Tag Archives: #Killadelphia

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Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Let’s tell an obvious truth here: Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw will be out of a job in a year. An appointee of Mayor Jim Kenney, the mayor elected in 2023 to replace Mr Kenney, who is term-limited, will want someone, anyone! other than Miss Outlaw in that job. Even if the next mayor likes Miss Outlaw, and agrees with every single thing the Commissioner has done, no one is going to want to be saddled her record. At this point, the Commissioner needs to just woman up, and reveal the whole truth:

Questions about the accuracy of Philadelphia’s homicide statistics

Philadelphia reports an eight-percent year-to-date decline in homicides, but police sources again raise concern over how some deaths are classified in the city’s federally required crime reporting statistics.

by Ben Mannes | Thursday, December 8, 2022

At the time of the writing of this article, the Philadelphia Police Department reports a year-to-date homicide total of 482, a decline of 41 murders from this date last year. Normally, a eight percent decline in murders would be great news in a city that desperately needs some. However, ranking police sources have sent Broad + Liberty a photo from inside Police Headquarters concerning “Other” or “O Job” classification — leading many to question whether the eight percent decline was valid.

You can click on the photo to enlarge it, but to simplify it for you, I’ll tell you: the photo is (allegedly) of a whiteboard in Police headquarters, supposedly the homicide unit, indicating that, at the point the photo was taken, there had been 465 murders, 101 ‘suspicious’ deaths, and 76 ‘other’ cases. In 2021, the numbers were the 562 homicides reported many times, plus 190 suspicious deaths. The ‘other’ is a new category, one which does not involve the finding of a dead body.

In contrast with the daily reporting and real-time tracking of reported crimes in television and social media, many are left to wonder if the questions of 2020, when the city ended the year with just one homicide short of their all-time record, was being repeated. Broad + Liberty reached out to the police department and talked with Capt. Jason Smith of the Homicide Unit to clarify these issues.

We have noted, several times, the change in the Philadelphia Police Department’s statistics, down from the 502 homicides initially reported for 2020, down to 499, one short of the then-all-time record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, under the ‘leadership’ of then-Mayor Wilson Goode, he of MOVE bombing fame. I made a totally rookie mistake, and failed to get a screen capture of that, but a Twitter fellow styling himself NDJinPhilly was apparently smarter than me that particular time, took the screen shot, and then tweeted it to me.

Capt. Smith confirmed that they are both things, but there are no deaths or “bodies” associated with O-jobs. He clarified that “M-jobs” are murder investigations while “S-jobs” are deaths that may not be classified murders. Smith estimated that of the 103 S-jobs so far this year, at least twenty may be deemed self-defense, and thus not result in a homicide charge. Numerous others, according to Smith, are awaiting toxicology and brain samples from the medical examiner to determine whether or not they are homicides, vs. overdoses or accidental deaths, which could take months to get back from them.

Smith said that “The Homicide unit would be conducting an audit of all S-jobs in the next week,” which should reconcile numbers by year-end. Smith said that his unit tries to conduct such an audit every two to three months, which could result in an increase in homicides by two to three cases as a result. More relevant to the questions presented by the 2020 year-end homicide total, says Smith, is the issue of “delayed death investigations”, in where a victim dies later from injuries first reported as an assault, or when S-jobs are later reported as murders due to delayed results from toxicologists and/or medical examiners.

That’s all well and good, but Mr Mannes did not follow up with the obvious question: if there were “S” cases at the end of 2020 and 2021, which hadn’t been resolved into homicides or not homicides when we were given the end-of-year homicide totals, why, when they were finally resolved — surely at least some of them have been — did the year-end homicide totals for 2020 and 2021 never change? Are we expected to believe that, out of 190 ‘suspicious’ deaths in 2021, not a single one was revised to be a homicide? The odds of such would seem vanishingly small!

