Tag Archives: #JimKenney

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When it comes to #VaccineMandates the maintenance of dictatorial power is far more important than the effectiveness of the vaccines!

On July 25th, The Wall Street Journal reported that “most people” have been infected at some point with SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19.

Geneticists and immunologists are studying factors that might protect people from infection, and learning why some are predisposed to more severe Covid-19 disease.

For many, the explanation is likely that they have in fact been infected with the virus at some point without realizing it, said Susan Kline, professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School. About 40% of confirmed Covid-19 cases are asymptomatic, according to a meta-analysis published in December in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

More than two years into the pandemic, most people worldwide have likely been infected with the virus at least once, epidemiologists said. Some 58% of people in the U.S. had contracted Covid-19 through February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated. Since then, a persistent wave driven by offshoots of the infectious Omicron variant has kept daily known cases in the U.S. above 100,000 for weeks.

As we have previously noted, this past winter, acting Food and Drug Administration head Commissioner Janet Woodcock told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee that she expected that, eventually, almost everyone would contract the virus. Celebrity doctor Anthony Fauci said that COVID-19 would infect “just about everybody.” This was during the BA.1 variant’s primacy, and two months later, the American Medical Association warned that the then-new BA.2 subvariant could be “30% to 60% more transmissible” than BA.1. While playing Blondie’s One Way of Another, we noted that BA.4 and BA.5 are gonna get ya, get ya, get ya, get ya! Yale Medicine also said that BA.4 and BA.5 appear to be more transmissible.

But, as it has turned out, the latest variant — has there been one since BA.5? — hasn’t been leading to serious illnesses. Also from the Journal:

Colleges Scale Back Covid Precautions for Fall, Saying Pandemic Phase Over

Requirements for masking, testing, vaccinations and isolation decrease even as virus surges

By Isabelle Sarraf and Melissa Korn | Updated August 3, 2022 | 8:59 AM EDT

Colleges this fall are no longer treating Covid-19 as an emergency upending their operations, shifting to eliminate mask requirements and mandatory coronavirus testing and letting students who contract the virus isolate in their dorms with their roommates.

With easy access to vaccinations and low hospitalization rates among college-aged adults—even during the latest surge in BA.5 subvariant cases—administrators said it is time to lift or at least rethink restrictions and redefine the virus as endemic, not a pandemic. That means scaling back mass testing, removing bans on large indoor gatherings and preparing for a fall term that more closely resembles life before Covid.

Another issue driving the decisions is exhaustion, according to public-health experts and academics on several campuses. Students and staff have been subjected to two years of daily health checks, weekly trots to a testing center and a roller coaster of mask protocols.

“It really comes down to a change in mind-set,” said Ken Henderson, who was co-chair of Northeastern University’s Covid-management operations until the group disbanded in January. Citing clinical therapies and the reduced severity of current variants, he said, “We’ve pivoted significantly to more living with the virus.”

Simply put, the COVID panicdemic — and no, that’s not a typo; panic has been exactly the overreaction people have had! — is both something with which we will have to live, and is not as serious as the doomsayers have been crying. But that hasn’t led Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia), who has presided over the City of Brotherly Love having already exceeded every single year’s homicide totals under his predecessor’s, Michael Nutter’s, two terms, and who is very vocally pro-choice when it comes to abortion, determination to enforce his choice when it comes to the COVID vaccines which neither prevent contraction of, nor the spreading of, the virus. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Nearly all city workers have complied with Mayor Jim Kenney’s vaccine policy, but 68 are getting fired

The 68 employees who are not in compliance with the policy and will be terminated soon include 39 who work in the Streets Department.

by Sean Collins Walsh | Tuesday, August 9, 2022

Philadelphia

Seal of the City of Philadelphia: Public Domain

Eight months after Mayor Jim Kenney’s vaccine mandate for city workers was supposed to take effect, the administration announced Tuesday that all but 68 of the city’s 22,000 unionized employees are now in compliance with the policy.

That doesn’t mean that almost all city employees are vaccinated against the coronavirus. Roughly 3,000 employees have obtained religious or medical exemptions from the mandate, and are required to test regularly to go to work.

The 68 employees who are not in compliance with the policy will be terminated soon, but dates will vary due to differing levels of paid time off, Kenney’s office said.

