Tag Archives: #Killadelphia

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Killadelphia The city counts 17 homicides, but Broad + Liberty has documented 20.

We had previously noted the decline in the homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love that began last November, and that, as of the end of November, there was actually a margin-of-error chance that the city could finish with slightly under 500 ‘official’ homicides. It didn’t work out that way, and Philly finished 2022 with 516 ‘official’ homicides, though with the number of deaths classified as ‘suspicious’ rather than homicides, the real number could be much higher. Currently, the Philadelphia Police are reporting 17 homicides as of 11:59 PM EST on Tuesday, January 17th, but Broad + Liberty are reporting 20 through that time period. The Broad + Liberty site includes its sources, and every single one of them is documented with Police Department press releases.

Of the 21 homicides noted by Broad + Liberty — their update at 11:28 AM EST this morning includes a killing this morning — 14 of the victims, 12 males and 2 females, were black, six were Hispanic (all males), and there was one Asian male constituting the victims. This is the kind of information The Philadelphia Inquirer has, in that they receive the same press releases as Broad + Liberty, but they censor out of their news stories.

Two dead, one in critical condition after shooting breaks out at a Chinese restaurant in Southwest Philly

Police said the motive is unknown, but the victims all lived close to the restaurant where the shooting occurred.

by Beatrice Forman | Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Shangri-La Chinese food takeout, August 2019, via Google Maps.

Two people were killed and another was in critical condition after a shooting at a Chinese takeout restaurant in Southwest Philadelphia.Police told reporters at least 16 shots were fired at the Shangri-La restaurant on the 5400 block of Chester Avenue around 11:30 p.m. on Tuesday night as customers were picking up orders.

Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small said officers found three unconscious victims on the floor of the takeout area when they arrived on the scene: a 19-year-old man, a 20-year-old man, and a 43-year-old woman. “All three victims were suffering from gunshot wounds,” Small said.

Police confirmed the 19-year-old man and the woman were pronounced dead at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. The 20-year-old man is in critical condition.

While Broad + Liberty reported that the two who were killed were black, I had to find out from the city’s shooting victims database that the third victim, the 20-year-old male, was also black. I would have guessed that anyway, given that the Inquirer’s story said that the two men were brothers. While Inspector Small stated that the motive was unknown, or who were the intended targets, the shootings victims database indicated that the two men suffered multiple body wounds, including a head wound to the survivor, while the slain woman was struck in the shoulder. I’d note here that the database is a pain to use, and the three shooting victims from the same incident are not listed together, but on the fifth, seventh, and nineth lines of the database, as accessed at 1:40 PM EST.

It’s still early in the year, but the difference between 17 homicides and 20 is stark. Extrapolated over the full year, it’s a difference between 365 and 429 murders for 2023. With three more dead bodies documented in the city, the Philadelphia Police Department need to explain why three people who are stone-cold graveyard dead, three people who died from gunshot wounds according to Broad + Liberty’s statistics, don’t count as homicides.

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Killadelphia: Lies, damned lies, and statistics! Even The Philadelphia Inquirer couldn't ignore these killings!

We have previously mentioned the questionable nature of Philadelphia’s homicide statistics. Following Ben Mannes report, the website Broad + Liberty has now undertaken to keep and report the numbers themselves, using data from several sources, including inside information:

With Philadelphia’s homicide total surpassing the 500 mark for two consecutive years, and with questions swirling about how the city tracks and tabulates that statistic, Broad + Liberty has launched an independent tracker to list homicides (what the city police call M-jobs) as well as special case/suspicious deaths (S-Jobs) in the city.

On any given day, the number of items (rows) entered in the tracker may not correlate precisely to the number of homicides in the city, which is, in part, why our outlet has embarked on this project.

In order to hold the city accountable for accurately reporting criminal deaths in the city, Broad + Liberty is also tracking cases that have traditionally been excluded from the Philadelphia Police website, which includes vehicular and suspicious deaths, in an effort to ensure that they are regularly and properly reconciled to Philadelphia’s own published homicide tally in the year that they occurred.

