Tag Archives: #JimKenney

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Things are not just bad in Philadelphia, things are getting worse

According to the Philadelphia Police Department, there have been 463 homicides as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, December 6, 2020. That’s 1.358 per day. With 25 days remaining in the year, if the average holds, the city can expect another 40 bodies in the streets by the end of the year. 463 + 40 = 503.

The all time record is 505 homicides, set in 1990. 1989 stands in second place, with 489, and now the City of Brotherly Love has just exceeded 1988’s previous third place finish of 460.

But there’s more. I noted, on October 22nd, just a month and a half ago:

The Current Crime Statistics released by the Philadelphia Police Department note that, as of 11:59 PM EDT on October 21st, 391 souls had been sent to their eternal rewards. That isn’t the record, of course, but 2007 is the base year on the Current Crime Statistics website, and that was the number of people killed that year in Philly. This year has now matched that total . . . with 71 days left in the year.

The math is 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.

That would not be a new record; 1990 holds that dubious honor with 505, killings, and 1989 comes in second with 489, but 485 would be solidly in third place!

Think about that: in just 46 days, Philly has crept up so that the projected homicide totals have increased by eighteen dead bodies; in just 46 days, 72 corpses have littered the city’s streets . . . and that’s a rate of 1.565 per day. As the weather has turned cooler, a time when homicides are expected to decrease, the killing rate has increased in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia.

On October 22nd, I noted that Philly was headed for a solid third place finish. As recently as August 18th, the projected numbers were for ‘just’ 439 homicides.

Now, it’ll take just a few ‘extra’ murders, and Philadelphia could break the all time record. Go, team, go! You can do it, Philly, you can do it!

I have previously noted that George Soros’ supported District Attorney Larry Krasner has done what he wanted to do. But Mayor Jim Kenney and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw deserve a lot of credit, too. The hapless Commissioner Outlaw has at least criticized Mr Krasner’s soft-on-crime prosecutions, but, coming from Oakland, California and later Portland, Oregon, she, too, is infused with at least some of the left coast attitude toward crime; if she hadn’t been, Mayor Kenney would never have appointed her in the first place.

This is the problem with liberalism! This is the problem with the boneheadedly stupid Social Justice Warriors! In their attempts to Do Good, that are making things worse, because their ideas are so wrongheaded, so out of touch with reality.

Crime exists because people tolerate its existence, and the left, the oh-so-understanding-and-tolerant left, always willing to show sympathy to those less fortunate, are more tolerant of crime than normal people.[1]Yes, I deliberately defined leftists as outside of normal. That is the culture which allowed a city like Portland to tolerate the Mostly Peaceful Protests™ of last summer, and which excuses crime because, well, just because the criminals have had life so tough.

Rudy Giuliani showed the way. He didn’t tolerate crime, and when he was mayor of New York City, he had the police arrest for and the district attorneys prosecute the small, petty crimes that people like Larry Krasner excuse and ignore and forgive. Mr Giuliani showed the punks what the inside of the penitentiary was like before they became more hardened criminals, a lesson lost on Mr Krasner.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

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↑1 Yes, I deliberately defined leftists as outside of normal.
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Philly starts December off with a bang!

I had planned on doing an article on Philadelphia’s prodigious murder rate yesterday, but got involved with other things. I did, however, tweet about it.

So, 454 homicides through the end of November. I checked my go-to site for those statistics, and shazamm! Philly banged off three more corpses on the first day of December.

The math is simple: 457 homicides in 336 days yields 1.36 killings per day. With 30 more days, including today, left in the year, that works out to a projected 40.8 more dead bodies on the streets. 41 + 457 = 498!

In 1990, the City of Brotherly Love saw 505 homicides, up from 489 the previous year, and 460 in 1988. With 457 homicides so far this year, 2020 is already in 4th place, with 1988’s number to be surpassed in just a few days.

The crime rate is supposed to decrease as the year wanes, and colder weather keeps more people inside. But as recently as October 22nd, we noted that the homicide rate was 1.325 per day, and the projected total would be 485 for the year. Now the average has increased to 1.360 dead per day, which might not seem like much, but from October 21st through December 1st, a period of 41 days, 66 people bled to death in the streets, and that’s 1.61 per day. When the weather turned cooler, the homicide rate went up, not down. If the City of Brotherly Love keeps up with 1.61 per day, it could actually tie the 1990 record of 505, though maybe there’d be an * by the number since, being a leap year, 2020 has an extra day in which to kill people.