Fifteen city employees had already been fired for failing to comply with a vaccine mandate that took effect for the city’s 3,200 non-unionized employees in December 2021.

The Democratic mayor obviously doesn’t care that 68 people will lose their jobs over refusing to take a vaccine which has had some negative side effects in some people and which, while it appears to make illness caused by the virus less serious, doesn’t prevent contraction or spreading of it. The city is already below authorized staffing levels and has been having real difficulties attracting applicants. Philly has had such a serious shortage of lifeguards that it was able to open only 50 of the 65 community swimming pools this year, and had such a serious behavioral problem at one pool in Kensington that it closed the McVeigh Recreation Center for the rest of the year. The news reports did not say that the staff refused to work there any longer, but I’d bet euros against eclairs — my version of the oft-used dollars to doughnuts expression — that that’s what happened.

Tuesday’s announcement brings to an end a chain of events that began in November 2021, when Kenney said city workers had to be vaccinated by Jan. 14, 2022. The mandate was delayed for months as the administration struggled through negotiations with each of the four major municipal unions, ending when an arbitration panel in May ruled that the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 22, the staunchest opponent of the policy, had to comply.

I did suggest, on July 14th, that the firemen and emergency medical technicians should go on strike, at least for a day, to support their union brethren who were getting suspended for refusing the vaccine. The fireman’s union President, Mike Bresnan, stated that about 700 of the union’s 2,300 members had obtained exemptions, almost all of them religious. Roughly 15% of police union members also requested exemptions.

Kenney said Tuesday that “safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines remain the best way to protect Philadelphians and save lives.”

“We have reached nearly 100 percent compliance with our vaccination mandate for our represented workforce, and this success was possible because of the hard work and partnership between our City labor partners and our Administration team,” he said in a statement. “I am proud of our City’s workforce who, as public servants, bear a responsibility to mitigate the harm that would result from inadvertent transmission.”

I wonder how many of the city’s employees would have taken the vaccine voluntarily were their jobs not put at risk. How many would have freely chosen to get vaccinated, and how many simply yielded to force? And how many used the faked vaccination cards to keep their jobs to get around tyrannical dictates?

We were told that the vaccines would prevent contraction of the virus, but that has turned out not to be the case. We were told that the vaccines would stop the spread of the virus, but that didn’t happen either.

But refusal to take the vaccine does harm the mayor’s exercise of dictatorial power, and that’s what this is really all about.

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Congratulations to Jim Kenney!

Congratulations to Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney! He has just achieved more murders in the City of Brotherly Love so far this year than any full year in which his predecessor, Michael Nutter, held the office. George Soros-sponsored District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw certainly deserve credit as well!

Last night was a Monday night, not a weekend, but at a time in which you’d expect Philadelphia’s gang-bangers to slow down a bit, they haven’t. I’d point out that August 8th was a Sunday, end of the weekend, in 2021, the 32nd weekend of the year, and the same number of weekends have elapsed in 2022, so there’s no additional weekend bump in 2022.

Yes, math geeks like me notice things like that.

August 8th was the 220th day of the year. 337 ÷ 220 = 1.5318 homicides per day in Philly, which works out to a projected 559.107 killings in the city for the entire year. But wait: done another way, taking the percentage increase in homicides over last year, 4.0123, and multiplying that by last year’s 562 murders, we could also project 584.549 murders in Philly!

The difference? In 2021, the city actually saw a decrease in the rate of killings between July 9th and September 6th, the end of the Labor Day holiday weekend. That hasn’t happened so far this year, as July saw sixty homicides, while July of 2021 saw ‘only’ 48 murders.

The homicide rate picked up after the Labor Day weekend last year, from an average of 1.4578 per day — which projected out to 532 for the year — and the final 116 days of the year saw 199 homicides, an average of 1.7155 per day, which lifted the yearly average to 1.5397 per day for the year, and 562 murders. While last year’s mid- to late-summer lull hasn’t been seen so far this year, it has to be asked: will last year’s post Labor Day surge be repeated?

At least The Philadelphia Inquirer didn’t ignore the most recent killings, or the surge:

Philly shootings leave 3 dead, including man slain in Popeye’s lot

No arrests have been made, and a motive remains under investigation.

by Rodrigo Torrejón | Tuesday, August 9, 2022

One person was killed and two others were injured in a shooting late Monday night in the parking lot of a Popeye’s in Kensington.