Smith told Broad + Liberty that a detailed breakdown of S-job classifications would be available after the audit and would be available for further updates. However, popular podcast host and former judicial warrant squad Sergeant Mark Fusetti reports some of his sources showed “S-jobs” that are obvious homicides, but remain outside the homicide statistics for various reasons; “Last year had a guy shot in the head in a van, but because the weapon wasn’t found, they have it as an S job” said Fusetti. “Sometimes its a clear murder, but the Medical Examiner sends back questions so it gets an S Job” continues Fusetti. “It then sits on the desk while the Detective has to work newer cases, and it never gets reported on the homicide stats.”

Also see: The OK Corral: The PPD Has Been Lying To Its Officers

The city shouldn’t have to rely on a retired Police Sergeant, or on an anonymous officer who tweeted out that photo of the whiteboard, a photo that you can bet your last euro that the city did not want to see released. Right now, Philly needs a homicide detective to put this information together and leak it to media who will report on it.

Of course, it would be preferable that, rather than having it leaked, if Commissioner Outlaw would realize that her career in Philly has no more than 12½ months left to run, that her job performance in the City of Brotherly Love means that she’ll never get a top police job in any city with a six-figure number of residents, and just go ahead and tell the whole truth herself. The end is coming; she might as well be honest about things, and rat out Mayor Kenney if he ordered her to massage the numbers.

Going out still lying about things won’t help her reputation anywhere she searches for another job, because, now that this story has broken, people will keep hammering down and hammering down and hammering down on it; it will eventually become completely public.

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Killadelphia The bad guys are just as bad, but the good guys have gotten a bit better

I will admit it: I was a bit, a bit, mind you, more optimistic when I saw the article by Robert Stacy McCain screencaptured at the right yesterday evening. I’m something of a numbers geek, because numbers, at least accurate numbers, tell a truth not shaded by human lies.

Mr McCain’s article began with a screen capture of his own, of an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer — archived version here, to get around the newspaper’s paywall — noting yet another gruesome killing in the City of Brotherly Love. This story actually made the Inky because it was different from the usual gang “clique of young men” being shot by a “rival street group,”[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 so that is at least interesting.

Mr McCain’s article did something that what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[2]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. naturally did not: he included a mugshot of the suspect, Ahmad Shareef.

Ahmad Shareef, photo via The Other McCain. Click to enlarge.

Mr McCain wryly implied that, with a name like Ahmad Shareef, most readers would automatically think that the suspect was black. I asked the question more directly a few months ago: is the Inquirer actually perpetuating a stereotype it wishes to avoid? Is the newspaper, by censoring all mugshots, contributing not only to the stereotype that most criminals are black, but actually pushing a message, that all criminals are black?

Mr Shareef is not black. Rather, he is Syrian. The Inquirer would probably say that he is “brown” if the #woke[3]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 writers there were asked, but he’s clearly Caucasian.

When I said, at the beginning of this article, that I was actually a bit optimistic when I first read Mr McCain’s original, it was expressed in this comment on his article:

Surprisingly enough, Killadelphia’s murder pace has slacked a bit, with ‘just’ 478 homicides in 339 days, which puts the city on pace for ‘only’ 514.66 murders for the year.

However, since Hallowe’en, there have been just 33 killings, in 35 days. If that particular rate continued through the end of the year, there would be ‘just’ 23.57 more murders, which works out to ‘only’ 501.57. Just a couple off from that average, and the City of Brotherly Love could actually finish at 499 for the year!

Alas! it didn’t take but this morning’s check of the city’s homicide statistics to dampen that optimism. Two more homicides, which once again raises the numbers. 480 killed ÷ 340 days elapsed = 1.411764705882353 homicides per day x 365 days in the year = 515.2941176470588 projected murders for 2022.

Taking just the reduced homicide rate since Hallowe’en, 35 killings in 36 days yields 0.9722222222222222 homicides per day. With 25 days remaining in the year, that works out to 24.3055555555555556 more in December, or a total of 504 killed.

The chances of the city seeing fewer than 500 homicides starts to get beyond any margin of error.

Nevertheless, the numbers are fairly starkly different. In 2021, there were 41 killings between December 7th and the end of the year, a completely different pace than we are seeing now.

