Tag Archives: #Culture

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Killadelphia: Just because 60 bullets flew doesn’t mean it was gang related!

Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Chris Palmer’s last paragraph contained an element of truth that Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw would like for you not to realize:

More than 1,100 people have been shot in the city as of Wednesday, according to police statistics, and 245 of those victims have died. The pace of gunfire was about 23% lower than last year, the statistics show, but still much higher than the years before 2020, when gun violence began hitting record heights.

The impetus for Mr Palmer’s story? Yet another gang-banger shooting in West Philadelphia!

Seven people were shot, one fatally, during possible shoot-out at West Philly block party, police say

Several gunmen sprayed at least 60 bullets through a crowd on the 500 block of North Creighton Street around 1:30 a.m., police said.

by Chris Palmer | Saturday, August 19, 2023 | 12:42 PM EDT

Seven people were shot, one fatally, when several gunmen sprayed at least 60 bullets through a crowd on a West Philadelphia street early Saturday morning, according to police.

The shooting happened about 1:30 a.m. on the 500 block of North Creighton Street, said Deputy Commissioner Frank Vanore. The victims ranged in age from 19 to 51, he said.

The 500 block of North Creighton Street is a poor, mostly black, rowhouse street, but, as we have reported previously, the good people of West Philadelphia don’t want public projects to make the area nicer, because that might cause more white people to move there.

Some witnesses described the shooting as a “shoot-out” at a block party or barbecue on the rowhouse street, said Vanore, though he added that detectives were in the early stages of gathering information and evidence.

A woman who lives on the block said in an interview that at least 100 people had been outside for a birthday party before gunfire erupted. . . . .

“It was a nice party — they were dancing, drinking, having fun, and then these knuckleheads [opened fire],” said the woman, who declined to give her name due to fear of retribution.

One of the victims, a 19-year-old man, was pronounced dead early Saturday, said Vanore. He declined to identify the man pending family notification.

Creighton Avenue PPD report, via Steve Keeley.

The Philadelphia Police reported that the deceased was a 19-year-old black male, but naturally, the Inquirer scrubbed the victim’s race from the report, even though the Philadelphia Police Department provided it. However, anyone ever remotely familiar with the City of Brotherly Love simply assumed that the deceased was black, just from the area.

There’s a truth that the Inky simply won’t report. The deceased was “shot several times to the face”, which tells you all that you really need to know: this was a deliberately targeted gang hit. We were, of course, reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups,” something that the newspaper has now come to use as well. I suppose that the word “gang” is now racist somehow, as though there cannot be any white gangs out there.

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Californie ain’t the place you wanna be! "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." -- Albert Einstein

After Jed Clampett struck oil when he missed a shot at some game he wanted for the dinner table, and became an instant millionaire, his kinfolk said that he needed to get away from the hillbilly life, and that “Californie is the place you wanna be, so they loaded up the truck and they moved to Beverly.”

Hills, that is. Swimming pools, movie stars.

Well, these days, perhaps Californie ain’t the place you wanna be. Ballot Proposition 47, which passed 4,238,156 (59.61%) to 2,871,943 (40.39%) on November 4, 2014, reduced several (purportedly) non-violent offenses from felonies to misdemeanors:

  • Shoplifting, where the value of property stolen does not exceed $950
  • Grand theft, where the value of the stolen property does not exceed $950
  • Receiving stolen property, where the value of the property does not exceed $950
  • Forgery, where the value of forged check, bond or bill does not exceed $950
  • Fraud, where the value of the fraudulent check, draft or order does not exceed $950
  • Writing a bad check, where the value of the check does not exceed $950
  • Personal use of most illegal drugs (Below a certain threshold of weight)

Robert Stacy McCain has been calling California a kleptocracy for some time now, but, of course, he’s just another evil Right Wing Extremist, so his views don’t matter.

It has been said that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, something certainly not entirely true, as I have not been mugged; whether Mr McCain has been, I do not know. But what happens when reporters for the liberal Cable News Network get robbed?

CNN reporter burglarized a third time while covering rampant crime in the Bay Area

Kyung Lah warns tourists visiting San Francisco and Oakland, ‘do not leave a single thing in your car’

By Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Fox News | Wednesday, August 2, 2023 | 9:00 PM EDT

A CNN crew has been burglarized a third time while covering the rampant crime in the Bay Area of California.

CNN correspondent Kyung Lah took to Twitter on Wednesday and shared video of her crew’s car with a completely-shattered window.

“I’m #Oakland, shooting a story about crime. Got broken into again— but this time our car was completely empty. We were across the street— this happened in seconds,” Lah wrote. “Even tho the car is empty, the thieves break in and lower the seat so they can steal anything in the trunk. Our trunk was empty. If you come to San Francisco or Oakland, do not leave a single thing in your car. Ours was thankfully empty.”

The CNN reporter continued:

If you’re here keeping track, this is the 3rd time my CNN rented car has been broken into in the Bay Area in the last year. But I’ve finally learned to not leave even a candy bar in the car anymore (still doesn’t stop the car break in but at least we don’t lose anything)

“(A)t least we don’t lose anything,” she wrote, but, then again, it wasn’t really her car, was it?

At the rental car return lot, the employee tells us of the 250 cars returned yesterday, 27 had been broken into, just more than 10% of cars returned

Just how long will the rental car agency be able to stay in business if 10.8% of the vehicles it rents out come back damaged like that? The agency’s insurance rates will have to increase, along with the repair costs within the deductible, and that means the price to rent a car will get jacked up. At what point do businessmen simply say, “This [insert slang term for feces here] just isn’t worth it”?

Fox News had a story on Miss Lah’s previous encounter with crime.

We previously wrote, At some point, you’d think that even the most liberal of the liberals would realize that without some semblance of law and order, you no longer have civilization! Yes, after fifteen good years in the Keystone State before I retired, I tend to concentrate on crime, mostly violent crime, in Philadelphia.

Carjackers beat a man to death in Northern Liberties, police say

The incident occurred late Thursday night, according to police, when two men pulled a 60-year-old from his vehicle and beat him before fleeing the scene in his car.

by Beatrice Forman | Friday, August 18, 2023

A pair of carjackers assaulted a man before fleeing the scene and taking his vehicle, leaving him for dead in Northern Liberties Thursday night, Philadelphia police say.