Well, of course it was in Kensington!

Just after 11:15 p.m. Monday, officers responded to a call for a person with a gun on the 300 block of West Lehigh Avenue. When officers arrived, they found multiple people with gunshot wounds inside a red sedan. The victims had been shot in the parking lot of the nearby Popeye’s, 6ABC reported.

Police said that three suspects, all armed, came up to the sedan and fired 47 bullets into the car, 6ABC reported. After the shooting, the suspects took off on foot.

One victim, a man, had multiple gunshot wounds to his head and was pronounced dead shortly after at Temple University Hospital. Another victim, a woman, had several gunshot wounds to her body, and the third victim, a man, had multiple gunshot wounds to his back. They were taken to Temple University Hospital in stable condition.

North Orianna Street, via Google Maps, May 2022. Click to enlarge.

The Popeye’s Chicken restaurant is at the corner of West Lehigh Avenue and North Orianna Street. North Orianna Street in the blocks around West Lehigh Avenue is a neighborhood of older row homes, some with porches barred in to keep out the bad guys, vacant lots with concertina wire topping fences, and a generally poverty-stricken look.

One of the wounded, but not killed, victims, was an employee of the Popeye’s restaurant.

The Inquirer report stated that 47 shots had been fired, but that the police had no motive as of yet, but one thing is obvious: this was a targeted assassination. The newspaper also censored the fact, gleaned from the city’s shootings database, that all of the dead were black males.

Further down:

As of Sunday night, the city was ahead of last year’s pace for what ended in a record high number of 562 homicides for the year. By Sunday night, police reported that 333 people have been killed in Philadelphia so far this year.

There were 324 homicides by the same date last year.

Perhaps it’s a bit unfair for a math geek like me to point this out, but the Inky really needs to start looking at the numbers. I’d like to think that a former Pennsylvanian, now 635 miles away in eastern Kentucky, isn’t the only person actually running, and publicizing, the statistics.

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I wonder how many Philadelphia workers used this to get around the city’s #VaccineMandate ? What if others went on strike to support their laid-off brethren fighting the mandate?

As we have previously noted, with the vaccine mandates imposed by various governments, some enterprising nurses were selling faked COVID-19 vaccination cards while other people stole blank vaccination cards.

Philadelphia was one of the cities which mandated vaccinations for its employees, and continues to enforce them even though it has become clear that vaccination, while it seems to reduce symptoms, has virtually no effect on preventing people from either contracting the virus, or spreading it if they do contract it.

Philly has started placing unvaccinated city workers on leave. Here’s how the numbers break down.

More than 20% of the city’s Fire Department and 15% of the Police Department requested exemptions for religious or medical reasons.

by Anna Orso[1]One thing about Miss Orso’s article: at 992 words, it proves my point about newspapers, at least in their online articles, no longer need to be concerned with word or column inch restrictions! | Thursday, July 14, 2022

Philadelphia city officials placed about 270 workers on leave this month for failing to comply with the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, and more than 1 in 6 of the city’s public-safety employees requested to be exempt.

The employees placed on leave are a fraction of the city’s unionized workforce of more than 22,000. The majority are from two departments: the Prisons Department and the Fire Department, both of which are already short staffed amid a broader labor shortage, according to data provided by Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration. Continue reading →

References

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↑1 One thing about Miss Orso’s article: at 992 words, it proves my point about newspapers, at least in their online articles, no longer need to be concerned with word or column inch restrictions!
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Killadelphia Philadelphia ties 2013's homicide totals, with more than half of the year remaining.

Congratulations for Philadelphia’s Mayor, Jim Kenney, District Attorney, Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw! As of 11:59 PM EDT on Wednesday, June 22, 2022, under their leadership the City of Brotherly Love has, with 246 homicides this year, tied the total number of murders for the entire year of 2013.

I will admit it: I hadn’t previously thought much of former Mayor Michael Nutter. He was a liberal Democrat in a line of liberal Democrats — Philadelphia’s last Republican mayor left office while Harry Truman was still President! — and, in following John Street, I didn’t really see reason to hope that he’d be any better than Mr Street. But, under Mr Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams — who wound up with legal problems of his own, and served 2½ years in federal prison — and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, murders in the City of Brotherly Love steadily declined, from 391 in 2007, the year before Messrs Nutter and Ramsey took office — Mr Williams was elected in 2009, succeeding Lynne Abraham — down to 246 in 2013. There was an increase to 248 in 2014, and then 280 in 2015, Messrs Nutter’s and Ramsey’s final year in office.

