use drugs under medical supervision and be revived if they overdose. By the end of the year, 1,217 people had died of an overdose, and city officials made the decision to sanction a site but not pay for it.

Five years later, the city still has no site, and the deaths go on. Still, advocates see renewed hope in the fact that the Justice Department under President Joe Biden signaled this week it is reconsidering the Trump administration’s long-held opposition to such efforts. Here’s a timeline of key moments in the process:

The article continues to list 18 specific dates and events in the timeline, the most important being the last:

February 7, 2022: In a statement first obtained by the Associated Press, Justice Department officials say they are “evaluating” supervised injection sites and discussing “appropriate guardrails” with stakeholders — signifying a shift in thinking on the sites. Goldfein, Safehouse’s vice president, says the organization is in productive talks with the federal government.

United States Attorney Bill McSwain had filed a lawsuit in 2019 to block a supervised injection site, “citing a 1986 federal law colloquially known as the “crackhouse statute.” That law makes it a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison to knowingly open or maintain any place for the purpose of using controlled substances.”

The “crack house statute,” 21 US §856, is pretty specific:

• a) Except as authorized by this subchapter, it shall be unlawful to—
• (1) knowingly open or maintain any place for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing, or using any controlled substance;
• (2) manage or control any building, room, or enclosure, either as an owner, lessee, agent, employee, or mortgagee, and knowingly and intentionally rent, lease, or make available for use, with or without compensation, the building, room, or enclosure for the purpose of unlawfully manufacturing, storing, distributing, or using a controlled substance.
• (b) Any person who violates subsection (a) of this section shall be sentenced to a term of imprisonment of not more than 20 years or a fine of not more than $500,000, or both, or a fine of $2,000,000 for a person other than an individual.

Translation: the Department of Justice, under President Bidden and Thank-God-and-Mitch-McConnell-he’s-not-on-the-Supreme-Court Attorney General Merrick Garland, are considering not enforcing the law, a law that isn’t being enforced in some other cities, including New York. Perhaps, just perhaps, people should be asking why deaths due to drug overdoses have skyrocketed under Mayor Jim Kenney and District Attorney Larry Krasner. In 2016, Mr Kenney’s first year in office, fatal opioid overdoses jumped from 561 to 752, a 34.05% increase. Just a year later, and they had jumped to 1,075, 91.62% higher than in Mayor Michael Nutter’s (D-Philadelphia) final year in office.

And now the city wants to enable further drug use by making it safer to shoot up! What a great plan!

Drug users are not somehow ‘not criminals’, no matter what District Attorney Krasner likes to think. To obtain their recreational pharmaceuticals, they have to buy them from a drug dealer, and Philadelphia’s record-setting 562 murders in 2021 were largely fueled by gang warfare, mostly drug gang warfare. Junkies buying heroin and fentanyl are a captive market which keeps the dealers in operation, and that endangers all Philadelphians.

Being the [insert slang term for the rectum here] that I am, I’ll ask the question a lot of people will not: why would we want to keep junkies alive? They are almost wholly non-productive, they frequently resort to petty crimes to finance their habits, they enable violent drug dealers, and they are a burden on our welfare systems and society in general. While one assumes that their families will mourn the deaths of individual junkies, society as a whole is better off when they go to their eternal rewards. Having ‘safe injection sites’ simply keeps alive the drags on our society, the petty, and perhaps not-so-petty, criminals who prey on other people to support their drug addictions.

District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), one of the George Soros-funded stooges who took office in some of our major cities with the explicit promise to reduce prosecutions, tried to tell people that yes, crimes with firearms had increased, but other crimes were down. That, of course, was bovine feces.

There are two different types of crime, crimes of evidence, and crimes of reporting. Murder is a crime of evidence, because it leaves a dead body, and dead bodies get found. It’s hard to dispose of 100 to 300 pounds of dead and decaying flesh and bone and muscle and fat unless someone has carefully planned how to do it.

But assaults, or robberies, or rapes? Assaults and rapes can be crimes of evidence, if the victim goes to the hospital for treatment. But if the victims is not seriously enough injured to seek medical care, or if the rape victim chooses not to report it, then those crimes become crimes of reporting, and if they are not reported to the police, then as far as the police are concerned, as far as the statistics measure, the crimes never happened. Yet, while the statistics vary, it seems that fewer than half of all “violent victimization” are reported to the police, and rape appears to be the least reported crime. According to the survey, only 32.5% or rapes or sexual assaults were reported in 2015, and that dropped to 23.2% the following year.^[1]See Table 4. In a city, in communities, in which the vast majority of crimes which are known about go unsolved, why would people who are already distrustful of the police, people who have low expectations that the crimes will actually be solved, even bother reporting the crimes? Why would residential burglaries be down 22% but non-residential burglaries up 15%? Same crime, just different targets, but different conditions for the owners. Commercial owners who find their businesses burgled^[2]Though “burglarize” is apparently a real word now, I refuse to use it. have a far greater possibility of getting an insurance recovery, while residents do not, so of course the victims of commercial burglaries are more likely to report the crimes. Residential burglaries? With so many unsolved crimes, and distrust of the police high, reporting such a crime must seem mostly useless to people.

