Tag Archives: #Killadelphia

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Killadelphia

I suspect that Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Stephanie Farr doesn’t normally write the crime reports, but simply drew the weekend assignment. But the City of Brotherly Love had a bloody, bloody weekend, and Miss Farr wound up being the reporter who had to write about it. Then, when I saw her Inky bio at the bottom of the article, in which she wrote, “I write about what makes Philly weird, wild, and wonderfully unique,” I found the irony inescapable. But, I must at the very least, give her props for using the Oxford comma!

Five people were killed in seven shootings across Philly in an eight-hour span this weekend

A 14-year-old is among the weekend’s homicide victims. At least 76 people have been killed in the city this year in just 64 days.

by Stephanie Farr | Sunday, March 5, 2023

A 14-year-old walking with his friends in Overbrook and a mother whose young child brought a gun he found on the street into their home were among seven people shot in an eight-hour period between Saturday night and Sunday morning in Philadelphia, according to police.

Five of the victims died, including the teen. The mother, whose shooting appears accidental, remains in stable condition, police said.

The shootings come less than a week after activists held a march against gun violence in Strawberry Mansion, following the shooting of seven people, including five teens and a 2-year-old, on Feb. 23 near the James G. Blaine School.

As the Inquirer also reported, parents of students at Building 21, West Oak Lane High School, are incensed that those students have been reassigned to Strawberry Mansion High School due to an asbestos problem at Building 21. Nobody wants anything to do with Strawberry Mansion if they can help it, because it’s just plain unsafe. Another story Monday afternoon reported that only 28 out of 390 Building 21 students showed up at Strawberry Mansion.

As of Sunday afternoon, at least 76 people have been killed in Philadelphia this year in a span of just 64 days, according to police statistics.

Sadly enough, Miss Farr’s report is already out-of-date: the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page now has 79 homicides as of 11:59 PM EST on March 5th, 79 homicides in 64 days, or 1.2344 per day.

As a daily average, 1.2344 homicides per day yields ‘just’ 451 for the year, but in Philly’s deadliest year, 2021, the 83 homicides as of the 64th day worked out to ‘only’ 473 murders . . . and the city saw 562 killings that year. Warmer weather brings out more gunfire, and Philly is on a clear path to another year of more than 500 people being sent untimely to their eternal rewards.

Yeah, Philly’s law enforcement trio of Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw are sure doing, to use a Kentucky expression from the 1960s, a fine, fine, super fine job!

“I also fight for Philly’s honor against all of its haters,” Miss Farr included in her bio. Well, Philadelphia’s haters are the ones roaming the city’s mean streets, killing other Philadelphians.

One of the comments was from someone styling himself only as T, who wrote:

Let me get this straight. The city got tore up for a career violent criminal, Walter Wallace. Got tore up for a career violent criminal, George Floyd. But when a 14 y/o presumably innocent kid gets murdered, the residents don’t even talk about it. Can someone make it make sense?

“(P)resumably innocent kid”? If the “residents don’t even talk about it,” perhaps they didn’t see him as all that innocent. With 27 rounds fired, this was clearly a targeted hit, and people get targeted for killing for real reasons. Those reasons may not make any real sense, but who knows what they are?

This, Miss Farr, is what leads people to trash Philadelphia. Philly is a wonderful and historic city, founded in 1682 by William Penn.

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You can never solve a problem unless you admit what the problem is, and Philly’s Democrats won’t do that

As we noted on Friday, with “(N)early thirty” spent shell casings — and an Inquirer photo shows a #29 evidence marker at the shell casings — and three shooters, and everyone is going to know that this was a targeted hit intended for one or more of the victims, and this is Philly same old, same old. Of course we were right!

The Strawberry Mansion shooting that wounded 7 was a targeted attack that hit bystanders — including a 2-year-old and her mother

Surveillance footage shows the three black-clad masked shooters firing at the teenagers, as bystanders flee stray bullets.

by Rodrigo Torrejón, Oona Goodin-Smith, and Chris Palmer | Friday, February 24, 2023 | 11:02 PM EST

The shooting that wounded seven people Thursday evening in Philadelphia’s Strawberry Mansion neighborhood appeared to be a targeted attack between three shooters and a group of teenagers — with stray bullets injuring a 2-year-old girl and her mother — police said Friday. The gunmen remain at large.

