Albert Einstein supposedly said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Perhaps relying on a misunderstanding of Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the progressive left can hold that if they just keep doing the same thing — albeit spending more of Other People’s Money while doing so — their oh-so-noble policies will work where they haven’t worked before. The progressive left are complaining that more conservative urban policies won’t work, but they are being implemented because liberal and progressive policies didn’t work! Continue reading
Tag Archives: #Kensington
Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right. "Nice guy" policies have led to disaster in Philly.
Philadelphia Inquirer website main page, March 25, 2024.
This site has previously noted the open-air drug market in the Kensington section of Philadelphia; with published photos of junkies shooting up right on the street in front of SEPTA’s Allegheny Avenue train station, it’s pretty difficult not to notice. The government of Mexico has actually used photos of Kensington in ads to discourage drug use in Mexico! And Philly’s George Soros-sponsored, police-hating, and softer-than-Charmin-on-crime District Attorney Larry Krasner has actually filed suit to stop efforts to fight crime in Kensington and on SEPTA.
But, rather than far-left Helen Gym Flaherty, whom hard-leftists Will Bunch, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, The American Prospect, have supported, and only slightly-less-leftist Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff, whom The Philadelphia Inquirer endorsed, the actual voters in the City of Brotherly Love voted for the tougher-on-crime Cherelle Parker Mullins[1]None of the female candidates for Mayor in Philadelphia had shown enough respect to their husbands to have taken their husbands’ names, though they certainly appreciated their husbands’ … Continue reading. And thus the Inky is having to take note of Mrs Mullins efforts to do one of the promises on which she campaigned: clean up Kensington! Continue reading
References
| ↑1 | None of the female candidates for Mayor in Philadelphia had shown enough respect to their husbands to have taken their husbands’ names, though they certainly appreciated their husbands’ money, and most of the articles cited do the same thing; The First Street Journal does not show their husbands the same disrespect, though we do not change the direct quotes of others. |
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Couldn’t we build something like this in Kensington?
In the two-part episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine entitled Past Tense, Part 1 and Part 2, a transporter accident lands Commander Benjamin Sisko, Dr Julian Bashir, and Lt Commander Jadzia Dax in San Francisco, in the year 2024. From Wikipedia:
Sisko and Bashir are found by a pair of police officers, who believe them to be vagrants and warn them to get off the streets. They are escorted to a “Sanctuary District”, a walled-off ghetto that is used to contain the poor, the sick, the mentally disabled, and anyone else who cannot support themselves.
Well, who would have thought that it would be so prescient!
Liberal City Builds Walls To Protect Elite, Clears Out Homeless
by Andrew Sanders | Tuesday, November 14, 2023 Continue reading
Killadelphia: The area “was littered with shell casings.”
If bullets fly in Kensington, is it really news?
700 block of East Madison Street. Photo via Google Maps, August 2019. Click to enlarge.
Kensington and Independence Mall-area shootings leave two dead, three wounded
The Kensington shootings occurred in an area long burdened by gun violence.
by Anthony R Wood | Saturday, August 26, 2023 | 11:07 PM EDT
A 39-year-old man was shot to death and two others were critically wounded late Saturday afternoon in a triple shooting in Kensington, police said.Several hours later, police said, a double shooting occurred in the Independence Mall area, leaving one man dead and another wounded.
The first shooting occurred just before 5 p.m. in the 700 block of East Madison Street, not far from the intersection of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, in an area that has been more burdened by gun violence than any other in the city.
The 700 block of East Madison is a racially-integrated, semi-dilapidated rowhouse street, with several homes in which the owners have literally put themselves in jail, adding security bars to keep people off of their front porches. Extremely narrow, cars are shown parked entirely on the sidewalk on the left-hand side of the street, as the one-way traffic flows, and partially on the sidewalk on the right-hand side.
A check of the real estate site Zillow shows that 711 East Madison is for sale, for a list price of $59,900, a 750 ft² home built in 1920, and being sold “as is.” No photos of the inside are available. Zillow’s map shows virtually every home in the neighborhood that is listed for sale is listed for under six digits. Continue reading
Ho hum! Another mass shooting in Philadelphia It was just Kensington, so who really cares?
It was August 17, 2020, when The Philadelphia Inquirer published the article “Even the pandemic doesn’t slow down Philadelphia’s drug markets: It’s unclear why COVID-19 hasn’t had much effect on Philadelphia’s drug market. But that’s not to say the drug supply here is or was predictable, even before the pandemic.” The article included a photo of what appears to be a young male shooting up — his back is to the camera — out in public, in broad daylight, on Kensington Avenue, right by the SEPTA train station. The street, one of Philly’s thoroughfares, is shown as being littered with trash. I noted that I was waiting for news that Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw organized a major sweep to clear the area, at least temporarily, of the drug dealers and junkies infesting the area, but I never heard of one.