But nothing like the increases under Mayor Kenney! 2016 saw 277 killings, but then they jumped to 315, then 353, 356, 499 and 562 last year. It was only by pure, dumb luck that 2020 finished below 500 homicides, given that there were two more on New Year’s Day of 2021, and the Philadelphia Police Department actually stated that there had been 502 homicides in 2020, before ‘correcting’ that down to 499. I fouled up and didn’t take a screen capture of that when it was up, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

Were it not for the previous record of 500 homicides in 1990, under Mayor Wilson Goode, he of MOVE bombing fame, Mayor Kenney would have both first and second place in the homicide numbers.

But, not to worry: although this year’s homicide numbers are down slightly, 5.75%, the city is still on track for between 519 and 530 homicides, easily good for second place.[1]Methodology: I divided the total homicides by June 22nd of this year by 261, the number of murders on the same date in 2021, yielding 0.9425287356321839, then multiplied that number by 562, the … Continue reading

The chart to the right? That includes only those years in which homicides were at least 400; Mayor Kenney ought to break into that chart again, for this year, sometime between and October 2nd and 8th.

Whatever Messrs Kenney and Krasner, and Miss Outlaw, are doing, doesn’t work!

References

References
↑1 Methodology: I divided the total homicides by June 22nd of this year by 261, the number of murders on the same date in 2021, yielding 0.9425287356321839, then multiplied that number by 562, the number of homicides in 2021 to get 529.70. I use this method to account for the fact that there are more warm months ahead than behind, and homicides normally increase in summer and fall. Another method, dividing 246, the number of homicides, by 173, June 22nd being the 173rd day of the year, yielding a figure of 1.421965317919075 killings per day, then multiplying that by 365, yields 519.02 homicides for the year.
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The powers that be in Philadelphia continue to blame each other for a problem about which they cannot tell the truth

There are times when I worry about being a bit of a broken record on the homicide rate in Philadelphia, and I skipped some recent stories, but the blame game in the City of Brotherly Love has gotten both hysterically funny and monumentally tragic.

Mayor Kenney acknowledges Philadelphia has ‘a gun crisis’ but sidesteps questions about DA Larry Krasner’s crime comments

District Attorney Larry Krasner drew criticism Monday when he said: “We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence.”

By Anna Orso | Wednesday, December 8, 2021 | 5:26 PM EST

Two days after District Attorney Larry Krasner stirred outrage by insisting the city isn’t in the midst of a crime or violence crisis, Mayor Jim Kenny and the city’s police commissioner sought Wednesday to gingerly wade into — or away from — the issue.

During their scheduled biweekly news conference, one that began this year in direct response to the rising number of shootings, Kenney and Commissioner Danielle Outlaw both said they do believe the city has a gun violence problem.

Both also declined to say more about Krasner’s comments or the ensuing pushback, including a blistering statement from Kenney’s predecessor, former Mayor Michael Nutter, who called Krasner’s remarks “some of the worst, most ignorant, and most insulting comments I have ever heard spoken by an elected official.”

Kenney on Wednesday said while he agrees “we’re in a gun crisis,” he would not “get involved in a back-and-forth between a former mayor and the DA.”

There’s more at the original.

Michael Nutter wasn’t the best mayor Philadelphia ever had, but, during his eight years in office, his Police Commissioner, Charles Ramsey, and he presided over a significant decrease in killings in the city. The city saw 391 homicides in Mayor John Street’s last year of 2007; that number was down 60, to 331, in Mayor Nutter’s first year in office, and though tied again in 2012, the numbers were generally down. In their last three years, 2013, 2014, and 2015, the city saw fewer than 300 murders, 246, 248, and 280, respectively.

Though that number dropped slightly, to 277 in Mayor Kenney’s first year, by the following year the numbers were above 300 again, at 315, 353, 356, and then last year’s whopping 499.

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

This is where the Inquirer truthfully reports the statistics, but never questions them. Murder is not normally an entry-level crime.

