Tag Archives: #Crime

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Prosecutor who sought to end cash bail imprisonment is bemoaning lower bail for violent offenders

Every once in a while, I’ll come across a story that has me both laughing my butt off and shaking my head in disbelief. As we’ve noted before, Larry Krasner won the election to become District Attorney in Philadelphia in 2017, and was the beneficiary of a huge campaign contribution from leftist billionaire George Soros, is a leftist who hates the police and doesn’t pursue supposedly petty offenses, and ran on a platform saying he would:

  • Stop prosecuting insufficient and insignificant cases
  • Review past convictions, free the wrongfully convicted
  • Stop cash bail imprisonment
  • Treat addiction as an illness, not a crime
  • Protect immigrants while protecting everybody
  • Reject a return to the failed drug wars of the past
  • Stand up to police misconduct

The cost of Mr Krasner’s victory has been written in blood. Philadelphia has seen more murders, many more murders than New York City, which has more than five times Philly’s population.

Philadelphia’s daily average inmate population was 6,409 when Mr Krasner took office, and was down to 4,849 on August 31, 2019.

One of the people who wasn’t in jail on Friday, March 13, 2020, was Hasan Elliot, 21. How did the District Attorney’s office treat Mr Elliot, a known gang-banger?

  • Mr Elliott, then 18 years old, was arrested in June 2017 on gun- and drug-possession charges stemming after threatening a neighbor with a firearm. The District Attorney’s office granted him a plea bargain arrangement on January 24, 2018, and he was sentenced to 9 to 23 months in jail, followed by three years’ probation. However, he was paroled earlier than that, after seven months in jail.
  • Mr Elliot soon violated parole by failing drug tests and failing to mate his meetings with his parole officer.
  • Mr Elliott was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine on January 29, 2019. This was another parole violation, but Mr Krasner’s office did not attempt to have Mr Elliot returned to jail to finish his sentence, nor make any attempts to get serious bail on the new charges;he was released on his own recognizance.
  • After Mr Elliot failed to appear for his scheduled drug-possession trial on March 27, 2019, and prosecutors dropped those charges against him.

Philadelphia Police Officers and FOP members block District Attorney Larry Krasner from entering the hospital to meet with slain Police Corporal James O’Connor’s family.

On that Friday the 13th, Police Corporal James O’Connor IV, 46, was part of a Philadelphia police SWAT team trying to serve a predawn arrest warrant on Mr Elliott, from a March 2019 killing. Mr Elliot greeted the SWAT team with a hail of bullets, and Corporal O’Connor was killed. Had Mr Elliot been in jail, as he could have been due to parole violations, had Mr Krasner’s office treated him seriously, Corporal O’Connor would have gone home safely to his wife that day. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:

Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 president John McNesby also has criticized Krasner, saying his policies led to the killing of O’Connor. “Unfortunately, he’s murdered by somebody that should have never been on the street,” McNesby said.

McNesby also said FOP members and police officers formed a human barricade to block Krasner from entering the hospital Friday to see O’Connor’s family.

The numbers don’t lie. Under Mayor Jim Kenney, who has managed to make past Mayors John Street and Michael Nutter look great, District Attorney Krasner and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw (who, to be honest, is really just Mayor Kenney’s puppet), Philadelphia has become measurably much worse. Mr Kenney has been in office since the beginning of 2016, and Mr Krasner since the start of 2018, and Philly is now much more dangerous. Their policies were put into governing practice, and, unless chaos and death was the goal all along, they failed miserably.

And now — and it’s difficult not to laugh about this — the esteemed Mr Krasner is lamenting that judges are not imposing high enough bail!

Amid rising gun crime in Philly, DA Larry Krasner blasts low bail

by Mensah M. Dean and Chris Palmer | January 11, 2021 | 7:21 PM EST

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner on Monday blasted bail commissioners for setting lower bails than his office routinely seeks for those charged with gun crimes at a time when the city is besieged by near-record gun violence.

While his office often has asked for million-dollar bails for those charged with violent gun crimes — with suspects typically having to pay 10% of that amount — the median bail last week for those arrested for possession of a gun was just $110,000, and $150,000 for those arrested for a violent offense involving a gun, Krasner said during a news conference in West Philadelphia with community leaders and anticrime activists.

