Tag Archives: #Lexington

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Political correctness in the city of Lexington

We have previously noted that the Lexington Herald-Leader apparently does not post photos of criminal suspects, — though an exception was recently made for a white suspect — even though the other city media do, and that McClatchy Company, which owns the Herald-Leader, apparently does not either.

Lexington Police Department shooting investigations chart; screen capture from city website.

Well, it seems that the Lexington city government is just as eaten up with political correctness as its newspaper. The unreadably small chart to the right, which you can expand by clicking on the image, is a screen capture from the city government’s Shooting investigations page, taken at 4:02 PM EDT on Monday, May 10th. If you expand it, you will see that it lists the victims’ sex, race and age, along with the suspect, if known. Of 31 shooting investigations, 24 of the victims are listed as black, 3 as Hispanic, and 4 as white.

Lexington Police Department shooting investigations chart; screen capture from city website.

But when you come to the city’s Homicide investigations page, on a different page of the same website — the two pages are linked — shown on the left, you’ll notice, if you click on the screen capture and expand it, the victims’ sex and race are not included. The Shootings investigation page excludes homicide victims.

I wonder why that is.

Now, you can get that information on the website original, in some cases, by clicking on the crime scene location. Nevertheless, I find it an odd omission, considering that the information is posted on the shootings investigations page; why exclude information that the police clearly have?[1]Note that the investigation of the shooting on January 31, 2021, on the 100 block of West Vine Street, has both a surviving shooting victim and the murder of Lonnie Oxendine. Are we to somehow think … Continue reading Why do the Lexington Police and city government censor information they clearly have? Why, if they are going to make the information posted for plain public view in the first place, do they deliberately withhold statistical information?

Well, I think that I can tell you. Lexington is, according to 2019 Census Department guesstimates, 74.9% white, 14.6% black and 7.2% Hispanic (of any race). If the city puts out too much information, then an [insert slang term for the rectum here] like me might look at the numbers and ask something like, ‘If the city is only 14.6% black, why are 77.4% of the shooting victims black? If the Lexington Police Department told us the race of the homicide victims, would we find a similar racial disparity?[2]According to the Homicide investigations page, all 15 of the listed victims — the page had not been updated with the most recent homicide — were killed by gunfire.

Lexington isn’t Chicago or Philadelphia yet, though sometimes it seems as though the criminal element there is taking that as a personal challenge. But if the city’s violence problems are ever going to be solved, they have to be solved by addressing the problem properly, by recognizing what and where the problem lays, and that’s something the city, and its newspaper, just won’t do.

References

References
↑1 Note that the investigation of the shooting on January 31, 2021, on the 100 block of West Vine Street, has both a surviving shooting victim and the murder of Lonnie Oxendine. Are we to somehow think that the Lexington Police recorded the race, sex and age of the surviving shooting victim but not that of the man who perished?
↑2 According to the Homicide investigations page, all 15 of the listed victims — the page had not been updated with the most recent homicide — were killed by gunfire.
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And another one bites the dust! Do black lives matter in Lexington?

There are no suspects yet, so I cannot fault the Lexington Herald-Leader for not posting their photos, but it does seem to be the newspaper’s policy specifically, and McClatchy Company’s policy in general, not to do so.

Teenager killed, two others injured in North Lexington shooting

By Karla Ward | May 8, 2021 07:57 PM EDT | Updated; May 9, 2021 | 10:20 AM EDT

Two men and a teen boy were taken to the hospital with serious injuries Saturday night after a shooting in a neighborhood off Georgetown Street.

The teenager, later identified as 17-year-old Mar’quevion Leach, died of his injuries at University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital, the Fayette County Coroner’s Office announced late Saturday.

Lexington police Lt. Chris Cooper said Saturday that officers were called to the 700 block of Florence Avenue just after 6 p.m. He said police received several calls about shots fired.

“Upon arrival, we did locate several individuals who had been injured by gunfire,” he said.

There’s a little more at the original.