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

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

And in the City of Brotherly Love, both Mr Krasner, and the nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper, have been working as hard as they can to undermine the police!

Of course, all of the politicians, all of the politically correct, want to talk about “gun violence,” as though those inanimate objects somehow levitate and shoot people all by themselves, all to push stricter gun control laws. In their own stories, the Inquirer noted that Latif Williams, the (alleged) killer of Samuel Collington, was a juvenile, with a criminal record, and could not be legally carrying a gun . . . but he was. They reported that Donavan Crawford, charged with the murder of Sykea Patton, was “charged overnight with murder and multiple counts of illegally carrying a gun.” Somehow, some way, the highly educated and experienced editors and reporters for the Inquirer never noticed that the people committing crimes with guns are almost never holders of firearms permits, almost never carrying firearms legally, and, shockingly enough, aren’t that interested in obeying the law in the first place.

This is the problem that the left simply cannot see, because they are unwilling to see it. It is not a matter of guns, but the people using the guns. Since the people using guns to kill others are disproportionately black, to admit that it’s the people who are the problem is to recognize that homicide in our major cities is primarily a black problem, and that the #woke[3]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading just cannot do.

But if you cannot admit what the problem is, you can never hope to solve the problem. And the left, including Mayor Kenney, including Commissioner Outlaw, would rather ignore the truth than deal with the truth.

References

References
↑1 See Table 4.
↑2 Though “burglarize” is apparently a real word now, I refuse to use it.
↑3 From Wikipedia:

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

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Killadelphia! The City of Brotherly Love has tied for the Gold Medal Philly has tied its all-time annual murder number, with 37 days left in the year!

That didn’t take long. It was just this morning I wrote about the city tying its second-place record of 499 homicides, set just last year.

    500th homicide: Woman, 55, fatally shot in South Philly

    It was the city’s 500th homicide so far in 2021, matching the worst year on record.

    by Robert Moran | Wednesday, November 24, 2021

    A 55-year-old woman was fatally shot Wednesday afternoon in South Philadelphia, police said.

    Her death was the 500th homicide in the city so far this year, matching the worst year on record — 1990 — and surpassing the total of 499 that occurred in 2020.

    Around 4:30 p.m., the woman was outside in the area of Seventh and Jackson Streets when she was shot three times in the chest. She was transported by medics to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 5:15 p.m.

Another murder in broad daylight.

    No arrests or other details were reported.

    Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw issued a statement Wednesday night:

    “Each and every homicide carries with it a profound sense of loss. However, for our City to have reached such a tragic milestone — 500 lives cut short — it carries a weight that is almost impossible to truly comprehend.”

    Outlaw continued: “There are not enough words to comfort our grieving families in their time of loss. However, I want these families to know that seeking justice for their loved one remains a top priority for the Philadelphia Police Department. We will continue to work with our local, state, and federal partners and other stakeholders to get ahead of the violent crime that is plaguing our beautiful communities.”

Of course, Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat, had complained earlier that afternoon, that it was the fault of the state legislature for not allowing the City of Brotherly Love to issue its own, stricter gun control laws:

    As Philadelphia records 500 homicides, Mayor Kenney takes aim at the state: ‘They don’t care’

    The administration convened the gathering hours before the city’s 500th homicide, tying to record for the most in modern history.

    by Anna Orso | Wednesday, November 24, 2021

    As Philadelphia approached a record number of homicides, Mayor Jim Kenney on Wednesday said the city is doing what it can to slow the bloodshed but is stymied by state law that keeps the city from enforcing stricter gun laws.

    “There are people making money selling these guns, making these guns,” he said, “and the legislature, they don’t care about people getting killed.”

    Kenney spoke during a morning news conference at City Hall alongside police brass, federal law enforcement officials, representatives from the District Attorney’s Office, and a handful of lawmakers from City Council and the state General Assembly. . . . .

    In taking aim at the state, Kenney was repeating his frequent criticism of a concept in state law known as preemption, which generally prohibits municipalities from passing laws that limit access to firearms. His administration last year sued the state, seeking to overturn the rule, and the case remains unresolved.

    If the city was not operating under preemption, Kenney said, officials would enforce regulations that target “straw purchasers,” or people who legally purchase firearms and then illegally sell them to others. Those include setting limits on how many guns someone can buy within city limits during a specific time period.

