Independence Day, the Fourth of July, is the 185th day of the year, just a couple of days past the midway point of the year. Prior to today, the Lexington 2021 Homicide Investigation page lists 20 murders in the city so far this year. However, it omits the murder of Demonte Washington, 28, reported on May 22th in the Herald-Leader. My attempts to get to someone who has the information on Mr Washington’s omission from the list — it could have been rules a suicide or justifiable homicide — have thus far been fruitless. Continue reading
Tag Archives: #Lexington
Would you believe that the city of Lexington wants to keep white people from moving into black neighborhoods?
Sometimes I read something, and I wind up just shaking my head at the obvious disconnect from reality of the writer. Are there no mirrors in some people’s houses? Can they not see themselves?
Report: 10 Lexington neighborhoods where residents are more likely to be forced out
By Beth Musgrave | July 2, 2021 | 10:30 AM | Updated: 12:”52 PM EDT
The public support for the Lexington Police Department, and the hits to officers’ morale
I have said it before: in our urban black communities, they dislike the police more than they dislike the criminals in their midst. They are like the Palestinians in Gaza, tolerating, feeding, supporting, hiding, and providing sex for Hamas, no matter how much damage Hamas cause in Gaza, because they hate the Israelis more.
And so the black community in Lexington have made it their mission to hobble, if they cannot eliminate, the city’s Police Department. On Friday, June 25th, they got a little bit of that done, getting the city government to ban no-knock warrants. Continue reading
Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council votes to further hamstring law enforcement and alienate the police
As we noted two weeks ago, the Lexington-Fayette County Urban-County Council wanted to ban no knock warrants. Well, on Friday morning, they got that done:
No-knock warrants officially banned in Lexington: Mayor signs new ordinance into law
By Jeremy Chisenhall | June 25, 2021 | 11:59 AM EDT | Updated: June 25, 2021 | 2:44 PM EDT
Lexington Mayor Linda Gorton has signed into law an ordinance which bans no-knock warrants in Fayette County, she told the Herald-Leader Friday morning.
The Lexington council approved the ordinance Thursday night in a 10-5 vote, but Gorton had the option to sign it or veto it. The council would’ve needed at least nine votes in favor of the ordinance to override the veto. But Gorton signing the document made it law, effective immediately.
Gorton previously voiced opposition to totally banning no-knock warrants in Lexington. But she signed the ordinance into law after hearing from local residents who wanted to ban no-knock warrants during the council’s public comment section Thursday.
Further down:
Rev. Clark Williams is a member of a group of Black faith leaders in Lexington who have pushed for a ban on no-knock warrants for more than a year. He said the enacted ban was a “relief” and the Black faith leaders want to work with those on the other side of the issue.
“I’m hopeful those who are on the other side of the issue can appreciate that we disagreed on the issue, but there is absolutely no reason for this to be viewed as an adversarial situation,” he said. “ … No one in Lexington wants the city to be any safer than we do, and so we all have a vested interest in that.”
If no one wants the city to be any safer than (they) do, why take a very infrequently used tool out of the hands of the police? All that can do is make things safer for the criminals! The Lexington Fraternal Order of Police vociferously opposed this move, as did Police Chief Lawrence Weathers.
The problem is simple: in our urban black communities, they dislike the police more than they dislike the criminals in their midst. They are like the Palestinians in Gaza, tolerating, feeding, supporting, hiding, and f(ornicating) Hamas, no matter how much damage Hamas cause in Gaza, because they hate the Israelis more.
The group of Black faith leaders “will be focusing attention” on how council members voted on the ban, Williams said. They’re also going to shift their focus to other issues of racial equity.
“That was merely just a step,” Williams said of the no-knock warrant ban. “That was not the journey. That was not the battle. That was merely a round in the fight for racial justice and equity.”
It is unsurprising that, having taken one tool away from law enforcement, they want to start hobbling the police in other areas.
In other, wholly unrelated news:
Two teens taken to hospital after shooting in downtown Lexington
By Karla Ward | Juna 26, 2021 | 1:40 PM
Two teen boys were taken to a local hospital Friday night after a shooting downtown.
Lexington police were called to a report about an altercation with shots fired at High and Mill streets at 11:19 p.m. and found the teens shot, said police Lt. Daniel Truex. Their injuries were not thought to be life-threatening.
One of the victims approached officers at the Fifth Third Bank Pavilion and told them he had been shot, while the other injured teen was still at the scene, WKYT reported.
There’s a little more at the original.
