Tag Archives: #JimKenney

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Is there any reason not to just wall Philadelphia in, like Manhattan in Escape From New York?

I asked, on August 18, 2020, What Are Mayor Jim Kenney and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw Doing About Open Air Drug Markets in Philly? I had noted The Philadelphia Inquirer’s story about the open air drug market in the Kensington neighborhood, complete with a photo of a man shooting up outside the Market Street SEPTA station. I noted that, despite the Inquirer making it very public, the Philadelphia Police did nothing.

I kept checking the news, for weeks, and never found a story about the Philadelphia Police making a sweep of the area, to clean up the drug dealers and users.

The Inquirer even identified one of the drug users, and published her picture!

“The blocks [where drug dealing takes place] never closed,” said Christine Russo, 38, who’s been using heroin for seven years. She waited Friday near Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, at the heart of the city’s opioid market, while a friend prepared to inject a dose of heroin. “Business reigns. The sun shines.”

Just now much more help did the cops need?

Well, here it is, nine months later, and the Inquirer is on the same beat:

Business and Bloodshed

Even as pandemic lockdowns ease, Kensington’s heroin economy thrives, along with the endless gun violence it fuels. And the neighborhood’s pain is plainer than ever.

By Mike Newell | Friday, May 21, 2021

As he looks out over the chaos at the corner of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues — the sprawling homeless encampments, the people injecting heroin and nodding off in the street, the dealers, the trash, the suffering — this is what Flac sees: Money.

“All I see is money, money, money. Ain’t nothing but money down here,” he said, waving at the intersection. “This is one of the few places in America where you can wake up Monday flat broke and on Tuesday you can have $10,000 in your pocket.”

Flac, who manages heroin-dealing operations on a number of corners in Kensington, and who asked to be identified by his nickname because his business is illegal, is a cog in the vast machinery that is Kensington’s drug trade — the largest open-air drug market on the East Coast, if not in the nation.

He is launching a new venture at K & A: a heroin-dealing operation across from the Allegheny El Station, the latest addition to his portfolio of corners around the neighborhood, where some blocks reap as much as $60,000 a day in heroin sales.

Flac says he is only following the riches. Since the temporary closure of the Somerset El stop two months ago, the growing crowds of people who use drugs and live on the street have been moving up Kensington Avenue. There are more customers at Allegheny now, more money to be made, and Flac and his supplier want to plant their flag.

“Every day is a party out here,” he said. “Every day is a good day.”

It’s a major story in the Inquirer, one which took a lot of legwork. There are photos of drug dealers, and Mike Newell, the reporter whose bio says, “I’m an enterprise reporter. I find stories about cops and crime, people and politics, and everyday life that tell a bit about a changing city,” was able to find, talk to, and identify the dealers, dealers who are apparently so unafraid of the cops that they were willing to talk to a reporter.

Of course, Mr Newell would claim some sort of journalist’s privilege and never identify or testify against the dealers if they were arrested.

Flac is upper management. According to his crew, he’s running the operation for a drug supplier with access to heroin sold on the best corners in the neighborhood. Flac, who says he’s out on bail for a gun charge, will oversee the squad of shift managers, dealers, runners and lookouts. Eventually, the aim is to match sales on some of the other “gold standard” blocks — many millions a year.

In other words, the cops could lock up “Flac” in a heartbeat; he’s already out on bail. Mr Newell already has the information needed for the police to get him off the streets, but you know that he won’t give that to the cops. Mr Newell already identified him, in the story, as having a Lincoln Town Car.

The Inquirer story tells readers just how useless it would be to raid the area and arrest all of the drug dealers:

“You can try locking people up — that ain’t going to stop nothing,…tomorrow there is going to be another group taking our place. It’s like trying to cover the sky with a finger,” said “Bebo,” who manages heroin-dealing operations on a Kensington corner.

Well, maybe so, but is that any reason not to try?