“I’m not saying that’s a tiny amount of money, but what I am saying is for people who have resources, including criminals who are deriving substantial profit from illegal activity, this is not a hard thing to pay,” he said. As a result, he said, many of those accused of gun crimes are back on the street while awaiting trial.

Within 60 days, his office will release a report that will explore the impact bail amounts are having on crime, Krasner said during the first of what he said would be weekly press conferences to keep the public apprised on his offices’ efforts to combat violence.

He campaigned on ending cash bail imprisonment, and now he’s shocked, shocked!, that bail commissioners are setting lower bail amounts. In asking “for million-dollar bails for those charged with violent gun crimes,” is he not seeking to keep those charged, but not yet convicted, suspects in jail, in “cash bail imprisonment”?

This is the type of thing that “social justice,” rather than real justice, law enforcement gets you. By not seriously pursuing the little crimes, when the bad guys get a bit older and are graduated to bigger and badder things, they have less of past criminal record, which naturally means lower bail amounts. More, it means that some of those “charged with violent gun crimes” could have been locked up in jail, on the lesser offenses, on the days that they committed worse crimes. As documented above, Hasan Elliot was one of those criminals who could have been in prison, not just on his original sentence, but on parole violations, had Mr Krasner treated him seriously. Police Corporal James O’Connor IV is stone-cold graveyard dead because Mr Krasner and his office didn’t treat him seriously.

From the Inquirer:

(Mr Krasner’s spokeswoman Jane) Roh responded (to Mt Nesby’s statements) on Friday saying it was “frankly ghoulish that anyone, much less an authority figure, would choose to spread lies for personal or political gain in response to this tragedy.”

On Monday, McNesby shot back, contending that police again “are under attack from the district attorney’s rogue staff.” Calling Roh a “Krasner henchman,” McNesby wrote in a statement that Roh was using “O’Connor’s murder as a reason to attack ALL Police as ‘ghoulish,’” and contended that the “vicious” attack was “tacitly approved and supported by Krasner.”

On Twitter Monday night, Roh said McNesby’s language in the aftermath of the shooting was filled with “Trumpian, deliberately inflammatory falsehoods.” She said he should be “working 24/7 to protect the health & safety of his members” during the coronavirus outbreak.

As opposed to protecting them from the bullets of street thugs Mr Krasner allowed out of jail? COVID-19 is serious, but bullets fired by criminals appear to be a deadlier danger. You can check out Miss Roh’s Twitter feed to see how much of a whacked-out leftist she is; it’s no wonder she is Mr Krasner’s spokesidiot.

Larry Krasner has brought this on himself, through his idiotic, social justice policies. Under his ‘leadership,’ Philadelphia jumped from 315 homicides before he took office, to 353, then 356, and then 2020’s whopping 499. Mr Krasner isn’t all of the reason behind those huge jumps, but he’s definitely part of it. He may be bemoaning the lower bail, but it’s the result of his policies. Thing is, he’s not paying the price for his failures, the good citizens of Philadelphia are.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

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Politically correct crime reporting

The Lexington Herald-Leader reported Tuesday on the 2020 homicide numbers in Kentucky’s second largest city, home of the University of Kentucky, and where I lived from August of 1971 through December of 1984. There were 34 homicides in the city in 2020, up from 30 in 2019, which was the previous record. With a guesstimated population of 323,152 in mid-2019, that puts the city’s murder rate at 10.53 per 100,000 population, far, far behind places like Philadelphia and Chicago. Lexington-Fayette County is the 60th largest city in the United States, larger than St Louis, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.[1]Unlike some other larger cities, Lexington has no contiguous suburbs, in that the Lexington city and Fayette County governments merged in 1974.

Teens, disputes drove a Lexington homicide record. COVID-19 made cases hard to solve

By Jeremy Chisenhall | January 5, 2021 | 2:57 PM EST | Updated: 4:12 PM EST

Lexington Police Chief Lawrence Weathers, from the city website.

Many of Lexington’s record-breaking 2020 homicides were violent conclusions to arguments or other crimes involving male adults or teens.

There were 34 homicides in Lexington in 2020, a 13 percent increase from 2019, according to Lexington police data. The previous record was 30, set in 2019. The difficulty of identifying suspects in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic made matters worse for police.