According to the Lexington Shootings Investigations page, there have been 58 shootings in the city, though the last one recorded was on June 20th, so the page is a few days out of date. Of those 58 shootings, 42, or 72.41%, of the victims were black. Lexington’s population is 14.6% black. When the group of black faith leaders “shift their focus to other issues of racial equity,” perhaps a good place to start would be addressing why black people are being shot in such disproportionate numbers.
Two more murders in Lexington
Lexington isn’t Philadelphia, at least not yet, but it’s not for lack of trying!
The Lexington Herald-Leader’s Jeremy Chisenhall reported that on the afternoon of Thursday, June 17th, 38-year-old Jocko Dianti Green was shot in the parking lot of an apartment complex near the University of Kentucky Hospital; he dies a few hours later.
Mr Chisenhall’s final paragraph:
Lexington has had at least 55 non-fatal shootings this year. There have also been 20 homicides committed by shooting. Lexington reported 14 homicides and 49 non-fatal shootings at this time last year.
Sadly, that information became obsolete just two days later.
Lexington man killed in overnight shooting downtown
By Karla Ward | June 19, 2021 | 12:16 PM
A 30-year-old man died after a shooting in downtown Lexington early Saturday.
Lexington police Lt. Dan Truex said police found the man suffering from a gunshot wound in a parking lot near North Mill and West Short streets at about 1:40 a.m. Truex said “a large crowd” had gathered in the area.
The man, identified as Raymar Alvester Webb by the Fayette County coroner’s office, was taken to University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 2:07 a.m.
Lt Truex said that the LPD didn’t have any information on suspects.
That’s 21 homicides on the 170th day of the year. If the current rate of one murder every 8.111 days continues for the rest of the year, that figures out to 45 murders in the city for 2021. It was just June 9th that I noted, following another two homicides, that Lexington was on track for 43 homicides. The city’s record was 34 murders, set just last year. If Lexington sees 45 this year, it would not just break the old record, but blow it out of the water, with a 32.35% increase.
Of course, in the city’s tremendous battle against crime and violence, the Urban County Council wants to take no-knock warrants out of the hands of law enforcement!
Lexington wants to ban no-knock warrants As the crime rate in Lexington is rising rapidly, the Urban-County Council wants to further hamstring the police
The black communities around the country have been really eager in their attempts to ban no-knock warrants. Louisville’s Breonna Taylor was killed when plainclothes police officers returned fire — not opened fire but returned fire — after Miss Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, claiming that he thought the police were armed intruders, and fired, hitting Officer Jonathan Mattingly in the leg. The officers then fired 32 shots, entirely missing Mr Walker, but hitting Miss Taylor six times. From Wikipedia:
The Louisville Metropolitan Police Department investigation’s primary targets were Jamarcus Glover and Adrian Walker (not related to Kenneth Walker), who were suspected of selling controlled substances from a drug house approximately 10 miles away. Glover had cohabited with Taylor and said the police had pressured him to move out of Taylor’s residence for unspecified reasons.[37] Glover and Taylor had been in an on-off relationship that started in 2016 and lasted until February 2020, when Taylor committed to Kenneth Walker.
In December 2016, Fernandez Bowman was found dead in a car rented by Taylor and used by Glover. He had been shot eight times. Glover had used Taylor’s address and phone number for various purposes, including bank statements.
In a variety of statements, Glover said that Taylor had no involvement in the drug operations, that as a favor she held money from the proceeds for him, and that she handled money for him for other purposes. In different recorded jailhouse conversations Glover said that Taylor had been handling his money and that she was holding $8,000 of it, that he had given Taylor money to pay phone bills, and that he had told his sister that another woman had been keeping the group’s money.
In the recorded conversations and in an interview with The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Glover repeatedly said that Taylor was not involved in any drug operations and that police had “no business” looking for him at her residence, and denied that he had said in the recorded conversations that he kept money at her residence. Taylor was never a co-defendant in Glover’s case.
A no-knock warrant was reasonable, in that the LMPD believed that Miss Taylor was holding drugs and money for Mr Glover. While the evidence sought through the warrant never appeared, Miss Taylor was, at the very least, closely involved with Mr Glover, a notorious drug dealer. That part never penetrated the consciousness of the black community.
And so we come to Lexington, where the Urban-County Council has advanced, on a 9-6 vote, a proposed ordinance to ban no-knock warrants.
Vice Mayor Steve Kay said of the four no-knock warrants Lexington police have served in the past five years, all were executed to preserve evidence in drug cases, despite Lexington police previously saying that they have been not used to preserve evidence.
Translation: we’ve got to give the drug dealers time to flush their stashes down the toilet!