By carefully tracking each homicide, found body, and suspicious death, we hope to either provide greater confidence in Philadelphia’s published tally, or we hope to expose and correct flaws and to help give a voice to concerned citizens, victims, and survivors throughout our city.

One of the most important columns in the tracker is “Source of Information” which will transparently show you if the information was received directly from Philadelphia Police, or from some other source.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Broad + Liberty’s homicide tracker is higher than the city’s. The very first homicide listed, of a 31-year-old black male in the 3000 block of Clifford Street is not listed in the city’s shooting victims database, even though the wounding of a second person in the incident is listed. We reported on this earlier.

Triple homicide leaves three dead, one injured in Northeast Philadelphia

Officials said they believed the shooting was a targeted attack.

by Rob Tornoe and Rodrigo Torrejón | Tuesday, January 10, 2023 | 11:13 AM EST

Three young people are dead and a fourth is in critical condition after a shooting Monday night in Northeast Philadelphia, police said.

The shooting occurred near the intersection of Rowland Avenue and Guilford Street in the Mayfair Monday night around 10 p.m., Police Chief Inspector Scott Small told reporters.

Actually, Rowland Avenue and Guilford Street do not intersect; Guilford Street has a roughly 45º intersection with Crabtree Street, which intersects with Rowland Avenue a short way down.

Two of the bodies were found near 50 spent shell casings at the intersection, Small said. A third victim was rushed to Jefferson Torresdale Hospital but later died, and a fourth person who was shot was hospitalized in critical condition.

The three men who died were ages 18, 19, and 24, police said. The fourth man, who was listed in critical condition as of Tuesday morning, is 28 years old, they said.

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.

As of the Inky’s report, the police believe that the four males were deliberately targeted, all knew each other, and were physically together. “Near” fifty spent shell casings makes it sound like a targeted drive-by, or perhaps a hidden ambush, but the police have no motive as of yet.

This is not a dilapidated rowhouse area, but one of neat and spacious duplexes. While Zillow does not show any homes currently for sale on Guilford Street, nearby properties such as this one are listed above $250,000. The Mayfair area is not considered part of the Philadelphia Badlands.

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↑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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Lies, damned lies, and statistics Did a Philly shooting victim recover from death?

We noted, earlier this morning, a tweet from Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News, telling us of the first homicide of 2023. Mr Keeley included a photo of the press release from the Philadelphia Police Department, 22nd, reporting it. The Philadelphia Inquirer also reported on it, albeit briefly:

11 shootings, 1 homicide mark New Year’s Day in Philadelphia

Jan. 1 saw 10 shootings before 5 p.m., one of which resulted in a grim milestone: Philadelphia’s first homicide of the year.

by Jenn Ladd | Sunday, January 1, 2023

Philadelphians bid good riddance on Saturday to 2022, which saw the city’s deadliest summer on record, more than 500 homicides, and nearly 1,800 shootings. But 2023 started off on a similar foot, with eight nonfatal shootings occurring in the first six hours of the new year. Only one of those resulted in an arrest as of the afternoon.

Shootings continued later in the day on Sunday, with two more reported before 5 p.m., including a double shooting in North Philadelphia, which resulted in one death. An 11th shooting was reported in the evening.

The paragraph on the fatal shooting was further down.

At 2:10 p.m., a 31-year-old man was outside on the 3000 block of Clifford Street in North Philadelphia when he was shot in the chest. He was taken by police to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 2:40 p.m. A second victim, a 34-year-old man, was shot in the left leg and was in stable condition at Temple.

It seems kind of obvious that Jenn Ladd, the reporter who “cover(s) the food community,” “want(s) to know how the sausage gets made and, when possible, (wants) to learn to make the sausage,” who obviously got the Inky’s New Year’s Day news desk duty was reporting from the same police press release as Mr Keeley, but I think that’s plenty of documentation that yes, the Philadelphia Police Department did report that homicide, and that it was a homicide by gunfire.