The incident occurred just before 10 p.m. on Third and Cambridge Streets, when two masked men pulled up on what a witness told police was a dirt bike. Then, the pair pulled a 60-year-old man from the driver’s seat of a parked 2023 Toyota Highlander, according to the witness account that police relayed to reporters.

That would be a “small, frail, thin, lightweight” 60-year-old Asian man, according to the Philadelphia Police. They sure proved how manly they are!

An altercation ensued before one of the masked men took off in the Highlander and the other took off in the on the dirt bike, according to police.

When officers arrived on the scene, they found the 60-year-old laying in the street as witnesses attempted to render aid.

“He was bleeding from the head. He was semi-conscious,” Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small told reporters. “He was unable to stand up.”

The victim was transported to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, but was pronounced dead less than an hour later.

Officers tracked the location of the Highlander to Camden, where it was recovered unoccupied by Camden police. The dirt bike was last seen traveling north on Third toward Girard Avenue Thursday night.

So, whatever the thugs had planned — and remember: they didn’t know that the victim they beat had died — they simply dumped the car they stole on the far side of the Ben Franklin Bridge, and at least one of them was back in Philly, and while Northern Liberties isn’t that bad an area, heading north on Third takes you to some not so great parts of town. But the innocent man they beat lost his life over what turned out to be a joyride for the thugs, and the odds are pretty good that the carjackers, the killers, were teenagers, and juveniles.

Beatrice Forman, the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, cannot always choose the stories she is assigned; news comes in, and has to be written up. She is, after all, a “general assignments reporter.” But when I read her bio at the bottom of her article, where it said that she “enjoys covering Philly-specific tomfoolery,” I had to wonder how she felt about this specific bit of tomfoolery, because, the way it ended, at least on the part of the killers, was little more than tomfoolery as far as they were concerned.

We have previously noted Oakland/Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, yet another one of the ‘progressive’ civil rights defense lawyers funded by George Soros, like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, who are softer-than-Charmin on crime. These idiots good people believe that they are somehow doing something good and noble by keeping oh-so-misunderstood young men out of jail, but what they have created, and what the Pyrite State’s Proposition 47 has enabled, a situation in which crime has few consequences, a situation in which crime has been enabled, and the ‘tomfoolery’ of a joyride into Camden has left an innocent man stone-cold graveyard dead.

Civilization requires civility, and civilization requires law and order, to keep the people living in it safe. Perhaps CNN correspondent Kyung Lah didn’t really feel the full effects of the car break-ins while she was reporting on crime in the Bay Area, because, after all, it wasn’t her car. But other people are feeling it, the rental car agency which has to repair the vehicle her producer and she rented, and the extra costs which that imposes on the agency, and eventually, its next customers. The people of Ward 8 in the District of Columbia are feeling the effects of crime, as the only grocery supermarket there is at least looking at closing its doors due to rampant shoplifting, and the store’s employees might feel the effects of crime as they could lose their jobs if the store closes. Michael Salerno’s family are feeling the effects, as he was murdered during a carjacking attempt, allegedly by a 15-year-old. “The latest serial carjacker had all of his cases dismissed in juvenile court and slaughtered a 19yo while on ankle monitor GPS.”

I would like to believe that Miss Price and Mr Krasner and the rest of the ‘progressive’ prosecutors are genuinely good people, who actually believe that what they are doing will reduce crime and create a better society, rather than just evil, because good people can eventually learn from their mistakes, from the consequences of their actions and policies. I would like to believe that ‘progressives’ in general are seeing the consequences of the policies they support, and at least considering whether conservatives have been right all along, and that crime needs to be punished, and punished harshly. I would like to believe that good people could see that excusing lesser crimes, crimes which could put the malefactors in jail for five years, does the bad guys no favors, when, instead of being able to look forward to being released in a few years, they have been enabled to commit crimes which could get them locked up for the rest of their miserable lives.

Sadly, if that is going to happen, it hasn’t happened yet, as the good, white liberals who live in Society Hill and University City voted for the Larry Krasner-supporting Helen Gym Flaherty, because crime hasn’t come to their doorsteps yet. Perhaps, just perhaps, Miss Lah and her staff have learned the hard lesson the easy way, and might at least consider voting for conservatives, rather than the same old, same old who have enabled America’s large cities to turn into crime-ridden [insert slang term for feces here]holes. California is run almost completely by liberal Democrats, and Philly hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Harry Truman was President.

Albert Einstein, usually considered a fairly smart fellow, once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” I keep hoping that our ‘progressives,’ who consider themselves to be very smart people indeed, eventually see that, despite their very good and noble intentions, that what they have been doing, how they have cast their votes, has led to only bad results.

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At some point, you’d think that even the most liberal of the liberals would realize that without some semblance of law and order, you no longer have civilization! In the end, 'progressive' and 'civilized' are mutually exclusive terms

Perhaps, just perhaps, even the George Soros-sponsored, police-hating District Attorney of Philadelphia, Larry Krasner, is starting, if just barely, to realize the seriousness of crime, as the District Attorney’s Office has said that they will seek to try the suspect arrested, supposedly the 17-year-old son of attorney and former judicial candidate Qawi Abdul-Rahman, as an adult. But it is also true that the United States Attorney could charge the thus-far unnamed suspect as an adult, if Mr Krasner chose not to do so.

Democratic primary voters in the city rejected Helen Gym Flaherty in the mayoral primary, instead nominating Cherelle Parker Mullins, who has at least contemplated bringing back ‘stop, question, and frisk, with her voting strength coming from the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in the City of Brotherly Love. However, Mrs Mullins was also the only black top-tier candidate in the race, and her strength among black voters could be attributed to that.

So, are the most liberal of the liberals realizing that some semblance of law and order are needed? Mrs Flaherty’s voting strength was primarily among the white liberal areas of the city, including the areas around the University of Pennsylvania, where people are generally safer than in the combat zones, and it is physically safer to vote for the harder left candidates.

My good friend, and occasional website pinch-hitter William Teach pointed out this article to me, and I think it’s an important one:

DC supermarket near closing after $500K in groceries walks out the door

Jamie Joseph | Monday, August 14, 2023 | 4:35 PM EDT

As cities across the U.S. grapple with a growing shoplifting problem, a Washington, D.C., grocery store may be on the verge of closure after rampant theft has depleted much of its resources, a D.C. councilman warned.

A popular Giant Food store reported $500,000 in product loss due to shoplifting, the store’s management told D.C. Councilman Trayon White recently, which equates to roughly 20% of sales after theft.

