Tag Archives: #Philadelphia

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Helen Gym Flaherty and Broken Windows

I had started on this story ten days ago, but had dropped it. It sat in my ‘drafts’ queue for a bit, until I say this tweet from Helen Gym Flaherty,[1]Even though Mrs Flaherty does not respect her husband, attorney Bret Flaherty, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal will not show him a similar disrespect. formerly a Philadelphia city councilwoman, and now a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Mayor:

But while the longtime activist who is typically aligned with the Democratic Party’s left wing said violence is “destroying our city and our people,” she was far from taking a tough-on-crime tone.

“I will not use this crisis to roll back the clock on civil rights,” she said. “While many people in this race will talk about public safety, let me be clear: Decades of systemic racism and disinvestment brought us to this place.”

Mrs Flaherty’s campaign website is full of the usual ‘progressive’ bromides, but, at least as of this writing, there’s no actual issues page, telling the city’s voters — of which I am not one — what she would actually do in office if elected.

But then, this self-described social justice warrior — or so I take it from this campaign website blurb — cites an article from The Philadelphia Inquirer. I’m sure that The Inquirer’s #woke[2]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 columnists and staffers will be aghast that this was even published! Why, it absolutely reeks of Rudy Guiliani and “broken windows policing“.

Renovating abandoned houses reduces the rate of gun violence, Penn study finds

Gun crimes went up during the study, but they went up less near houses that got new doors and windows, at a cost of $5,900.

by Tom Avril | Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Hammers and screwdrivers might be effective tools in preventing gun violence.

That’s the conclusion of a new study by University of Pennsylvania researchers, who measured crime rates near clusters of abandoned Philadelphia homes that were outfitted with new doors, windows, and other improvements.

Previous research has found that crime goes down when vacant houses are fixed up, but it was unclear whether the connection between those two things was more than a coincidence. To nail down whether home repairs actually prevent crimes, the Penn team tackled the question with the same rigorous approach doctors use to study a new drug: with a randomized, controlled trial.

The results left little doubt, said lead author Eugenia C. South, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.

Gun crimes increased everywhere in the city during the study period, but there was less of an increase in the neighborhood blocks surrounding renovated homes, compared to those where abandoned homes were left alone, South and her coauthors reported in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The repairs likely helped in two ways, she said: by healing the social fabric of the neighborhood and by eliminating possible hiding places for guns.

There’s a lot more at the original, and while the original, and the study behind it, are more concerned with new windows, doors and façades on abandoned houses, it’s obvious that upgrading occupied units would be even better: fewer places to become drug shooting galleries, fewer places to stash weapons and stolen goods, and more responsible neighbors.

The left really didn’t like broken windows policing, because it involves more than just fixing up neighborhoods; it also involves seriously prosecuting ‘minor’ crimes, and giving the ‘entry-level’ criminals a small taste of life behind bars, giving them an early opportunity to decide that, hey, this life isn’t for me.

And Mrs Flaherty, a strong supporter of the police-hating defense attorney who, aided by George Soros’ money, became District Attorney in Philadelphia, certainly won’t like that part.

Cleaning up the city’s streets is certainly important, but cleaning up crime has to be part of it. Philadelphia has tolerated the open-air drug market around the Allegheny Street SEPTA train station, and discarded drug needles just wherever, and it’s little wonder that there’s no respect for the law when the law shows little indication of being actually enforced.

Mrs Flaherty won’t support something like that, and that means that, even with her (apparent) support of spending city money to redo windows and doors on abandoned rowhouses, there won’t be much of a positive impact on reducing crime. One fact is just too simple and too obvious to penetrate the progressive mindset: the criminal who is already behind bars isn’t out on the streets committing other crimes.

References

References
↑1 Even though Mrs Flaherty does not respect her husband, attorney Bret Flaherty, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal will not show him a similar disrespect.
↑2 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

We’ve pretty much reached the end point, at which any calculations of the final toll of blood in the City of Brotherly Love are down to the margin of error. With just five days left in the year, Philadelphia has seen 510 ‘official’ homicides, so the final toll is going to be somewhere in the 514 to 521 range.

It was just twenty days ago that I noted the margin of error possibility that the city could finish slightly under 500 homicides. I guess that the gang-bangers “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 took that as something of a personal challenge.