We also noted that, despite that reported homicide, the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page reported zero homicides through 11:59 PM EST on January 2nd. That page has been updated since this morning to tally 516 homicides in 2022, rather than the 514 in the earlier report.

I then went to the city’s shooting victims database, and guess what I didn’t find? I didn’t find the victim reported as shot and killed in it! The database did include the 34-year-old black male who was shot in the leg at the same time, on the 3100 block of Clifford Street, at 2:09 PM EST, but the fatal shooting was not included.

So, did the fatal victim recover from death? Did the bullet somehow spring from his chest, and the wound close? Was his death recorded as ‘suspicious’ rather than a homicide, and did that cause him to not be recorded as a shooting victim?

The city uses a .csv data format, and whether deliberate or otherwise, can be difficult to read. The city would do better to simplify the format — at least if they want people other than computer geeks and nerds to easily read it, which is not necessarily the case — and produce complete data. The homicide report does not include suspicious deaths, but the shooting victims database does not qualify fatal shootings as homicides; the far right data column simply has fatal or not.

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Killadelphia: What’s going on with the statistics?

What is happening with the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page? The report, pictured here as of 9:19 AM EST, claims that the 2022 total was 514 homicides, and that, as of 11:59 PM EST on Monday, January 2nd, there had been zero homicides in the City of Brotherly Love this year.

However, Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News tweeted that a homicide had occurred at 2:10 PM, and the victim pronounced dead at 2:40 PM at Temple University Hospital.

More than Mr Keeley just reporting it: he included the image of the Philadelphia Police Department’s press release on it. The Philadelphia Inquirer also reported on it.

At 11:14 PM EST on Saturday, December 31, 2022, Sergeant Mark Fusetti, now retired from the PPD’s Warrant Squad, but who has a source on the inside, tweeted that the final numbers for 2022 were 516 murders, 116 deaths classified as ‘suspicious,’ and 76 ‘other’ cases for the homicide unit.

I’ll tell the truth here: I would trust Sgt Fusetti’s numbers far more than anything, anything! that comes from the Philadelphia city government. As of 9:05 AM EST, the city’s shooting victims database has not been updated to account for any incidents after Thursday, December 29, 2022.

Perhaps I should be charitable here, and assume that whoever does the statistics for the Philly Police is on vacation today, and his replacement isn’t experienced and just made an error or two. But somehow, some way, I’m just not feeling it this morning.

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Killadelphia: Well, isn’t this interesting?

As we noted on Friday, the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated during normal business hours, Monday through Friday, as far as the current year’s numbers are concerned, but the computer program does update previous years’ daily numbers. For example, the report on Saturday, New Year’s Eve, updated the numbers for December 30th from the 557 in 2021 and 494 homicides through 11:59 PM EST on December 29th to 559 and 498 on December 30th.

With the odd nature of the change from the initially reported 502 total for 2020 down to 499, which led some people to speculate that the numbers were fudged.

I had lamented taht I had made a rookie error in failing to get a screen capture of the 502 number, but, fortunately, a fellow styling himself NDJ in Philly did take the screenshot, which he forwarded on Twitter. Yup, that’s the evidence needed!

It occurred to me, as I was showering this morning — many of my best ideas occur as hot water is pouring down my back, so don’t judge me! — that while there’d be no update on December 31, 2022 this morning, the computer’s automatic update would give us the numbers for 2021 and 2020, and perhaps we’d see how things had been fudged.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Another Bloody Year in ‘Killadelphia’

Well, guess what: the December 31st numbers for every past year were reset to zero, with the exception of 2013, which had a number 1 recorded. More, the percentage increase from the previous day last year showed 0%, which means that the computer calculation function had somehow gotten fouled up.

So, how did this happen? Are we supposed to believe that it was the gremlins, or, more nefariously, did someone at the Police Department contemplate the same thing I did, and want to hide the 2020 numbers?