There’s more at the original.

In a story published just yesterday, reporter Anna Orso, who wrote the story immediately above, noted:

    Donavan Crawford, 28, of West Philadelphia, was arrested Monday and charged overnight with murder and multiple counts of illegally carrying a gun.

WPVI-TV reported the charges more specifically:

    Crawford is also charged with Violation Uniform Firearms Act -Former Convict, Violation Uniform Firearms Act -No License, Violation Uniform Firearms Act -On Streets, Possessing Instruments of Crime, Recklessly Endangering Another Person and Criminal Use of Communication Facility.

In other words, it was already illegal for Mr Crawford, a previously convicted criminal, to have a firearm. Just what good does Mayor Kenney think having more gun control laws will do when people like Mr Crawford are willing to (allegedly) break the gun control laws already on the books?

Those gun control laws were on the books in 2008, when Mayor Michael Nutter, a Democrat took office, and appointed Charles Ramsey to be his Police Commissioner. In 2008, under Mr Nutter, city homicides decreased from 391 to 331, and then made steady progress, to 302, 306, 326, 331, 246, 248, with an unfortunate jump to 280 in 2015, Mr Nutter’s and Commissioner Ramsey’s last year in office.

If the homicide rate could be reduced that much under the current gun control laws by Messrs Nutter and Ramsey, why has everything collapsed under Mayor Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Commissioner Outlaw? Under Messrs Nutter and Ramsey, the city averaged a still-too-high 296.25 killings a year, while, since they left office, the average has jumped to 383.33 per year, and, with 37 days left in the year, will go higher.

Mr Krasner, whom The Philadelphia Inquirer actually endorsed for renomination, has more of a history of letting criminals go free so that they can then go out and murder people. And while the police have been making more illegal gun possession arrests than ever, under Mr Krasner, a George Soros stooge, convictions for illegal possession of firearms have dropped dramatically:

    Inspector Derrick Wood, commanding officer of Southwest Division, attributes some of the spike in VUFA arrests to what he describes as a growing lack of fear among people carrying guns due to dropping conviction rates and lower bails set by bail commissioners.

    “What I see is that the city and the criminal justice system do not take illegally carrying firearms seriously,” Wood said. “There’s been an explosion of gun violence in the last three years, and there’s more than one reason — but I think one reason is we don’t take it seriously.”

    An Inquirer review of 2019 gun arrests from the 18th Police District, in Wood’s Southwest Division, showed that of the 82 people whose cases were resolved as of January 2021, more than half, 53%, had their charges withdrawn or dismissed.

    Wood and some of his officers contend that amid this reality, they are encountering the same suspects over and over again. Fed up, they began posting photos on social media of confiscated firearms and calling for stricter consequences for carrying them.

    “They know there’s no consequences for carrying a gun in Philly. It’s zero to none,” he said. “I don’t care what kind of programs you come up with, what kind of money you put in prevention — if people are not held accountable, then people are going to keep carrying guns.”

Then, further down:

    These problems existed long before Krasner took office, and yet none seemed to prohibit his predecessors from securing a higher conviction rate. . . .

    Krasner has built his administration on the idea that fewer people belong in jail — that he was sworn in to help unravel decades of misguided policy devastating communities of color and fueling more crime.

And there you have it: Philadelphia has a District Attorney who believes that fewer people should be in jail, and he’s doing just that, putting fewer people in prison. Mr Krasner blames his lower conviction rate on the police not bringing good evidence, but how much evidence is actually needed: man found with a gun, man not legally allowed to have that weapon, it ought to be case closed.

The problem is not what the left refer to as “mass incarceration,” but that not enough people who could already be behind bars are behind bars.

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Philly ties for 3rd place!

It wasn’t really that much of a stretch to guess that 475 wouldn’t be the final homicide number for Thursday, and it wasn’t: the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page shows that 476 Philadelphians have been murdered so far this year, up from ‘just’ 428 on the same day last year. Last year being a leap year, the gang bangers had an extra day to hit that 428 number.

The numbers are ugly: 476 homicides in 315 days works out to 1.5111 per day, or a projected 551.5555, rounding up to 552 for the year.