White called the news “disheartening” in a press conference last week, especially after the store recently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire security guards and upgrade its equipment.

Despite its effort to crack down on shoplifters, thieves remained emboldened and continued to walk out of the store with their carts filled with stolen items, White said.

“We know it’s tough times, and we know the price of food has skyrocketed in the last three years,” White said. “Well, we cannot afford to hurt ourselves by constantly taking from the store, because I mean, everybody is going to be without a place to eat, and enough is enough.”

The store has had to stop suspects 135 times, “and they almost doubled that amount and didn’t get stopped,” White said.

If the store has to shut its doors, White warned the impact would be felt hard in the community, as the chain is the only major grocery outlet in Ward 8, serving more than 85,000 people.

There’s more at the original. Mr Teach pointed out:

Ward 8 is the section of D.C. that is south of the Anacostia River, and, overall, is probably the worst ward for crime. Should this really be happening in our nation’s capitol? This is embarrassing.

Embarrassing? Yes, but unexpected? No, not really, and if the Giant Food Mart closes, people in the area will be left with either having to travel further to buy groceries, or buy them at smaller bodegas or convenience stores, where prices are usually higher. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted, in a completely unrelated article:

Groceries typically operate with very low profit margins of about 1% to 2%. But stores in poor, urban neighborhoods often operate with a 4% loss, Brown said. In Philadelphia’s case, that resulted in supermarket chains largely pulling out of disadvantaged Black and brown neighborhoods by the 1990s.

I still chuckle at the Inky’s stylebook, coming from the Associated Press, of capitalizing ‘Black’ to refer to race, but leaving ‘brown’, which in this case usually means Hispanic, in lower case. We do not engage in such silliness at The First Street Journal, but also do not alter the direct quotes of others.

But I digress. Why would “stores in poor, urban neighborhoods often operate with a 4% loss,” if they were charging the same prices as ones in more affluent areas, unless retail theft is higher in stores in those depressed areas?

Robert Stacy McCain noted that the unprecedented wave of brazen retail theft can be directly attributed to the election of ‘progressive’ politicians and other leftist policies:

“Absolutely unacceptable,” says the mayor who was elected by these same criminals. That’s just it — California has become the world’s first mass kleptocracy. All the honest people have left the state, and the criminals have taken over. Everybody is stealing everything:

Proposition 47 . . . reduced penalties on property thefts less than $950 from a felony to a misdemeanor. This means no prison time. Charges for grand larceny (a felony) now require thefts of more than $950 – more than double the previous threshold of $400.

Now, not only will a thief steal more without facing a felony charge, they may steal again, and again, and again, without serious consequences. Each theft is counted as a single incident. The law allows for serial thefts. Thieves can repeat their criminal behavior as long as they don’t steal more than $950 in each larceny.

Proposition 47 passed with 60% of the vote in 2014, and opponents of the measure clearly warned that this would happen, so it’s not as if the people of California are victims — they inflicted this disaster on themselves.

‘Progressivism’ in the United States is a mindset that we just have to be understanding and kind to everyone — except, of course, those evil reich-wing MAGA Republicans! — and have sympathy for the poor and downtrodden. The result has been a serious relaxation of law enforcement, especially since the unfortunate death while resisting arrest of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled previously convicted felon and career criminal George Floyd, and now the criminal culture has metastasized, with more and more of those poorer people realizing that they don’t have to obey the law, at least not for the more ‘minor’ offenses, because breaking the law brings no real consequences to them. And despite the great sympathy for the poor and downtrodden, that increase in crime has occurred in just those areas in which the poor and downtrodden live! Mr McCain said, “All the honest people have left the state,” but that’s hyperbole, and not true at all. Some of the honest people have left the Pyrite State, but, just as the well-to-do, honest people in Rittenhouse Square and University City haven’t been the victims of crime themselves, many have remained, safely able to vote for ‘progressive’ politicians and policies, because their personal philosophies haven’t been punched in the mouth by street crime.

The real victims? The people of Kensington have been made victims, not by wallowing in the open-air drug markets themselves, but by tolerating its existence, and voting for the politicians who won’t clean it up. The honest, working-class employees of the Giant Food Mart in Ward 8, and the Nordstrom in the Topanga Mall, have been made victims, because, if things keep going as they have been, when the store closes, they’ll lose their jobs.

This is the conundrum that the left just can’t seem to understand: in their great and noble sympathy for the poor, the downtrodden, and minority Americans, their policies have made things worse for those very same people. In their attempts to shield them from the realities of law, order, and civilization, they have subjected poorer and minority communities to lawlessness, disorder, and barbarians.

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Philly’s Mother of the Year Has The Philadelphia Inquirer finally admitted that there are gangs in the city?

We have expended some bandwidth mocking The Philadelphia Inquirer for its statement that there are no real gangs in the City of Brotherly Love:

In Philadelphia, there are no gangs in the traditional, nationally known sense. Instead, they are cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families. The groups have names — Young Bag Chasers, Penntown, Northside — and members carry an allegiance to each other, but they aren’t committing traditional organized crimes, like moving drugs, the way gangs did in the past.

We also mocked the George Soros-sponsored defense attorney who is now the city’s District Attorney, Larry Krasner, when his office decided to refer to them as rival street groups. And we pointed out, at the end of last year, that what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. was still using euphemisms to refer to gangs those cliques of young men, though the word “gang” in one article, apparently for prosaic reasons, since the term “street group” had been used previously in the same sentence.

Well, perhaps the journolists[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading at the Inky got tired of being mocked; I know that I wasn’t the only one doing it!

A Southwest Philly street gang burglarized three gun stores, stealing nearly 100 guns, DA says

Members of 54th Street targeted gun stores in the suburbs, prosecutors said Wednesday, committing overnight, smash-and-grab burglaries that put guns in the hands of criminals.

by Vinny Vella | Thursday, January 25, 2023

Investigators in Montgomery County dismantled a Philadelphia street gang that they say burglarized a series of suburban gun stores in the fall, stealing 93 firearms that they used in shootings in the city or sold to other criminals. One of the guns, prosecutors said, was used in the murder of a 16-year-old.

OK, reporter Vinny Vella gets a point for using the word “gang,” but he loses a point for using the horrible, made-up word “burglarized,” which has, sadly, come into the dictionary, when the proper word is “burgled.”