That different pace, however, isn’t indicative of what it might seem. According to the Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard, there had been 2,187 shooting victims in the city through December 5th, compared to 2,183 on the same date in 2021. It’s not that the cliques of young men blasting away at rival street groups have slacked off; it’s just that they haven’t been quite as successful in killing rather than wounding their enemies. Much of that is due to the Philadelphia Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy of placing shooting victims in patrol cars and taking them directly to the emergency room rather than waiting on the ambulance, along with even more experience in dealing with gunshot wounds by emergency personnel.

In other words, the bad guys are just as bad, but the good guys have gotten a bit better.

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.” If you think you’ve read this footnote previously, you have: its mocking nature is such that I have it saved for frequent use.
↑2 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.
↑3 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.
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Killadelphia Things aren't as bad as last year, but they're sure not good

The weekend is over, and we’ve finally got the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page updated reliably. The news, though certainly bad enough, is a lot less bad than last year. Homicides are down 6.56% from the same date last year, and while a murder rate of 1.4199 per day (470 ÷ 331) works out to 518.2779 homicides for the year, that’s not only lower than last year by a significant amount, but lower than the 534.2928 the numbers at the end of October projected.

The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer noted the numbers, in a kind of weird way:

As of Tuesday, there have been 465 homicides in our city. All but 30 have been fatal shootings. The tally of the nonfatal kind, the kind that can leave physical and emotional scars that last a lifetime, stands at 1,688.

That includes four Overbrook High School students who were shot Wednesday morning after the West Philadelphia school let out early for Thanksgiving.

If we stay under last year’s record of 506 shooting deaths, it may be a victory of luck — an inch to the left, an inch to the right — or of the talented professionals at our overworked trauma centers. Either way, Philadelphians will be left holding their breath, wondering what next year will bring.

I notice that the police-hating Editorial Board gave no credit to the Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy of loading shooting victims into the initial patrol car on the scene and rushing them directly to the hospital rather than waiting for an ambulance. I can’t say that I find that surprising at all.

Looking at those numbers, there were 506 out of 562 total homicides in Philly last year, meaning that 56 murders, 9.96%, were committed by other means. This year, according to the Inky’s statistics, only 30 homicides, 6.45%, were committed with something other than a gun.

The numbers work out to 1.3344 shooting deaths per day, 487.0399 for the year, so the “inch to the left” argument tells me that the Editorial Board didn’t bother to actually do the math, but that’s another thing I don’t find a surprise.

Of course, even with the reduction in total homicides anticipated, it still means that the law enforcement team of Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia), District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw will have supervised five of the six bloodiest years since 2007. The only years Mr Kenney had that weren’t at the top of the chart was when Mr Krasner was not District Attorney, but I’m certain, certain! that that has nothing, nothing at all, to do with it.

The Census Bureau guesstimated Philadelphia’s population, as of July 2021, to be 1,576,251, a drop from the 2020 census figure of 1,603,797. Using those numbers, Philly had a homicide rate of 31.11 per 100,000 population in 2020, and 35.65 in 2021. Using 2021’s population guesstimate, and a projected homicide total of 518, the 2022 numbers work out to 32.86 per 100,000, but that’s provisional. It’s an improvement over last year, but certainly nothing about which to brag.

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The useful dead

Five people were murdered, with another 18 wounded, in a mass shooting in a Colorado Springs nightclub which catered primarily to homosexuals, and it’s a crisis unlike any we’ve ever seen before! Horrors! A mass shooting! “LGBTQI+ people are under attack! They’re not safe!”

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg is a homosexual male, so naturally this is on his radar, just like it is for all of the left who will never let a “crisis” go to waste.

In the meantime, as of 11:59 PL EST on Monday, November 21st, 464 people had poured out their life’s blood in the mean streets of the City of Brotherly Love, and nobody says a damned thing, because the vast majority of the victims, and of their killers, are black. According to the Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard, out of 2,746 fatal shootings in the city from 2015 through November 18, 2022, 2,114, or 76.79%, of the victims were black males, with another 153 (5.56%) being black females. That’s 82.35% of all fatal shooting victims over an almost eight-year period being black, in a city which is only, when Hispanics are counted as a separate category, 38.3% non-Hispanic black.