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Killadelphia: It’s the last update of 2022 But The Philadelphia Inquirer is still trying to obscure the truth.

The Philadelphia Police Department have released their last ‘official’ homicide report for the year, showing that 514 people have spilled out their life’s blood in the city’s mean streets. Oh, there’ll be another report tomorrow, generated by computer to update past year’s daily numbers, but the current year’s numbers are updated only Monday through Friday, meaning that Friday’s numbers won’t be included on Saturday’s report, now will New Year’s Eve’s numbers on the Sunday report.

We might not even get the yearly total on Monday, because New Year’s Day, a government holiday, occurs on Sunday, and whomever in the Philadelphia Police Department updates the statistics will be allowed to take his holiday on Monday; that’s what happened on December 26th, the Monday after Christmas Day.

In 2021, there were five total murders on December 30th and 31st.

Of course, with a final number which will fit within the range I projected three days ago, 514 to 521, there’s no particular reason to fudge the numbers the way that some have alleged happened at the end of 2020, where an initial report of 502 was downgraded to 499. With the second-place number being an even 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, and the record of 562 set last year, this year’s 514 to 521 will be securely in between those two, so there’d no advantage to any downgrade.

If anything, a homicide or two committed early enough on New Year’s Day might as well be added to 2022’s statistics, in the hope that 2023 can come in under 500; that’s something I can easily see happening.

But, regardless of what the final number is, there’s no escaping one simple fact: under Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police commissioner Danielle Outlaw, the City of Brotherly Love have averaged 525 homicides per year, assuming that the current 514 is the final number for this year. Assuming that 514 is the end number for 2022, for the Kenney-Krasner-Outlaw triumvirate to average under 500, the city would have to see a homicide number for 2023 down to 421. Of course, for every homicide added to the 2022 total, that 421 number decreases by one.

It’s so bad that even The Philadelphia Inquirer noted this year’s numbers, though, of course, they never did the real math to note the average that the law enforcement triumvirate have racked up.

Philly’s gun violence remained at record levels for the third straight year

Philadelphia had recorded 512 homicides this year through Tuesday, police said, and nearly 1,800 people were shot and survived.

by Ellie Rushing and Chris Palmer | Thursday, December 29, 2022

When Taneesha Brodie’s eldest son turned 8, she moved her family out of North Philadelphia to Upper Darby, seeking a safer community away from the city’s gun violence.

She was proud of the people her children became, especially her eldest, Quenzell Bradley-Brown. A married father of four, the 28-year-old spent four years in the National Guard reserves, then worked two jobs and often performed hip-hop, poetry, and comedy at open mic nights.

In February, Bradley-Brown and his family moved back into the city, to Overbrook Park, for more affordable housing and to be closer to his elderly grandmother.

Brodie worried at first, but considered the area to be relatively safe.

Seven months later, her son was dead.

Quenzell Bradley-Brown was apparently a victim of a mistaken identity killing, and remains unsolved, as are hundreds more. With a mostly uncooperative public who hate the police, a police department around 600 officers undermanned, and a probable next mayor who hates cops, who can reasonably expect that number to get better?

Many subsequent paragraphs give us some of the statistics and references, before article authors Ellie Rushing and Chris Palmer go off the reservation:

Arguments and drug-related feuds remained the predominant motives in homicides, according to police statistics. But authorities also pointed to ongoing gang conflicts, social media posts, retaliation or revenge, and domestic violence.

We have several times mocked the Inquirer for recently claiming that there were no real gangs in the city. We were reliably informed by the 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.” But, the embedded link led to another article, from just 11 days ago, in which Miss Rushing was one of the authors, along with Rodrigo Torrejón, telling of the violence not of gangs, but “West Philadelphia street groups.” They did use the word “gang” one time, but it appears to simply have been a matter of prose, because they’d already used “street group” in the sentence:

Lacey-Woodson and Mickens, affiliated with the street group “02da4,” were targeting a member of the rival gang “524″ and opened fire on the party, said Jeffrey Palmer, an assistant district attorney with the Gun Violence Task Force, which headed the investigation.