In a sweeping affidavit of probable cause released Wednesday, prosecutors outlined the investigation of 54th Street, a gang active in Southwest Philadelphia. The group, mostly teens, wielded guns openly on social media and in music videos of rap songs in which they bragged about killing their rivals and terrorizing their neighborhoods, according to the document.Two adults and 11 juveniles were charged in the investigation, but only four were named in the affidavit: Angel Mason, 40, Elijah Terrell, 16, Donte Purnell, 22, and Liv Hall, 18. The nine other suspects, between the ages of 14 and 17, have been charged in juvenile court and were not publicly identified.

All have been charged with operating a corrupt organization, conspiracy, gun violations, and related offenses.

Elijah Terrell, photo via Steve Keeley, Fox 29 News.

Hmmm, young Miss Hall looks like she never expected to get into this kind of trouble! The Inky, of course, did not include her photo, but Fox 29 News did.

But she’s 18-years-old, legally an adult, and she (allegedly) took a stupid decision to join in burgling a gun store. They whooped and partied and made some good bucks last fall, but now someone is stone-cold graveyard dead, shot by one of the guns the 54th Street clique of young men, and apparently women as well, (allegedly) stole, and since the burglary occurred in Montgomery County and not Philadelphia, Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner won’t be able to cut her any sweetheart plea bargain.

None of the attorneys representing the four charged as adults had any comments concerning the cases. Mr Vella wrote that he found no indication that two of the defendants had yet hired lawyers.

According to Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele, only 33 of the stolen guns have been recovered. That means that sixty of the stolen firearms are still out there, almost certainly in the hands of other criminals. Perhaps, just perhaps, the gun control laws the editors of the Inquirer say that Philly ought to be able to enact on the city’s own authority wouldn’t do anything at all to have stopped a few dozen bad guys from obtaining the firearms they wanted.

Donte Purnell, photos via Steve Keeley, Fox 29 News.

The first burglary was committed on September 24, 2022, when Miss Hall and four of the charged juveniles broke into Founding Fathers Outfitters in Springfield Township, getting away with 26 handguns, only six of which have been recovered.

Angel Mason would be my nominee for Mother of the Year in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy, Philadelphia. It seems that 16-year-old Elijah Terrell, her son, (allegedly) attempted to rob a man at gunpoint in Southwest Philly, but was thwarted when his intended victim drew his own weapon and shot Mr Terrell. After that, our Mother of the Year candidate supposedly called 22-year-old Donte Purnell, who is also her son, to tell him to get the stolen weapons out of their home before detectives arrived with a search warrant.

There comes a point at which it’s difficult to believe that anything else in Philly could surprise you, and then you read a story like this. Apparently there’s really no bottom to the decadence in the City of Brotherly Love. Liv Hall, the fourth suspect pictured? She was caught when she (allegedly) used one of the weapons from the first burglary to shoot at her brother during an argument outside of their home.

These people were caught not so much because they are evil but because they are just boneheadedly stupid. Who knows, Miss Mason might be the leader of this gang, but a criminal mastermind she isn’t.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Nice guys will never solve Kensington’s problems Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the anus here] to get things done

The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer is, since publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes took over, and the firing resignation of Executive Editor Stan Wischnowski, has been the wokest of the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading, so it’s rare for me to see them get something even half-right, but half right they got it:

It’s going to take more than $20 million to help the people of Kensington | Editorial

Without a comprehensive plan to clear the open-air drug markets and help those struggling with addiction and homelessness, the city will be throwing good money after bad.

by The Editorial Board | Sunday, January 15, 2023 | 5:00 AM EST

The city’s plan to steer millions of dollars to Kensington to combat the opioid crisis is a much-needed welcome start. But without a comprehensive plan to address the rampant open-air drug markets and homelessness lining the main business corridor there, the city will be throwing good money after bad.

Mayor Jim Kenney announced plans to distribute $20 million to community groups in Kensington to fund a variety of efforts, including overdose prevention, home repairs, and improvements to parks and schools.

The money is part of the $200 million Philadelphia expects to receive over 18 years as part of a national settlement with Johnson & Johnson and three drug distribution firms that helped fuel the opioid crisis.

Overall, Pennsylvania expects to receive $1.6 billion as part of the settlement negotiated by then-Attorney General (and now Gov.-elect) Josh Shapiro.

To their credit, Kenney and District Attorney Larry Krasner initially balked at the city’s portion of the settlement, given the scale of the opioid epidemic in Philadelphia, which has resulted in more than 1,100 deaths annually since 2017.

Philadelphia is ground zero in the state’s opioid crisis and should receive more funding. But the city ultimately went along with the settlement, figuring it was better than nothing.

The challenge now is to not waste the opportunity — or the money. For far too long, the city has allowed Kensington to devolve into an infamous drug bazaar.

That blurb above? That was in the online version of the editorial itself. It pretty much pegs the irony meter having the Editorial Board telling us about the “opioid crisis” and the Hellhole Kensington has become, and then link an OpEd which implores making illegal drug abuse safer!

As for the “infamous drug bazaar” mentioned? That’s a link to the Inky’s story about the Mexican government using videos of Kensington’s homeless and junkies in an ad campaign to scare Mexicans away from drug use!

The scene along the main business corridor is dystopian. Homeless encampments line the trash-strewn streets along with used needles, human feces, and vomit. There are scores of people smoking, drinking, sleeping, sitting, standing, and stumbling in different states of addiction.

Those unfamiliar with the jaw-dropping sight should google videos of Kensington, as words can’t capture the daily horror. It is an appalling and embarrassing blot on the city that no leader should accept.

Let’s tell the truth here: Mayor Jim Kenney has accepted it! Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw has accepted it. And District Attorney Larry Krasner has accepted it. Oh, they’ll never say that, not out loud, but the fact that they haven’t actually done anything about it speaks volumes.

I don’t particularly like copying photos from the Inquirer, but the one on the right, which you can click to enlarge, illustrates the problem, and I thought that photographer José Moreno captured it well. An unidentified junkie, passed out on litter-strewn Kensington Avenue, just a few steps from the SEPTA Market Street/Frankford rail line station, by security roll-down shutters marred by graffiti, with someone trying to see if he’s just passed out or maybe dead, while the police look on. Are the police doing anything about it? Has an ambulance been called?

Another photo can be found here.

Near the end of the editorial:

Past efforts to clamp down on drug dealing and homelessness have been successful, but short-lived. In 1998, then-Police Commissioner John Timoney launched Operation Sunrise, a major effort designed to retake control of Kensington’s streets.