In a city of 308,000 people, four no-knock warrants used over five years does not exactly seem like overuse or some sort of blanket policy.
“I believe strongly that we have a great police force and it’s lead by a great chief,” Kay said. Yet, the Black community has repeatedly said it does not want the police to use no-knock warrants.
“My sense is that the no-knock represents a threat … a continuation of the way that they have been at the wrong end of police enforcement. I want them to have faith in the department,” Kay said. “What I don’t want to read is that there has been a shooting and no one will come forward and provide evidence to the police.”
If the black community in Lexington “have been at the wrong end of police enforcement,” might that not indicate that too many members of their community have been on the wrong end of the law?
Lexington police union blasts nine council members who voted for no-knock warrant ban
By Beth Musgrave | June 10, 2021 | 1:04 PM EDT | Updated: June 10, 2021 | 3:34 PM EDT
The union that represents Lexington police officers blasted nine members of the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council who voted Tuesday to ban no-knock warrants, saying they were pandering to “radically anti-police protesters.”
In Facebook posts, the Fraternal Order of Police Bluegrass Lodge #4 tied a rise in the number of shootings and murders this year to the vote to ban no-knock warrants. “City leaders are less concerned with your safety than they are with pandering to a small group of radically anti-police protestors,” one post read. . . .
In another Facebook post, the FOP tied two Wednesday murders to the vote on the no-knock ban.
“These shooting deaths came just hours after the Lexington City Council irresponsibly voted to ban no-knock warrants in Lexington. When it comes time for officers to arrest these murderers, do we really want to restrict the tools they have to apprehend the suspects safely?”
The Lexington Police Department is like major police departments everywhere: the officers have a hard, dangerous job to do, and they are doing it during a time of increased lawlessness. Lexington has seen 19 homicides in 160 days, which puts the city on pace for 43 murders this year, which would blow 2020’s record of 34 out of the water. At a time in which the city is less safe than it has ever been, the black community want to hobble law enforcement even more.
“There is a concerted effort underway by the Fraternal Order of Police, as we speak, to paint council members who voted for this police reform, our group and others as supporting both criminals and the endangerment of our fellow citizens and police officers,” said Rev. Clark Williams, a member of the group (of black religious leaders).
“We are not the enemies of the Lexington police, and for the record, nobody wants Lexington to be safe for everybody more than we do,” Williams said. “But this form of misinformation and divisive rhetoric has no place in the legislative process, and it further demonstrates why we need a permanent ban on no-knock warrants.”
Really? If “nobody wants Lexington to be safe for everybody more than (they) do,” why are they trying to aid the criminal element in town?
No-knock warrants have hardly been abused in Lexington; there’s no need for an absolute ban. It would be an easy check to keep the current policy, of having the Mayor, someone who isn’t part of the Police Department, review and approve or disapprove of the applications before they are presented to a judge.
Two men sentenced for assault during a #BlackLivesMatter protest Unfortunately, the judge just might grant 'shock probation'
Dylan Dempster (Fayette County Detention Center)
Lexington men who pleaded guilty in summer protest altercation sentenced to jail time
By Morgan Eads | June 10, 2021 | 11:49 AM EDT
Two men were sentenced Thursday to a year in jail for charges related to an altercation last summer during racial justice protests in Lexington.
Kaulbert Wilson and Dylan Dempster, both 20, received their sentences Thursday morning after pleading guilty in April to the charges against them. Both were initially facing felony charges, but after their charges were amended in their pleas, the most serious charge against each was a class A misdemeanor.
Wilson pleaded guilty to second-degree riot, fourth-degree assault, second-degree disorderly conduct and two counts of third-degree criminal mischief. Dempster pleaded guilty to amended charges of second-degree riot and two counts of third-degree criminal mischief.
Kaulbert Wilson (Source: Fayette County Detention Center)
Judge Thomas Travis told the attorneys for the two criminals that there were post-sentencing remedies available, including, unfortunately, “shock probation,” which could have them released at any time. The judge said he would consider such motions if filed.
Translation: these guys are going to (mostly) get away with it.
Of course, while the Herald-Leader (sort of) subscribes to the McClatchy policy of not publishing mugshots, the newspaper’s ‘reporting partner,’ WKYT-TV, Channel 27, does not. Being a visual medium, television stations like mugshots, and the mugshot of Mr Wilson came from WKYT-s website. The First Street Journal definitely does not go along with the policy of hiding mugshots, especially when these two are not just criminal suspects but actually convicted criminals. Let the world see who they are!
