Sometimes even the innocuous jargon used in government documents can tell a large truth, From the Philadelphia City Council’s 100 Shooting Review Committee Report:
There appears to be a trend in the criminal justice system where gun cases are treated more leniently than in earlier years. It is particularly concerning that the reoffending rate for another gun offense during a VUFA (Violations of Uniform Firearm Act) open case has increased, when the bail posting percentages have increased and overall sentences have become lighter. The current analysis was limited to arrested offenders; it is important to also take into account the network of criminals; they communicate. Criminals see and hear from their peers.[i]
While the office of the George Soros-funded District Attorney, Larry Krasner, did participate in the committee and its findings and recommendations, the document noted that “all of these recommendations are not unanimous,[ii] a rather curious grammatical construct, which I think means that none of the recommendations was unanimous. It’s difficult to believe that Mr Krasner and his stooges would have agreed to that finding. Specifically, the quote is from the section entitled “Last 100 Shooting Data Analysis: Analysis Result by PPD (Philadelphia Police Department)”, so the District Attorney and his office would very much not like that point.
Comprehensive gun violence strategies should have equally balanced elements of enforcement, intervention, and prevention. As for enforcement, classical deterrence theory suggests three elements for deterrence: severity, swiftness, and certainty. Enhanced sentencing will not be the sole solution; however, being lenient against gun crimes at the time of the gun violence crisis should perhaps be scrutinized. Swiftness of the criminal justice system has always been a limitation to deterrence, but court closures during the pandemic as well as increasing number of gun cases coming in (an average of 7 VUFA arrests per day in 2021) will only aggravate this, unless dedicated and increased resources are allocated. Simply increasing the frequency of stops in hopes for strengthening the (perceived) certainly of arrests is not the solution either. Deterring illegal firearm possessions should be holistically addressed by implementing changes in policing, prosecution, and courts, as discussed in the recommendation section of this report.[iii]
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that the DA’s office won’t like that!
The Police Department put together a graphic which showed just what the shooting victims and alleged shooters were like, and it isn’t pretty.[iv] The chart specifically excluded those charges the District Attorney chose not to pursue, and previous charges were limited to the year 2000 and more recently.
Note the obvious: two thirds of the shooting victims had criminal records, most with violent felony records, most with prior firearms charges. The majority of the arrested shooters had violent felony records, had prior firearms charges, and PWID – possession of drugs with the intent to distribute – charges.
These are people who do not obey gun control laws, these are people to whom firearms are simply the tools of their trade, and who are going to carry weapons because, to them, they need those weapons. That most have prior criminal records demonstrates what ought to be obvious to anyone with any common sense: that their actions are illegal doesn’t bother them in the slightest, other than the possibility of getting caught.
There is another graph, on page 21[v] of the report: since District Attorney Krasner took office, the percentage of firearms charges resulting in convictions has dramatically decreased. In Mr Krasner’s first year in office, 2018, 57% of VUFA only arrests resulted in convictions, with 35% having the charges dismissed. Those trend lines crossed the following year, with a larger percentage of charges dismissed, 47%, than resulting in convictions, 43%, and only got worse in 2020 and 2021, 49%/42%, and 62%/36% respectively. In their attempts to get illegal firearm possessions off the streets, the Philadelphia Police Department increased the number of VUFA arrests each year, and each year Mr Krasner’s office let the (alleged) malefactors off the hook in increasing numbers.
Of course, the analysis by the District Attorney’s Office (DAO) didn’t look at it the same way at all. The DAO’s opening statement was:
The urgency of Philadelphia’s crisis of fatal and non-fatal shootings will not be met by looking away from shootings. As noted above, City Council has led a valuable “100 Shooter Review,” a title that makes clear what we already know: that shootings are the primary issue. Our efforts must be focused on preventing shootings and holding people who commit shootings accountable, and we should not accept arrests for gun possession as a substitute.[vi]
This is very much in line with Mr Krasner’s statement:
This office believes that reform is necessary to focus on the most serious and most violent crime, so that people can be properly held accountable for doing things that are violent, that are vicious, and that tear apart society. We cannot continue to waste resources and time on things that matter less than the truly terrible crisis that we are facing.[vii]
That sounds fairly typical for a ‘social justice’ and ‘racial justice’ warrior, someone more concerned with keeping people out of jail than locking up the bad guys.
Gun possession arrests that involve no violent acts present a secondary and important frontier in curbing gun violence, but must be targeted to distinguish between drivers of gun violence who possess firearms illegally and otherwise law-abiding people who are not involved in gun violence. On the one hand, the cases of people charged with 6105[viii] (prohibited person in possession of a firearm) are carefully scrutinized to do individual justice, which will usually look like vigorous prosecution. On the other hand, another criminal charge that applies to people who have no felony conviction (carrying a gun in Philadelphia without having obtained a permit in Philadelphia) is only a felony in Philadelphia. The exact same offense in every other county in Pennsylvania (carrying a firearm without a permit to carry) is only a misdemeanor offense.[ix]
I am one who believes that the Second Amendment means what it says, that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and that requiring a permit to carry a weapon ought to be considered wholly unconstitutional. It is, however, a statement wholly at odds with the Democratic Party’s insistence on gun control legislation.