Unless I’ve missed one, young Mr Leach would be the sixteenth person murdered in Lexington thus far this year. Saturday having been the 128th day of the year, that would put Lexington at one murder every eight days, assuming none of the other victims of what may have been a gun battle die. At that rate, Lexington would see 45 to 46 people murdered in 2021; the city set it’s records of 34 murders just last year, and that was four over the previous record of 30, set the year before.

Actually, 45 to 46 (the actual number is 45.625) is a better rate than just three weeks ago, when the city was on track for 51 homicides. But, if one of the other shooting victims succumbs, and becomes the 17th homicide victim, the projected total jumps to between 48 and 49 victims. A 17th would be fully half of 2020’s total, just 1/3 of the way through the year.

And the summer hasn’t started yet!

Do black lives matter in Lexington? It doesn’t really seem so, as young black men are being killed at record rates in a city which used to be fairly peaceful; I lived in the city from 1971 through 1984.[1]There is a Facebook page for a Mar’quevion Leach in Lexington, though the profile photo was posted ten years ago. I assume that this is the same person, as the name is fairly unusual.

The Herald-Leader reported that the police believe that the victims were “probably targeted.” At least to one person, Mr Leach’s black life didn’t matter, nor the lives of the other two victims.

References

References
↑1 There is a Facebook page for a Mar’quevion Leach in Lexington, though the profile photo was posted ten years ago. I assume that this is the same person, as the name is fairly unusual.
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An interesting juxtaposition #BlackLivesMatter protesters celebrate the conviction of Derek Chauvin, but don't help police solve murders of black Americans by other black Americans

There they were, two stories, side by side on the Lexington Herald-Leader’s website main page:

Lexington Herald-Leader website main page, 8:36 AM EDT, April 21, 2021. Screenshot by DRP.

Two stories, one about the glee being felt by some over the conviction of Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd, and one about the black lives that really don’t matter to the #BlackLivesMatter activists:

‘Justice can prevail.’ Group gathers in Lexington after verdict in Derek Chauvin trial

By Karla Ward | April 20, 2021 | 7:43 PM EDT | Updated April 20, 2021 | 8:11 PM EDT

A group that has been protesting since last summer against police violence gathered Tuesday night in downtown Lexington to hear the verdict announced in the trial of Derek Chauvin, who was found guilty on all counts in the death of George Floyd.

April Taylor, a member of LPD Accountability and a prominent protest organizer in Lexington, was emotional after the verdict was read. She addressed the group of a few dozen that gathered in front of the Fayette County courthouses.

Taylor said Tuesday night that she was grateful for the guilty verdict, but that police reforms are needed to prevent more deaths.

“I am worried about what will happen on appeal,” Taylor said. And she said, as a tear rolled down her cheek, “There are so many other people who have lost their lives who did not get justice.”

Taylor hopes that the verdict in Chauvin’s case will encourage people to keep fighting because “there are moments when we can have wins, when justice can prevail.”

It was only a few days ago that we noted Lexington Police Chief Lawrence Weathers and his complaint:

Lexington Police Chief Lawrence Weathers urged people with information regarding homicide investigations to speak with police. He said some witnesses don’t cooperate with police investigations, making it more difficult to identify suspects.

The other article noted the difficulties in obtaining justice on Lexington’s mean streets:

‘Tired of burying one another.’ Families of Lexington homicide victims rally to end violence

By Jeremy Chisenhall | April 20, 2021 | 8:14 PM EDT | Updated April 20, 2021 | 9:42 PM EDT

Concerned about a recent spike in fatal shootings, Lexington community members on Tuesday gathered to say they’re “sick and tired of burying one another.”

That was Pastor Joseph Owens’ message as he spoke to other residents gathered in the parking lot outside Shiloh Baptist Church. Lexington has had 15 homicides in 2021, all of which have been shootings, according to police data.

An early spike in shootings this year follows a record-setting year for homicides in 2020. Lexington reported 34 homicides last year. Some of the people at Tuesday’s rally were concerned that violence involving gangs and other groups is a significant contributor to the spike in shootings.

