Tag Archives: #Crime

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The witnesses who sat by and did nothing should be publicly identified and publicly shamed A woman is raped on a SEPTA train, and not one other passenger had the courage to stop it or even call 911

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain is incensed:

From the New York Post:

Passengers do nothing as woman is raped on Philadelphia train, cops say

By Eileen AJ Connelly | October 16, 2021 | 2:39 PM EDT Updated 5:06 PM EDT

A homeless man raped a woman this week on a commuter train in suburban Philadelphia in full view of other passengers –who cops said didn’t lift a finger to help, or even dial 911, reports said.

The attack at around 10 p.m. Wednesday was captured on surveillance video that showed other people in the train car, according to Superintendent Timothy Bernhardt of the Upper Darby Police Department.

“Were they watching? I don’t know. Again, we’re still going through the video but there was a lot of people, in my opinion, that should’ve intervened. Somebody should’ve done something.,” Bernhardt said, Philadelphia’s CBS-3 reported.

“It speaks to where we are in society; I mean, who would allow something like that to take place? So it’s troubling.”

Bernhardt said it was a Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority employee who called the cops to report that “something wasn’t right” with a woman aboard the train.

SEPTA police waiting at the next stop were able to “apprehend the suspect in the act,” an agency spokesman said in a statement, according to NBC-10 Philadelphia.

They arrested Fiston Ngoy, 35, who is believed to be homeless, the station reported.

Ngoy was charged with rape, aggravated indecent assault and related counts, police said.

He remains behind bars in lieu of 10% of $180,000 bail, Philadelphia’s ABC-6 reported.

Bernhardt said he is known to both SEPTA and Upper Darby police.

The woman, who did not know her attacker, was taken to a hospital. Bernhardt called her an “unbelievably strong woman” who provided police with a lot of information, The Associated Press reported.

“She’s on the mend,” Bernhardt said. “Hopefully she will get through this.”

SEPTA issued a statement calling the attack a “horrendous criminal act.”

“There were other people on the train who witnessed this horrific act, and it may have been stopped sooner if a rider called 911,” the authority said.

Or maybe it would have been stopped sooner if people had the courage to intervene physically. Were there no men on that train at all? We may eventually find out that there were some males on that train, but it’s obvious that none of them were actually men.

The Philadelphia Inquirer had an article on the assault, but, of course, the Inquirer would never publish the (alleged) rapist’s mugshot:

SEPTA reports rape on Market-Frankford Line, says no one called 911

A rape occurred Wednesday night but riders did not report it, SEPTA said.

by Stephan Salisbury | Saturday, October 16, 2021

A woman was raped on the Market-Frankford Line on Wednesday night in a car with other passengers but none called 911.

Their failure to do that was noted by SEPTA in an unusual statement — and condemned by the police chief in Upper Darby, where the attack took place.

“There was a lot of people in my opinion that should have intervened, somebody should have done something,” Police Superintendent Timothy Bernhardt said. “It speaks to where we are in society and who would allow something like that to take place. So it’s troubling.”

In the statement Friday, the SEPTA agency said that “anyone witnessing an emergency” needed to report it immediately.

Report it immediately? How about take action to stop it?

Frank Herbert, in Dune, noted fear, and how fear had to be overcome. But our governments, federal and state and city, have spent the last year and a half trying to instill fear into the public, and it looks like they have succeeded: a train car full of people, and no one of them had the courage to intervene, to stop a rape being perpetrated right in front of them.

“The assault was observed by a SEPTA employee, who called 911, enabling SEPTA officers to respond immediately and apprehend the suspect in the act,” the agency said. ”There were other people on the train who witnessed this horrific act, and it may have been stopped sooner if a rider called 911.” . . . .

Bernhardt said the assault was caught entirely on surveillance video. Bernhardt said they are reviewing the footage, in part to look at the passengers.

Good, and I hope that tape is revealed, and every passenger, especially every male passenger, in that railcar is identified, by name and by photograph, and their information published, widely published, so that everyone knows who they are, and what they were too cowardly to do. I noted that neither story indicated that the (alleged) assailant was armed, with a knife or a firearm.