As for ‘racial justice,’ there isn’t much such justice by the demographics:
Offender and victim demographics resemble each other: for the arrested shooters, 94% were male, 95% were people of color (74% Black Male), and the peak age was in late adolescence and young adulthood (18-30 years old). Similarly, for victims, 86.5% were male, 88.5% were people of color (61.5% Black Male), and the peak age was in young adulthood to mid-thirties (21-35 years old).[x]
It is the black population, primarily young black males, who are both the shooters and the victims. In Mr Krasner’s zeal to establish racial justice in the City of Brotherly Love, those who are paying the price for that are primarily black people.
“The role of the District Attorney’s Office is to vigorously, justly, and accurately prosecute people who commit serious and violent crimes,” the DAO wrote.[xi] No, the role of the District Attorney’s Office should be to vigorously, justly, and accurately prosecute people who commit all crimes, not just the ones a particular person believes to be serious. At the point at which the District Attorney and his minions decide that certain crimes are not serious, and should not be prosecuted, they have assumed the function of the state legislature, and declared certain crimes, determined through the constitutional process of legislation and gubernatorial assent, to not be crimes at all.
It’s actually pretty simple: even if someone has no previous record, and is committing only the crime of possessing a firearm without a license, 18 Pa.C.S. § 6106, he is knowingly committing a felony, and he must have a reason for that, normally not a very good one. By not prosecuting such people, Mr Krasner and his minions are allowing them to not have criminal records, which means that when they do shoot someone, they’ll have no priors.
As we have previously noted, the Philadelphia Police have charged Steven Thompson, who shot and killed a man trying to steal the catalytic converter from his car, with a firearms violation. I guess that we’ll see if Mr Krasner’s office will prosecute Mr Thompson for ridding the city of yet another criminal.
There’s a lot more to the report than I have included here, and much of it is liberal pablum, from the Defender Association of Philadelphia, a group of defense attorneys who represent the indigent and who want to get the accused off, and from the Department of Public Health, which sees the shootings and killings as a public health situation rather than what they actually are, crimes committed by criminals. Access to the document, 196 pages in the .pdf file, is free at this link.
The simplest way to reduce crime is to convict and lock up actual criminals when you catch them; Mr Krasner and his stooges don’t like doing that, and they have helped produce a Philadelphia which saw 353 homicides in 2018, Mr Krasner’s first year in office, an increase of 38 killings, up 12.06% from the previous year, followed by 356 in 2019, then 499, a 30.17% jump, in 2020, just one short of the all-time record of 500 set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990, and finally 562, a 12.63% increase in 2021. As of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, January 27th, the city has seen 39 people bleeding out their life’s blood in the cold, mean streets.
How many of those people would be alive today if Mr Krasner and his office had done the job that they were supposed to do, actually prosecute criminals, rather than deciding that some crimes were just not serious and turned people actually in custody loose?
We can’t know that, but we do know that Samuel Collington and Philadelphia Police Corporal James O’Connor IV would still be with us.
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[i] – 100 Shooting Review Committee Report, page 17 of the document, page 19 of the .pdf file.
[ii] – ibid, page 9 of the document, page 11 of the .pdf file.
[iii] – ibid, page 17 of the document, page 19 of the .pdf file.
[iv] – I was unable to copy the internal chart, and had to reproduce it via Microsoft Excel.
[v] – op cit, page 21 of the document, page 23 of the .pdf file.
[vi] – ibid, page 30 of the document, page 32 of the .pdf file.
[vii] – Original citation: “‘A terrible crisis’: Krasner discusses Philly’s gun violence after officer’s son gunned down”, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Monday, January 24, 2022.
[viii] – There are two main categories of illegal gun possession cases in Philadelphia: Possession of a firearm by a person who has been prohibited from carrying gun due to a past serious conviction or other prohibition (18 Pa.C.S. § 6105), and possession of a firearm without a license (18 Pa.C.S. § 6106). The former is generally viewed as the most serious illegal gun possession statute, while the latter is generally viewed as less serious than possession by a prohibited person. Both are non-violent offenses only related to illegal possession of a gun. Footnote copied from footnote 16 on page 31 of the document, page 33 of the .pdf file.
[ix] – op cit, page 30-31 of the document, page 32-33 of the .pdf file.
[x] – ibid, page 20 of the document, page 22 of the .pdf file.
[xi] – ibid, page 31 of the document, page 33 of the .pdf file.
Judges in state and federal courts in recent weeks have raised questions about whether prosecutors under District Attorney Larry Krasner included incomplete or even misleading information in court documents seeking to remove one man from death row and overturn another man’s murder conviction.