It was just two days ago that we noted that Lexington’s 15 homicides by April 18th put the city on a path toward 51 homicides for 2021, and a 15.78 per 100,000 population homicide rate. But, at least the Herald-Leader regards homicides as newsworthy, something The Philadelphia Inquirer does not. Of course, when Lexington has an average of one murder a week, while the City of Brotherly Love averages 1.4 per day, I suppose I can see why the Inquirer doesn’t bother.

Today’s Inquirer? Their website main page was filled with articles of gloating and joy that Mr Chauvin was convicted:

You know what I didn’t see on the Inquirer’s main page? I didn’t see a single story about the the people who were murdered in Philadelphia last night. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page noted that there had been 154 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love by the end of April 20th, a 31.62% increase over the same date last year — and 2020 being a leap year, April 20th of 2020 was the 111th day of the year, not the 110th as it is this year — and three more homicides than just the day before.[1]It’s worth noting that very white Uber-feminist Amanda Marcotte, herself a resident of South Philadelphia, never writes about the black-on-black homicide rate in her adopted home town, but sure … Continue reading

But that didn’t matter to the editors of the Inquirer. It didn’t matter that former Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey used to lament the “no snitchin'” culture which hindered the police in finding and arresting the thugs who killed so many Philadelphians, it doesn’t matter that the city had a higher homicide rate than Chicago, it doesn’t matter that the vast majority of the homicide victims are black, because #BlackLivesMatter only means that black lives matter to the #woke of the Inquirer newsroom when they are taken by white policemen.

We noted, last October, in an article entitled We need to stop pretending that #BlackLivesMatter, because in the City of Brotherly Love, it’s very apparent that they don’t, that:

(A)s of 11:59 PM EDT on October 21th, 391 souls had been sent to their eternal rewards. That isn’t the record, of course, but 2007 is the base year on the Current Crime Statistics website, and that was the number of people killed that year in Philly. This year has now matched that total . . . with 71 days left in the year.

The math is simple: 391 people killed in 295 days so far equals 1.325 people killed every single day. With 71 days left in the year, at that rate the city should see another 94 people sent to their deaths before the ball drops in New York City.

By October 21, 2020, summer had been over for a month, and summer is the season when most murders occur in our major cities. But the math I did, 391 + 94 = 485, turned out to be short, as the daily homicide rate in Philadelphia increased, and 499 souls were sent early to their eternal rewards. And Philly’s homicide rate of 1.40 dead every single day, in just the depths of winter and the first month of spring is higher than it was that October day last year.

But that’s not news to the inquirer! Oh, there was an article by columnist Will Bunch blaming the increase in homicides on increased gun ownership, but the increase in black-on-black murders in Philly was never mentioned. As always, the problem was “gun violence,” rather than the culture and attitudes of the bad guys who used the guns. Malcolm Jenkins, formerly a safety with the Philadelphia Eagles, and Natasha Cloud, a guard with the Washington Mystics, wrote an article published yesterday blaming the police, even though deaths of blacks at the hands of the police are minuscule compared to the deaths of black Americans at the hands of other black Americans.

Michele Kilpatrick, one of District Attorney Larry Krasner’s minions, came ever-so-close to describing the problem:

In 2020, there were four victims of shootings in the Philadelphia Police Department’s 5th District, which includes the affluent, majority-white neighborhoods of Roxborough and Manayunk. Just a few miles away in the 14th District, which includes the low-income, majority-Black neighborhood of Germantown, there were 121 victims of shootings. That disparity is not new: In 2018, the 14th District had 20 times the number of shooting victims than the 5th. In 2016, there were 80 shooting victims in the 14th and none in the 5th.

We know that proactive policing policies like stop-and-frisk, which sometimes yields unlicensed or unregistered guns, are not the reason shootings have remained so low in Chestnut Hill — because the same policies have consistently failed to make shootings also rare in Germantown.

Instead, throughout Philadelphia and cities nationwide, generations of low-income Black and Latino residents have lived and died in communities that have been reduced to symbols in the public imagination — the South Bronx, Compton, South Side of Chicago — as we mistake failed policies for failed people and resign ourselves to the idea that certain types of places and people are just inherently dangerous.