Hispanic males were the victims in 282 fatal shootings (10.24%), while 31 (1.13%) Hispanic females were shot to death. Using the formulation so loved by The Philadelphia Inquirer, that means that “Black and brown” people were the victims in 93.72% of all fatal shootings, and, other than when an “innocent” is killed, nobody really cares.

And while to-date homicides are actually down 6.45% from 2021’s record-shattering numbers, shootings are up, 1.16%. The Philadelphia Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy, of getting shooting victims into patrol cars and rushing them to the hospital rather than waiting on an ambulance appears to have had a significant effect in reducing the percentage of those shot expiring.

I guess that I have to give Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw credit for something, anyway, though I don’t give her credit for much.

But I have to ask: why are the five people killed in Colorado Springs more important than the 464 slaughtered in Philly? For every person killed in that nightclub, 93 were murdered in Philly!

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Crazy People Are Dangerous: No Motive Yet in Colorado Springs Shooting

Of course, the nightclub gunman can be demonized as someone who hated homosexuals — despite the fact he had a previous criminal incident which had nothing to do with them — and will be charged with a “hate crime”, while the Philly killers are mostly indistinguishable from their victims as far as race or ethnic group is concerned; there are no political points to be gained by demonizing the people who killed them. For the left, the nightclub victims are somehow deader than the people slaughtered in Philadelphia.  At the very least, they are far more useful dead than ordinary people in Philly.

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Maybe Larry Krasner ought to consider the possibility that not all of the juveniles he treats leniently will turn out to be good guys?

Given that the Philadelphia Police Department already had mugshots of the fine young men who committed the Roxborough High School shooting, the following story from The Philadelphia Inquirer isn’t that much of a surprise. Since juvenile records are normally sealed, we’ll probably never get the story as to for what those young gentlemen were first arrested, unless some good person who can get access to those records leaks the information.

Three teens suspected in the Roxborough shooting committed another murder the day before, police say

Police believe three of the teens responsible for the Roxborough High School shooting committed a separate, unrelated fatal shooting the day before.

by Ellie Rushing and Chris Palmer | Friday, November 4, 2022 | 9:43 AM EDT

Three of the teens accused of shooting five young football players, killing one, outside Roxborough High School in September are expected to be charged with murder in connection with another fatal shooting the day before, police said Friday.

Troy Fletcher, 15, and Zyhied Jones, 17, could face the new murder charges as early as Friday afternoon for the killing of 19-year-old Tahmir Jones in North Philadelphia on Sept. 26, said Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore.

Police also expect to charge Dayron Burney-Thorne, 16, who is wanted in the Roxborough case but remains a fugitive, with an additional murder charge once he is caught.

Around 2 p.m. on Sept. 26, police say, Tahmir Jones was walking in front of his father’s home on the 600 block of North 13th Street when three shooters jumped out of a car and shot him more than 20 times. He was rushed to Jefferson Hospital, where he died a short time later.

Jones had just earned his GED and was working in a construction apprenticeship program, his mother Theresa Guyton has said.

Police stated that the only known connection between the murder of Mr Jones and the Roxborough shootings is the identity of the suspects, and that it is possible that Mr Jones murder was a case of mistaken identity. The Inquirer report stated that shell casings recovered at Roxborough have been forensically linked to three weapons used in “other events.”

It is possible, of course, that the gang members 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 in the Roxborough shootings were using weapons which they had obtained from other street groups in some sort of trade.

Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News reported via Twitter about what was apparently a gun battle in the Frankford neighborhood. By the time was all said and done, over 170 shell casings were found by police.

This is the culture of the combat zones of Philadelphia! 170 or more shell casings found, but “far outnumbered” by orange needle caps.