“Everybody’s wearing masks,” Lexington Police Chief Lawrence Weathers told the Herald-Leader. “That puts a little extra work on us, and we have to corroborate a little bit more on some of the things without having a full face.”

Well, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) did mandate that, so, how about that, even criminals are obeying the orders!

There’s a lot more at the original, which you can read at the embedded link.

Jeremy Chisenhall, the article author, included some graphics in which homicides were mapped by location, by time and day of the week, by the ages and sexes of the victims and suspects.

You know what’s missing? Any data or graphics on the race or ethnicity of the victims and suspects.

Now, I didn’t know if it was political correctness on the part of the Herald-Leader or Mr Chisenhall that omitted that information, or whether the Lexington Police Department failed to provide it, so I did the obvious thing: I went to the Police Department’s website. There I found a chart on homicide investigations, listing all 34 victims and the current dispositions of their cases, including named suspects, plus the ages of the victims and where they were killed. But it doesn’t disclose race or ethnicity.

The LPD certainly keeps that information, because in another chart, on the same page I found the homicide chart, is a three page .pdf file of assaults with firearms, which specifically states that it does not include homicides, in which the races, sexes and ages of the victims are specified.

I was able to dig a bit deeper. On the homicides page, the 25 named offenders were hyperlinked to their mugshots. Based on observation of mugshots and names, I counted 11 non-Hispanic black males, 2 non-Hispanic black females, 4 non-Hispanic white males, 1 non-Hispanic white female, 2 Hispanic white males, 1 black Hispanic white male, 2 unidentifiable suspects and 3 juveniles.

So, why did I have to manually count a number that the LPD provided much more easily available in shooting victims?

Why hide this stuff? The omission was so glaring that anyone could have noticed it, and Mr Chisenhall’s graphics made that even more obvious. Eventually, the city will have to report the numbers anyway. But we’re not supposed to talk about race, are we?

References

References
↑1 Unlike some other larger cities, Lexington has no contiguous suburbs, in that the Lexington city and Fayette County governments merged in 1974.
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Killadelphia reaches the milestone I didn't think they'd make it, but they did: 502 homicides in 2020.

This is part of the penitential rite at the beginning of Mass:

I confess to almighty God
and to you, my brothers and sisters,
that I have greatly sinned,
in my thoughts and in my words,
in what I have done and in what I have failed to do,
through my fault, through my fault,
through my most grievous fault;
therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin,
all the Angels and Saints,
and you, my brothers and sisters,
to pray for me to the Lord our God.

And I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, because, as Philadelphia was approaching 500 homicides for 2020, I was, morbidly enough, rooting for the city to reach the milestone of 500 homicides. And, according to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, that ghastly goal was achieved, with 502 people bleeding out their lives in the city’s mean streets.

I noted, only a few days ago, that the City of Brotherly Love had, under the great leadership of Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, won the Silver Medal, with 489 homicides, tying the second place mark set in 1989, but that 1990’s 505 number seemed out of reach.

I had used an article in Wikipedia as my source, which gave that number. But, as of just a couple of days ago, the article changed, stating that 1990’s total was 497. And The Philadelphia Inquirer’s old website, philly.com, has interactive data which gives that same 497 number for 1990.

That may not be the last word, because the Inquirer’s Chris Palmer reported, on New Year’s Day:

The number of people killed last year — 499 as of late Thursday — is 40% higher than in 2019, and more than in all of 2013 and 2014 combined. The only time more people were slain in the city was in 1990, when police reported 500 homicides as violence surged alongside an intensifying crack-cocaine epidemic.

With that 505 number stuck in my brain, I had thought that Mr Palmer was simply using 500 as an approximation, but with the change in data from my source — now two sources — I have to wonder, is the 500 number an approximation, or precise?

Because, if it is precise, and the Police Department’s 502 number is accurate, Messrs Kenney and Krasner, and Miss Outlaw, have won the Gold Medal!

That’s a pretty sad award.

At any rate, a site search for 502 homicides on the Inquirer’s website, at 5:40 PM EST did not turn up any stories noting the ‘achievement.’