So, my congratulations to Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, on the fine job they’ve done.

In eight years under Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, Philly never once cracked the 400 ‘barrier,’ and saw two years, 2013 and 2014, in which the homicide total was under 250! Homicides were under 300 during the trio’s final three years in office together.

New York City has seen 418 homicides through Christmas Day. Philly, with just 18.5% of the Big Apple’s population, just smiles and says, “Hold my beer!”

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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You can’t make poorer people wealthier by making wealthier people poorer

Though Philadelphia is, overall, quite “diverse,” a word that I mostly despise due to the way it has been co-opted, it is, internally, one of the most segregated large cities in America. As we previously noted, the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer were aghast that the “percentage of Black and Hispanic Philadelphians who feel unsafe in their neighborhood is double the percentage of white Philadelphians.”

Gun violence is both a disease and a symptom. It’s crucial that our city’s goal be twofold: ensuring that all Philadelphians feel safe, and that the ranks of those who do not isn’t determined by skin color. Only when that is the case can Philadelphia truly say it is facing its challenges together.

For what are the Board asking here? They have already let us know that they don’t like gentrification, wealthier white people moving into predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and fixing up distressed homes; that, they claimed, led to segregated white pockets in the city. Somehow, no one seems to see the increased values in gentrifying areas lifting the net worth of the homes of black and Hispanic people living in those areas, or the value of white residents who are completely accepting of living in an integrated neighborhood. The Board seem to want more black residents in Chestnut Hill — which, with zip code 19118, one of the examples the Board used, being 67% white, ought to be considered integrated because that means 33% are not white — and Rittenhouse Square, but unless those residents can afford to move there, either the city, or someone, will have to provide the same subprime mortgages that caused the crash of 2007-9, or build ‘affordable housing’ in places which would then see other people’s property values decline due to it.

There is, of course, a not-so-subtle undertone to the Board’s editorial, the theme that white people make places safer, while blacks and Hispanics make areas more dangerous. The members would deny that, of course, but it is right there, obvious to anyone who reads what they wrote.

Unless, of course, the Board are saying that white Philadelphians should feel as unsafe as black and Hispanic residents do? If Will Bunch is on the Board, that wouldn’t surprise me!

And now the Board want to financially depress white areas of the city:

Race should not determine where you live

A recent lawsuit shows that segregation remains high in Philadelphia and that significant obstacles remain for Black households to build wealth through real estate.

By The Editorial Board | Tuesday, December 20, 2022 | 6:00 AM EST

As demonstrated through The Inquirer’s “A More Perfect Union” series on the legacy of racism in Philadelphia, bias and discrimination have a long history in our city. It is a rot in the foundation of America that we must all continue to repair and rebuild.

A recent housing lawsuit may be the latest part of that effort.

A Philadelphia landlord is accused of steering federal housing voucher recipients into properties in majority-Black neighborhoods, but not in predominantly white areas. This closes even more doors for people already hemmed in by a growing shortage of available rental housing and perpetuates racial disparities.

It is also a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act and the city’s own prohibition against tenant discrimination, as detailed in the suit against ProManaged Inc., a Mount Laurel-based landlord with 77 rental properties throughout Philadelphia.

Housing choice vouchers were designed to give low-income households a choice in where they live. Rather than being forced into disinvested areas, these families would have options, with market-rate housing in middle-class neighborhoods finally on the table. At least it was supposed to be.

What are federal housing vouchers? From the Department of Housing and Urban Development:

A housing subsidy is paid to the landlord directly by the PHA on behalf of the participating family. The family then pays the difference between the actual rent charged by the landlord and the amount subsidized by the program.

Note that: unless the voucher is for 100% of the rent, the family with the voucher are responsible for part of the rent. While the property owners are guaranteed the voucher amount, since that money is sent directly to them, they remain dependent upon the family to pay the remainder. And if the family are poor enough to be eligible for the vouchers in the first place, that means that many of them will be poor enough to be shaky in their ability to pay even the reduced amount.

A 2018 Urban Institute study found that two-thirds of landlords in the city refused to even meet with voucher holders. Compared to municipalities around the country, Philadelphia also had one of the highest disparities between acceptance rates in high- and low-income neighborhoods, a difference of 26%.