Of course, ” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>The Philadelphia Inquirer, a proud newspaper from its inception in 1829, and Pennsylvania’s newspaper of record, hasn’t even noticed the increased murder rate this fall. I searched the Inquirer’s website, and while there was a story which noted that shootings were up 53% from last year, I found nothing which indicated that the editors of the newspaper had noticed that the already high murder rate had ticked up a bit. They’ve been great on covering the election and its aftermath, and COVID-19, but when it comes to the daily killings in the city, well, that just isn’t news anymore.

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The shutdowns are about more than just missing some Christmas presents

While I have noted the complaints of Lexington restaurateurs in response to Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) three-week indoor dining ban, Kentucky isn’t the only place in which government’s over-zealous response to COVID-19 is destroying businesses and throwing people out of work. Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) has done even worse. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Six-week shutdown could mean a ‘year without Christmas’ for Philly businesses

by Sam Wood and Katie Park | November 18, 2020

Beleaguered business owners and city residents, who had reconfigured their work lives to survive the pandemic’s first wave, latched onto a now-ubiquitous sentiment on Tuesday: Hang on. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

The City of Philadelphia imposed new business restrictions on Monday that will go into effect at the end of the week. Sectors of the local economy will be required to shut down or severely curtail operations until at least Jan. 1.

Until New years Day? Even Governor Beshear only ordered closure for three weeks, at which point he could, conceivably, reissue the restrictions, while Mr Kenney decided he’d just destroy the rest of the year.

“For millions of people, this could be the year without a Christmas,” said Stephen Mullin, principal at Econsult Solutions and a former city director of commerce during the Rendell administration. “We’ll see unemployment bouncing up significantly again.”

The poor will be hit disproportionately as minimum wage jobs in retail, hospitality, and restaurants disappear, he predicted. The next six weeks will be tougher than in the spring and will probably endure into the new year. And businesses are pushing back and taking their complaints directly to City Hall.

With a salary of $218,000, Mr Kenney isn’t worried that COVID-19 shutdowns will put him in the poorhouse; that’s reserved for the working class people. He’s been in city government for most of his adult life, spending 23 years as a city councilman before being elected mayor; government is really the only thing he knows. Being on the wrong side of government edicts and regulations? That’s something he does not know.

The shutdown order comes at a critical time. It’s only with the holiday shopping season that many retailers begin to generate their best sales of the year. The order also puts a kibosh on Christmas parties and the peak of tourism in Philadelphia.

Translation: Jeff Bezos will get even richer, as more and more people will be shopping online, while ‘brick-and-mortar’ stores will suffer, many completely failing, and their employees will be laid off from jobs which will never return.[1]Restaurants are frequent business failures, which are followed by subsequent restaurant start-ups. But in the current economic and regulatory climate, the next wave of restaurant start ups will be … Continue reading Property owners will not be paid the rent they are due, which means that some property maintenance will not get done.

There’s a lot more at the original, including noting that Center City shops have lost a tremendous amount of business, because telecommuting has dramatically reduced the number of office workers. Office occupancy, the story stated, is down 85% from prior to the outbreak.

But this personal story is the one which really needs to be quoted:

Fran Cassidy, general manager of the Sporting Club at the Bellevue, was furious at the shutdown orders, which he considers unnecessarily draconian.

Business at the luxury fitness center had already crashed to 50% of its pre-pandemic level, Cassidy said. Of his 4,200 members, just 2,000 had returned. Though he believes there “hasn’t been a single case of COVID-19 among his clients,” he will have to issue pink slips to the Sporting Club’s entire staff.

“They’re devastated. How can you not be? It’s the holiday season. We had to tell 90 employees they’d be laid off,” Cassidy said. “In eight or nine days, it’ll be Thanksgiving. And that’s the news we had to deliver.”

Perhaps ninety employees from one business makes more of an impact than twenty million people on unemployment. Twenty million is a number that starts to fall outside of people’s consciousness, but ninety, that’s 45 to 50 homes. Where I lived in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, I can see that as the entire street from my former house to the beginning of the street. That’s a number of houses that I could see, every day, on my way home from work. That’s a number that I can visualize, a number of houses I could see and recognize, a number of houses in which I knew or at least recognized people.

The street on which my family lived in Mt Sterling, when I was growing up? There are fewer than fifty houses on the entire street.