It occurred shortly before 6 p.m. as the group of four teens rounded the corner of 31st and Norris Streets, in front of a beer distributor and half a block from James G. Blaine School.

Surveillance footage shows that as the group turned the corner, three black-clad masked shooters hopped out of a silver Hyundai parked in front of the beer shop and began to shoot at the teenagers using at least one gun with an extended clip — peppering the street with gunfire. . . . .

Police said Friday they are still searching for three shooters and a gray, four-door Hyundai Elantra, possibly a model from 2011 to 2016, with an unknown Pennsylvania license plate. Police said it wasn’t immediately clear why the group of teens was targeted.

“It wasn’t immediately clear why the group of teens was targeted”? Bovine feces! It is crystal clear: one group had a beef with another, and in Philadelphia’s normal culture under Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, beefs among the gang-bangers “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families” are settled with bullets. It wouldn’t be quite so bad if the bad guys underprivileged young men from neighborhoods depressed by years of housing ‘redlining’ and economic disinvestment were better shots and only struck their intended victims. Continue reading →

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Killadelphia: Once again, The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to obscure the truth. Philly's "cliques of young men" are some really lousy shots!

According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, there have been 68 people murdered in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, February 23rd, four more than the previous day’s report.

The Twitter site Philly Crime Update reported on two of them, which was more than our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, did. The Inky did, however, have a big story on a multiple shooting in which no one was killed, because it was near a school:

7 people, including a 2-year-old girl and 5 teenagers, were shot in Strawberry Mansion

The gunfire erupted just after 5:50 p.m. at 31st and Norris Streets, police said. Three shooters remained at large, police said.

by Robert Moran, Ellie Rushing, and Kristen A. Graham | Thursday, February 23, 2023 | 10:48 PM EST

Seven people, including a 2-year-old girl and five teenagers, were wounded in a shooting Thursday evening near a school in the city’s Strawberry Mansion section, police said.

The gunfire erupted just after 5:50 p.m. on the northeast corner of 31st and Norris Streets in front of a beer distributor, said police, who provided the following information on the victims:

  • 2-year-old black female who was shot in her left thigh, transported by private vehicle with a police escort to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, listed in stable condition.
  • 15-year-old male, race not specified, shot twice in the chest and once in the right side of his body was transported to Temple University Hospital, listed in critical condition.
  • 13-year-old black male shot in his left hand, transported to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, listed in stable condition.
  • 16-year-old black male shot in his left arm, transported to Temple University Hospital, listed in stable condition.
  • 16-year-old black male shot in his right arm and left leg was taken by medics to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, reported in stable condition.
  • 17-year-old black male with a graze wound to his thigh was transported by Uber to Thomas Jefferson, reported in stable condition.
  • 31-year-old black female, was shot twice in the left leg, transported to Temple, listed in stable condition.

Except that, nope, what I listed above was the information actually provided by the police. What the Inquirer published was:

A 2-year-old girl who was shot in her left thigh was transported by private vehicle with a police escort to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where she was listed in stable condition.

A 15-year-old boy shot twice in the chest and once in the right side of his body was transported to Temple University Hospital, where he was listed in critical condition.

A 13-year-old boy shot in his left hand also was transported to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where he was listed in stable condition.

A 16-year-old boy shot in his left arm also was taken to Temple and was reported in stable condition.

Another 16-year-old boy shot in his right arm and left leg was taken by medics to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. He was reported in stable condition.

A 17-year-old boy with a graze wound to his thigh was transported by Uber to Thomas Jefferson and was reported in stable condition.

The seventh victim, a 31-year-old woman, was shot twice in the left leg. She was listed in stable condition at Temple.

Note that the newspaper deliberately scrubbed all references to race from their story. It’s nice to have the direct confirmation of what I have been saying, that the Inky has been deliberately censoring the information they have received, in order to fulfill publisher Elizabeth Hughes’ dictate that the newspaper will be an “anti-racist news organization,” but at some point, I’ve got to ask: who do they think they’re fooling? It’s Strawberry Mansion, and anybody who knows anything about Philly will simply assume that the victims are black.