There’s some irony that the Inquirer’s editorial was published the same morning that the City of Brotherly Love informed us that it’d hit an even 500 homicides for the year. Given the fact that Philadelphia is a very violent city, and that violence is heavily concentrated in the neighborhoods with higher black and Hispanic percentages of the population, is it any particular surprise that a property owner in a ‘better’ neighborhood would not be all that happy about renting to people from those neighborhoods? Yes, it’s something of a ‘profiling’ judgement, but if the ‘profiling’ is being done based on vouchers rather than race, even there’s a question as to whether that constitutes racial discrimination. After all, poorer whites would face the same problem.

Even the Board recognized the problem, albeit in a backhanded way:

It’s no accident that maps showing structural racism in housing and the current epidemic of gun violence are nearly identical, according to a study by the Office of the City Controller.

Though it’s probably outside of the Board’s paradigm, they have said, inter alia, that bringing more black families into wealthier, whiter neighborhoods means bringing in more of the culture of violence. The people living in Kensington or Strawberry Mansion might be attempting to escape the violence of those areas, but they have also been more culturally conditioned to accept violence as normal, to accept the open-air drug markets as normal.

The Editorial Board at least noted that accepting vouchers came with its own economic disincentive to property owners:

For their part, landlords complain that accepting vouchers is costly and cumbersome. Unlike a private rental license — which in Philadelphia does not require an inspection — apartments leased to voucher holders must be inspected, and are held to higher standards. The landlord must also become certified through the Philadelphia Housing Authority.

So, the rental property owners must have their properties inspected by the city, which exposes them to unanticipated costs if the inspector finds something out of compliance. While the certification courses are listed as being free, they also require two days of the owners’ time, and time is money.

Leasing to voucher holders also comes with significant delays to the move-in process, keeping tenants unhoused and landlords unpaid from anywhere between 45 and 90 additional days when compared to a nonsubsidized rental. With record-low vacancy rates in the city, keeping units empty is expensive.

It sure seems as though people with apartments or houses to rent would want to keep them rented, rather than up to three months of vacancy, and no rent coming in, along with the problems that having an unoccupied dwelling brings. The owners’ property taxes don’t get suspended just because the property is vacant!

Property owners are rightly concerned about their properties’ values, and there’s a cost to that in bringing in people who must rely on vouchers to pay all or part of their rent. When the neighborhood starts to have more poorer people in it, it’s not just the rent: it’s vehicles of lesser value parked on the streets or in the driveways, it’s property not kept quite as nicely as previously, and it’s a subtle, but nevertheless real, perception that the neighborhood is losing value. These are things which depress property values, not only for the landlords, but the other properties in the neighborhood.

What the Editorial Board want is not just for landlords to accept more vouchers and rent to more poorer people, but for the resident homeowners to see the value of their properties to go down. It might not be politically correct to say — and being politically correct has never been something I do — but poverty metastasizes, poverty spreads more widely than just the poor family itself.

It’s both humorous and ironic that the Editorial Board have previously weighed in against “gentrification,” the very thing that both increases racial integration and raises property values in currently heavily minority areas. It takes some research, and familiarity with the Inquirer and its editorial slant, but if you read all of their editorials, and consider them together, you might well come up with the same conclusion I have: the Editorial Board want to mostly keep whites out of existing heavily minority neighborhoods, but move black and Hispanic residents into the more heavily white areas. Just how that makes sense mystifies me!

Home ownership is the best path to the economic success of a working class family, and we should not try to deny it to black or Hispanic Americans. But it is also something which cannot be forced, and the Editorial Board just don’t realize this. Rather, they would make people poorer by reducing their existing home values by pushing an influx of poorer people into established and economically growing neighborhoods.

The problems in Philadelphia are the things that the Editorial Board simply do not want to hear: they are cultural, in the acceptance and normalization of violence, the acceptance and normalization of bastardy, and the acceptance and normalization of drug use. Those are the things which have to be addressed, and they have to be addressed not by Governors and Mayors and city Councilmen, but by parents and neighborhoods and churches. There is no reason that poor or black or Hispanic residents cannot have a moral and ethical structure which leads to decent and safe neighborhoods, but the Board just don’t like people saying radical things like Christian or Jewish or Islamic morality are important culturally, that some of the individual choices some people take are harmful to both themselves and the community around them.
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Killadelphia: the city is tied for third place all time in murders, with 13 days left in the year

I had asked, just yesterday, if the City of Brotherly Love would hit 500 ‘official’ homicides when the Philadelphia Police Department released its official statistics this morning. Well, not quite: Philly is sitting at 499 homicides, which ties for third place in the all time records, matching 2020.