In 2017, the city cleared a large heroin encampment that existed for years in a gulch along the Kensington rail line. In 2021, the city cleared two homeless encampments along Kensington Avenue.

Really? The Editorial Board could reference just three major efforts in twenty-five years? Well, perhaps there were more, and the newspaper simply didn’t have all of the information, or the Board believes that more links would make poorer prose. But I did notice that after a major story in the Inquirer on August 17, 2020, there’s no referenced story about the police making a major raid that year.

The Editorial Board noted that the l;aw abiding residents in Kensington want the police to “crack down” on the open air drug markets, on the crime and the homelessness, but one particular paragraph stands out:

“If the drug dealers are not here then the drug addicts won’t be here,” Darlene Burton, a Kensington resident and community activist, told the Editorial Board. “You have to cut off the head of the snake.”

The Board let that statement stand without challenge, but let’s tell the truth: as long as there are drug addicts, there will be people willing to sell drugs to them. And that is where all of the proposals to attach the dealers fail: the city needs to crack down on the addicts as well.

The addicts need to be arrested and charged for using illegal drugs, and they need to be kept locked up at least long enough for the drugs to get out of their systems, and go through detoxification. You can’t just offer the junkies drug rehabilitation, you have to get them through detox, and force them to go through rehab, or you are just wasting your time and money. You need to convict them of crimes, so that they can, at the very least, be put on probation with frequent, mandatory drug tests.

Why haven’t Mayor Kenney, Commissioner Outlaw, and District Attorney Krasner done anything about Kensington? Because, deep down, they know that what I wrote in the previous paragraph is necessary, and none of them are willing to invest the time or money or political capital to do that. But if the city doesn’t do that, doesn’t treat not only the drug dealers but the drug addicts seriously, then the current situation in Kensington will continue. Oh, a police action of sorts could move the junkies out every so often, but without taking care of the addicts, all that can be done is push them into Fairhill, Harrowgate, or Hunting Park.

The truth ought to be obvious: you can’t be a nice guy and solve the problems. Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the anus here].

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Killadelphia’s Democratic mayoral candidates do not want the killing to stop They must want the killings to continue, because they keep advocating the policies which have enabled more crime

When #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading journolists[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading write the news, it tends to fall into the category of GI/GO: garbage in, garbage out. It was the subtitle of this article from what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[3]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. that told us that the leftward bias of the newspaper was going to force it into irrelevance.

Philly’s next mayor will inherit an unprecedented gun violence crisis. Here’s how it’s defining the race.

The Democrats running today must strike a balance that many of their predecessors did not: they must show they can fight crime while maintaining the criminal-justice reforms most of them supported.

by Anna Orso | Wednesday, January 11, 2022

Crime has been a top political issue in Philadelphia for as long as anyone can remember, but few recall a time when it was quite this salient.

The subtitle, the Democratic candidates “must show they can fight crime while maintaining the criminal-justice reforms most of them supported” tells us everything: it takes on the assumption that Philly’s terrible crime rate can be fought while continuing with those “criminal justice reforms” left in place. More, it assumes that those ‘progressive’ “criminal justice reforms” did not contribute to the increase in crime.

While I have previously criticized Anna Orso’s reporting, article headlines are traditionally written not by the reporter, but by an editor. In this case, the original headline was “Philadelphia mayor’s race: how gun violence crisis is defining campaigns”, as you can see if you hover your cursor over the tab in your browser. I cannot assign the responsibility for that subtitle to her, even though she could have been the one who wrote it.

Homicides climbed to all-time highs over the last two years, and thousands more people survived shootings. Carjackings and vehicle thefts have skyrocketed, and the Police Department has hundreds of vacancies. Residents of long-neglected neighborhoods report often feeling unsafe, and many say the city feels as if it’s at a crossroads.

And nine Democrats are vying to run it.

I’ll point out the history here: Philadelphia’s last Republican mayor left office while President Harry Truman was still in office. Those city mayors in the chart above? All Democrats! The chance that a Republican will be elected in November is almost vanishingly small.

As the Philadelphia mayor’s race takes shape ahead of the May primary election, all the candidates agree: Public safety is the No. 1 issue. What they’ll debate now is how to lead Philadelphia out of the shootings crisis — and they’ll do so in a city that just two years ago saw a mass protest movement challenge the role of law enforcement.

It means Democrats running for the nomination must strike a balance many of their predecessors did not. They must show they can fight the urgent gun violence problem, and also tackle the long-standing societal factors that drive it. They must set the agenda for the Police Department and also the city’s antiviolence programs.

That last embedded link? It’s not just a throwaway, but leads to a previous story, one in which Miss Orso is listed as a co-author, in which the Inquirer blames the existing problems not on the rotten behavior of the current residents and gang members cliques of young men,[4]We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes … Continue reading but on real-estate “redlining”, community disinvestment, and poverty. There’s not a single word about children born to single mothers, about absent and frequently unknown fathers, or empty churches. Nothing was said about parents rearing children with no values or morals or ethics. In a Lord of the Flies culture among those “cliques of young men”, there isn’t a single word about children growing up with little or no parental supervision, the overarching theme of Lord of the Flies in the first place.

Former Councilmember Helen Gym, seen as the most progressive candidate in the race, centered her campaign announcement speech on public safety, saying violence is “destroying our city and our people.” She’s focused largely on expanding social programs and tailoring them to young people.

Mrs Flaherty,[5]Although Helen Gym Flaherty doesn’t have enough respect for her husband to have taken his name, at The First Street Journal we do not show similar disrespect. as Miss Orso told us, is the furthest left of the Democratic candidates, a supporter of the leftist defense attorney who is Philadelphia’s District Attorney “Let ’em Loose” Larry Krasner, and has supported both significant ‘decarceration,’ turning more criminals loose, and ‘defunding the police.’ That the ‘social programs’ she favors have done no good in the literally decades that Philadelphia individually, and the country as a whole, have been applying them, is not a question Miss Orso raised.

Joseph P. McLaughlin, an adviser to two former mayors, said he’d recommend a mayoral candidate running in 2023 avoid being dismissive of law enforcement and work to separate themselves from the “defund the police” movement. The slogan that refers to diverting law enforcement funding to social services was adopted by racial justice protesters in 2020, and local officials across the country — mostly Democrats — backed versions of the idea.