The Inquirer, which routinely prints stories bemoaning “gun violence,” its euphemistic term that allows the paper not to mention that there are bad people picking up guns and shooting other, usually also bad, people, tells us about the violence there:

With more customers comes more competition. More than ever, violence follows the markets.

In a 1.9-mile stretch covering the narrow streets along Kensington Avenue, near McPherson — an area smaller than Old City — police have identified 80 corners with open-air drug markets.

In 2020, in that same grid, the heart of the drug markets, 40 people were killed and 178 were shot and wounded.

The escalating bloodshed is overwhelmingly driven by disputes among drug rivals fighting for the profits to be made, said Capt. Pedro Rosario, the commanding officer of the 24th police district in Kensington.

“There’s a lot of great people that live on these blocks,” said Rosario, walking down the narrow blocks by McPherson. Even with the captain there in his uniform, the sales didn’t stop. “And right now, they’re basically prisoners in their own homes.” . . .

Rosario, the police captain, says that with such an overwhelming amount of drugs on the corners — and with gun violence in the district nearly tripling since 2017, when the opioid crisis exploded — it often feels like the best his patrol officers can do is displace dealers from one corner to the next, providing neighbors temporary relief.

A transit hub like K & A, with its ceaseless streams of customers pouring off the El, becomes a battleground. In 2020, two people were shot and killed at the intersection, and two more were wounded. This year, two people have been shot and killed on the blocks near K & A and five others have been wounded. All of the cases are drug-related, Rosario said. And in recent weeks, after a spike in shootings, nearly a dozen more patrol officers have been redeployed to the intersection.

To do what? Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw could set up a huge sweep, and arrest every drug dealer there. The Philadelphia Police Department is the fourth largest in the nation, with 6,300 officers. The manpower is there to sweep through Kensington and arrest all of the bad guys. If more manpower is needed, the Pennsylvania State Police could provide it. And when the drug dealers arrested are replaced the next day, sweep up the next crew as well, then the next, and then the next.

The Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) is the nation’s fourth largest police department, with more than 6,300 sworn officers and 800 civilian employees. Our mission is to make Philadelphia one of the safest cities in the country.

The police department partners with communities across the city to:

  • Fight crime, the fear of crime, and terrorism.
  • Enforce laws while safeguarding people’s constitutional rights.
  • Provide quality service to all Philadelphia residents and visitors.
  • Recruit, train, and develop an exceptional team of employees.

There sure isn’t much evidence that the Police Department’s “What we do” statement is true, not if the Inquirer can send reporters down there and get drug dealers to talk to them with seeming impunity. Of course, with softer-than-soft on crime District Attorney Larry Krasner having just won his primary election, it’s understandable that the police might not bother; his office wouldn’t prosecute them anyway.

As of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, May 20th, the Philadelphia Police reported that there had been 199 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love, up from 144 on the same date last year, and as the article made clear, most of the homicides in the city are related to drugs and gangs. I get it: the Democrats who have controlled the city for longer than Elizabeth II has been Queen of England are all social justicy, but at some point, doesn’t someone have to realize that their policies have not worked?

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Mayor Jim Kenney wanted to not increase police funding, to appease the left, and tried to sneak it through in other departments

We have not been particularly charitable toward Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia), nor any of the rest of the political leadership of the City of Brotherly Love, but this story from The Philadelphia Inquirer just thoroughly amused me:

Mayor Kenney said his budget wouldn’t increase police spending. It’s not that simple.

His proposal does include new investments for police. They’re just included in the budgets for other departments.

by Anna Orso and Laura McCrystal | April 15, 2021 | Updated: 6:25 PM EDT

Mayor Jim Kenney avoided taking a side in the political battle over law enforcement funding on Thursday when he said he’s proposing flat funding for the Philadelphia Police Department in the coming year.

But his proposal does include new investments for police. Some fund reforms. Others are tucked into budgets for different departments.

In addition to the $727 million police allocation that’s roughly equivalent to last year’s, the administration proposed funneling additional money for police-related reforms and programs through the Managing Director’s Office. And it set aside funding for expected raises as a result of upcoming contract negotiations with municipal unions, including the police.