After shooting in Kensington, some accuse city leaders of not doing enough to improve area’s conditions
Five people were critically wounded in an attack one political leader called the latest example of Philadelphia’s failure to address the depths of Kensington’s public health catastrophes.
by Ellie Rushing | Sunday, November 6, 2022
A shooting of nine people overnight in Kensington, a section of Philadelphia beset by gun violence and an open-air drug market, renewed community leaders’ criticisms of city leadership and heightened calls for a plan to address the neighborhood’s compounding crises.
The shooting Saturday near the intersection of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, ground zero for the city’s opioid epidemic, left all of the victims seriously wounded after police said at least three people jumped out of a car and fired more than 40 shots into a crowd shortly before 10:45 p.m. Eight men and one woman, ranging in age from 23 to 40, were struck and taken to Temple University Hospital.
Four of the men remained in critical condition as of Sunday evening, police said.
No arrests have been made and no weapons were recovered. Additional details were scarce, including what may have motivated the shooting.
Screen capture from The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 19, 2022.
I would say that the motivation is obvious: one gang clique of young men[1]We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes … Continue reading put out a hit on another clique of young men, and the police simply need to figure out which clique was targeted and which clique was responsible. It’s quite possible that not all of the people wounded were among the specifically targeted, and that even none of the wounded were among the targeted clique; these fine but misunderstood young gentlemen apparently accept that there will be some collateral damage as they set out on their missions.[2]Will Bunch, the Inquirer’s most off-the-wall leftist columnist, wrote: These twin blows came at the very end of a brutal autumn in which the right’s unified messaging — in so many ways the … Continue reading
Actually, I feel kind of sorry for Inquirer reporter Ellie Rushing. Her byline is on so many of the crime stories in the newspaper that it’s got to be at least a little bit depressing!
As we have previously noted, the Philadelphia Police Department believe that three of the teenaged suspects in the Roxborough High School shooting murdered another young man the previous day.
There is no neighborhood as burdened by shootings as Kensington, a section of the city plagued by an open-air drug market and high rates of deep poverty. Along the Kensington-Allegheny corridor, there are sprawling homeless encampments, and people in addiction openly use drugs.
Law enforcement officials have said dealers sell heroin, crack, and other drugs on more than 80 blocks in the neighborhood.
If the police know of these drug sale areas, why aren’t they sweeping through and arresting the dealers? Oh, that’s right:
Law enforcement officials say they cannot arrest their way out of the crises there.
They could at least try, since the city is apparently not doing anything else to solve the problems.
Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw tweeted:
…deserve nothing less. The women and men of @PPD24Dist, under the command of Cpt. Pedro Rosario, are passionate about their work. I thank them… pic.twitter.com/Wt3XqHiPu4
— Danielle M. Outlaw (@PPDCommish) November 6, 2022
In other words, the Commissioner knows that the people of that neighborhood, and the city in general, do not believe that the Philadelphia Police Department really care about Kensington. Given that the Inquirer can report that drugs are being sold openly on “more than 80 blocks” there, and the police aren’t doing anything about it, what other impression would people have?
Of course, if the police did make a bunch of drug busts, District Attorney would refuse to prosecute the arrested seriously.
Miss Rushing wrote about the frustrations of Philly’s worst, most crime-ridden neighborhood, without showing any understanding about her subject. Kensington is the way it is not because of poverty, but because of the culture in that area, a culture which says that it’s perfectly fine to go out and blast away at your perceived enemies. Eastern Kentucky is just as poor, if not poorer, than Kensington, but while there is certainly crime here, and Kentucky’s firearms law are less restrictive than Pennsylvania’s, we don’t have the mass shootings or rampant killings seen in the City of Brotherly Love.
Miss Rushing was one of the Inquirer writers who told us that there were no gangs in Philadelphia, just those “cliques of young men”, and if she didn’t write those specific words herself, her name is still on it, demonstrating for us that those writers, Jessica Griffin, Ximena Conde, and Chris Palmer along with Miss Rushing, are simply in denial of what is going on in their fair city.
That, or they actually do know the truth, but are unwilling, or unable due to their editors’ dictates, to actually say it out loud.
The “city leaders” from Miss Rushing’s headlines really can’t do much to “improve (Kensington’s) conditions” because the people there are responsible for them. Yes, many of them are poor, but that doesn’t mean that they have to use drugs or tolerate drug use among others. The area’s open-air drug markets exist because the residents of Kensington allow them to exist. The filthy homeless camps and junkies strung out and laying wasted in the middle of the sidewalks exist because the neighborhood allow them to exist. The area is full of crime because the people who know who committed the crimes won’t tell the police, so crime continues, and gets worse, because there are few consequences.
Kensington’s consequences are the fault of Kensington’s people. The “city leaders” cannot change that; only the people themselves, hopefully encouraged by church pastors, block captains, and the mothers in the area concerned about their children, can change things.
References
| ↑1 | We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups“ |
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| ↑2 | Will Bunch, the Inquirer’s most off-the-wall leftist columnist, wrote:
With 449 homicides in Philly so far this year, on a pace for 529 for the year, and total shootings at a higher pace this year than last. I’m not sure how “cherry-picked” those crime statistics are. The Inky’s writers seem to be living in denial. |