Aggravated assault? The total number of aggravated assaults increased 14.58%, using the city’s own numbers; it’s simply that the tools used were more heavily included firearms than before.

And now we have this, from Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

Police arrest Philly teens wanted in carjackings and Wawa robberies

The arrests come amid an unprecedented surge in carjackings. The rate of such attacks doubled in 2020 and again in 2021 — and 2022 is off to an even more dangerous start.

by Samantha Melamed | Sunday, February 6, 2022

Philadelphia police on Saturday night arrested two teens, aged 14 and 18, who they said had been wanted in a series of armed carjackings in the city, as well as the robberies of two Wawa stores in Upper Darby.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Man killed in Philadelphia carjacking.

Officers on patrol around 8 p.m. near Broad and Wallace Streets in the city’s Spring Garden neighborhood recognized the suspects during a vehicle stop, police said. Both teens were armed and attempted to flee on foot, according to police. The 14-year-old was quickly apprehended, while the older suspect fled into a house on the 1200 block of Wallace Street, causing police to report a barricade situation. SWAT was called in and he, too, was arrested. Police recovered two loaded handguns, one from the car and the other from the house.

“These two arrests are a result of cooperation between the Philadelphia Police Department and also neighboring agencies,” Inspector D.F. Pace told 6ABC, which reported that authorities are investigating whether the two may be implicated in additional crimes. Charges were still pending as of Sunday morning, police said.

And here’s the money line:

The arrests come as Philadelphia is grappling with an alarming spike in carjackings: The rate nearly quadrupled from 2019 to 2021, when there were 840 such attacks. This year, there have already been 140 carjackings, putting the city on an even more perilous pace.

Carjackings are a pretty serious, violent crime, and while people might just throw up their hands and say, “Forget it,” when their home is burgled, because they think it fruitless, cars are big, important and cost a lot of money; when someone’s car is stolen, he loses a lot of capacity, to get to work or school, to carry home groceries, really to do much in society that involves travel.

Yet we are supposed to believe that crime, overall, has decreased in the City of Brotherly Love. well, no, I don’t believe it, don’t believe it at all.

Now, happily enough, one crime has decreased: murder. As of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, February 6^th, there had been 50 homicides reported by the Philadelphia Police Department, compared to 54 on the same date last year, and 39 in 2020. Homicides are running behind 2021’s record 562 killings, but ahead of 2020’s 499, which is the city’s third worst year, with the 500 killings during the crack cocaine wars of 1990.

So, is it an improvement that the city might see fewer murders than in 2021, but is still ahead of 2020’s pace? I guess that Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw would call it an improvement if there are ‘only’ 543 homicides, but that would be pretty much damning with faint praise.

“This is like the new way of stealing a car, and it’s become very dangerous,” Chief Inspector Frank Vanore, told The Inquirer last week.

Of course, the Inquirer tried to blame guns:

Philadelphia is hardly alone in experiencing an unusual surge in the crime. Although it’s not tracked by all police departments nationally, cities including Chicago, New York, New Orleans, and Minneapolis have all reported skyrocketing numbers of carjackings in recent months.

Officials have offered varying explanations: Young people taking joyrides. Cars being targeted for parts. The Chicago Sun-Times quoted one anonymous carjacker saying vehicles were sometimes stolen and then used in other crimes, including drive-by shootings.

Motive aside, the dramatic rise in carjackings has come as gun sales have exploded over the past two years.

No, the great rise in gun sales have been to law-abiding people, people who have to go through a background check, to defend themselves from crime! The law-abiding aren’t the ones out there jacking cars. As we have previously noted, a couple of good citizens took out the thieves, though sadly one of the good guys didn’t have his weapon properly registered.

The real reason for the increase in carjackings? It’s because the perps simply aren’t very afraid of being caught, or, if they’re caught, being seriously punished, not with a ‘social justice’ District Attorney in charge of prosecutions. And it’s because so many of the kids in Philadelphia simply aren’t being reared properly. I’ve said it before: you show me a rotten kid, and I’ll show you a lousy parent.