Of the cash that would run through the Managing Director’s Office, about $6 million would fund a citywide program that pairs behavioral health specialists with officers responding to mental health-related 911 calls. Another $750,000 in spending for that office would expand training for police “to make positive decisions when put in difficult situations.”

There’s more at the original.

So, the Mayor is yielding to the leftist mobs, and not increasing funding for the Philadelphia Police Department, despite 145 homicides in the city, 35 more than the same date last year, a 31.8% increase, and last year saw a near-record 499 people bleed out their life’s blood in Philly’s mean streets.[1]The record was 500, set during the crack cocaine wars in 1990.

But he also knows that more funding is needed, so he’s hiding it in other areas of the city budget. There are more details in the Inquirer story.

But proponents of defunding the police criticized the proposal, saying tax dollars going toward reforms still prop up a system they see as harmful.

“Mayor Jim Kenney is trying to pull the wool over our eyes,” said Kris Henderson, executive director of Amistad Law Project, a West Philadelphia public-interest law center that advocates ending mass incarceration. “Resources that end up in the hands of police are police funding.”

So, what is the Amistad Law Project? They say they are “a public interest law firm and organizing project working to end mass incarceration in Pennsylvania and fighting to get our communities the resources they need to thrive,” without realizing that the problem isn’t ‘mass incarceration,’ but that too few people are locked up!

At some point, the soft-heartedness of the left has to be recognized for what it really is, soft-headedness.

Do the good people at Amistad think that, somehow, the 145 people who are now stone-cold graveyard dead, or the 499 who were murdered last year, got that way by the honest mistakes of nice guys? They are “attorneys and organizers,” and one has to assume that anyone who got into law school in the first place isn’t a complete idiot; they have to know that the people who are committing these homicides have mostly had previous brushes with the law, sometimes many brushes with the law. These are the people that the noble #SocialJusticeWarriors want to keep out of jail, but when they have been left out of jail for lesser offenses, some of them wind up going on to bigger and badder things.

When a 6-year-old boy was wounded, and a man killed when someone fired “at least” twelve shots at them as they were sitting in a parked car in the 800 block of South 53rd Street Wednesday evening, do the very concerned “attorneys and organizers” of Amistad think it was really nothing? Are they saying to themselves, “Well, at least the shooter, or shooters — the story said that there was “at least” one shooter but there could have been more — wasn’t incarcerated”?

It seems that almost every time we read about a suspect in a Philadelphia murder — in the too few times the police actually identify and catch him, anyway — we read that he already had a criminal record, that he couldn’t legally own the gun he used, and that he was already wanted on a parole violation. Such suspects usually could still be in jail, were they given the maximum sentence for their previous crimes.

Nikolas Cruz was not a victim of ‘mass incarceration,’ because the Broward County Sheriff’s Department let him go without charges on several occasions. Young Mr Cruz could have been in jail on an in-school assault charge, but the school board did not want to contribute to the “school to prison” pipeline, so he had no criminal record, was able to purchase his weapon legally, and now seventeen people are pushing up daisies, because oh-so-well-meaning people like the Amistad “attorneys and organizers” didn’t want to take his earlier crimes seriously.

In Philadelphia itself, Lewis Jordan, a.k.a. John Lewis, had been treated leniently by the office of then-District Attorney Lynne Abraham, and was out on the street when he could, and should, have been in jail. On October 31, 2007, Philadelphia Police Officer Charles Cassidy walked into a Dunkin’ Donuts, the scene of a previous robbery, to check on it, just as Mr Jordan was attempting to rob the place; Mr Jorden shot Officer Cassidy in the head, killing him. Had law enforcement treated Mr Jordan seriously, rather than dropping the charges if he’d attend drug counseling courses, he would have been in jail, and Officer Cassidy would have gone home to his wife that Hallowe’en.

More, Mr Jordan might have spent what, a year in the clink. No one can say whether he would have learned his lesson in prison, but if he had been locked up that day, as he could have been, he (probably) wouldn’t be on death row now.