Of course, it wasn’t just the victims about whom the Inky censored information:

Late Thursday night, police said they were looking for three shooters and a gray 4-door Hyundai Elantra, possibly a model year from 2011 to 2016, with an unknown Pennsylvania license plate.

The Inquirer printed the same images that Philly Crime Update had received from the police, but the newspaper censored the fact that all three suspects are black males, another thing that almost all readers would suspect. “(N)early thirty” spent shell casings — and an Inquirer photo shows a #29 evidence marker at the shell casings — and three shooters, and everyone is going to know that this was a targeted hit intended for one or more of the victims, and this is Philly same old, same old. The police will interrogate the victims, to attempt to find out which one had been the real target, though it’s always possible that the intended victim will clam up, expecting street justice from other members of his crew.

One final point: at least 29 rounds fired, and the gang-bangers “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 didn’t actually kill anyone? Philly’s “cliques of young men” are some really rotten shots!

References

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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Are dog lives more important than humans in Philadelphia?

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page has reported that 62 Philadelphians have been sent untimely to their eternal rewards as of 11:59 PM EST on Monday, February 20th. While that number is lower than the same date in 2021 and 2022, it’s higher than in 2020, which saw 499 ‘official’ homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. And, as we have reported frequently, very few of those killings — other than the fatal shooting of Temple Police Officer Christopher Fitzgerald, allegedly by a privileged punk kid from Bucks County — have received much press coverage from The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and the newspaper of record for the entire area.

Well, this morning, the newspaper I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. showed us just what shootings in the city are really important!

Off-duty FBI agent shoots dog in Center City

The incident occurred Monday evening on the 1500 block of Spruce Street. It was not immediately known if the dog survived.

by Robert Moran | Tuesday, February 21, 2023 | 7:38 AM EST

An off-duty FBI agent shot a dog outside a Center City apartment building Monday, the FBI and Philadelphia police said.

Video posted on social media showed the aftermath of the incident on the sidewalk in front of the Touraine residential high-rise on the 1500 block of Spruce Street.

The special agent was walking a small dog when she encountered at least one other person walking two dogs, according to witnesses. A fight broke out involving the three dogs.

It was not immediately known if the dog that was shot survived. The FBI did not identify the agent.

At the end of the story:

Animal rights organization Revolution Philly is planning to protest the animal shooting in front of FBI headquarters at 10 a.m. Tuesday.

“This woman is a trained professional and a dog owner. Her first reaction shouldn’t be to shoot first,” said Revolution Philly organizer Tiffany Stair in a statement. “This is unacceptable and we are demanding that she be held accountable.”

The entire article, exclusive of the headline, subheading, photos, and byline, was 237 words over nine paragraphs, a lot longer than the usual reports of killings.

Polar Bear, the Great Pyrenees who is trying to move in with us.

We have two dogs ourselves, and a third, a 150 lb Great Pyrenees we have named Polar Bear, who is trying to move in with us. If we didn’t know his actual human, who lives ¾ mile away from us, we’d let him, but his real human loves him. Bear loves our dogs, and us, more than his human. So, yes, to us, the shooting of a dog is a bad, bad thing.

But, radically enough, the idea that a dog was shot, and perhaps killed — that part is as yet unknown — is generating a protest by Revolution Philly, while the 230 reported shooting victims[2]Through February 20, 2023, including 46 fatally shot, plus 16 other murders, have mostly drawn nothing but the sound of crickets in the city, strikes me as a terrible thing.

Murder has simply been normalized in Philadelphia. Yes, Officer Fitzgerald’s senseless murder, by a punk who seemingly thought he was playing Grand Theft Auto in real life, has generated a lot of emotion in Philly, but for the most part, murder victims are mourned by their family and friends, and otherwise dismissed as just the same old, same old.