Occam’s Razor is:

a scientific and philosophical rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities.

Miss Kilpatrick is apparently not a fan of William of Occam, because she, like so many others, feels the need to go beyond the simple, go beyond the obvious, and find all sorts of reasons why bad people are bad people beyond them simply being bad people! She wants to blame poverty, but I grew up poor, grew up without a father, and it didn’t lead me to kill anyone. I didn’t have the community services she advocates, yet I wasn’t out committing crimes or shooting at people.

Mt Sterling, Kentucky is a small town, and we had something called October Court Day. On Court day, the third Monday of the month, the country folk would come to town and set up along Locust Street and other areas on the south side of town, to sell and trade for their products. On two separate October Court Days, I walked up North Maysville Street, in full view of where the city Police Department used to be on Broadway, across the street from the Montgomery County Courthouse, carrying long guns that I had bought, when I was still in high school . . . and nobody cared, because nobody thought that I was going to shoot anybody.[2]Sadly, Court Day has degenerated into nothing more than a professional vendor-driven flea market.

Why? Because everybody knew that my mother had taught me right!

There’s no way my solutions are politically correct, and many of the Special Snowflakes™ on the left who read it will be absolutely triggered, but I, of course, don’t care; it’s still the truth.

And that’s what it all boils down to: bad kids are brought up by bad parents, assuming that anybody brings them up at all. Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old in Chicago, is stone-cold graveyard dead after being shot by a police officer, because young Mr Toledo was outside, consorting with a 21-year-old convicted criminal, and fleeing with a gun, at 2:30 in the morning. The officer thought that Mr Toledo had turned on him with a gun, though the body camera footage shows Mr Toledo had dropped the weapon, but the real fault is that his parents were letting him run around at 2:30 on a Monday morning.

Miss Kilpatrick got it wrong: the problem really is failed people, failed people in the neighborhoods she mentioned, the South Bronx, Compton, South Side of Chicago, and the ones she left out, Philly’s own Strawberry Mansion or Nicetown, because they are being brought up, are growing up, in a culture which glamorizes violence, which doesn’t teach right from wrong, and in which “street cred” is of major importance.

Well, I’m just enough of an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to tell you what the real solution is. It won’t be politically correct in the slightest, and will doubtlessly offend some people, but I’m retired, and can’t be ‘canceled,’ can’t be fired from a job for telling you the truth. They key to understanding the causes of violence is understanding what is most important to teenaged boys and young men: pussy!

There is nothing teenaged boys and twenty-something men think about more than sex. I know; I used to be a teenaged boy and twenty-something young man, sometime just after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. The greatest reward for young men of those ages is getting laid, and therein lays the key: when young girls reward the behavior of the bad boys with pussy, bad behavior is incentivized, and good behavior devalued. When the gang-bangers get laid, and the nerds do not, the girls wind up with some exciting times, but with guys who will never provide any sort of reasonable and safe future for them.

The key is the education of teenaged girls, teaching them that the nerds they are shunning are the guys who will be there when they get into their thirties and forties, the guys who will actually be fathers to their children, and the guys who will help provide a solid and reliable middle-class home for them. They will be the men who can be with them every day, and not be spending five-to-ten years away in Graterford or Eddyville prisons.

In the end, the solution to the problem is black mothers, teaching their black daughters how their behavior affects their neighborhoods, their cities, and all of society. The black mothers of Lexington and Philadelphia and Chicago and St Louis, mothers who now have a 69.4% out-of-wedlock birth rate, need to realize and teach their daughters that there is a better way of life than the ones the mothers have, need to rear their daughters to do what’s right for themselves and their neighborhoods and their eventual children rather than just what is exciting in the moment.