Now, I’m something of a math geek, and I do really radical things like run the numbers. It wasn’t so long ago, October 22nd, that I noted in an article entitled We need to stop pretending that #BlackLivesMatter, because in the City of Brotherly Love, it’s very apparent that they don’t, that the math said Philly was on track for 485 homicides.

And that had been a huge jump, because on August 18th, the daily averages led to a number of 439.

Of course, in mid-August, there was still a lot of warm weather left, and violent crimes tend to increase in the long, hot summer.

But by October 22nd, we were a month into autumn, cooler weather had prevailed, and supposedly, so would cooler heads. As I wrote then, the math was simple: 391 people killed in 295 days so far equals 1.325 people killed every single day. With 71 days left in the year, at that rate the city should see another 94 people sent to their deaths before the ball drops in New York City.

391 + 94 = 485.

But 502 killings in 366 days? That works out to 1.372 people being slaughtered, every single day of the year. In the last two months of autumn, and the first two weeks of winter, Philadelphia saw 1.563 homicides per day. The rate of death increased in the cooler months. December’s 48 homicides in 31 days works out to 1.548 per day, during what is supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year. December, after President Trump had been defeated for re-election, and COVID-19 vaccines had been developed and approved, yet the things on which the left would like to blame the increased crime rate now being diminished didn’t do much to lower the homicide rate.

I have been profuse in my criticism of Mayor Kenney, District Attorney Krasner and Commissioner Outlaw, and I do not take back a single word of it. But the real blame lies with not just the killers, but the parents who reared them. Yes, a no-nonsense “broken windows” policing and prosecution regime would reduce crime, the way Mayor Rudy Giuliani (D-New York) accomplished it, but the real key is reducing criminal thought in the minds of the people. If the kids are reared right, they won’t commit the crimes, regardless of the policing regimen.

Political leaders cannot rear our children for us; that’s up to parents and grandparents. But the Mayor and the District Attorney can look at what Mayor Giuliani accomplished, and if they don’t like his methods, they can at least appreciate his numbers. Philadelphia’s previous Mayor, Michael Nutter, and his Police Commissioner, Charles Ramsey, might not have been full on “broken windows” in their policies, but, as Robert Stacy McCain pointed out, there were more killings in Philly last year than in two consecutive years, 2013 and 2014, under Messrs Nutter and Ramsey.

Mr Krasner’s Twitter biography states, “District Attorney Larry Krasner fights for equal justice for the great people of Philadelphia. A fair and effective criminal justice system makes us safer.”  The one thing Mr Krasner’s policies have not done is to make Philadelphians safer.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

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Chicago only thinks it’s the murder capital

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain noted the good mayor of the Windy City, and what had happened to the homicide rate in that toddlin’ town:

Stupid City, Stupid Mayor: Homicide Increases 55% in Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago

January 3, 2021

Remember, dead people are still eligible to vote in Chicago:

A 41-year-old man was shot and killed early Friday morning in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, marking the city’s first homicide of 2021 and following a year of spiking crime rates there and around the nation.

According to Chicago police data, the city recorded 769 homicides in 2020, a 55% increase over 2019.

The increase, reversing a three-year trend, is among the highest in city history, The Chicago Tribune reported Thursday.

Fatal shootings rose by 53%, with December shootings totaling 50, compared with just 19 a year earlier.

According to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office, 78% of the gun violence victims were Black.

So that’s about 600 black people shot dead in Chicago last year, a Democrat-run city in a Democrat-controlled state with some of the strictest gun-control laws in the country. If Black Lives Matter actually cared about saving the lives of black people, they’d be rioting about this, but the truth is the Black Lives Matter is just a propaganda operation with only one goal, to help Democrats win elections.

It would be wrong to say to describe this as a “tragedy,” because it’s so predictable. When you elect Democrats, people get killed as a result. If you’re too stupid to understand this, that’s not my fault.

There’s more to the story. The 2020 Census numbers aren’t in yet, but, according to Wikipedia, Chicago’s population was guesstimated at 2,693,976 for 2019. Since crimes rates are calculated by 100,000 population, 769 homicides works out to a murder rate of 28.54.

That’s pretty high, but but Philadelphia laughs, and says, “Hold my beer.”