And why not? The city is governed by Democrats, has been since Harry Truman was President, and it seems as though preserving prenatal infanticide is the most important issue to them. It’s not as though teenagers don’t get that message, that people who are inconvenient can simply be disposed of, and it really isn’t a surprise that teenaged gangbangers and wannabes find life cheap enough that they will shoot people over the least provocation. The Democrats want to ‘explain’ the city’s killing spree as the result of poverty, racism, segregation, and community ‘disinvestment,’ but the 18-year-old white kid who (allegedly) killed Officer Fitzgerald was a privileged kid, living in his mother’s $1.2 million, 15-acre estate in Bucks County, who’d had one previous ‘contact’, a telephoned and internet reported bomb threat that got him one month’s probation in Bucks County, with law enforcement as a juvenile. For whatever reasons there were, his parents — who are now divorced, with a rumored, but unconfirmed by reliable sources, custody dispute — didn’t teach their son respect for life, and now he’s looking at spending the rest of his miserable life behind bars.

The death penalty, to which I am opposed anyway, is off the table: Governor Josh Shapiro (D-PA) has stated that he will not allow any executions to proceed as long as he is in office,[3]In Pennsylvania, the Governor does not have independent authority to commute capital sentences, but can only do so with the recommendation of the state Board of Pardons and Paroles. and District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia) has campaigned on, and vowed, never to seek the death penalty in any capital crimes committed while he is prosecutor. A photo of the alleged killer shows him in custody, leaning back, apparently awaiting questioning, with a posture that says, “What the f(ornicate) did I do? The rest of my life is trashed,” perhaps the best picture from this entire, sad episode. His father and mother — and the mother may be charged with a crime as well, for allegedly picking up her son after he called her for help — are going to have to live with that image, burned into their minds, wondering what they could have done differently.

There’s also a photo of him, as a juvenile, wearing a Biden-Harris t-shirt. Yeah, that’s a way not to rear your children right!

Philadelphia, and many other urban areas as well, are places in which human life has become cheap, and with life being cheap, life is being taken cheaply. When we have politicians telling us that human life before birth can be sucked out and destroyed, because some babies are just plain inconvenient, when we have parents supporting and voting for the politicians who support prenatal infanticide, we’re going to get more punks like the one who murdered Officer Fitzgerald. And we’re also going to get more punks roaming the streets of our major cities who apparently think nothing of blowing away rival gang members or girls that cheated on them or people who resist armed carjacking attempts or just look at them the wrong way.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑2 Through February 20, 2023
↑3 In Pennsylvania, the Governor does not have independent authority to commute capital sentences, but can only do so with the recommendation of the state Board of Pardons and Paroles.
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Killadelphia: Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw has a Department in complete disarray

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page shows 54 homicides through 11:59 PM EST on Monday, February 13th, three more than the previous day, which is actually more than Broad + Liberty’s homicide tracker.

As we previously reported, there was a decline in the rate of homicides in Philadelphia that began last November, and that had continued into early this year, but the number of killings had begun to exceed the 2020 total, and 2020 finished with an ‘official’ 499 murders. Now the total, while lower than in 2021 and 2022, is 20.0% higher than 2020. It’s a bit too early to derive any strong statistical trends, because even though this winter has been mild, homicides normally increase significantly in the summer.

Naturally, The Philadelphia Inquirer didn’t have any stories on these on their website main page, but on their specific crime page I was able to find Hit-and-run drivers killed two people after the Super Bowl and 4 dead, 5 injured in shootings during a violent (Saturday) overnight in Philly.

From the 2023 Mummer’s Parade in Philadelphia. Click to enlarge.

But the Inky did note the disarray in Commissioner Danielle Outlaw’s Police Department. Yes, a very large grain of salt has to be taken with this, given that the newspaper and its Editorial Board absotively, posilutely hate the police, there’s nothing I’ve seen which tells me that their reporting is false.

Lacking accountability, some Philly cops follow checkered path to high-ranking positions | Editorial

Apparently, one way to get ahead in the Philadelphia Police Department is to first get fired. No wonder some officers act as if they are above the law.

by The Editorial Board | St Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2023 | 6:00 AM EST

As Philadelphia endures record numbers of shootings and murders, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw implemented a second department shake-up in less than a year, which included promoting several dozen officers and transferring others.

Whether her actions result in safer streets remains to be seen. Given some of the officers who were commended, let’s hold the applause for now.

One of the promoted officers was fired in 2020 after allegedly supervising a meeting where officers were instructed to falsify reports in drug cases. He was also accused of attacking a female officer, hurling racist insults, and hiding information from the District Attorney’s Office. Last year, an arbitrator found the officer’s dismissal violated policy and reinstated him with back pay.