“Whatever you think of the particular policy,” McLaughlin said, “the headline on it was a disaster for Democrats.”

It has arguably been a ‘disaster for Democrats’ in competitive elections, but once a Democratic nominee is selected, it no longer matters, not in Philadelphia; if the Republicans nominated Jesus, and Satan was running as the Democrat, Satan would win in the City of Brotherly Love, and it wouldn’t even be close.

Still, tough-on-crime rhetoric or strategies that call for increasing funding to the Police Department may not sit well with the city’s growing and well-organized progressive movement, which has notched notable electoral wins over the last five years, including elevating District Attorney Larry Krasner to office.

“The message of ‘more police are going to solve this, more prisons will solve this’ is out of touch,” said Robert Saleem Holbrook, executive director of the Abolitionist Law Center. “Philadelphia has a very strong movement that is opposed to that and is not going to accept any kind of talk like that from these candidates.”

The Abolitionist Law Center, huh? They very honestly tell you what they are about, which is “abolishing class and race based mass incarceration”. As many criminals as Mr Krasner has sprung from prison — and shooting and homicides have both risen dramatically as the incarcerated population have dropped — many of whom have wound up committing new crimes, you would think that if ‘decarceration’ worked to reduce crime, crime would have come down.

I began this article by slamming Miss Orso, but in a way, it really wasn’t fair: she was reporting on the political positioning of the candidates for the Democratic nomination for Mayor, and it wasn’t really her job to point out that their common problem would be that their proposed policies are all terrible.

In the meantime, there was this:

16-year-old boy killed in North Philadelphia shooting

The killing on West Erie Avenue in North Philadelphia on Wednesday could have connections to a non-fatal shooting of another 16-year-old boy two days earlier, police said.

by Jason Laughlin | Wednesday, January 11, 2023 | 7:32 PM EST

A 16-year-old boy was shot to death in North Philadelphia Wednesday night, and police said the shooting could have ties to another shooting of a teenager in the neighborhood just two days earlier.

The 16-year-old, whom the Philadelphia Police Department did not identify, was found shot multiple times in an empty lot on the 1400 block of West Erie Avenue about 5:25 p.m. Wednesday. He was taken to Temple University Hospital and pronounced dead there about a half hour later.

Shell casings gathered at the scene suggested at least 11 shots were fired just half a block from Broad Street and Erie Avenue, a bustling commercial intersection in North Philadelphia. When the shots fired people scattered, said Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small, and the teenager, already shot, ran to the vacant lot where he collapsed. It was unclear how many shooters were involved, Scott said.

Police are investigating whether the killing Wednesday is related to a shooting nearby Monday night, Small said. In that shooting, another 16-year-old male was shot in the leg at 15th Street and Erie Avenue. He survived. That victim and the teenager killed Wednesday appeared to have known each other, Small said. Both lived in that neighborhood, he said.

There’s more at the original, but one thing is clear: decarceration, anti-violence initiatives, and social programs won’t do anything, not as long as 16-year-olds are out running in gangs “street groups”, and won’t mean a thing if parents aren’t rearing their children properly. It takes two parents to bring up children properly, a mother and a father, and it takes parents with a strong moral, ethical, and yes, religious foundation.

And there is one more thing. All of the Democrat politicians in Philly are fully supportive of abortion. But what is abortion other than teaching children that other children are disposable? Was the probably teenaged shooter who slew the 16-year-old really doing anything different from the pregnant women ‘terminating’ their pregnancies in the city’s abortion clinics? The shooter was just engaged in a sixteen-years-late abortion. As we see the supporters of prenatal infanticide telling us that abortion is a good thing, helping women to avoid a disruption in their lives, helping them to maintain their chosen career paths, don’t think that the children in Philly don’t see that as well, don’t get the message that a child can be simply gotten rid of because he might happen to be inconvenient.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑3 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑4 We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups“. Even after the widespread mockery the Inquirer has received over this, they were still avoiding the word “gang” in preference for “street groups” and “groups.”
↑5 Although Helen Gym Flaherty doesn’t have enough respect for her husband to have taken his name, at The First Street Journal we do not show similar disrespect.
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Ho hum! Another mass shooting in Philadelphia It was just Kensington, so who really cares?

It was August 17, 2020, when The Philadelphia Inquirer published the article “Even the pandemic doesn’t slow down Philadelphia’s drug markets: It’s unclear why COVID-19 hasn’t had much effect on Philadelphia’s drug market. But that’s not to say the drug supply here is or was predictable, even before the pandemic.” The article included a photo of what appears to be a young male shooting up — his back is to the camera — out in public, in broad daylight, on Kensington Avenue, right by the SEPTA train station. The street, one of Philly’s thoroughfares, is shown as being littered with trash. I noted that I was waiting for news that Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw organized a major sweep to clear the area, at least temporarily, of the drug dealers and junkies infesting the area, but I never heard of one.

After shooting in Kensington, some accuse city leaders of not doing enough to improve area’s conditions

Five people were critically wounded in an attack one political leader called the latest example of Philadelphia’s failure to address the depths of Kensington’s public health catastrophes.

by Ellie Rushing | Sunday, November 6, 2022

A shooting of nine people overnight in Kensington, a section of Philadelphia beset by gun violence and an open-air drug market, renewed community leaders’ criticisms of city leadership and heightened calls for a plan to address the neighborhood’s compounding crises.

The shooting Saturday near the intersection of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, ground zero for the city’s opioid epidemic, left all of the victims seriously wounded after police said at least three people jumped out of a car and fired more than 40 shots into a crowd shortly before 10:45 p.m. Eight men and one woman, ranging in age from 23 to 40, were struck and taken to Temple University Hospital.

Four of the men remained in critical condition as of Sunday evening, police said.

No arrests have been made and no weapons were recovered. Additional details were scarce, including what may have motivated the shooting.

Screen capture from The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 19, 2022.

I would say that the motivation is obvious: one gang clique of young men[1]We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes … Continue reading put out a hit on another clique of young men, and the police simply need to figure out which clique was targeted and which clique was responsible. It’s quite possible that not all of the people wounded were among the specifically targeted, and that even none of the wounded were among the targeted clique; these fine but misunderstood young gentlemen apparently accept that there will be some collateral damage as they set out on their missions.[2]Will Bunch, the Inquirer’s most off-the-wall leftist columnist, wrote: These twin blows came at the very end of a brutal autumn in which the right’s unified messaging — in so many ways the … Continue reading

Actually, I feel kind of sorry for Inquirer reporter Ellie Rushing. Her byline is on so many of the crime stories in the newspaper that it’s got to be at least a little bit depressing!