We had previously noted that Philadelphia actually cut back three from the 502 originally reported, but 499 was bad enough, and whatever accounting tricks might have been used to downgrade to 499 from 502 became pretty much irrelevant when there were 562 murders, plus apparently 190 ‘suspicious’ deaths not yet classified as homicides.

Being tied for third place shouldn’t last long, as second place is held by 500 homicides, set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990; the odds are that the city will hit that with tomorrow’s report.

There’s virtually zero chance that the city will match last year’s record of 562; there are only 13 days left in the year. Even in blood-soaked 2021, there were ‘only’ 22 murders between December 18th and the end of the year. But the 514 to 519 range seems most probable given current statistics.

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Philadelphian Amanda Marcotte is very, very upset that 35 transgender people have been murdered this year, but doesn’t care about 496 killings in her home town

Unless she has moved again, and I missed it — something which is always possible — Salon’s senior politics writer Amanda Marcotte lives in Philadelphia. As of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, December 15th, the City of Brotherly Love had seen 496 homicides officially, and with 110 deaths listed as “suspicious,” the total is doubtlessly well above 500. At least one other homicide occurred on Friday, but the Police Department do not update the homicide statics until Monday morning, so it’s entirely possible that the city will top 500 by then.

Yet, to Miss Marcotte, the important thing is hate crimes!

Republicans want to blame Club Q shooting and other hate crimes, baselessly, on police defunding

During Wednesday’s House hearing, Republicans minimized the role bigotry plays in anti-LGBTQ hate crimes

by Amanda Marcotte | Thursday, December 15, 2022 | 6:00 AM EST

“To the politicians and activists who accuse LGBTQ people of grooming children and being abusers, shame on you.”

During Wednesday’s House Oversight committee hearing on anti-LGBTQ violence, Club Q bartender Michael Anderson was blunt, both about his experiences and whom he holds responsible for the horrific mass shooting he survived. A combination of “inaction on gun reform” and “hate speech,” he said, led to that terrible night last month in Colorado Springs, where he “saw my friend lying on the floor, bleeding out, knowing there was little to no chance of surviving the bullet wound.”

Matthew Haynes, the owner of Club Q, testified that there is a direct line from Republican leaders who reject LGBTQ rights to the five deaths and massive trauma suffered by his customers and staff. Noting that “169 members of Congress” voted against a recently-signed law protecting same-sex marriage, he asked, “Are LGBTQ people not part of your constituency? Do you not represent us? While we wait for you to answer, we are being slaughtered and dehumanized across this country, in communities you took oaths to protect.”

Well, perhaps some of them represent the great majority of their constituents, many of whom do not accept the notion of same-sex ‘marriage.’

There were, as Miss Marcotte cited, five deaths in the Club Q shooting; that’s only 491 fewer than her adopted hometown has seen through her publication date.

Republicans on the Oversight Committee, however, had a different villain in mind to blame — for not just the Club Q shooting, but for the fact that the past two years have seen record levels of fatal violence against trans and gender non-conforming people. They pointed fingers at Democrats, protests against police brutality, and mostly non-existent police defunding.

Well, I followed the link Miss Marcotte gave us, and found this:

Sadly, 2022 has already seen at least 35 transgender people fatally shot or killed by other violent means. We say “at least” because too often these stories go unreported — or misreported. In previous years, the majority of these people were Black and Latinx transgender women.

The 35 transgender people killed? There had been 35 Philadelphians killed by January 23rd — 37, actually — of this year, but their deaths weren’t worth the notice of the political left.

What was I writing about in January of 2022? I was writing about The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far-left columnist Will Bunch, and his hatred not of crime, but of the police! I was writing about Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, and his refusal to seriously enforce the gun control laws the city does have.

The left complain that so many ‘transgender women of color’ have been killed, without wanting to recognize that the majority of them were working as prostitutes, and tricking some frequently intoxicated johns into thinking they were real women.