With 50 days left in the year, and ‘only’ 24 murders needed to tie the all-time record of 500, set in 1990, the homicide rate would have to drop to slightly less than a third of what it is right now, and, at this point, only God could make that happen. At the current rate, the city should tie the all-time high in just 16 days, or Saturday, November 27th.

Mayor James Kenney (Democrat-Philadelphia), District Attorney Larry Krasner (Soros stooge-Philadelphia), and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw (Kenney Puppet-Philadelphia) have certainly done a fine, fine job, haven’t they?

But hey, Philadelphians must like all of those bodies stacked up like cordwood, because they just re-elected George Soros stooge District Attorney Larry Krasner. No one can say that they didn’t know what they were getting.

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Killadelphia! Philadelphia's homicide rate has increased dramatically since Joe Biden was elected

Mayor Jim Kenney (Democrat-Philadelphia), District Attorney Larry Krasner (Soros-Philadelphia), and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw (Puppet-Philadelphia) haven’t quite won the Bronze Medal for annual homicides for the City of Brotherly Love for the year, but they aren’t far away. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page reports that there have been 471 homicides in the city so far this year, through 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, November 7th. With 471 killings over 311 days elapsed in the year, that works out to 1.5145 per day, or a projected 552.7814 for 2021. Since there’s no such thing as 0.7814 of a homicide, that works out to a projected 553.

As of November 7th in 2020, there had been 422 killings in the city. Due to the counting problems in the 2020 elections, that Joe Biden had defeated President Trump on November 3rd wasn’t certain until November 5th. Since the Philly Police don’t report the homicide numbers on the weekend until the subsequent Monday, this is the first day I could make this comparison, but since the evil reich-wing Donald Trump was defeated, and the all sweetness-and-light Joe Biden elected, there have been 548 homicides in the city, over 367 days.

Yet from November 7, 2019 to November 7, 2020, Philly saw ‘only’ 474 murders. It seems as though the killing rate in Philly has been significantly higher, as in 15.61% higher, since Mr Biden was elected! And remember: the vast majority of the COVID-19 lockdowns occurred when Mr Trump was President, so you can’t blame it all on the pandemic.

No Bronze Medal yet, but Miss Outlaw and Messrs Kenney and Krasner need just five more to tie for third place, and at the current rate, they ought to get that by Wednesday or Thursday.

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Killadelphia

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page reported that the City of Brotherly Love — and yes, I have been using that title sarcastically for a long time — has suffered through 412 homicides as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, September 30th. 412 murders ÷ 273 days = 1.509157509157509 killings per day x 365 days = 550.8425 homicides projected for the year.

The 2020 census reported that 1,603,797 live in Philly. With 499 homicides in 2020, that gives the city a homicide rate of 31.11 per 100,000 population. With a guesstimated 2021 population of 1,607,667, and the city on track for 551 murders, the city’s homicide rate has jumped to 34.27 per 100,000 population.

Former Mayor Michael Nutter produced a chart of Philadelphia homicides per year from 1960 through 2020. It was rather self-serving, as he added the name of the Mayor of Philadelphia, given that it showed there were fewer homicides per year under his regime than under other recent mayors, but, in fact, there was no year in which murders reached the 400 mark under Mr Nutter and his Police Commissioner, Charles Ramsey. I have reproduced the chart for all of the years with 400 or more homicides, and sorted it by the number of killings. Note that with 412 killings, 2021 is 16th out of 18 years with more than 400 homicides, having passed 1994 and 2006, and there are still three full months left in the year!

Since the end of the Labor Day weekend, 24 days ago, there have been 49 murders reported in Philadelphia, or 2.0417 per day. If that rate continues for just one more week, the total would jump to 426, jumping up five more spots.

Then there’s this:

    Philly’s top cop says she and DA Krasner ‘just don’t agree’ on how to reduce shootings

    “Fundamentally, there are very key disconnects there,” Outlaw said, “as far as which crimes we prioritize, and who believes what are the main drivers of the violent crime that we’re seeing.”

    by Anna Orso | September 30, 2021

    Philadelphia’s top law enforcement officials don’t agree on which crimes they should prioritize while seeking to address the city’s record-setting gun violence crisis, a notable disconnect made public yet again this week.

    The Philadelphia Police Department is focused on arresting people for dealing drugs and illegally carrying guns, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said this week, but top brass don’t see the District Attorney’s Office prioritizing the prosecution of those crimes.