Philly’s violent year: Nearly 500 people were killed and 2,200 shot in 2020

by Chris Palmer | January 1, 2021 | 5:00 AM EST

For just the second time in its history, Philadelphia’s annual homicide total threatened in 2020 to reach 500, another grim marker in a year where the city has been wracked by the coronavirus pandemic, economic strife, and social unrest over racial inequity.

The number of people killed this year — 494 as of Tuesday — is 40% higher than last year, and more than in all of 2013 and 2014 combined. The only time more people were slain in the city was in 1990, when police reported 500 homicides as violence surged alongside an intensifying crack-cocaine epidemic.

It’s obvious that Chris Palmer, the author, had been working on this story for a couple of days. Though further down in the article he noted that the reported total was 498, he had written this when the reported number was slightly smaller.

The Philadelphia Inquirer noted in a different story that at least one person was murdered on New Year’s Eve, which would bring the total to 499. The population of Philly was guesstimated to be 1,584,064 in 2019. That gives Philly a murder rate of 31.50, leaving Chicago in it’s rear-view mirror. The Philadelphia Police Department should release its final number on 2020 homicides on Monday.

The spike in shootings was even more pronounced. More than 2,240 people were shot since Jan. 1, 40% more than police have ever recorded. Those statistics only date back to 2007, when the department began keeping track of shooting victims separately from the broader category of assaults involving a gun.

As in most years, the vast majority of victims were young, Black men — many from impoverished neighborhoods lacking resources and long afflicted by gun violence. But shots also killed and wounded children playing on the street. A pregnant woman was struck by a stray bullet — forcing the early delivery of her baby. Some gunmen fired indiscriminately into block parties. A witness was shot dead near City Hall in what police believe was a targeted hit for his testimony in a murder trial.

Then came the money line:

Still, the city’s crime picture continued to show uneven and unusual signs: As homicides and shootings soared, overall violent crime — which also includes rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults — remained near decades-long lows, while overall property crime was also lower than last year.

Are there really fewer other crimes? That’s what the statistics say, but there’s an unforgotten factor. Murder is a crime of evidence; dead bodies are very difficult of which to dispose or hide, and they get found. But rape, assaults which don’t result in hospitalization, robberies, etc, are crimes of reporting; if the victims don’t report them, then as far as the police, as far as the statistics are concerned, they didn’t happen.

And with Larry Krasner’s refusal to prosecute seriously the ‘little’ crimes, with the black community hating the police, and with conviction rates so low, it is more probable that other crimes are simply being reported less frequently than it is that fewer crimes are being committed. When your city is stuck with a District Attorney like Mr Krasner, who doesn’t believe in prosecuting criminals, or sentencing them harshly when they are prosecuted and convicted, what reason is there to report that you were robbed?

From the District Attorney’s Wikipedia biography:

During his tenure, Krasner has sought to spearhead criminal justice reform by ending bail payments for low-level offenders, reducing supervision for parolees, and seeking more lenient sentences for certain crimes. Prior to his government service, Krasner had a 30-year career as a criminal defense and civil rights attorney and public defender. He aggressively pursued police misconduct.

Why would anyone go through the hassle of reporting a crime, and perhaps having to testify in court, when the city isn’t going to give the criminals more than a slap on the wrist?

Murder is not normally a criminal’s first crime; the bad guys tend to start out small, and work their ways up to the really bad stuff. But with all of the ‘social justice’ bovine feces, all of the hatred of the police, and the frustration that comes with crimes not being solved, what’s the point of someone in Kensington or Nicetown calling the cops when they get mugged?

Krasner said summer could have been the moment when the near-total shutdown of social services and alternatives to gun violence collided with warmer weather and other traditional drivers of violence, such as long-simmering feuds — suddenly allowed to play out on streets where witnesses, like everyone else, stayed home in the pandemic lockdown.