There’s no way that is politically correct, and many of the Special Snowflakes™ on the left who read it will be absolutely triggered, but I, of course, don’t care; it’s still the truth.[3]Trigger: to cause an intense and usually negative emotional reaction in (someone)

References

References
↑1 It’s worth noting that very white Uber-feminist Amanda Marcotte, herself a resident of South Philadelphia, never writes about the black-on-black homicide rate in her adopted home town, but sure jumps on the Derek Chauvin bandwagon.
↑2 Sadly, Court Day has degenerated into nothing more than a professional vendor-driven flea market.
↑3 Trigger: to cause an intense and usually negative emotional reaction in (someone)
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It looks like Lexington is trying to become Philadelphia

The Lexington Herald-Leader reported on Tuesday, January 5th, on the 2020 homicide numbers in Kentucky’s second largest city, home of the University of Kentucky, and where I lived from August of 1971 through December of 1984. There were 34 homicides in the city in 2020, up from 30 in 2019, which was the previous record. With a guesstimated population of 323,152 in mid-2019, that puts the city’s murder rate at 10.53 per 100,000 population, far, far behind places like Philadelphia and Chicago. Lexington-Fayette County is the 60th largest city in the United States, larger than St Louis, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.

Well, it seems as though the city’s gang-bangers took that number as a personal challenge, and one to be left in the dust.

Man dead, suspect arrested after Lexington’s 2nd fatal shooting in hours

By Jeremy Chisenhall | April 19, 2021 | 7:22 AM, Updated 3:28 PM EDT

Brandon Carl Munford, 37 (Photo: Lexington-Fayette County Detention Center)

A 28-year-old man is dead after a fatal shooting in Lexington Sunday evening, according to Lexington police and the Fayette County coroner’s office.

The shooting was called into police at 7:09 p.m. Sunday, according to police Lt. Chris Van Brackel. Officers responded to the 1000 block of Pennebaker Drive to find Devante Bell injured after being shot. He was transported to University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital but later died, according to the coroner’s office.

Brandon Carl Munford, 37, was arrested Sunday night and charged with murder and wanton endangerment, according to an arrest citation. A Lexington officer wrote in the arrest citation that Munford intentionally shot Bell, who was inside his vehicle at the time. Police later released that the shooting happened when an argument escalated to the point of shots being fired.

At least the Lexington Herald-Leader actually reported on the killings, unlike The Philadelphia Inquirer, which no longer sees stories about homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as newsworthy, unless the victim is a child, a “somebody,” or a cute little white girl.

The photo used to illustrate the Herald-Leader article was not in the newspaper’s story. Other Lexington media, including WKYT-TV, WLEX-TV, the Lexington city government page, and WDKY-TV carried the photo. The Lexington Police department tweeted it out. The Herald-Leader instead ran a stock photo of Lexington police car pursuit lights. The newspaper has apparently decided against publishing the photos of accused criminals, for some unknown reason.

Further down came the kicker:

Bell’s death was also the fifth Lexington homicide in April and the 15th homicide in 2021. Lexington set a record for homicides in 2020 with 34.

Sunday, April 18th, was the 108th day of 2021. At that rate, 0.1389 homicides per day, Lexington is on track for 51 murders in 2021! Fifteen homicides on the 108th day of the year is fully half of 2019’s total of 30, less than a third of the way through the year. Doing the math, Lexington is on pace for a year end homicide rate of 15.78 per 100,000 population, which still pales in comparison to Philadelphia or Chicago or St Louis, but the increase is certainly a disturbing trend, in a city with far lower population density, with far fewer people stacked on top of each other.

Of course, the Herald-Leader article uses the journalistically (journolistically?) favored term “gun violence,” as though inanimate objects magically jump into people’s hands and then fire themselves:

The increase in gun violence in Lexington has caused concern from BUILD (Building a United Interfaith Lexington through Direct-Action), a faith-based group made up of 26 member congregations in Lexington. The group addresses issues of poverty and injustice locally. Members from the group are hosting a “Stop the Violence” rally Tuesday evening.

“As Pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church, I see that Lexington has a violence problem,” said Pastor Joseph Owens, a co-chair of BUILD. “This isn’t new. We have gangs. I have presided over the funerals of several young men who were shot and killed in Lexington over the last few years. My fellow clergy from around the city have also presided or attended some of these funerals.