To fix the violence, you have to fix the drug problem, and the cultural problem that enables people to use drugs, and think that blowing away your enemies, or even just someone who has pissed you off in the moment, is a good idea.

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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Killadelphia: If your refuse to define the problem, then you can never find the solution!

I noted yesterday that the homicide problem in Philadelphia is not one of too few police, or even a ‘progressive’ District Attorney, but a problem of culture, in which some idiot thought that the best way to handle an argument was to just shoot the guy. Yeah, he “won” the argument, I suppose, but if he’s caught he might just spend the rest of his miserable life behind bars. The idiot who ‘settled’ his argument on Hallowe’en by shooting another man in the chest could, under Pennsylvania Title 18 §2502 be charged with Murder of the first degree, though third degree seems more probable. First degree murder is punishable by life in prison without the possibility of parole, or even a death sentence, though District Attorney Larry Krasner refuses to pursue capital sentences, while third degree murder, a first degree felony in the Keystone State, carries a sentence of ten to twenty years in prison.

So, about what were the two men arguing that is somehow worth ten to twenty years in the state penitentiary? Was the one man blocking access to the street as he was helping a lady move from the 2500 block of Carroll Street? Did the two men have a previous beef with each other?

The Philadelphia Shootings Victims Database details, in an awkward format, the people shot and killed in the City of Brotherly Love. There are times that I wonder if that awkwardness is deliberate, because you have to import the .csv file, and open it in Microsoft Excel, alter some of the column widths, and then hide data columns which are mostly meaningless. The data column for whether the victim is Latino or not is stupidly placed, and the fatality column is at the far right hand side. Someone more easily frustrated than me would have given up!

But one thing is obvious: the cultural problems which have led to the huge murder rate in Philly are not evenly spread among the residents of the city. The 2020 census as reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer shows just 38.3% of city residents as being non-Hispanic black, and in the October shootings chart above, all but one of the Latino victims listed are listed as white Latino, not black Latino. Black male Philadelphians have been the victims of shootings in 61.31% of the cases, and overall blacks have been the victims in 72.36% of shootings.

Non-Hispanic whites have been the victims in ‘only’ 5.53% of the cases in October, despite being 34.3% of the city’s population. There were no reported incidents of Asians being shot.

The shootings database reported 199 people shot in Philly in October of 2022; the same database, if you scroll farther down, shows 181 reported shooting victims for October of 2021. As we have previously noted, the number of homicides is slightly lower this year as opposed to last, but with the number of shootings being 9.94% higher in October alone, and 2.45% (2004 this year vis a vis 1954 through October in 2021) higher than 2021, I see that attempted murders — and I count every shooting as an attempted murder — have increased. The Philadelphia Police Department’s scoop-and-scoot policy of taking victims directly to the ER rather than waiting for an ambulance, even more experience in dealing with shooting victims by the hospitals’ emergency staff, and perhaps even lower shooting accuracy by the gang-bangers “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,”[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 blasting away at their rivals.

The city’s elected leadership want to blame guns, as does the Inquirer and practically every other group around. But, last time I checked, guns were completely inanimate objects, and didn’t care who held them or carried them or owned them. If the problem was guns, we ought to see the shootings and killings rates closely match the demographic percentages in the city, and we should see the homicide rates in Philly fairly similar to the rates throughout Pennsylvania; we don’t.[2]As we have reported previously, Pennsylvania’s firearms control laws are pretty much uniform across the Commonwealth; state law prohibits municipalities from imposing restrictions which are … Continue reading

No one will address the real numbers, and no one will conclude that yes, this is primarily a cultural problem among the black and Hispanic communities of Philadelphia, because that would be raaaaacist.[3]The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer managed to admit that people’s race determined how safe they feel, but had a not-so-subtle undertone that white people make places safer. I will … Continue reading I can say it because I’m retired, have no job from which I can be canceled, and no employer who can somehow be punished. But if the problem of homicides in our cities — more cities than just Philadelphia — cannot be honestly recognized for what it is, then that problem can never be addressed, never be solved.