And that’s a number of houses that I could see dark, as they had to conserve electricity,[2]Many states have banned utility shutoffs for non-payment due to the economic crisis, but eventually that will end, and eventually people will have to repay their back bills. that’s a number of houses I could see having potatoes and beans for supper one night, and beans and potatoes the next, because the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), what used to be called Food Stamps, doesn’t really feed a family all that well.

What happens when the hot water heater fails? A no-eviction order means that the tenants can’t be put out on the street, but can a landlord who has not been receiving his rent be forced to repair or replace it if he has no money? A no-foreclosure order might mean that a family can’t be evicted if they haven’t been able to pay their mortgage, but if they have lost their jobs, can they afford a new hot water heater? A quick look at Lowe’s website showed it’s least expensive hot water heater cost $319.00.

In Pennsylvania, if your automobile insurance lapses, the insurance company is required, by law, to report it to the state, and your license plates are immediately suspended for a minimum of ninety days, unless you can present proof that you kept your insurance by contracting with another company before the old insurance lapsed. If you have an insurance payment of $300 due, and you don’t have it, too bad, so sad, must suck to be you, but your plates are suspended. Since the Commonwealth stopped issuing license plate stickers and went to automatic scanners in patrol cars, the police will see you if you are driving with expired or suspended plates.

Very few of the elites, and big city mayors and state governors are most certainly among the elites, really understand what it is like to be poor, what it is like to live paycheck-to-paycheck, and how even a single setback can throw people into a deep hole. The Federal reserve reported, in 2019:

  • If faced with an unexpected expense of $400, 61 percent of adults say they would cover it with cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement — a modest improvement from the prior year. Similar to the prior year, 27 percent would borrow or sell something to pay for the expense, and 12 percent would not be able to cover the expense at all.
  • Seventeen percent of adults are not able to pay all of their current month’s bills in full. Another 12 percent of adults would be unable to pay their current month’s bills if they also had an unexpected $400 expense that they had to pay

Perhaps the math are too complicated for the elites, but $400 is a full week’s gross pay for someone earning $10.00 an hour, but Mayor Kenney is throwing exactly those people out of work not for a week, but for six weeks. Doing the more complicated math, adding in the 7.65% Social Security and Medicare withholding, Pennsylvania’s 3.07% state income tax withholding, and Philly’s 3.8712% wage tax for city residents, a person needs to be paid $11.53 per hour to take home $400 for a forty hour week.

COVID-19 is serious, and in some cases — not many — can be fatal. But poverty is serious, and unemployment can be fatal in itself. For the people who needn’t fear the economic consequences of shutdown orders themselves, it’s quite easy to say that these shutdowns are necessary, and something through which we just have to fight. But for the people who do bear the consequences of the shutdowns, it’s more than just losing Thanksgiving dinner due to gathering restriction orders, more than no presents under the Christmas tree, it’s a big government boot stomping into a life already lived at the hard edge of survival.
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Thanks to Robert Stacy McCain for the link!
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Cross-posted on RedState.

References

References
↑1 Restaurants are frequent business failures, which are followed by subsequent restaurant start-ups. But in the current economic and regulatory climate, the next wave of restaurant start ups will be long delayed.
↑2 Many states have banned utility shutoffs for non-payment due to the economic crisis, but eventually that will end, and eventually people will have to repay their back bills.
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What Are Mayor Jim Kenney and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw Doing About Open Air Drug Markets in Philly?

According to Wikipedia, the Philadelphia Badlands

 is a section of North Philadelphia and Lower Northeast Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, that is known for an abundance of open-air recreational drug markets and drug-related violence. It has amorphous and somewhat disputed boundaries, but is generally agreed to include the 25th police district.

Usually, it is widely understood to be an area between Kensington Avenue to the east and Broad Street to the west, and between Hunting Park Avenue to the north and York Street to the south, mostly coinciding with the neighborhoods of Fairhill, Glenwood, Hunting Park, Harrowgate, Stanton, North Central, West Kensington, Hartranft, and Kensington.

The term “The Badlands” was popularized in part by the novel Third and Indiana by then Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Steve Lopez. The neighborhood also was featured in several episodes of ABC’s Nightline. The intersection of 3rd Street and Indiana Avenue was listed number two in a 2007 list of the city’s top ten drug corners according to an article by Philadelphia Weekly reporter Steve Volk.

