Tag Archives: #Killadelphia

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C’mon, Philly, you can do it! 500 homicides for 2020 is within range!

I spent a good deal of time yesterday on an article about the murder rate in Killadelphia Philadelphia, but it sort of petered out, because, well, just because. But the first three paragraphs were decent:

I will admit to having taken an almost perverse pleasure in checking the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, which tells us that, as of 11:59 PM on Tuesday, December 29th, 494 people had lost heir lives on Philadelphia’s mean streets. That was up two from the previous day, which had been up three from the end of the Christmas weekend.

And the Christmas weekend itself? The 24th through the 27th, four days, saw seven homicides.

On Friday, December 11th, Helen Ubiñas published an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer entitled “What do you know about the Philadelphians killed by guns this year? At least know their names.” As of the day prior to publication, there had been 466 killings in the city. In the 19 days since the publication of that article, 28 people were sent to their eternal rewards, 1.47 per day, which is a faster rate than the rate for the entire year, 1.36 per day. At a time celebrated in song as The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, times don’t seem quite so wonderful in the City of Brotherly Love.

With ‘only’ 494 homicides, and two days left in the year, the numbers were against the city reaching 500 for 2020, or so it seemed until I checked the Current Crime Statistics page this morning. And there it was: 498 homicides as of 11:59 PM EST on December 30th. Only two more people need to be slaughtered to make it happen!

OK, OK, I’m getting pretty morbid here. But in 2019, there had been 353 homicides through December 30th, but 356 for the entire year, meaning that Philadelphia saw three more people killed on New Year’s Eve last year. This year has seen a 41.08% increase over last year, and New Year’s Eve parties can be boisterous. And the weather forecast has temperatures in the low 40s to mid 30s through midnight, with relatively mild winds, and a low probability of precipitation, which shouldn’t keep the gang bangers holed up inside. Partiers will want their molly or blow to celebrate the New Year, and that’s always a chance to get people interacting with the sellers of recreational pharmaceuticals, and that is always a chance for gunfire.

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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.

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Killadelphia * Updated!

The Philadelphia Police Department only updates its Current Crime Stats page on normal business days, so the numbers are current as of 11:59 PM on Wednesday, December 23rd, where they show that 482 souls have gone to their eternal rewards due to homicide in the City of Brotherly Love in 2020. Uncharacteristically, The Philadelphia Inquirer has told us the tales since then. Yesterday, there was this:

Shootings leave two young men dead on Christmas Eve, police say

by Catherine Dunn | December 24, 2020 | 9:11 PM EST

A 20-year-old man who was shot multiple times died Thursday morning, Philadelphia police said.

The shooting occurred in the city’s Overbook section, on the 1800 block of Wynnewood Road, about 11:30 a.m., according to police. The man was taken to Lankenau Medical Center, and pronounced dead at 11:46 a.m.

In a statement, police said that a preliminary investigation indicated the victim was outside recording on social media when another man approached him, started a verbal altercation, and then shot the victim. When police arrived, authorities said, they found the victim lying in the grass, with multiple wounds to the torso. . . .

Hours later, at 1:42 p.m., a shooting in Philadelphia’s Kensington section led to the death of another young man.

The victim was about 20 years old, police said. He was shot five times on the 3200 block of G Street, according to information provided by police.

In neither case was an arrest made or weapons recovered. The Inquirer noted that no motive was determined in the first shooting.

Assuming those were the only two homicides on Christmas Eve, well 482 + 2 = 484.

Today is Christmas Day, a day of peace and love and brotherhood, right?

Philly police fatally shoot gunman accused of shooting into a crowd, killing teen and injuring another

by Diane Mastrull | December 25, 2020 | 2:51 PM EST

Christmas morning got off to a grim start in Philadelphia when a street fight escalated to one man firing a gun into a crowd, striking two teenagers in the neck before officers fatally shot him, according to police.

A 15-year-old male whose identity was not released was pronounced dead at Temple University Hospital, where a 17-year-old remained Friday in stable condition, police said.

The alleged gunman, 43, was shot in the torso and pronounced dead at Temple, police said. Police did not disclose how many times he was hit, just that two officers fired at him about 12:30 a.m. on the 3300 block of Emerald Street in the city’s Kensington section.

The officers had responded to a call about a disturbance or fight at that location. They were attempting to defuse the situation, police said, when additional family members of the feuding people came out of their houses and gathered on the sidewalk and in the middle of the street. Pushing and punching ensued between the original combatants, police said, when a man pulled a gun from his right rear waistband and fired it, hitting both teenagers.

The officers immediately pulled their service weapons and shot the “alleged” gunman, and I have to wonder if we’ll see protests such as the ones following the shooting of Walter Wallace, because the police killed a violent criminal.

484 + 2 = 486. Yes, the dead criminal counts as a homicide, even though it was obviously justified.

And Christmas Day isn’t even over yet.

Philly’s record is 505 killings in 1990, with 1989 coming in at second place with 489. With six more days remaining in 2020, the city has a very good chance to make second place.