Really? The Police Department reported that, as of 11:59 PM on October 23rd, there had been 399 homicides in 297 days in the city. That works out to 1.34 killings per day. But with 498 homicides in 365 days, the average is slightly higher, at 1.36 per day; cooler weather didn’t seem to stem the tide of killings. And in the last 68 days, there were 99 killings, or 1.46 per day, a higher rate, around Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Mr Palmer’s article concludes with the usual platitudes about not enough legitimate opportunities for young black males growing up in the City of Brotherly Love, and Mr Krasner and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw saying that they are trying to put in programs that involve more than just (the barely existent) law enforcement. But what no one will do is admit the truth, because the truth is so very, very politically incorrect: the only solution to bad behavior by teenagers and young adults, regardless of race, is better parenting and better communities. The parents of young black males need to rear them better, and that has to mean both parents. If their fathers are absent, boys are crippled in a way that is easy to quantify:

Children brought up in single mother homes are:

  • 5 times more likely to commit suicide,
  • 9 times more likely to drop out of high school,
  • 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances,
  • 14 times more likely to commit rape,
  • 20 times more likely to end up in prison,
  • 32 times more likely to run away from home.

But if that’s easy to quantify, current political realities prohibit us from noting the quality that’s a problem, namely that children need both male and female role models when they are growing up, and they need fathers and mothers who show love and respect for each other, something that cannot happen when they are not living together.

District Attorney Krasner and Commissioner Outlaw can’t do anything about fathers in West Philadelphia not being married to or living with the mothers of their children.

The solution to Philadelphia’s crime rate, to any city’s crime rate, does not come from Mayors or District Attorneys or Police Commissioners. Yes, Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s (R-New York City) “broken windows” policing policies tamped down on serious crime somewhat, but the real solution has to come from parents being married and staying together, and rearing their children properly. Mr Giuliani’s stricter policing may have prevented some bigger crimes, but holding crime down is eventually a losing proposition; only by bringing up kids who don’t want to commit crimes, not because they are afraid of getting caught, but because it’s the right way to live, can society improve.

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Killadelphia * Updated!

The Philadelphia Police Department only updates its Current Crime Stats page on normal business days, so the numbers are current as of 11:59 PM on Wednesday, December 23rd, where they show that 482 souls have gone to their eternal rewards due to homicide in the City of Brotherly Love in 2020. Uncharacteristically, The Philadelphia Inquirer has told us the tales since then. Yesterday, there was this:

Shootings leave two young men dead on Christmas Eve, police say

by Catherine Dunn | December 24, 2020 | 9:11 PM EST

A 20-year-old man who was shot multiple times died Thursday morning, Philadelphia police said.

The shooting occurred in the city’s Overbook section, on the 1800 block of Wynnewood Road, about 11:30 a.m., according to police. The man was taken to Lankenau Medical Center, and pronounced dead at 11:46 a.m.

In a statement, police said that a preliminary investigation indicated the victim was outside recording on social media when another man approached him, started a verbal altercation, and then shot the victim. When police arrived, authorities said, they found the victim lying in the grass, with multiple wounds to the torso. . . .

Hours later, at 1:42 p.m., a shooting in Philadelphia’s Kensington section led to the death of another young man.

The victim was about 20 years old, police said. He was shot five times on the 3200 block of G Street, according to information provided by police.

In neither case was an arrest made or weapons recovered. The Inquirer noted that no motive was determined in the first shooting.

Assuming those were the only two homicides on Christmas Eve, well 482 + 2 = 484.

Today is Christmas Day, a day of peace and love and brotherhood, right?

Philly police fatally shoot gunman accused of shooting into a crowd, killing teen and injuring another

by Diane Mastrull | December 25, 2020 | 2:51 PM EST

Christmas morning got off to a grim start in Philadelphia when a street fight escalated to one man firing a gun into a crowd, striking two teenagers in the neck before officers fatally shot him, according to police.

A 15-year-old male whose identity was not released was pronounced dead at Temple University Hospital, where a 17-year-old remained Friday in stable condition, police said.

The alleged gunman, 43, was shot in the torso and pronounced dead at Temple, police said. Police did not disclose how many times he was hit, just that two officers fired at him about 12:30 a.m. on the 3300 block of Emerald Street in the city’s Kensington section.

The officers had responded to a call about a disturbance or fight at that location. They were attempting to defuse the situation, police said, when additional family members of the feuding people came out of their houses and gathered on the sidewalk and in the middle of the street. Pushing and punching ensued between the original combatants, police said, when a man pulled a gun from his right rear waistband and fired it, hitting both teenagers.