Unless I missed it, which is always possible, that was the only use of the word “gang” in the article. There were plenty of subsequent references to “street groups” and “groups” in the article.

Obviously, there was some editorial ‘guidance’ in this. While the article headline and subheading are “West Philly street group members charged for their roles in five different shootings: The rash of violence was part of ongoing feuds between feuding West Philadelphia street groups, authorities said,” the original article title, visible by hovering your cursor over the article tab, was “West Philadelphia gang members arrested in Sircarr Johnson Jr., Salahaldin Mahmoud fatal shooting”, and the article url is https://www.inquirer.com/news/sircarr-johnson-west-philadelphia-gang-arrests-july-4-shooting-20221219.html.

Translation: what I have often referred to as 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. is, I assume to follow Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes directives to be an “antiracist news organization“, the word “gang” is apparently racist. Perhaps, for Miss Hughes, the word “gang” draws into the minds of readers an image of black gangs, or perhaps it’s simply that, for her, the truth is racist.

The Enquirer, oops, sorry, Inquirer really doesn’t like investigating the truth. The paper will never report the numbers I use, all from documented sources, to note how the current law enforcement triumvirate have failed, nor have they, at least as far as I could find, mentioned what Ben Mannes reported on Broad + Liberty, that the homicide numbers are obvious fudges, given the high number of obvious homicides that remain classified as ‘suspicious,’ and not counted in the official homicide statistics.  When the Lenfest Institute, which owns the Inky, sends out begging letters which state that “It is impossible to have a democratic society without a free press that informs citizens,” and “Reporters at The Inquirer are dedicated to speaking truth to power and delivering you news that makes Philadelphia a better place,” one ought to expect that the reporters who are dedicated to speaking truth to power would do something really radical and investigate what that truth really is.

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↑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

We’ve pretty much reached the end point, at which any calculations of the final toll of blood in the City of Brotherly Love are down to the margin of error. With just five days left in the year, Philadelphia has seen 510 ‘official’ homicides, so the final toll is going to be somewhere in the 514 to 521 range.

It was just twenty days ago that I noted the margin of error possibility that the city could finish slightly under 500 homicides. I guess that the gang-bangers “cliques 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 took that as something of a personal challenge.

So, my congratulations to Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, on the fine job they’ve done.

In eight years under Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, Philly never once cracked the 400 ‘barrier,’ and saw two years, 2013 and 2014, in which the homicide total was under 250! Homicides were under 300 during the trio’s final three years in office together.

New York City has seen 418 homicides through Christmas Day. Philly, with just 18.5% of the Big Apple’s population, just smiles and says, “Hold my beer!”

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↑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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Killadelphia: the city is tied for third place all time in murders, with 13 days left in the year

I had asked, just yesterday, if the City of Brotherly Love would hit 500 ‘official’ homicides when the Philadelphia Police Department released its official statistics this morning. Well, not quite: Philly is sitting at 499 homicides, which ties for third place in the all time records, matching 2020.

We had previously noted that Philadelphia actually cut back three from the 502 originally reported, but 499 was bad enough, and whatever accounting tricks might have been used to downgrade to 499 from 502 became pretty much irrelevant when there were 562 murders, plus apparently 190 ‘suspicious’ deaths not yet classified as homicides.

Being tied for third place shouldn’t last long, as second place is held by 500 homicides, set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990; the odds are that the city will hit that with tomorrow’s report.

There’s virtually zero chance that the city will match last year’s record of 562; there are only 13 days left in the year. Even in blood-soaked 2021, there were ‘only’ 22 murders between December 18th and the end of the year. But the 514 to 519 range seems most probable given current statistics.