A second officer who was promoted had been dismissed in 2013 after he was charged with aggravated assault and stalking his girlfriend. The charges were dropped after a witness failed to appear in court, and the officer was reinstated.

A third officer who was promoted had been suspended for three days in 2011 after he lost his gun. Three years later, he was suspended for six days after improperly releasing three shooting suspects without questioning them, confiscating their weapons, or entering their information into police records.

Further down:

The message to many who are already wary of the police — as well as to many young officers learning the ropes — is that apparently, one way to get ahead in the Philadelphia Police Department is to first get fired. For that, you can thank the Fraternal Order of Police, which protects all cops, even the rotten apples.

Indeed, when it comes to being a Philly cop, fired rarely means fired. About 70% of officers disciplined in incidents from 2011 to 2019 had their cases overturned or reduced, The Inquirer found.

Of course, the Inky loves unions, at least unions other than the FOP and their own News Guild of Greater Philadelphia. The police officers’ union is doing what a union is supposed to do, protect its members. If the Philadelphia Police Department has been disciplining or firing officers without proper procedure, that’s on the Department and the city.

But promoting such officers? That doesn’t look so good. This is the Commissioner’s second top brass reorganization in half a year.

Then there’s this:

Eight more Philly cops were benched amid widening probe into a city antiviolence program

The officers’ guns were taken after an Inquirer investigation found they were improperly paid $76,000 in city funds to coach boxing. Children of police also got thousands of dollars to participate.

by Max Marin, Samantha Melamed, and Jeremy Roebuck | St Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2023 | 6:00 AM EST

Eight Philadelphia police officers have been placed on restricted duty and stripped of their service weapons — and the FBI is investigating — after an Inquirer report revealed that the officers had improperly received tens of thousands of dollars in city antiviolence grant money.

A police spokesperson confirmed the reassignments of the officers as well as a civilian police staffer. Together with a police captain who resigned last week, they pocketed more than $75,000 from a $392,000 city grant issued to Epiphany Fellowship Church for a program called Guns Down Gloves Up, city records show. City employees are not allowed to be paid from such grants.

The captain who resigned? He was scheduled to be another of the officers promoted, but resigned over other issues, including chronic absenteeism. Why would Commissioner Outlaw plan on promoting a district captain who was frequently absent? Did she not know that he was offnot on duty a lot?

In addition, children and relatives of police officers collected at least one third of funds paid to participants in the youth boxing program — more than $5,000 in prepaid debit cards, records obtained by The Inquirer show.

The program, according to its grant application, was supposed to use those debit cards to attract young people in North Philadelphia’s 19121 zip code who are at risk of becoming involved in gun violence, thereby improving police-community relations in the neighborhood. Yet, public records indicate that several of those teens and young adults reside in Delaware County or in the city’s Mount Airy neighborhood.

The program made its first payments in December of 2021, which was almost two years into Commissioner Outlaw’s watch. And she is responsible for whatever happens on her watch.

The Commissioner serves at the pleasure of the Mayor, and Mayor Jim Kenney, who brought Miss Outlaw in from the left coast in February of 2020, will be out of office at the end of the year, and Commissioner Outlaw will be out with him; none of the serious mayoral candidates will want to retain a police commissioner with her record.

The Philadelphia Police Department is in obvious disarray, with shake-ups, suspensions, firings, and a failure of the Commissioner to have her officers’ backs. She is hardly the only failed Philadelphia official, but she’s certainly very prominent among the failures.

There was, of course, very little reason to think that she’d actually be a success. When she was hired to be Police Chief in Portland, Oregon, this fawning tribute was written about her by Oregon Public Broadcasting, including this tell-tale line:

“She is the personification … [of] a current 21st-century mindset in police and policing in the community,” said Derald Walker, president of Cascadia Behavioral Health. . . . .

“When she left the room, there was an audible collective sigh that represented an incredible impression,” Walker said. “I think it’s going to be very hard to see her negatively, and for those people who have an ax to grind with police, to vilify her.”