As we have previously noted, the Philadelphia Police Department believe that three of the teenaged suspects in the Roxborough High School shooting murdered another young man the previous day.

There is no neighborhood as burdened by shootings as Kensington, a section of the city plagued by an open-air drug market and high rates of deep poverty. Along the Kensington-Allegheny corridor, there are sprawling homeless encampments, and people in addiction openly use drugs.

Law enforcement officials have said dealers sell heroin, crack, and other drugs on more than 80 blocks in the neighborhood.

If the police know of these drug sale areas, why aren’t they sweeping through and arresting the dealers? Oh, that’s right:

Law enforcement officials say they cannot arrest their way out of the crises there.

They could at least try, since the city is apparently not doing anything else to solve the problems.

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw tweeted:

In other words, the Commissioner knows that the people of that neighborhood, and the city in general, do not believe that the Philadelphia Police Department really care about Kensington. Given that the Inquirer can report that drugs are being sold openly on “more than 80 blocks” there, and the police aren’t doing anything about it, what other impression would people have?

Of course, if the police did make a bunch of drug busts, District Attorney would refuse to prosecute the arrested seriously.

Miss Rushing wrote about the frustrations of Philly’s worst, most crime-ridden neighborhood, without showing any understanding about her subject. Kensington is the way it is not because of poverty, but because of the culture in that area, a culture which says that it’s perfectly fine to go out and blast away at your perceived enemies. Eastern Kentucky is just as poor, if not poorer, than Kensington, but while there is certainly crime here, and Kentucky’s firearms law are less restrictive than Pennsylvania’s, we don’t have the mass shootings or rampant killings seen in the City of Brotherly Love.

Miss Rushing was one of the Inquirer writers who told us that there were no gangs in Philadelphia, just those “cliques of young men”, and if she didn’t write those specific words herself, her name is still on it, demonstrating for us that those writers, Jessica Griffin, Ximena Conde, and Chris Palmer along with Miss Rushing, are simply in denial of what is going on in their fair city.

That, or they actually do know the truth, but are unwilling, or unable due to their editors’ dictates, to actually say it out loud.

The “city leaders” from Miss Rushing’s headlines really can’t do much to “improve (Kensington’s) conditions” because the people there are responsible for them. Yes, many of them are poor, but that doesn’t mean that they have to use drugs or tolerate drug use among others. The area’s open-air drug markets exist because the residents of Kensington allow them to exist. The filthy homeless camps and junkies strung out and laying wasted in the middle of the sidewalks exist because the neighborhood allow them to exist. The area is full of crime because the people who know who committed the crimes won’t tell the police, so crime continues, and gets worse, because there are few consequences.

Kensington’s consequences are the fault of Kensington’s people. The “city leaders” cannot change that; only the people themselves, hopefully encouraged by church pastors, block captains, and the mothers in the area concerned about their children, can change things.

References

References
↑1 We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups“
↑2 Will Bunch, the Inquirer’s most off-the-wall leftist columnist, wrote:

These twin blows came at the very end of a brutal autumn in which the right’s unified messaging — in so many ways the Powell Memo brought to life — is embraced by the icons of mainstream media like the New York Times, Washington Post or NPR. The fearmongering over cherry-picked crime stats or supposed migrant caravans, or an emphasis on high inflation over low unemployment, or cheap gas over deadly climate change that’s hatched in conservative think tanks and promulgated on Fox News has proved catnip to journalists so eager to prove their balanced objectivity — that they aren’t in the tank for Biden coming off the Donald Trump nightmare.

With 449 homicides in Philly so far this year, on a pace for 529 for the year, and total shootings at a higher pace this year than last. I’m not sure how “cherry-picked” those crime statistics are. The Inky’s writers seem to be living in denial.
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In which I tell you, very politically incorrectly, how to solve all of Philadelphia’s problems

I really, really, really wanted to write about something else this morning; I’ve spent so much time on the homicide rate in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia that I felt in a rut.

Then the Memorial Day weekend happened, and I had two stories entitled Killadelphia in a row, as the blood flowed freely in the city’s streets. A three-day holiday weekend, commemorating American soldiers who dies in wars to protect our liberty, our freedom, and our country’s interests abroad, was celebrated by killing other Americans, civilians, because the City of Brotherly Love has run out of that love, because civilization has degenerated into savagery. Even The Philadelphia Inquirer couldn’t ignore it! Continue reading →

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Gentrification is a good thing!

On its website main page Thursday morning, The Philadelphia Inquirer, in plugging a new story, Philadelphia’s gun violence crisis through the eyes of those experiencing it, there was a link to an older story, Philly blocks besieged by shootings have long endured poverty, blight, and systemic racism. Dated September 16, 2021, I had seen it before. The story documents some of the blocks with the highest number of shootings, and tells us what we already knew:

But in Philadelphia, the epidemic of gun violence has been intensely concentrated in just a handful of neighborhoods and several dozen blocks — like the one where Johnson was killed, according to an Inquirer analysis. These shootings have left behind a breathtaking level of fear and trauma among a fraction of the city’s residents, nearly all of whom are Black and brown.

I admit to being wryly amused by the Inquirer’s stylebook, seemingly copied from the Associated Press, which decided that, in reference to race, “black” should be capitalized, but “white” should not. The stylebook led to “black” being capitalized and “brown” being left in lower case. Social justice, racial justice, and just generally being #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading leads to some real stupidity.

As unchecked gun violence has reached unprecedented heights this year, it has continued to disproportionately batter these same communities, where residents also endure higher poverty levels, lower life expectancy, and more blighted housing, the analysis shows.

Naturally, the “anti-racist” Inquirer wants to blame everything but race, unless it’s the racism of white people!

After several paragraphs noting violent areas, including the blocks around the intersection of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, about which we have written previously, and around which the Philadelphia Police Department has mostly ignored the open-air drug markets, I came to these two paragraphs, two I found very important:

The vast majority of the city’s developed[2]By “developed,” article authors Chris Palmer, Dylan Purcell, Anna Orso, John Duchneskie, and Jessica Griffin meant blocks not devastated by crime and neglect, blocks in which the … Continue reading blocks with housing — more than three-quarters of them — haven’t experienced a single shooting since 2015. Entire swaths of Center City, Northeast Philadelphia, Chestnut Hill and Roxborough, far whiter and wealthier than the rest of the city, have not seen a shooting for years.