And another two bite the dust
Lexington, Kentucky, had gone 18 days without a homicide, but I suppose that it was too good to last. From the Lexington Herald-Leader:
2 men shot dead in Lexington: 1 was left in a vehicle, another killed outside a club
By Jeremy Chisenhall | June 9, 2021 | 7:05 AM EDT | Updated 4:33 PM EDT
The fatal shootings were the 17th and 18th homicides in Lexington this year, according to Lexington crime data. The city set a record last year with 34. At this point in 2020, Lexington had reported 12 homicides for the year.
Sadly, this is incorrect; the victims are teh 18th and 19th murder victims in the city.
I can understand why Jeremy Chisenhall made the error: the Lexington Police Department has not updated its homicide investigation page in a long time, with the May 9th killing of Mar’Quevion Leach as the 16th and last victim listed, but the Herald-Leader reported on the murder of Demonte Washington, 28, on May 22nd. Since Mr Chisenhall was not the reporter on that story, he may have missed it completely.
Police found the first shooting victim around 11:35 p.m. Tuesday, according to Lt. Ronald Keaton. The victim was a 28-year-old man who had been shot and left in a vehicle in the 200 block of Hedgewood Court in the Woodhill area. . . . .
The city’s second overnight shooting occurred outside The Office, a gentleman’s club in the 900 block of Winchester Road.
Keaton said police were called to the location around 2:35 a.m. for a report of shots fired outside. The victim was already dead when officers arrived, Keaton said. He said it was unclear if the victim or anyone involved in the shooting was a patron at the club.
As of Mr Chisenhall’s most recent update, there was little information about the victims or any suspects available.
Nineteen homicides in 160 days. That doesn’t put Lexington in similarly-sized St Louis’ class, with the Gateway City having 82 homicides to date, or Louisville’s “more than 80,” but Louisville, with 617,790 people is twice Lexington’s size.[1]The Louisville metropolitan area has about 1,265,000, while Lexington, the borders of which extend to the Fayette County line, doesn’t really have a ‘metropolitan area.’ Still, Lexington is on pace for 43 murders in 2021, which would shatter last year’s record of 34, and the long, hot summer hasn’t really begun yet.
___________________________
Update: June 10, 2021, at 2:20 PM EDT:
While I didn’t get personal credit, Mr Chisenhall did update the homicide numbers:
CORRECTION: The total number of homicides in Lexington this year was incorrectly stated in a previous version of this story.
References
| ↑1 | The Louisville metropolitan area has about 1,265,000, while Lexington, the borders of which extend to the Fayette County line, doesn’t really have a ‘metropolitan area.’ |
|---|
Still not Killadelphia! Lexington sees its 17th homicide of the year
Lexington, Kentucky, which saw a city record of 34 homicides in 2020, is now half way to that total, with 7¼ months left to go in the year.
Victim of fatal shooting in Lexington early Saturday has been identified
By Karla Ward | May 22, 2021 | 1:06 PM | Updated: 2:26 PM EDT
Two separate shootings left one man dead and two women injured in Lexington early Saturday.
Lexington police Sgt. Wayne Terry said police were investigating a fatal shooting on Hillcrest Avenue, just off Winchester Road. The crime was reported just before 3 a.m., he said.
The Fayette County coroner’s office said Demonte Washington, 28, was pronounced dead at the scene at 3:33 a.m.
It was the 17th homicide of 2021 in Fayette County.
Terry did not have any information about a suspect, but he said “it appears to be an isolated incident.”
WLEX-TV updated their report at 7:03 PM, and said that the Lexington Police Department has a suspect in custody.
Seventeen murders in 142 days works out to 43 to 44 homicides for the year, if the rate continues to be the same. But hey, that’s way, way, way behind St Louis and Philadelphia!
It seems that the neighborhood doesn’t want the police defunded. From WKYT News:
It comes as no surprise to neighbors down the street. “This is the third shooting here in a couple of months,” one neighbor said. “Sometimes it sounds like two or three shots a night sounds like a lot, but in this neighborhood that’s just common place.”
Some say they’re worried about their kids playing outside. “We don’t come outside. We play in the backyard. We make sure we don’t ever play out front. It’s kind of a dumb thing around here.”
But they say the shootings don’t involve the neighbors themselves. Many people we talked to believe the nightlife is to blame.
That’s why they’re begging for more police in the area.
“I think that with everything that’s going on, we don’t have enough protection. We need to be protected from the people who are out here doing these things,” the neighbor said.
The shooting location is given as the corner of Winchester Road and Hillcrest Avenue. Winchester Road is heavily commercial in that area; the neighborhoods around Hillcrest Avenue are mostly starter homes, and are racially integrated.