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“
↑2 As we have reported previously, Pennsylvania’s firearms control laws are pretty much uniform across the Commonwealth; state law prohibits municipalities from imposing restrictions which are stricter than those provided for under state law. In 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.

It got worse last year: with 562 homicides in Philly, out of 1027 total for Pennsylvania, 54.72% of all homicides in the Keystone State occurred in Philadelphia. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, was second, with 123 killings, 11.98% of the state’s total, but only 9.52% of Pennsylvania’s population.

The other 65 counties, with 78.11% of the state’s total population, had 33.30% of total murders.

↑3 The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer managed to admit that people’s race determined how safe they feel, but had a not-so-subtle undertone that white people make places safer. I will confess to having thought that the Editorial Board were less concerned about how unsafe ‘black and brown’ Philadelphians feel than they were that white people felt too safe.
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Killadelphia: the problem is the culture!

I suppose I wrote too soon! I noted yesterday morning that Philadelphia was seeing a real and noticeable decrease in the murder rate, with ‘just’ 441 people murdered through 11:59 PM EDT on October 30th. Sadly, Hallowe’en turned out to be deadly:

3 people killed in separate Philly shootings

A 27-year-old man was fatally wounded in a triple shooting around 8:15 p.m. in North Philadelphia that left two other victims in critical condition.

by Robert Moran | Hallowe’en, October 31, 2022

Three men were killed in separate shootings Monday evening in Philadelphia, police said.

Around 8:15 p.m. in North Philadelphia, three people were shot outside on the 200 block of West Ontario Street by an unknown attacker, police said.

A 27-year-old man shot multiple times in the body was transported by medics to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 8:45 p.m.

A 26-year-old man shot five times in the body was taken by police to Temple and was listed in extremely critical condition.

There’s more at the original, but the number killed is not three; as both Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News and the Philadelphia Police Department report, there were four murders on Hallowe’en night, bring the total dead to 445 for the year.

We’re far enough into the year, 304 days, that four killings yesterday moves the averages just a little. From 1.4554 per day, and a projected 531.2376 as of yesterday, the City of Brotherly Love is up to 1.4638 murders per day, which works out to 534.2928 projected homicides for 2022. I’m tempted to say, big deal, so what, just three more killings, right? It’s not like anyone really seems to care!

Just before 5:45 p.m. in Southwest Philadelphia, a 47-year-old man was cleaning out a building on the 2500 block of Carroll Street when he was shot once in the chest by an unknown assailant, police said. The man, whose name was not released, was pronounced dead at the scene by medics.

NBC10 reported that the man, who lived in Darby, was working as a mover to help a woman. An argument erupted between the victim and an unidentified man before the fatal shooting.

I have to wonder: about what did someone argue with a man, not from the neighborhood, helping a lady move argue that was worth pulling a gun and killing him, and risking going to jail for the rest of his miserable life?

Kitchen in 2639 Carroll Street. Click to enlarge.

Carroll Street is not the worst neighborhood in Philly, but it’s hardly the best: a look through Google Maps shows a street of typical rowhomes, which have the look or some lower-end remodeling by one contractor sometime a couple of decades ago, fixing porch facias and second-story bay windows. SEveral of the homes show what were old porches now enclosed to create additional inside space. A rowhome at 2605 Carroll Street is listed as being a three-bedroom, one bathroom, 960 ft² home for sale for $180,000, and the photos show an interior which looks like a typical lower-priced flip: grey laminate floors, new paint and appliances throughout. Just down the street, at 2639 Carroll Street, is another rowhome being flipped, though the flipper put less money into it, for $125,000. Before the flipper got to it, the home sold for just $47,000 on July 22, 2020.

Maybe the orange kitchen cabinets aren’t helping get the place sold? 🙂

This is a cultural issue in Philadelphia. For whatever reason, the shooter felt the need, or the desire, to walk down Carroll Street while carrying a firearm. Then, for whatever reason they argued, the armed man thought it was serious enough to pull out his weapon and shoot the victim in the chest. Apparently little enough thought was given to just saying, “F(ornicate) you!” and walking away.