All it would have taken was one man, just one, to rally the other passengers to intervene and stop the assault, but no one did. Those people need to be publicly shamed, publicly humiliated, and the men males divorced by their wives.

The alleged assailant had been previously convicted of drug possession in 2015, and had been arrested both last year and this in both Philadelphia and Delaware County on charges that included public drunkenness, resisting arrest, and scalping tickets. The Defender Association of Philadelphia, which provides lawyers for people too poor to hire one, had been providing him with representation on the ticket scalping charge.

This crime happened not in Philadelphia, but in Delaware County, and if there’s any good at all in this, it’s that Mr Ngoy won’t be prosecuted by Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, who would give him a serious, serious! slap on the back of the hand, and maybe even a stern talking to.

There was a time in which, had this occurred then, the other men on that train would have rushed to the victim’s defense and beaten the assailant to a bloody pulp. But fear, fear! was upon them, upon a population cowed into masks and isolation and indifference.

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Lexington ties the 2019 record! Not a good record to tie

We noted, on October 5th, Lexington’s 29th homicide of 2021, and how Lexington was just one behind the then record of 30, set in 2019, but, of course, the record was broken again, with 34 in 2020. Well, that didn’t last long!

    Man dies after double shooting near Tates Creek High School in Lexington

    by Christopher Leach | October 14, 2021 | 12:10 PM EDT | Updated: 4:26 PM EDT

    One of two people shot outside a Lexington apartment building died, Lexington police said Thursday.

    Andre Holloway, 46, died at University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital where he was taken after the shooting, according to the Fayette County coroner’s office.

There’s more at the original. A previous article, published at 8:17 AM the same day, noted the double shooting, but Mr Holloway hadn’t been reported as having died at the time. Neither the Lexington Shootings Investigations page nor the Homicide Investigations page have, as of this writing, been updated to include this crime.

Thirty murders in 286 days works out to 0.104895 per day, or 38.29 for the year. If that rate holds, it will not only smash the record set just last year, but give the city a homicide rate of 11.71 per 100,000 population.

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You can’t fix the problem if you won’t admit what the problem is

Philadelphia’s homicide rate has skyrocketed since Mayor Jim Kenney took office, and only gotten worse since George Soros-sponsored police hater Larry Krasner became District Attorney. The appointment of left coaster Danielle Outlaw –she was formerly Chief of Police in Portland, Oregon, and a deputy chief in Oakland, California — didn’t improve things.

From October 12, 2020 through October 12, 2021, 551 bodies have littered the streets of America’s sixth largest city. With a population of 1,603,797, that works out to a homicide rate of 34.36 per 100,000 population. As we noted just a few days ago, the city is on track for 554 homicides this year, so the rate has remained constant, despite a slowdown in killings from mid-July through August.

But the city’s homicide rate for all of 2020 wasn’t that high: it was ‘just’ 31.11 for the entire year, even though that year saw 499 homicides, just one short of 1990’s all-time record. No, the killing rate got far, far worse after the death of George Floyd while resisting arrest in Minneapolis, and the summer long protests, demonstrations and #BlackLivesMatter riots against the police. Continue reading →

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Bullets flying in the Bluegrass State

Lexington isn’t Philadelphia, but that doesn’t mean that the guns aren’t firing there! I was checking The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website Sunday evening, to see if there were any stories on homicides, and then said to myself, “Self, you should check the Lexington Herald-Leader as well!”

    1 woman, 1 teenager shot outside a Lexington home, police say. Suspect flees scene

    By Jeremy Chisenhall | Sunday, October 10, 2021 | 4:40 PM EDT | Updated: 7:38 PM EDT

    Endon Drive, Lexington, from Google Maps. The red mark on the map does not indicate the shooting site. Click to enlarge.

    A Lexington shooting suspect fled Sunday after wounding a woman and a teenager outside a home, according to Lexington police.