The term Badlands was first used by Lt. John Gallo, who headed the East Division Narcotics Task Force. Its use spread, with many people attempting to take credit for the moniker. It was Gallo’s work along with ASAC Billy Retton that worked about a dozen long-term investigations in the 25th and 26th Police Districts that preceded “Operation Sunrise”. Ted Koppel, Geraldo Rivera, 20/20 and 48 Hours all rode with Gallo at one time or another, and it was during this time that Gallo was able to make the name stick.

I wrote yesterday about the open-air drug market publicized by The Philadelphia Inquirer. I had thought that maybe, just maybe, the publicity would push Commissioner Danielle Outlaw and the Philadelphia Police to raid the place, to arrest the drug dealers — and hopefully the addicts as well, but I really didn’t expect that — and seize the illegal drugs and guns found there.

So, at 11:40 AM EDT this morning, I did Google searches for police raid drug market and police raid drug market Philadelphia. I found a few stories about law enforcement raids in Missouri and even incompetent Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago:

Feds bust open-air drug market in Humboldt Park, charging 18

Undercover agents allegedly made about 80 purchases from the market during a year-long investigation dubbed “Operation Monticello’s Revenge.”

By David Struett @dstru312 | July 20, 2020 | 5:58 PM CDT

The feds have charged 18 men who allegedly worked at an open-air drug market in Humboldt Park, where undercover agents allegedly made about 80 purchases during a year-long investigation dubbed “Operation Monticello’s Revenge.”

Most of the men were arrested last week on charges of federal drug conspiracy in connection to the drug market in the 1000 block of North Monticello Avenue, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago announced Monday.

According to a criminal complaint, Sam Howard and Kelvin Franklin worked as street-level managers of the market, coordinating the sale of fentanyl-laced heroin, and personally sold drugs to undercover officers more than a dozen times each.

Oops! Sorry, it was federal agents, not the Chicago Police who did that; no credit goes to Mayor Lightfoot.

In Philly? I found this story about a police raid on drug markets . . . last February. Then there was another raid in April:

Police Arrest 60 Buyers/Dealers in Massive Drug Sweep in Philadelphia; Release Mugshots and Names

by: iradioal | started: 04/04/15 8:30 am | updated: 04/04/15 8:30 am

Philadelphia Police have arrested 60 people and seized two dozen vehicles in a massive drug sweep in Fairhill on Thursday. The department’s east division set up in multiple locations in the 25th district near the intersections of Waterloo and West Cambria streets, North Front and West Cambria streets, North Swanson and East Somerset streets, Rosehill and East Cambria streets, and East Tusculum and East Somerset streets. Those arrested ranged in age from 17 to 67. Forty were alleged buyers and twenty were alleged sellers. Out of those arrested about 35% are from the suburbs who came to the neighborhood’s open air drug markets looking to buy or sell a variety of drugs including pills, heroin, crack cocaine and marijuana.

Philadelphia Police Insp. Melvin Singleton wants to close down the drug market and dissuade anyone from coming to the 25th district (which also includes North Philly, Feltonville, Fairhill, and Hunting Park). “If you think it’s a good idea to come to Philadelphia to buy drugs…if you think it’s a good idea to come to Philadelphia to sell drugs, you will be arrested. Your vehicle will be confiscated.” The police say these kind of arrest operations will continue around the city.

The area raided today was only blocks away from other drug hot beds in neighboring Kensington. Neighbors want to see the entire area cleaned up so that children can walk to school, people can feel safe on their own blocks, and the streets no longer are occupied by dealers selling and addicts getting high.

There was even a major raid just before last Christmas in the Fairhill and Kensington neighborhoods, including Allegheny Avenue, mentioned in yesterday’s Inquirer article. But nothing yesterday.

The Philadelphia Badlands exist because the city government and law enforcement allow them to exist. Crime ridden neighborhoods exist because law enforcement doesn’t shut them down. Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg cleaned up New York City with a harsh attitude toward crime and the ‘broken windows’ policing philosophy, but Philadelphia never followed suit, and that’s why the Badlands exists. George Soros poured over a million dollars into getting an anti-police, anti-law enforcement District Attorney, Larry Krasner, elected, and that’s what Philadelphia got: a contracted, weakened Police Department and a soaring crime rate.