Amistad opposes “mass incarceration,” but had criminals been treated more seriously for their lesser offenses, people like Mr Cruz and Mr Jordan would have a reasonable chance of walking free at sometime in the future. As it is, they will both die in prison.

This is what those who are soft on crime have wrought. Petty criminals who aren’t slapped down hard become bigger criminals, and worse things happen. At some point, the soft-heartedness of the left has to be recognized for what it really is, soft-headedness.

References

References
↑1 The record was 500, set during the crack cocaine wars in 1990.
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And another one bites the dust!

I have previously noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer does not really take much notice of shootings or homicides unless the victim is a cute little white girl. I do not know if the victim in this case is white, but the story made the website because one of the victims isn’t known to be a gang-banger.

Girl, 15, in critical condition after double shooting in West Philly

The shooting happened in the 6200 block of Chestnut Street.

By Robert Moran | Tuesday, February 23, 2021 | 4:43 PM EST

A 15-year-old girl and was hospitalized in critical condition after being wounded in a double shooting Tuesday afternoon in West Philadelphia, police said.

Just before 3:20 p.m. in the 6200 block of Chestnut Street, the girl and a 20-year-old man were both shot in the head, police said. The girl was taken by private amubulance to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. The man was taken by police to the same hospital and was listed in stable condition.

Police reported no arrests or other details.

As of 11:59 PM EST on Monday, February 22, 2021, the City of Brotherly Love had counted 75 homicides, in 53 days of the year. On the same date last year, in which Philadelphia saw 499 killings, just one short of the all-time record, there had been ‘just’ 53, to yesterday’s totals were a 41.5% increase. It looks like Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw are doing just an outstanding job, doesn’t it?

Maybe I’m too early with the headline, but if I am with the victim in the Inquirer story, it’ll be true enough of someone else in Philly.

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Chicago thinks it’s the murder capital; Philly says, “Hold my beer!”

I had noted on Twitter that the City of Brotherly Love was exceeding its one-short-of-the-record homicide rate for 2020, though we aren’t even through January, the coldest month of the year, and that The Philadelphia Inquirer hadn’t even noticed it:

I did see an article on the Inquirer’s website yesterday evening, noting that two men had been murdered in a bodega:

Two men fatally shot in North Philly store

by Mensah M. Dean | January 28, 2021 | 6:17 PM EST

Two men were fatally shot in a North Philadelphia store Thursday in what police are calling a double homicide.

Shortly before 1 p.m., police were called to the Al-Madinah Traders store in the 3600 block of Germantown Avenue, which sells jewelry, perfume, books, and other items. Police said passersby had found the men dead inside the store.

Police did not release the names of the victims, but described one as a man in his 40s who had been shot two times in the face, and the other as a man shot once in the head. His age was not given. Both were pronounced dead on the scene by medics.

As of Thursday evening, police had made no arrests and had not recovered weapons, they said.

The article author continued to note that the number of homicides was well above the same date in 2020, and that two other men had been murdered that morning, on in Kensington and one in the Wissinoming neighborhood.

So, that was four people sent early to their eternal rewards on Thursday, so I figured that I’d see 45 as the total when I checked the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crimes Statistics page this morning. I was wrong; it wasn’t 45, it was 46!

That’s compared to 35 slaughtered by January 28, 2020, a 31.4% increase.

As noted two days ago, the Editorial Board of the Inquirer blamed the Police Commissioner, the ironically named Danielle Outlaw, for the Police Department’s response to the #BlackLivesMatter protests. The Editorial Board thought that Miss Outlaw’s response was too harsh; I thought it too lenient.

But what the Editorial Board did not do was blame the huge jump in homicides on Commissioner Outlaw, or Mayor Jim Kenney, or District Attorney Larry Krasner, the three top law enforcement officials in Philadelphia.

People think of Chicago under its ridiculous Mayor, Lori Lightfoot, as the nation’s murder capital. In 2020, the Windy City saw 769 homicides, 270 more than Philadelphia. But Chicago has a population of 2,710,000, while Philly’s is 1,579,000. Crime rates are compared by rate per 100,000 population, and that leaves Chicago with a homicide rate of 28.38 per 100,000.