Neighborhoods like Graduate Hospital, Fishtown, and University City — where years of reinvestment have ushered in more wealth and opportunity — are just a few minutes’ drive from shooting hot spots. But they rarely experience gun violence.

“(Y)ears of reinvestment have ushered in more wealth and opportunity”, huh? Let’s not beat around the bush here: the writers managed to avoid the word itself in their long article, but the word is gentrification.

Gentrification is the process of changing the character of a neighborhood through the influx of more affluent residents and businesses.[3]“Gentrification”. Dictionary.com.Lees, Slater & Wyly 2010[page needed] define gentrification as “the transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city to a … Continue reading It is a common and controversial topic in urban politics and planning. Gentrification often increases the economic value of a neighborhood, but the resulting demographic displacement may itself become a major social issue. Gentrification often shifts a neighborhood’s racial or ethnic composition and average household income by developing new, more expensive housing and businesses in a gentrified architectural style and extending and improving resources that had not been previously accessible.[4]West, Allyn (5 March 2020). “Baffled City: Exploring the architecture of gentrification”. Texas Observer. Archived from the original on 22 June 2020. Retrieved 21 June 2020., [3][5]Harrison, Sally; Jacobs, Andrew (2016). “Gentrification and the Heterogeneous City: Finding a Role for Design”. The Plan. 1 (2). doi:10.15274/tpj.2016.01.02.03.

The gentrification process is typically the result of increasing attraction to an area by people with higher incomes spilling over from neighboring cities, towns, or neighborhoods. Further steps are increased investments in a community and the related infrastructure by real estate development businesses, local government, or community activists and resulting economic development, increased attraction of business, and lower crime rates. In addition to these potential benefits, gentrification can lead to population migration and displacement. However, some view the fear of displacement, which dominates the debate about gentrification, as hindering discussion about genuine progressive approaches to distribute the benefits of urban redevelopment strategies.

But it appears that the residents of these poorer neighborhoods don’t want wealthier, and let’s be honest here, whiter people moving in:

In a plan for a safer, vibrant 52nd Street, worried West Philly neighbors see gentrification looming

Angst is roiling minority neighborhoods as they struggle to balance the opportunities and the threats created by gentrification. “West Philly is the new Africa,” one resident warned at a community meeting. “Everyone wants the property that’s in West Philadelphia.”

by Jason Laughlin | February 21, 2020

The topic of the community meeting — a plan to beautify 52nd Street, to make it safe, welcoming, and prosperous once again — was, on its face, nothing but good news for West Philadelphia’s long-declining business corridor.

Yet the audience of about 50 residents and retailers, mostly African American, grew increasingly agitated as urban designer Jonas Maciunas flipped through a PowerPoint presentation of proposed improvements. Many weren’t seeing a vision of a neighborhood revitalized from Market to Pine Streets. Instead, in the talk of redesigned intersections, leafy thoroughfares, and better bus shelters, they heard the ominous whisper of gentrification.

“It just seems that when white people decide to come back to a certain neighborhood, they want it a certain way,” said Carol Morris, 68, a retired elementary school teacher.

Morris’ declaration opened the floodgates of fear and anger that recent night at the Lucien E. Blackwell West Philadelphia Regional Library. Maciunas and Jesse Blitzstein, director of community and economic development for the nonprofit Enterprise Center, which is spearheading the project, were peppered with skeptical questions ranging from the validity of surveys showing community support for the improvements to the maintenance of trees that would be planted.

There’s more at the original.

As we have previously noted, the Editorial Board of the Inquirer have told us that racial segregation is very much part of the problem in city residents feeling unsafe, and Philadelphia is one of the United States’ most internally segregated big cities. But that very same Editorial Board, less than two years ago, were very wary about gentrification. To be fair — and I so rarely am when it comes to the Inquirer — the Board have at least mixed feelings when it comes to gentrification.

While Philadelphia and the Inquirer haven’t been so blatant as to say so directly, the liberal city of Lexington[6]Fayette County was one of only two counties, out of 120 total in the Bluegrass State, to be carried by Joe Biden in the 2020 election. has. As we have previously noted, Lexington said, directly, that it was concerned about gentrification, and, “Most new owners being more affluent and differing from the traditional residents in terms of race or ethnicity.” The city was concerned about white people moving into heavily black neighborhoods.[7]Lexington’s Hispanic population are not large enough to really dominate larger neighborhoods.

Philadelphia is not concerned about black residents moving in and integrating nearly all-white neighborhoods, and that is what the Inquirer’s Editorial Board said ought to happen. But somehow, liberal cities don’t seem to want that to happen in reverse, don’t seem to want white people moving into majority black neighborhoods.  Yet, as the Inquirer noted:

Neighborhoods like Graduate Hospital, Fishtown, and University City — where years of reinvestment have ushered in more wealth and opportunity — are just a few minutes’ drive from shooting hot spots. But they rarely experience gun violence.

Gentrification seems to reduce violence!

Gentrification ought to be something every city wants. Not only do revitalized properties raise property values around them, but when white ‘gentrifiers’ move into a majority black neighborhood, they are clearly white people who have no racist attitudes toward blacks, people perfectly willing to have black neighbors. Is that not a good thing?

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 By “developed,” article authors Chris Palmer, Dylan Purcell, Anna Orso, John Duchneskie, and Jessica Griffin meant blocks not devastated by crime and neglect, blocks in which the housing was not dilapidated, but they couldn’t quite bring themselves to say that.
↑3 “Gentrification”. Dictionary.com.Lees, Slater & Wyly 2010[page needed] define gentrification as “the transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city to a middle class residential and/or commercial use”.
↑4 West, Allyn (5 March 2020). “Baffled City: Exploring the architecture of gentrification”. Texas Observer. Archived from the original on 22 June 2020. Retrieved 21 June 2020.
↑5 Harrison, Sally; Jacobs, Andrew (2016). “Gentrification and the Heterogeneous City: Finding a Role for Design”. The Plan. 1 (2). doi:10.15274/tpj.2016.01.02.03.
↑6 Fayette County was one of only two counties, out of 120 total in the Bluegrass State, to be carried by Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
↑7 Lexington’s Hispanic population are not large enough to really dominate larger neighborhoods.