The officers immediately pulled their service weapons and shot the “alleged” gunman, and I have to wonder if we’ll see protests such as the ones following the shooting of Walter Wallace, because the police killed a violent criminal.

484 + 2 = 486. Yes, the dead criminal counts as a homicide, even though it was obviously justified.

And Christmas Day isn’t even over yet.

Philly’s record is 505 killings in 1990, with 1989 coming in at second place with 489. With six more days remaining in 2020, the city has a very good chance to make second place.

By the time the Philadelphia Police Department updates its figures, on Monday, December 28th, the city might have already moved into second place!

The left will cry for more gun control, as though the guns somehow killed people by themselves. But the 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun used was reported stolen from Virginia. Shockingly, it appears — though I hate to judge a thing like that before all of the facts are in — that a criminal misguided gentleman broke the law in obtaining his weapon.

Updated: December 26, 2020 | 8:45 AM EST

Well, how about that? It turns out that the Christmas Day shooter, Jesus Perez, killed his own son, and wounded a nephew. From the updated version of the Inquirer story:

The family of the man, identified by CBS3 as Jesus Perez, denied that he was armed or would have fired at his own child. “He would obviously never do that,” his brother, Noris Cueva-Nova, said in an email. “He was a respectable, hard-working man who cared deeply for his family.”

The family denied that the guy, from whose warm, dead fingers the police pulled a 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun, was armed. I guess it was just imaginary bullets which killed the guy’s son.

Pretty soon we’ll hear that the police shot the two boys, then planted the stolen 9mm in Mr Perez’s hand.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

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The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer asked for “radical new thinking” and “radical realism” I'm guessing that they won't like my "radical new thinking" and "radical realism"

About fifteen years ago, I worked for a ready-mixed concrete company in suburbs of Philadelphia, and one of my responsibilities was driver recruitment. The biggest problem? More than half of potential recruits couldn’t pass the drug test!

The greatest anti-poverty program is a job, and a huge percentage of those in poverty in Philadelphia have made themselves ineligible for decent jobs through their own choices to use drugs. Reducing poverty cannot come from the top down, from boards and commissions and charities. It must come from the bottom up, from a community which refuses to use drugs and will not tolerate those who sell drugs.

I know, I know, it’s just horribly politically incorrect to say this, but poor people are poor primarily due to their own choices.

Solving Philly’s poverty problem requires radical thinking — and realism | Editorial

The Inquirer Editorial Board | November 22, 2020 | 6:00 AM EST

One of the great challenges of living in a city with the high poverty rate that has long dogged Philadelphia is how to remain optimistic that the proposals designed to alleviate it can work.

The past few decades have seen many attempts to “solve” the poverty problem, both nationally and locally. Mayor John Street launched a $300 million anti-blight program called the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative. In 2013, Mayor Michael Nutter launched the Shared Prosperity program, designed to streamline and maximize available aid to people. Both had their successes, but change in the poverty rate was incremental.

The latest effort, a “Poverty Action Plan” was released in early March from City Council and a committee including Darrell Clarke, Maria Quiñones Sanchez and Allan Domb. Last week, Council announced the creation of a new nonprofit to implement the plan, funded with a $10 million grant from the city.

The plan, originally described as a “moonshot” designed to lift 100,000 people out of poverty by 2024, offers a set of sweeping actions: seven strategies that range from providing a basic income to individuals and wage tax refunds to adult education and job training stipends. It creates a Poverty Commission, described as a public-private partnership including city and state government, philanthropies, universities and civic institutions like the United Way. In addition to a fund, it creates a dashboard to measure progress.

The commission also assembled a staggering number of people: five co-chairs, 19 full committee members, and 57 additional people spread over three separate committees.

So, 81 people, probably none of them truly poor themselves, involving government employees, philanthropies, universities and civic institutions. Philadelphia is going to have yet another anti-poverty program put together and run by the elites, most, and possibly all of whom have never been poor, have never, to use the expression of Robert E Howard, had their lives nailed to their spines, trying to put together a program for people who are not like them.

Many are familiar names who have been at the front lines of fighting poverty for years, if not decades. While it will take a large, all-hands-on-deck effort to make inroads, it is of concern that, especially in this town, many people means many politics, and many often-conflicting agendas. And the last eight months have complicated things further, since many organizations will be fighting for their own survival.