Philadelphia laughs and says, “We can beat that!”, checking in with a murder rate of 31.60 per 100,000.

As of January 25th, Chicago had 44 homicides, compared to Philly’s 37, but the disparity in population means that the City of Brotherly Love was far ahead.

New York City saw a huge rise in homicides as well, from 319 in 2019 to 462 last year, 44.8%, fewer than Chicago’s or Philadelphia’s, even though its population is several times that of the latter two cities.

Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York is on the fast track back to the Hell that Mayor Rudy Giuliani cleaned up, and even the liberal Michael Bloomberg didn’t trash. What New York and Chicago and Philadelphia all need is solid, conservative, no f(ornicating) nonsense mayors, district attorneys and police commissioners who will actually fight crime.

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The Editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer blame the puppet, not the puppet master!

Sometimes you just have to laugh at the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer. After years of rising homicide rates, they blame problems not on Mayor Jim Kenney, whom the Editors endorsed in his 2019 campaign, but on Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, the ‘social justice’ policewoman from the left coast, and a near-total puppet of the Mayor:

Danielle Outlaw’s failure should push Kenney to ask for her resignation — but she didn’t fail alone

by The Inquirer Editorial Board | opinion@inquirer.com | January 27, 2021 | 4:46 PM EST

A little over 100 days into her job as Police Commissioner, Danielle Outlaw faced a trial by fire when peaceful protests over the killing of George Floyd turned chaotic and destructive.

Of course, the #woke staffers of the Inquirer, the ones who forced the firing resignation of Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski, fully supported the #BlackLivesMatter protests of the Summer of Fire and Hate, and they would have complained about any police efforts to rein in the Mostly Peaceful Protests™.

It was a trial demanding leadership and preparation that she failed miserably. But this failure is not hers alone. It was compounded by a failure of leadership of Mayor Jim Kenney and other city officials, including Managing Director Brian Abernathy who has since resigned.

These failures are detailed in an investigation released Wednesday by City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart, conducted by Ballard Spahr, At Risk International, Inc., and input from a Community Advisory Council.

The report detailed the city’s failure to anticipate or prepare for the protests here despite their presence across the country, a failure to create a plan for handling protests despite the existence of a blueprint for just such events, and a series of disastrous and troubling decisions – from declining to activate an Emergency Operations Center to using tools and weapons on crowds and neighborhoods that created chaos instead of control.

At the height of protests about police brutality and violence, Philadelphia police responded with often militaristic force, using tear gas, rubber bullets and force, including in a neighborhood where children and innocent bystanders were present. The city’s failure to anticipate or plan meant there were not enough police or vehicles to stop or contain looting. The report also details the troubling inconsistencies between police response to Black Lives Matter protesters and their friendlier interactions with white vigilantes wielding baseball bats and racial slurs.

The only problem is that the Philadelphia Police Department didn’t use enough force!

There are no “troubling inconsistencies between police response to Black Lives Matter protesters and their friendlier interactions with white vigilantes wielding baseball bats and racial slurs” because the #BlackLivesMatter protesters were vandalistic and violent, and others were not.

Commissioner Outlaw was a ridiculous hire in the first place, coming from the Left Coast, and more concerned about ‘diversity’ than actually fighting crime. But the truth is simple: she was a ‘social justice’ hire of a ‘social justice’ mayor, and both his puppet and his tool.

What the City of Brotherly Love needs is something the Editorial Board of the Inquirer would never, ever accept: the complete replacement of every liberal Democrat officeholder with hardline, conservative Republicans. The Editors would be aghast, but really, could they do any worse?

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In Killadelphia, the beat goes on!

Just twenty-one days into the year, it’s a little bit early to tell. Checking the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page has been all over the board. Some days, 2021 has been behind the running total of homicides from 2020’s disastrous year, and some days ahead.