As of 11:59 PM EDT yesterday, 276 homicides were recorded in the City of Brotherly Love. That’s a 31% increase over the same day last year, more than the entire year’s murder totals in 2013 and 2014, and just one fewer than the entire year total for 2016.¹

In 230 days, Philadelphia has seen 276 homicides. That’s 1.2 murders per day. With 136 days remaining, if the average holds, that’s an additional 163 homicides, for a projected total of 439 people. There were 280 people murdered in 2015, Mayor Michael Nutter’s and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey’s last full year in office; if their regime could get the murder rate down, as it did, then the blame has to fall on Mayor Kenney, DA Krasner and Commissioner Outlaw.

Well, who knows? Perhaps Commissioner Outlaw is planning a big raid in the Badlands, now that the Inquirer has publicized the problems, and it’s just taking a few days to get the planning and organization done. Mayor Kenney might be very incensed, since the photos in the Inquirer showed the junkies not wearing facemasks!

But the drug raids of the past haven’t done anything; they got a few bad guys off the streets, recovered some drugs and cash and weapons, but all of that is back in place now. Philadelphia needs the law enforcement raids, yes, and a lot more funding for the Police Department, but what it really needs is a change of attitude among the city leadership, a no nonsense, zero tolerance attitude toward crime, toward all crime, and toward illegal drugs. Mayor Kenney was re-elected in 2019, so he still has 3½ years remaining.² He was just great at raising a ‘sugary drink tax,’ to take a bigger bite out of a Big Gulp, but on making Philly safer, not so much.

District Attorney Krasner was elected in 2017, meaning he won’t face the voters until 2021. Wikipedia noted of Mr Krasner:

In his first week in office, Mr Krasner fired 31 prosecutors from the District Attorney’s Office, including both junior and career supervisory staff. Up to one-third of the homicide prosecutors in the office were dismissed. Those fired represented nearly a 10% reduction in the number of Philadelphia assistant district attorneys.

In February 2018, Krasner announced that law enforcement would no longer pursue criminal charges against those caught with marijuana possession. That same month, Krasner instructed prosecutors to stop seeking cash bail for those accused of some misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. Krasner said that it was unfair to keep people in detention simply because they could not afford bail. He also announced that the DA’s office had filed a lawsuit against a number of pharmaceutical companies for their role in the city’s opioid epidemic. Krasner instructed prosecutors to stop charging sex workers who had fewer than three convictions.

In March 2018, it was reported that Krasner’s staffers were working on creating a sentence review unit–the first of its kind in the country–to review past cases and sentences, and seek re-sentencing in cases when individuals were given unduly harsh punishments. Also in March 2018, it was reported that Krasner instructed prosecutors to: “Offer shorter prison sentences in plea deals. Decline certain classes of criminal charges. And explain, on the record, why taxpayers should fork over thousands of dollars per year to incarcerate people.” He said,

Fiscal responsibility is a justice issue, and it is an urgent justice issue. A dollar spent on incarceration should be worth it. Otherwise, that dollar may be better spent on addiction treatment, on public education, on policing and on other types of activity that make us all safer.

The statistics seem to indicate that the esteemed Mr Krasner’s policies have not made Philadelphians safer. But that’s what happens when you put a social justice warrior in office.

You might ask: why do I care? After all, I don’t live in Philadelphia, and I moved out of Pennsylvania entirely three years ago. I don’t vote in Pennsylvania and I don’t pay taxes to the Keystone State.

But I worked in the Philadelphia area, traveling all around the city and the suburbs doing quality control work for a ready-mixed concrete company. Even after I left that position and started working further north, I picked up a copy of The Philadelphia Inquirer every day on my way to work.³ Philly is the city in which the Continental Congress met, in which our Declaration of Independence was signed. I want to see good for the city, but good isn’t happening there.

Now, Philadelphia is a warning, a warning for all who love our country, who want to see good for the United States, a warning as to what can and will happen if “progressives” and their cockamamie ideas achieve governing power. Philadelphia is an experiment in liberal and lax government, an experiment gone horribly wrong. I want to publicize what is happening there, to hopefully help others to step back, and see what a nightmare it has become.
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¹ – The statistics in yesterday’s report from the Philadelphia Police were 261 murders; since there wasn’t a 15-man massacre yesterday, I have to assume that a significant update in the statistics occurred in the postings.
² – This being his second consecutive term, Mr Kenney is term limited out.
³ – The men at the plant always complained, saying that I should have picked up the Allentown Morning Call instead, because it was closer to local news for them.
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