Translation: the same people who have “been at the front lines of fighting poverty for years, if not decades,” and failed, will be at it again. Is there any reason to expect different results?

Part of leadership is setting goals that are slightly out of reach. But leadership must also recognize that there needs to be a possibility of success, especially confronting complicated problems like poverty. Lifting 100,000 people out of poverty will take vision and optimism. But it will also take a lot more than $10 million – and a lot longer than four years. Solving this crisis requires a capacity for radical new thinking as well as radical realism.

“Radical new thinking as well as radical realism”? I can provide the Inquirer Editorial Board with that, but I’m pretty sure that they wouldn’t like it. But perhaps, just perhaps, some actual plainspokenness is needed here.

There are three things which have to be done to reduce poverty in Philadelphia, and they need to come from within the poorer, primarily black, communities.

  1. People have to stop using drugs! The Philadelphia Police can only do so much to find, stop and arrest drug dealers. Drug dealers exist because people want to use drugs, and they will continue to exist as long as people are willing to buy and use drugs. But drugs lead to lost employment opportunities as employees in a lot of fields are subject to pre-employment, random and post-accident drug tests, as well as lowered productivity when on the job even if applicants get past the drug screens. Drug use leads to other poor lifestyle decisions, and syphons money from people’s earnings into useless spending which does not improve their situations or enable them to save.The neighborhood has to take action that the police cannot, to drive out the drug dealers and give them no shelter or security. The dealers need to be shunned as the neighborhood cancers they are.
  2. Neighborhood women and girls need to step up and take leadership roles. Most of the bad behavior, from petty crimes all the way up to Philadelphia’s exploding murder rate, comes from young males, and, if we are brutally honest about it, young black males. But there is one thing that young males value more than anything else: sex. Young women in poor neighborhoods need to stop rewarding the bad behavior of young males with sex. The guys who stay in school, the ones who try to make something of themselves, they are the ones that young women in the neighborhoods should date.This is something that their mothers, and the other older women in the neighborhoods, need to stress to younger women as they grow up.

    This point will be denounced as horribly sexist, but I am far beyond caring about that. You may think it sexist, but it is true nevertheless.

  3. Fathers in the neighborhood must step up and take responsibility. Almost every negative social statistic, for suicides, for criminal behavior, for dropping out of school, and for out-of-wedlock childbearing, is much higher for people who grow up without their fathers present in the home. Young women should not date young men who are unlikely to stick around if the woman gets pregnant, and young women should not let themselves get pregnant by men to whom they are not married. Single parenthood is very often a one-way ticket to poverty, at far greater rates than are the case for two-parent homes.Again, that point will be condemned as sexist, but there is one incontrovertible fact: pregnancy and child rearing put a much greater burden on women than men, and if the man is absent, 100% of the burden falls on the woman. Men who impregnate women and then refuse to step up and do their duty as fathers need to be shunned in the neighborhoods.

There are many other behaviors that only people in the neighborhoods can fix, only the individuals involved can change, but they are all part of the three points made above. The various ‘civic leaders’ the Editorial Board mentioned can stress these things, but only the people on the ground in their neighborhoods can actually change behavior.

Readers can denounce me as sexist or racist or whateverist, but it doesn’t matter to me; I am retired, living out in the country, and I can’t be fired for writing something some people will find uncomfortable. Because uncomfortable or not, the points I have made are true, and any rational examination of the facts will bring the reader to the same conclusions.

This is the “radical new thinking” and “radical realism” the Inquirer’s Editorial Board wanted. That it is not #woke, nor sufficiently sparing of the feelings of some, that it is horribly politically incorrect does not mean it should not be examined for whether it is true or not. That it puts much of the blame for poverty on the behavior of the poor will be seen as unjustifiably harsh, but harsh or not, it is still true.

Poor behavior leads to unfortunate consequences, consequences which are often far beyond what people would like to believe. No well-intentioned committee of 81 committed fighters against poverty, no brilliant Mayor of perfectly good motivations, and no priest nobly absolving parishioners of their confessed sins can change the consequences of poor and economically inefficient behavior.

The solution to poverty can be encouraged by all of those people, but the implementation of the solution has to come from the people in poor communities themselves.
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Cross-posted on RedState.