By the time the Philadelphia Police Department updates its figures, on Monday, December 28th, the city might have already moved into second place!

The left will cry for more gun control, as though the guns somehow killed people by themselves. But the 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun used was reported stolen from Virginia. Shockingly, it appears — though I hate to judge a thing like that before all of the facts are in — that a criminal misguided gentleman broke the law in obtaining his weapon.

Updated: December 26, 2020 | 8:45 AM EST

Well, how about that? It turns out that the Christmas Day shooter, Jesus Perez, killed his own son, and wounded a nephew. From the updated version of the Inquirer story:

The family of the man, identified by CBS3 as Jesus Perez, denied that he was armed or would have fired at his own child. “He would obviously never do that,” his brother, Noris Cueva-Nova, said in an email. “He was a respectable, hard-working man who cared deeply for his family.”

The family denied that the guy, from whose warm, dead fingers the police pulled a 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun, was armed. I guess it was just imaginary bullets which killed the guy’s son.

Pretty soon we’ll hear that the police shot the two boys, then planted the stolen 9mm in Mr Perez’s hand.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

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Murder in Philadelphia: Is anybody there? Does anybody care?

Sometimes an article which would deserve a laughing out loud derision is about a subject which is in no way humorous. On Friday, December 11, 2020, Helen Ubiñas published an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer entitled “What do you know about the Philadelphians killed by guns this year? At least know their names.”

The last time we published the names of those lost to gun violence, in early July, nearly 200 people had been fatally shot in the city.

Just weeks before the end of 2020, that number doubled. More than 400 people gunned down.

By the time you read this, there will only be more.

Even in a “normal” year, most of their stories would never be told.

At best they’d be reduced to a handful of lines in a media alert:

“A 21-year-old Black male was shot one time in the head. He was transported to Temple University Hospital and was pronounced at 8:12 p.m. The scene is being held, no weapon recovered and no arrest.”

That’s it. An entire life ending in a paragraph that may never make the daily newspaper.

The truth is simple: Murders of young black men in Phila-delphia are simply no longer news.

Of course, Miss Ubiñas followed the Inquirer’s stylebook in claiming that these Philadelphians were “killed by guns.” No, they were killed by bad people, people who used guns as their tools. But the Inquirer doesn’t want to ever say that part.

I’ve told the truth previously: unless the murder victim is someone already of note, or a cute little white girl, the editors of the Inquirer don’t care, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the murder of a young black man in Philadelphia is not news. Unless the victim was a Somebody, the Inquirer didn’t care. If the victim is a white male, and the shooting probably accidental, yeah, that merits not just one but two stories.

And so we come to a story in Sunday’s Inquirer:

3 dead, 9 people shot in another violent overnight in Philly

by Katie Park | December 13, 2020 | 2:23 PM EST

Nine people were shot overnight Saturday, three fatally, in a series of violent hours in Philadelphia that included a double homicide, police said.

Two men died at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center after they were shot on South Ruby Street in West Philadelphia around 1:30 a.m., police said Sunday.

One of the men, who was 33, had been shot a total of eight times — three times in each leg, once in the chest, and once in the torso, police said. The other man, 25, was shot in the chest. Police said both died within minutes of each other around 2 a.m.

Take note: this was Saturday night; the weekend was not over when the Inquirer reported the story. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Stats page on Sunday still shows 466 homicides, but that was of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, December 10th; it’s normally updated during the business week around 8:00 AM.

At Broad Street and Hunting Park Avenue in North Philadelphia, a man between 20 and 25 years old died from a gunshot wound to the chest during a carjacking a little before 10:40 p.m., police said. He was pronounced dead about 20 minutes later at Temple University Hospital.

We cannot expect the Inquirer to report the names of those victims in the initial stories, because families have to be notified, but the truth is that the Inquirer will almost certainly not have any further stories on these victims unless the police are able to make arrests and charges in the cases listed. That’s the part Miss Ubiñas appeared to be decrying, but, with all of the layoffs over the years at Pennsylvania’s newspaper of record, perhaps a newsroom full of the #woke doesn’t really have the time to pursue such stories.

Going back to Miss Ubiñas’ story, roughly a third of the names have hyperlinks embedded, some to a website called the Philadelphia Obituary Project, and some to news stories about their killings. Still, in a lot of cases, such as this one about 22-year-old Isaiah Carter, all that it has is a photo and “If you have any information about this victim, please contact us at tips@phillyobitproject.com. Date: 2020-08-14 Location: 200 E Clearfield St, Philadelphia, PA”.

The Philadelphia Eagles, in the midst of a really bad season, replaced starting quarterback Carson Wentz with former Alabama and Oklahoma quarterback Jalen Hurts, and the Iggles beat the New Orleans Saints 24-21. There will be four or five, and maybe more, stories on the Inquirer’s website about this game, in which nobody died.

I guarantee there won’t be a bunch of stories about the at least three people who lost their lives in Philly’s mean streets, because it really isn’t news, and let’s be honest, other than their families, nobody cares.
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Cross-posted on RedState.