Philadelphia finished Inauguration Day with 32 homicides, 3 ahead of the same date in 2020, for a rate of 1.60 per day. That’s slightly higher than how Philly finished up in December, 1.45 per day.

I wrote earlier that Philadelphia had 502 homicides for 2020, but the Police Department revised its figures, coming up with a total of 499 for the year. What, did three people recover from death or something?

Is the City of Brotherly Love getting ready to leave 2020’s 499, and 1990’s 500 killings in the dust? It’s a little bit early to make a statement like that, with just twenty days gone and 345 days remaining in the year. But one thing is certain: Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw have failed, failed, failed in their jobs.

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Why should Philadelphia spend money keeping drug addicts alive?

I’m enough of an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to ask: why do we want to keep junkies alive?

They have to steal from innocent people to support their habits, they cannot keep jobs to support themselves, and are nothing but a burden on society. And, heaven forfend! they probably don’t even wear their facemasks properly! Trying to get them off of drugs, so that they can become responsible members of society might make sense, but Safehouse simply enables them to keep shooting up.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

A federal appeals court rejects plans for a supervised injection site in Philly

by Jeremy Roebuck and Aubrey Whelan | Updated: January 12, 2021 | 5:36 PM EST

In a setback to advocates who had hoped to open the nation’s first supervised injection site in Philadelphia, a federal appellate court ruled Tuesday that such a facility would violate a law known as the “crack house” statute and open its operators to potential prosecution.

In a 2-1 decision, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit lauded the goals behind Safehouse — the nonprofit that, in an attempt to stem the city’s tide of opioid-related deaths, has proposed the site to provide medical supervision to people using drugs.

But, Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote for the majority, “Safehouse’s benevolent motive makes no difference.”

“Congress has made it a crime to open a property to others to use drugs,” he added. “And that is what Safehouse will do.”

There’s more at the original, and the Usual Suspects in Philadelphia have supported Safehouse: Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner and former Mayor, and Pennsylvania Governor, Ed Rendell, all Democrats.

United States Attorney William McSwain, who brought the suit for the Department of Justice and argued the case himself in court, an unusual move, was pleased with the victory, so if he doesn’t resign by January 20th, will probably be fired by Joe Biden. That would hardly be unprecedented: President Clinton fired all 93 US Attorneys in one day, and President Trump, after a couple months delay, told the 46 remaining Obama Administration appointees to tender their resignations. Given that Mr McSwain was a strong critic of Mr Krasner, the George Soros-financed District Attorney will want him gone, gone, gone!

As a lower-case “l” libertarian, but not a Libertarian, I should be perfectly happy with recreational pharmaceuticals being legal. And if the only damage that drug abusers did was to themselves, it would be fine with me.

But that’s not the case: drug abusers damage, and financially burden, society in a major way. Junkies can’t hold jobs, and thus burden our welfare rolls. Junkies can’t support their habits, and wind up stealing from innocent people to support their habits. And, most importantly, drug addicts usually wind up being, at some points, responsible for children.

My wife was a pediatric nurse, and she has told me that she has never seen a case of child abuse — and they had to be pretty bad, hospitalization bad, before she saw them — in which drugs or alcohol, usually drugs and alcohol, were not involved. Here in eastern Kentucky, drugs are a scourge, and my nephew, formerly an Emergency Medical Technician, has told me that at least half of the ambulance calls on which he went were drug related. He worked in Lee and Owsley counties; Beattyville, which CNN called the poorest white town in America, is wracked with poverty and drug abuse:

Rugged explorer Daniel Boone made this part of Kentucky famous in the late 1700s around the time of the Revolutionary War. The rolling hills and forests are still as picturesque as when Boone found them. Rock climbers come from all over the world to tackle the area’s peaks and natural bridges.

But today it’s also easy to come by heroin and cocaine in Kentucky’s hills. Almost every family CNNMoney met in Beattyville had been impacted by drugs.

(Barbara) Puckett and her husband are currently raising a great niece and nephew because their biological parents are drug addicts. The situation is so common in Beattyville that the local elementary school runs a support group for grandparents raising grandkids.

