Tag Archives: #Lexington

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