The Philadelphia Police Department is shorty hundreds of officers, but adding hundreds of police officers won’t solve the problem. More police officers might help in catching the bad guys who’ve already shot or killed someone, and perhaps, if ‘progressive’ District Attorney Larry Krasner could change his mind and start prosecuting criminals seriously, perhaps a few shootings and killings could be prevented by having the bad guys already locked up.

The problem is a culture, an attitude, a mindset that tells people that attempting to kill other people is a great solution to whatever problems they believe they have. The problem is an attitude that being a tough gang-banger is a real status symbol, proves your manhood, and is someone young girls want to f(ornicate). And the problem is a culture and an attitude that tells people it’s perfectly acceptable to use drugs, which creates the drug dealers who are responsible for much of the violence.

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Killadelphia: the numbers are slightly better!

I had previously speculated that it was possible that the City of Brotherly Love would have fewer homicides this year than last. The reason was simple: at the end of the Labor Day holiday weekend in 2021, the city was on a path fort 532 homicides, but then saw a huge spike in the rate of killings, and finished the year with 562 people pouring out their life’s blood in the city’s mean streets.

It’s Hallowe’en, almost two months past the Labor Day weekend, almost half of the way to the end of the year, and city homicides have fallen by 3.71%. At the current rate of murders, 1.4554 per day, Philly is on a pace for 531.2376 homicides, a horrible number, easily second-place all time, but still 31 fewer people killed than last year.

But if the numbers have improved slightly over last year, the city has still already reached 6th place on the all-time list, with 62 days left in the year. It should only be a few more days until Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw top the high under former Mayor Frank Rizzo, and get into Mayor Wilson Goode — he of the MOVE bombing fame — territory. Given that Philly’s top three still have another year in office together, they could actually hold first, second, and third place, gold, silver, and bronze, when Mr Kenney, and I have to presume, Commissioner Outlaw, leave office at the end of 2024.

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Killadelphia: Black Lives Don’t Matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer * Updated! *

Friday morning’s Current Crime Statistics page by the Philadelphia Police Department indicated that there had been 433 homicides in the city as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, October 20th. Since the police only update that page Monday through Friday during normal business hours, we don’t get individual daily reports, but just the one on Monday morning, updating Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

And over those three days, the homicide total increased by four, up to 437.

Naturally, I checked The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, and neither their main page nor specific crime page had a story, not a single story, on any of those four murders, as of 9:32 AM EDT on Monday, October 24th. I already knew that two murders had occurred Friday, via Twitter, but with the Philadelphia Phillies winning the National League pennant, not a whole lot of other news seems to have been covered in the city’s media.

My guess? All four of the homicide victims, some of which could have been people shot earlier but who had not died until a couple of days later, are all young black males killed by other young black males in gang-related attacks or gun battles, because those black lives don’t matter to the Inquirer.

The city’s shooting victims database is normally updated around noon; I’ll see then if my guess is right.
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Update at 11:26 AM EDT: The shooting database statistics are in, and the four murder victims are:

  • 44-year-old black male, fatally shot in the chest at 3:18 AM EDT on Sunday, 3600 block of Oxford Avenue, PPD district 2, Wissinoming
  • 26-year-old black male, fatally shot in the abdomen at 4:54 PM EDT on Saturday, 1500 block of West Clearfield Street, PPD district 39, Upper North Philadelphia, near Broad Street
  • 26-year-old white Hispanic male, fatally shot in multiple places, at 5:06 AM EDT on Saturday, 4300 block of North American Street, PPD District 25, North Philadelphia
  • 23-year-old white Hispanic male, fatally shot in the arm, at 2:25 PM EDT on Friday, 3900 block of Kensington Avenue, PPD district 24, Harrowgate

Well, the victims were not all young black males, but they were all male, all ‘persons of color,’ and all in the less desirable neighborhoods. None of the deceased were of people shot days earlier, who didn’t expire until the weekend, so yes, there were four murders committed over that three-day span, and the Inky covered none of them.