    During a biweekly news conference with Mayor Jim Kenney on Wednesday, the city’s top cop said she and reform-minded District Attorney Larry Krasner “just don’t agree” on whether illegal gun and narcotics charges can reduce violent crime, making it hard to progress in slowing the bloodshed.

    ”Fundamentally, there are very key disconnects there, as far as which crimes we prioritize, and who believes what are the main drivers of the violent crime that we’re seeing,” Outlaw said.

    Jane Roh, a spokesperson for Krasner’s office, said violent crimes “have always been the top priorities” and said all law enforcement should be squarely focused on shooting and homicide investigations. She pointed to low clearance rates, saying that so far this year, police have made arrests in just 29% of homicides and 15% of nonfatal shootings.

    “No public official should be defending that, much less spinning it,” she said in a statement. “Our communities and our neighbors who have been wounded or killed by gun violence deserve real leadership and action.”

There’s more at the original, but both are right: the Commissioner should not be throwing shade at the District Attorney when their clearance rates are so low, but the DA’s office should not be minimizing arrests for dealing drugs and illegally carrying firearms, because drug dealers and gang bangers are the number one perpetrators of shootings. Mr Krasner, whom The Philadelphia Inquirer actually endorsed for renomination, has more of a history of letting thugs go free so that they can then go out and murder people:

    In June 2018, Maalik Jackson-Wallace was arrested on a Frankford street and charged with carrying a concealed gun without a license and a gram of marijuana. It was his first arrest.

    The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office recommended the Frankford man for a court diversionary program called Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition (ARD) that put him on two years’ probation. His record could have been expunged if he had successfully completed the program.

    But Jackson-Wallace, 24, was arrested again on gun-possession charges in March in Bridesburg. He was released from jail after a judge granted a defense motion for unsecured bail. And on June 13, he was arrested a third time — charged with murder in a shooting two days earlier in Frankford that killed a 26-year-old man.

It seems that in his eagerness to keep Mr Jackson-Wallace out of jail, the District Attorney did him no favors. Instead of a potential sentence from 2½ to 7 years in the clink, Mr Jackson-Wallace faced the rest of his miserable life behind bars.

It’s true enough that the city’s police are not closing homicide cases at a satisfactory rate, but there are homicide cases which would not have occurred at all if Mr Krasner were more interested in locking up the bad guys than he is at attacking the police.

The left have, for years, decried “mass incarceration,” but lenient law enforcement has proven to be a bad idea even for the criminals. We have previously noted how John Lewis, AKA Lewis Jordan, who slew Philadelphia Police Officer Charles Cassidy, and Nikolas Cruz, accused of the mass murders at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, were given every possible break. Had they been in jail at the time they committed their murders, yeah, they might have served a year or three, but Mr Jordan wouldn’t be on death row today, looking at spending the rest of his miserable life in prison, and Mr Cruz wouldn’t have the same kind of sentence looking him dead in the eye.

Are Messrs Jordan and Cruz somehow better off today because lenient law enforcement kept them out of jail? Is Andrew Brown, with his 180-page-long rap sheet, better off today because, despite many criminal convictions, he was out of jail the day he decided to start a gunfight with several Pasquotank County, North Carolina, deputies trying to serve a couple of warrants? Was 21-year-old Hasan Elliot better off on that Friday the 13th when he should have been in jail, and would have been in jail had not Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office declined to have him locked up on a serious parole violation, and he had a shootout with police?

Treating the petty criminals seriously is better for everyone in the long run. It’s better for society, as it gets the bad guys off the street, and lowers the overall crime rate, and it’s better for the criminals themselves, because when they are locked up for crimes that leave them with hope of eventually getting out of prison, they don’t have as much time on the streets, usually in their prime crime committing ages, they are likely to commit the big crimes which will have them locked up for the rest of their miserable lives.

And so, after finishing 2020 in second place all time for homicides, the thugs of Philadelphia have basically said, “Hold my beer,” and are looking to not just break, but completely shatter the record number of murders.

There are three more months in 2021, and at the current annual rate, the gang bangers are poised to break the city’s murder record on Thanksgiving day. Lenience in law enforcement has not worked, and the price that has been paid is measured in the blood on Philly’s streets.