Translation: Mr Walker thought that the incoming Police Chief wouldn’t offend the people who already didn’t like the police, then he thought her someone who would soft-peddle enforcement of the law.

Well, soft-peddling law enforcement just plain doesn’t work! And Miss Outlaw’s tenure as Commissioner has been an utter, utter failure, with officers leaving in droves, the Department hundreds of officers undermanned, and enough of a lax atmosphere that some officers think that it really doesn’t matter if they cheat the taxpayers.

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Killadelphia

We have previously reported a decline in the rate of homicides in Philadelphia that began last November, and that had continued into early this year. But a bloody weekend in the City of Brotherly Love has led to the Philadelphia Police Department now reporting 41 murders in the city through 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, February 5th, and that, while lower than 2021 and 2022, is now higher than the same day in 2020, a year in which the city finished with an “official’ 499 murders.

Official murders, that is!

On January 4, 2021, I posted the article, “Killadelphia reaches the milestone: I didn’t think they’d make it, but they did: 502 homicides in 2020.” That soon went out of date, because the Philadelphia Police Department changed the figure on their Current Crime Statistics page to 499 homicides in 2020. I couldn’t prove that they had initially reported 502 killings; it was something that I remembered, but in a truly rookie mistake, I failed to consider that the political powers that be, including Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, a political appointee of Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia), not an officer who rose up in the ranks of the PPD, might not want that number to break 500, and the previous record of 500 set under Mayor Wilson Goode (D-Philadelphia) of the MOVE bombing fame, during the crack cocaine wars of 1990.

Well, if I made that mistake, someone obviously smarter than me did not. I got a tweet from NDJinPhilly with the screenshot I failed to get, so I consider that confirmation of my earlier stories.

The website Broad + Liberty has been keeping its own running track of city homicides, and they actually show two fewer murders — than do the Police, 39 murders plus one ‘suspicious’ death. B+L currently shows 40 homicides, but the 40th killing they show is listed as having occurred early this morning, not on the 5th. But I have to wonder: are B+L’s data being restricted, or has Commissioner Danielle Outlaw decided that she might as well have her department report more honestly now that somebody is counting?

The first five weeks of the year don’t really provide a good average daily number of killings; the warmer weather of late spring and summer get into the real averages. And 2020 was the year of the unfortunate death of methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled career-criminal George Floyd in custody, leading to the “Black Lives Matter” riots in many of our cities, including Philadelphia. That probably inflated the number of killings in Philly that year, but I’d note that the number of murders in the city was significantly higher in both subsequent years.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page had no stories at all about the weekend’s killings[1]Access3ed at 10:10 AM EST on Monday, February 6th. — though it naturally included a four-day-old OpEd piece once again supporting open homosexuality — while the specific crime page showed two stories about three of the murders. Given that the Philadelphia Police Department acknowledged five more homicides than in its previous report, ending on Groundhog Day, one would think that two more deaths would have been noted. I suppose that tells us just what is more important to the editors of the Inquirer.

References

References
↑1 Access3ed at 10:10 AM EST on Monday, February 6th.
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Killadelphia: Not as bad as last year!

January is over, and we have the final numbers from the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page: the city officially admits to 30 homicides for January, a major improvement over January of the previous three years. If the current rate of killings is maintained throughout the year, that would put Philly on track for 353 murders for 2023.

However, the website Broad + Liberty, following its exposé concerning how the official numbers have dramatically undercounted killings, has a different number. Broad + Liberty has been keeping a running track of homicides and suspicious deaths in the City of Brotherly Love, including documenting with official police press releases.

B + L have counted 33 homicides, plus one suspicious death. Yeah, that’s still significantly lower than the last three years, but it’s 10% higher than the city admits.

As always, there’s more. The city’s official shooting victims database has documented 141 shootings in January. That’s an improvement over January of 2022, in which the same site recorded 166 shootings, a 15.06 decline in shootings, which is a far lower decline than the 31.82% decline in the official homicide numbers. Either the city is getting better at keeping people who have been wounded by gunfire from dying, or the gang-bangers have become even worse shots than usual; both could be true.

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Hold them accountable!