At least the Rev Owens mentioned gangs, mentioned “a violence problem” rather than “a gun violence problem.” The problem isn’t guns; the problem is bad people, mostly bad younger people, reared by mostly bad parents. Of course, it’s quite politically incorrect to say that, because, well just because.

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Political correctness in the Lexington Herald-Leader? (Part3) I wonder if journalists have been replaced by journolists?

We noted, in two different stories, that while all of the other Lexington media sources published the picture of Juanyah Clay, who was being sought in the murder of 26-year-old Bryan D. Greene, whose body police found at the Eastridge Apartments on Alumni Drive on January 30th. The first linked story concerned the police looking for Mr Clay, so the publication of his photo could only have helped the police find him.

We also noted that in both of the earlier stories in the Lexington Herald-Leader included stock photos of the police stringing crime scene tape around an unspecified area, so the failure to use Mr Clay’s photo, which was freely available at the Lexington city government’s page as well as the Police Department’s Facebook page. Thus, it was not a matter of the newspaper having to pay someone for the photo.

And today, we have this:

Detectives detail multiple cases against Lexington man charged in Alumni Drive murder

By Morgan Eads | April 15, 2021 | 12:31 PM

At a court hearing Thursday morning, two detectives and a jail employee discussed the various charges against a man accused of shooting and killing a 26-year-old after he was already wanted for cutting off an ankle monitor while on conditional release in a different criminal case.

Juanyah J. Clay, 19, was arrested in March and charged with murder in the death of 26-year-old Bryan Greene, according to police.

Greene’s body was found on the night of Jan. 30 after someone spotted a large amount of blood outside an apartment at 2800 Alumni Drive, Lexington police detective Jeremy Atkins testified at the preliminary hearing Thursday. When police went inside the apartment they found Greene dead of what appeared to be multiple gunshot wounds.

Further down we find:

Clay was arrested on March 30 at a hotel on E. Lowery Lane, Lexington police detective Keith McKinney testified. He was found to have $1,020 in small bills, three concealed loaded firearms and unknown pills on his person, and a digital scale and marijuana was found in the room he was exiting, McKinney said. In addition to the charge of murder, Clay is facing two charges of drug trafficking and one charge of concealing a deadly weapon.

After his arrest, Clay admitted to Atkins that he shot Greene, Atkins testified. Clay also stated that another person was present at the time of Greene’s death, and that that person has since died. While Atkins did not testify to how that person died, he said that the person’s name was Markel Allen, which is the name of a 17-year-old who was shot and killed in Lexington on Feb. 17. That case is still under investigation.

At the time of Greene’s death, Clay had an arrest warrant out for violating the conditions of his release as he awaited trial on a separate burglary charge, according to court records. An employee of the Fayette County Detention Center testified Thursday that Clay was placed on an ankle monitor in May of 2020. He’s accused of cutting that ankle monitor off in June 2020 and throwing it out the window of a vehicle in Lexington, the jail employee testified.

Sounds like a bad dude! He was in possession of illegal drugs and the paraphernalia for selling it, and three concealed, loaded weapons, all while he was on the lam for a burglary trial.

But here’s the part that gets me. The Herald-Leader included this video in today’s story:

Underneath was the caption:

Lexington Police Chief Lawrence Weathers urged people with information regarding homicide investigations to speak with police. He said some witnesses don’t cooperate with police investigations, making it more difficult to identify suspects. By Jeremy Chisenhall

Jeremy Chisenhall was the writer of the first two stories, the ones referenced in my previous articles.

Now, if the Herald-Leader is going to post the video of Police Chief Lawrence Weathers urging people to come forward, why wouldn’t the paper publish the suspect’s photo, particularly when the suspect was at large, and information from the public could have proven helpful in finding him?

I do not know the newspaper’s policy on this, and when I tried to contact both Morgan Eads, who wrote today’s story, and Mr Chisenhall, who wrote the previous two, neither was available by telephone.