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Philadelphian Amanda Marcotte is very, very upset that 35 transgender people have been murdered this year, but doesn’t care about 496 killings in her home town

Unless she has moved again, and I missed it — something which is always possible — Salon’s senior politics writer Amanda Marcotte lives in Philadelphia. As of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, December 15th, the City of Brotherly Love had seen 496 homicides officially, and with 110 deaths listed as “suspicious,” the total is doubtlessly well above 500. At least one other homicide occurred on Friday, but the Police Department do not update the homicide statics until Monday morning, so it’s entirely possible that the city will top 500 by then.

Yet, to Miss Marcotte, the important thing is hate crimes!

Republicans want to blame Club Q shooting and other hate crimes, baselessly, on police defunding

During Wednesday’s House hearing, Republicans minimized the role bigotry plays in anti-LGBTQ hate crimes

by Amanda Marcotte | Thursday, December 15, 2022 | 6:00 AM EST

“To the politicians and activists who accuse LGBTQ people of grooming children and being abusers, shame on you.”

During Wednesday’s House Oversight committee hearing on anti-LGBTQ violence, Club Q bartender Michael Anderson was blunt, both about his experiences and whom he holds responsible for the horrific mass shooting he survived. A combination of “inaction on gun reform” and “hate speech,” he said, led to that terrible night last month in Colorado Springs, where he “saw my friend lying on the floor, bleeding out, knowing there was little to no chance of surviving the bullet wound.”

Matthew Haynes, the owner of Club Q, testified that there is a direct line from Republican leaders who reject LGBTQ rights to the five deaths and massive trauma suffered by his customers and staff. Noting that “169 members of Congress” voted against a recently-signed law protecting same-sex marriage, he asked, “Are LGBTQ people not part of your constituency? Do you not represent us? While we wait for you to answer, we are being slaughtered and dehumanized across this country, in communities you took oaths to protect.”

Well, perhaps some of them represent the great majority of their constituents, many of whom do not accept the notion of same-sex ‘marriage.’

There were, as Miss Marcotte cited, five deaths in the Club Q shooting; that’s only 491 fewer than her adopted hometown has seen through her publication date.

Republicans on the Oversight Committee, however, had a different villain in mind to blame — for not just the Club Q shooting, but for the fact that the past two years have seen record levels of fatal violence against trans and gender non-conforming people. They pointed fingers at Democrats, protests against police brutality, and mostly non-existent police defunding.

Well, I followed the link Miss Marcotte gave us, and found this:

Sadly, 2022 has already seen at least 35 transgender people fatally shot or killed by other violent means. We say “at least” because too often these stories go unreported — or misreported. In previous years, the majority of these people were Black and Latinx transgender women.

The 35 transgender people killed? There had been 35 Philadelphians killed by January 23rd — 37, actually — of this year, but their deaths weren’t worth the notice of the political left.

What was I writing about in January of 2022? I was writing about The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far-left columnist Will Bunch, and his hatred not of crime, but of the police! I was writing about Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, and his refusal to seriously enforce the gun control laws the city does have.

The left complain that so many ‘transgender women of color’ have been killed, without wanting to recognize that the majority of them were working as prostitutes, and tricking some frequently intoxicated johns into thinking they were real women.

Even beyond Colorado Springs, there’s little reason to think police “defunding” is shaping crime. As the Center for American Progress reported in July, “Democrat-run cities spend more money on policing than Republican-run cities” and of “the 25 largest cities, 20 saw increases in their police budgets from FY 2019 to FY 2022.” The slogan “defund the police” that was bandied about Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 never really took off with Democratic politicians and certainly hasn’t had much impact on actual police funding. For certain, some cities have attempted to reallocate police funding to prevention services, but in general, those efforts have been overstated in the media coverage given to the “defund the police” movement.

Miss Marcotte claimed that the failure of Colorado Springs to enforce the law against the Club Q shooter for his previous crimes, or use the so-called “red flag” law against him, wasn’t the result of defunding the police problems, without recognizing that while Philadelphia hasn’t defunded the police de jure, being around 600 officers short of authorized staffing levels has done so in a practical sense. Philadelphia is her (adopted) hometown; surely a political junkie like her can’t be unaware of that.