Meet Edwin Vargas. If you were expecting to see Mr Vargas’ mugshot in The Philadelphia Inquirer, your expectations would have been dashed, but at least the Inky covered his arrest:

Man arrested for quadruple shooting that killed 3 in Mayfair

Edwin Vargas also is charged with murder that occurred on Jan. 3. Vargas has been in custody since Jan. 18 for an earlier gun incident.

by Robert Moran | Tuesday, January 24, 2023

A 24-year-old man is facing murder charges for the deaths of three young men in a quadruple shooting on Jan. 9 in the city’s Mayfair section, police said.

We had previously noted the killings in Mayfair. We said then:

According to the city’s shooting victims database, which records only three victims, not four, and only two fatally shot, not three, as of 12:22 PM EST on Tuesday, January 10th, the victims were all Hispanic white males; what I have often called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. doesn’t want to tell you that part. As of this writing, the 18-year-old victim does not appear on the database.

A check of the city’s shooting victims database, which now lists 124 shooting victims since the beginning of the year, now lists all four victims.

Mr Vargas was already behind bars, and has been charged with another murder that occurred on January 3rd, but had been locked up since January 18th for a December 30th “gun incident”. The police finally connected him with the January 3rd killing after he had been jailed, and then detectives sought a warrant for him for the triple murders.

But here comes the money line:

Court records show Vargas has been in and out of jail as an adult since late 2016, when he pleaded guilty for firearms violations.

Last July, Vargas pleaded guilty to illegal possession of a telecom device by an inmate.

On Aug. 30, he was released from prison.

Under Pennsylvania Title 18 §5123(c)(2), illegal possession of a telecom device by an inmate is a first degree misdemeanor. Under Title 30 §923(a)(7), the sentence for a first degree misdemeanor is “a fine of not less than $1,500 nor more than $10,000, or imprisonment not exceeding five years, or both.”

Yet, according to the Inquirer, Mr Vargas was locked up for less than two months for this crime.

So, Mr Vargas, “in and out of jail as an adult since late 2016”, and with who knows how many juvenile offenses under his belt, could have been locked up until 2027, but someone, somewhere, decided that nahhh, they could let him back out on the streets.

And now four people are stone-cold graveyard dead.

Mr Vargas is, of course, innocent of those four murders until proven guilty, but if he is guilty of even one of them, whoever decided to turn this fine gentleman loose has the victim’s, or victims’ blood on his hands. Will that person, or persons, ever be held accountable?

That, of course, is a rhetorical question: no, nobody will be held accountable. But if we did hold prosecutors, judges, and parole boards accountable for the crimes committed by previously convicted criminals who could have still been behind bars but were treated leniently and released before the maximum possible sentence, we would see crime rates go down dramatically, if for no other reason than the bad guys would spend more time in prison and less out on the streets. Had Mr Vargas been behind bars when he could have been, when the state already had him in custody, four more men — assuming the charges are correct — could still be alive today.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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Killadelphia: Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Broad + Liberty’s Philadelphia Homicide Tracker noted that the dead body found on January 23rd was not classified as a homicide by the Philadelphia Police Department, although the website did not tell us how the police did categorize it. And there was no change in the PPD’s Current Crime Statistics page to indicate that it was a homicide.

But here’s the PPD’s press release on the discovery of the body, which was Broad + Liberty’s information source:

Death Investigation:

39th district .. Stabbing –3xx Hansberry Street inside at 11:50 AM  a 25-year-old black male was stabbed to the right side of his neck, under his chin. The male was pronounced (dead) on location at 11:52 AM by Medic 28. Scene held, no weapon recovered, no arrest made.

Now, I don’t know about you, but the fact that someone died from being stabbed in the neck, under his chin, and the fact that the knife was not found on the scene, sure makes that seem like a homicide to me! Broad + Liberty obviously thinks so, as would anyone with an IQ higher than Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw’s, but the Philadelphia Police Department can’t quite seem to say that’s what it is.

There are things which could make it not legally a homicide: if it was a killing in self-defense, it’s not considered a homicide under the law. A suicide is also not considered a homicide under the law, but this was no suicide, because the knife disappeared.

It would make more sense to list this as a homicide, and if it turns out to be a self-defense case, remove it from the homicide report later. As it is, it looks like Commissioner Outlaw’s minions are trying to keep the numbers down artificially.