    The shooting happened around 1:45 p.m. on Endon Drive, according to police. The woman was believed to have “critical” injuries, according to police Lt. Chris Van Brackel. Both victims were taken to University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital for treatment, Van Brackel said.

    The suspect fled in a vehicle, Van Brackel said. But he wasn’t the only one who took off from the area after the shooting.

There’s more at the original, but there wasn’t a whole lot more information. Then again, it seemed as though the Lexington Police didn’t want to share much with the article author. The victims were a 56-year-old black woman and 15-year-old black male.[1]The last sentence was added at 10:30 AM on Wednesday, October 13, 2021, with information taken from Lexington Shootings Investigations page.

Lexington isn’t like Philly, jammed up with row houses. Endon Drive is a starter home neighborhood, some brick, a couple of them stone, some clapboard and even a couple showing what appears to be asbestos shingle siding. The Google Maps streetview image, taken in October 2015, shows an Alison Lundergan Grimes campaign sign in support of her 2015 re-election campaign for Kentucky’s Secretary of State, a campaign she won. Mrs Grimes had been the 2014 Democratic Senate nominee, a campaign she lost to Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) by a landslide margin.

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↑1 The last sentence was added at 10:30 AM on Wednesday, October 13, 2021, with information taken from Lexington Shootings Investigations page.
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Killadelphia

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated Monday through Friday,[1]With Monday, October 11th being a government holiday, Columbus Day, it is possible that the website will not be updated until Tuesday. during “normal business hours,” so it still states that ‘just’ 427 people have been murdered in the City of Brotherly Love so far this year, but The Philadelphia Inquirer has the story of the killing of at least the 428th:

    A 13-year-old boy was fatally shot on his way to school in North Philly, police say

    The victim, whom police did not immediately identify, was shot once in the chest on the 3100 block of Judson Street just after 9 a.m., police said.

    by Chris Palmer and Anna Orso | Friday, October 8, 2021

    A 13-year-old boy was fatally shot on his way to school Friday morning in North Philadelphia, according to police and School District officials — another bleak example of how the city’s ongoing gun violence crisis is leaving a record number of young people dead or wounded.

    The victim, whom authorities declined to identify, was shot once in the chest on the 3100 block of Judson Street just after 9 a.m., police said. He was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead about 20 minutes later.

    Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said detectives believe the boy and several other young people had been sitting in a car parked on the block when at least one gunman walked up and fired shots into it.

    Lunette Ray, 86, heard the shots — at least 10 — right outside her house. She peered out the window and saw several boys jump out of a vehicle and run away. One was severely bleeding and fell in the street. She called 911.

There’s more at the Inquirer’s original. A photo in the article shows a maroon PT Cruiser sitting parked on North Judson Street at the intersection with West Clearfield Street, with bullet holes in the windshield. However, the Inquirer’s headline, that the victim was “on his way to school” appears to be misleading:

    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.

If the victim was shot “just after” 9:00 AM, it would seem that he wasn’t actually on his way to school. The Rhodes Elementary School website states that “All students must be in homerooms by 8:45 am each day.”

This was a targeted killing, though it is entirely possible, and perhaps probable, that the murdered boy wasn’t the intended target, that someone else in the vehicle was.

We have frequently noted that the inquirer only covers homicides when the victim is an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl. At least someone in that vehicle wasn’t exactly an innocent, but I have to ask: just what were “several” young people doing sitting in a parked car, at 9:00 AM on a school day? Many things could be speculated, which I will leave up to the reader.

Chris Palmer and Anna Orso, the article authors, perhaps accidentally, stepped away from the Inquirer’s position that it’s all about guns:

    Carl Day, an antiviolence advocate and pastor whose church is two blocks from where the shooting took place, said, “We should be stirred up right now, all of us.” The killing is a mandate for adults in the community, he said, to reach out to more children and teenagers and provide alternatives to violence.

    “We in this community and in this zip code need to put all hands on deck,” he said. “We have to let our youth know this doesn’t have to be life. This world is so much bigger than what they think they see in front of them.”