(Chuck Caudhill, the general manager of the local paper, The Beattyville Enterprise) estimates that 40% of kids in the area don’t live with their birth parents because of drugs.

“We need help. Eastern Kentucky is beautiful, but it needs help,” says Patricia “Trish” Cole. Her son died of an overdose when he was 27. Pictures of him are all around her living room. She’s normally quick to smile, but she gets choked up when his named is mentioned. She has a tattoo on her chest that reads: “Can’t keep your arms around a memory.”

Cole saves lives as an EMT for the local ambulance company. She estimates 80% of the ambulance runs she makes now are for drug-related issues. The day after her son died, she had to go get a young man who overdosed out of a closet.

The slow death of the coal industry has strangled many counties in eastern Kentucky, and drugs are destroying the rest. It’s hard to hold that recreational pharmaceuticals ought to be legalized when they are destroying our society around them. Kentucky has the nation’s highest rate of grandparents or other relatives raising children— with 9 percent of kids being raised by a relative compared with the national rate of 4 percent, according to Kentucky Youth Advocates.

Eastern Kentucky ought to be a dream location for industry: a beautiful landscape plus a population with, let’s be honest here, fewer options, ought to leave a potential employer with a more stable workforce, with less employee turnover. But with illegal drugs being rampant, what decent employer would want to come here?

This is what drugs have done to Kentucky! So why, I have to ask, should Philadelphia spend money keeping drug addicts alive?

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Killadelphia reaches the milestone I didn't think they'd make it, but they did: 502 homicides in 2020.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s a pretty sad award.

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

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

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

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

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

391 + 94 = 485.

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

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

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

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

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Congratulations to Philadelphia! 2020 has won the silver medal!

In 1989, the City of Brotherly Love set a new record for homicides, at 489 souls. The record didn’t last long, as 505 people gave up the ghost in Philadelphia’s streets the following year, but, after that, the number of murders started declining, and 1989 still holds the silver medal.

Well, not anymore: as of 11:59 PM on Sunday, December 27th, Philadelphia tied that 489 number, with four days left to go in 2020. With a current average of 1.3508 homicides per day, Philly ought to easily move past that number, and end up with 494 or 495 homicides. Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia), District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia) and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw ought to be really proud of the jobs that they have done.

Really, it wasn’t easy for them. When Mayor Michael Nutter (D-Philadelphia) and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey retired in first week of January, 2016, they left a city which saw 280 homicides in their last year. The year before Messrs Nutter and Ramsey took office, 2007, Philly had suffered through 391 killings. In their first year in office, the number of homicides dropped by 60, to 331.

In 2007, the homicide rate was 27.3 per 100,000 population. By 2013, it was down to 15.9. A bad spike in 2015, their last year in office, saw the murder rate jump to 17.9, as there were 280 killings that year, up from 248 the previous year.

In 2017, it jumped to 21.1, and then to 22.2 in 2018 and 2019. All of the progress under Messrs Nutter and Ramsey had been undone.

Now, at the end of 2020, projecting 494 homicides, and with the city’s population last guesstimated at 1.556 million, the homicide rate figures out to 31.75 per 100.000. Even if the last four days of the year pass with no more killings, the rate works out to 31.43. Either would be the highest number since 1997. Mr Krasner has accomplished what he set out to do, with his cockamamie social justice version of law enforcement.

Everyone hears about Chicago, where murders have skyrocketed under laughable Mayor Lori Lightfoot. According to The Chicago Tribune’s Tracking Chicago Homicides page, last updated following Sunday, December 20, 2020, the Windy City had seen 753 murders. That’s a lot of blood running into the gutters. But with a population of 2.706 million, the homicide rate there is 27.83, pending, of course, the final blood tally for the year. That’s a lot lower than Philadelphia’s! If Philly had Chicago’s murder rate, there’d be about 60 fewer people murdered in the streets. That’s how bad Philadelphia has become.
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Cross-posted on RedState.