So, I will go back to my previous speculation of March 30th: if the newspaper’s website had enough bandwidth available for a generic crime story photo, why didn’t the Herald-Leader include Mr Clay’s photo instead? Wouldn’t Mr Clay’s photograph be much more useful to people who might just happen to see him on the streets than a picture of crime scene tape?

That’s the big question, why? And being the very politically incorrect observer of media bias that I am, one answer springs immediately to mind. Having written about the horrible damage the #woke and #BlackLivesMatter activists have done in the newsrooms of The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer, I instantly thought: to have published the photo of a murder suspect who happens to be black might be seen as racist by the reporter or his editors.

Is there another explanation for this egregious failure of journalism? If there is, it hasn’t occurred to me. Perhaps someone else can give me a better answer, but right now, I’m calling it the way I see it: the newspaper cares more about political correctness than it does journalism. Journolism over journalism, perhaps?

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Politically correct crime reporting

The Lexington Herald-Leader reported Tuesday on the 2020 homicide numbers in Kentucky’s second largest city, home of the University of Kentucky, and where I lived from August of 1971 through December of 1984. There were 34 homicides in the city in 2020, up from 30 in 2019, which was the previous record. With a guesstimated population of 323,152 in mid-2019, that puts the city’s murder rate at 10.53 per 100,000 population, far, far behind places like Philadelphia and Chicago. Lexington-Fayette County is the 60th largest city in the United States, larger than St Louis, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.[1]Unlike some other larger cities, Lexington has no contiguous suburbs, in that the Lexington city and Fayette County governments merged in 1974.

Teens, disputes drove a Lexington homicide record. COVID-19 made cases hard to solve

By Jeremy Chisenhall | January 5, 2021 | 2:57 PM EST | Updated: 4:12 PM EST

Lexington Police Chief Lawrence Weathers, from the city website.

Many of Lexington’s record-breaking 2020 homicides were violent conclusions to arguments or other crimes involving male adults or teens.

There were 34 homicides in Lexington in 2020, a 13 percent increase from 2019, according to Lexington police data. The previous record was 30, set in 2019. The difficulty of identifying suspects in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic made matters worse for police.

“Everybody’s wearing masks,” Lexington Police Chief Lawrence Weathers told the Herald-Leader. “That puts a little extra work on us, and we have to corroborate a little bit more on some of the things without having a full face.”

Well, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) did mandate that, so, how about that, even criminals are obeying the orders!

There’s a lot more at the original, which you can read at the embedded link.

Jeremy Chisenhall, the article author, included some graphics in which homicides were mapped by location, by time and day of the week, by the ages and sexes of the victims and suspects.

You know what’s missing? Any data or graphics on the race or ethnicity of the victims and suspects.

Now, I didn’t know if it was political correctness on the part of the Herald-Leader or Mr Chisenhall that omitted that information, or whether the Lexington Police Department failed to provide it, so I did the obvious thing: I went to the Police Department’s website. There I found a chart on homicide investigations, listing all 34 victims and the current dispositions of their cases, including named suspects, plus the ages of the victims and where they were killed. But it doesn’t disclose race or ethnicity.

The LPD certainly keeps that information, because in another chart, on the same page I found the homicide chart, is a three page .pdf file of assaults with firearms, which specifically states that it does not include homicides, in which the races, sexes and ages of the victims are specified.

I was able to dig a bit deeper. On the homicides page, the 25 named offenders were hyperlinked to their mugshots. Based on observation of mugshots and names, I counted 11 non-Hispanic black males, 2 non-Hispanic black females, 4 non-Hispanic white males, 1 non-Hispanic white female, 2 Hispanic white males, 1 black Hispanic white male, 2 unidentifiable suspects and 3 juveniles.

So, why did I have to manually count a number that the LPD provided much more easily available in shooting victims?

Why hide this stuff? The omission was so glaring that anyone could have noticed it, and Mr Chisenhall’s graphics made that even more obvious. Eventually, the city will have to report the numbers anyway. But we’re not supposed to talk about race, are we?

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↑1 Unlike some other larger cities, Lexington has no contiguous suburbs, in that the Lexington city and Fayette County governments merged in 1974.