Pastor Day spoke a truth that the #woke of the Inquirer’s newsroom don’t want to hear, that the problem of homicide in the City of Brotherly Love isn’t about guns, but about bad people, about people who think that killing others is perfectly OK, that killing other people is a reasonable and logical thing to do, for whatever reasons they have. The current generation of kids in Philly have already been lost; it’s going to be up to the next group of parents to start bringing up their children in a manner in which they don’t see killing as a reasonable thing to do, and don’t see drugs as a smart thing to take.

It’s a pretty sad thing to note that murder and death are common risks for 13-year-olds like the victim in this story, but the reality is that they are, and they are due to the aggregate behavior of other teenagers in neighborhoods like North Judson and West Clearfield Streets. The victim in this story may or may not have been doing anything wrong, but enough of his peers have been, and are, that the danger is created for all of them.

References

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↑1 With Monday, October 11th being a government holiday, Columbus Day, it is possible that the website will not be updated until Tuesday.
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This guy must like jail! His first adult mugshot taken just 39 minutes after he turned 18!

Adrun Bennett, Fayette County Detention Center, October 6, 2021, 10:14:53 PM EDT.

Adrun Demetrius Bennett, born February 19, 1998, has managed, in his short life, to become rather familiar with the Fayette County Detention Center. The mugshot to the right was taken on Wednesday, October 6, 2021, after he was captured following a standoff with police:

After an approximately three-hour standoff Wednesday, Lexington police captured a man accused of robbing a Fifth Third bank, police said.

According to police, a first-degree robbery warrant was issued for Adrun Bennett, 23, after an investigation identified Bennett as the suspect in the Aug. 9 Fifth Third Bank robbery on Walden Drive, near the intersection of Tates Creek and Armstrong Mill roads. During the robbery, Bennett allegedly handed an employee a note threatening he had a gun and demanded money. The employee complied and Bennett fled the scene.

Officers found Bennett inside an apartment on Spangler Drive Wednesday morning, police said. Bennett barricaded himself inside the unit for approximately three hours, but Bennett was ultimately arrested without further incident, police said.

There’s more at the original, but the jail records also include three other mugshots of Mr Bennett, taken on January 11, 2021 at 11:37:02 AM; August 30, 2018 at 2:45:34 AM; and February 19, 2016 at 12:39:20 AM, which just happens to be thirty-nine whole minutes after he turned 18. Would it be wrong of me to suspect that he has a sealed juvenile record as well?

Well, he managed to rack up some adult charges:

Two teens charged in connection with robbery of Central Bank on Versailles Road

By Greg Kocher | June 3, 2016 | 2:17 PM EDT

A 16-year-old and an 18-year-old have been arrested in connection with the Thursday-afternoon robbery of the Central Bank and Trust branch, 2347 Versailles Road, Lexington police said. . . . .

Police said they found the juvenile, whose name is not being released because of his age, and the 18-year-old, Adrun D. Bennett, in an apartment on Cambridge Drive.

The juvenile is charged with first-degree robbery. Bennett is charged with tampering with physical evidence for trying to conceal stolen money, police said. Bennett is also charged with two counts of wanton endangerment in connection with shots fired on Appian Way on May 29; the shooting is unrelated to the robbery, police said.

Also see Robert Stacy McCain: Milwaukee Teen Killed by System Racism and High-Speed Head-On Collision, But . . .

If this fine gentleman was firing shots, then charged with aiding and abetting a bank robbery, the obvious question is: why wasn’t he already in jail? This is not a good dude!

The Lexington Herald-Leader, of course, did not publish Mr Bennett’s mugshot, even though the reporter for the first cited news story, Christopher Leach, noted that he checked “jail records” to ascertain the charges Mr Bennett faced, and had to have seen the same four mugshots that I saw. His article was originally published at 7:21 AM on Thursday, October 7th, and updated at 4:20 PM the same day, so he had plenty of time to ask permission of Editor Peter Baniak to use the mugshot. Whether he did or not, I do not know, but at some point even the McClatchy Mugshot Policy ought to give way when a multiple-time repeat offender is involved.

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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.

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↑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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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

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↑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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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.