But she can be aware of the fact that she just doesn’t care about the crime which isn’t politically useful for the Democrats. She is appalled that Republicans in the state House of Representatives impeached District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), due to his let ’em loose attitude when it comes to criminals and the city’s homicide rate, blaming it instead on Pennsylvania’s not-terribly-strict gun control laws, but she never did anything really radical like look at the numbers behind those laws. It was about Mr Krasner and “his anti-racist and progressive views on fighting crime,” without looking at the fact that crime has gotten worse, not better. She whined about the National Rifle Association standing up for our Second Amendment rights, after eight people were murdered in Buffalo and another ten in Boulder, blaming it on, you guessed it, evil white men:

The grim reality is that the entire nation is in the thrall to a minority of extremely insecure mostly white men who, drunk on decades of NRA-fueled propaganda, have decided that having the ability to commit mass murder at a moment’s notice is a crucial component of maintaining their manhood against the ever-encroaching threats from de-gendered Potato Heads and lady video game players. Most of these men claim exoneration because they don’t personally grab one of their many overpriced killing machines to lay waste to a grocery store or high school. Grotesquely, some even use these mass shootings to indulge in public fantasies about how they would totally stop an active shooter, though somehow they never seem to actually get around to doing it. But ultimately, they’ve become complacent in the face of mass murder from decades of being told by right-wing media that there’s a binary choice between preventing murder and watching Michelle Obama personally run off with their testicles in her handbag. Worse, the right has cultivated an overall suspicion of the very concept of concern for the lives of others at all.

On the day she published that, March 23, 2021, 111 Philadelphians had bled out their life’s blood so far that year in the city’s mean streets, the vast majority of them black, and the vast majority of their (too few) known killers also being black. Unless my math is very, very wrong, 111 killed in Philly, in her adopted hometown, is a larger number than the 18 victims she mentioned. While not in the daily homicide totals, the Philadelphia Shootings Victims Dashboard takes the information from the city’s Shootings Victims Database, and has noted that, from the beginning of 2015 through Thursday, December 15th, out of 2,779 fatal shootings in the city, 2,129, or 76.61%, were black males, with another 154, 5.54%, being black females.

Think about that: of 2,779 homicides by firearm in Philadelphia, blacks were the victims 2,283 times, 81.15%, in a city in which only 38.3% of the population are non-Hispanic black. And while Philly doesn’t make the statistics by race easy, St Louis does. Out of 191 recorded homicides reported on December 18, 2022, 170, or 89.01%, of the victims were black. Of the 141 identified suspects, 135, or 95.74%, are black.

According to the Census Bureau, only 44.8% of the city’s population are black.

What am I to think other than, when it comes to Miss Marcotte, and just as I have said about The Philadelphia Inquirer, black lives just don’t matter, not unless they are somehow politically useful to the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading left.

Robert Stacy McCain just published an article on his site, Crime is not just a statistic, adapted from The American Spectator, No Safety in Chicago: A daylight robbery highlights danger in urban crime wave. Somehow, some way, we evil reich-wing white males are actually concerned with the huge crime rate in our major cities, about black people being killed in the virtually normalized gang, oops, sorry, cliques of young men[2]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 shootings, while for the oh-so-noble left, those things are normalized and ignored, because they just aren’t politically useful for the left.

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated during normal business hours, Monday through Friday, so the last ‘official’ report was 496 homicides as of the end of Thursday. I’ve already heard of two more, and I’m wondering: will the city hit 500 when the statistics are published again on Monday?

The left don’t like conservatives using the crime statistics for political gain, but conservatives can use the crime statistics that way for one reason, and one reason only: what the left have been doing simply has not worked. But for the left to admit that they have not worked is to challenge their entire mindset, their entire political philosophy.

So, they do the only thing that they can: they hide their heads in the sand and deny reality. For the left, they’d rather keep their governing philosophy, and if that means ignoring over 500 homicides a year in Philly, well that’s just what they’ll do.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 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.”