Even beyond Colorado Springs, there’s little reason to think police “defunding” is shaping crime. As the Center for American Progress reported in July, “Democrat-run cities spend more money on policing than Republican-run cities” and of “the 25 largest cities, 20 saw increases in their police budgets from FY 2019 to FY 2022.” The slogan “defund the police” that was bandied about Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 never really took off with Democratic politicians and certainly hasn’t had much impact on actual police funding. For certain, some cities have attempted to reallocate police funding to prevention services, but in general, those efforts have been overstated in the media coverage given to the “defund the police” movement.

Miss Marcotte claimed that the failure of Colorado Springs to enforce the law against the Club Q shooter for his previous crimes, or use the so-called “red flag” law against him, wasn’t the result of defunding the police problems, without recognizing that while Philadelphia hasn’t defunded the police de jure, being around 600 officers short of authorized staffing levels has done so in a practical sense. Philadelphia is her (adopted) hometown; surely a political junkie like her can’t be unaware of that.

But she can be aware of the fact that she just doesn’t care about the crime which isn’t politically useful for the Democrats. She is appalled that Republicans in the state House of Representatives impeached District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), due to his let ’em loose attitude when it comes to criminals and the city’s homicide rate, blaming it instead on Pennsylvania’s not-terribly-strict gun control laws, but she never did anything really radical like look at the numbers behind those laws. It was about Mr Krasner and “his anti-racist and progressive views on fighting crime,” without looking at the fact that crime has gotten worse, not better. She whined about the National Rifle Association standing up for our Second Amendment rights, after eight people were murdered in Buffalo and another ten in Boulder, blaming it on, you guessed it, evil white men:

The grim reality is that the entire nation is in the thrall to a minority of extremely insecure mostly white men who, drunk on decades of NRA-fueled propaganda, have decided that having the ability to commit mass murder at a moment’s notice is a crucial component of maintaining their manhood against the ever-encroaching threats from de-gendered Potato Heads and lady video game players. Most of these men claim exoneration because they don’t personally grab one of their many overpriced killing machines to lay waste to a grocery store or high school. Grotesquely, some even use these mass shootings to indulge in public fantasies about how they would totally stop an active shooter, though somehow they never seem to actually get around to doing it. But ultimately, they’ve become complacent in the face of mass murder from decades of being told by right-wing media that there’s a binary choice between preventing murder and watching Michelle Obama personally run off with their testicles in her handbag. Worse, the right has cultivated an overall suspicion of the very concept of concern for the lives of others at all.

On the day she published that, March 23, 2021, 111 Philadelphians had bled out their life’s blood so far that year in the city’s mean streets, the vast majority of them black, and the vast majority of their (too few) known killers also being black. Unless my math is very, very wrong, 111 killed in Philly, in her adopted hometown, is a larger number than the 18 victims she mentioned. While not in the daily homicide totals, the Philadelphia Shootings Victims Dashboard takes the information from the city’s Shootings Victims Database, and has noted that, from the beginning of 2015 through Thursday, December 15th, out of 2,779 fatal shootings in the city, 2,129, or 76.61%, were black males, with another 154, 5.54%, being black females.

Think about that: of 2,779 homicides by firearm in Philadelphia, blacks were the victims 2,283 times, 81.15%, in a city in which only 38.3% of the population are non-Hispanic black. And while Philly doesn’t make the statistics by race easy, St Louis does. Out of 191 recorded homicides reported on December 18, 2022, 170, or 89.01%, of the victims were black. Of the 141 identified suspects, 135, or 95.74%, are black.

According to the Census Bureau, only 44.8% of the city’s population are black.

What am I to think other than, when it comes to Miss Marcotte, and just as I have said about The Philadelphia Inquirer, black lives just don’t matter, not unless they are somehow politically useful to the #woke[1]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 left.

Robert Stacy McCain just published an article on his site, Crime is not just a statistic, adapted from The American Spectator, No Safety in Chicago: A daylight robbery highlights danger in urban crime wave. Somehow, some way, we evil reich-wing white males are actually concerned with the huge crime rate in our major cities, about black people being killed in the virtually normalized gang, oops, sorry, cliques of young men[2]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 shootings, while for the oh-so-noble left, those things are normalized and ignored, because they just aren’t politically useful for the left.

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated during normal business hours, Monday through Friday, so the last ‘official’ report was 496 homicides as of the end of Thursday. I’ve already heard of two more, and I’m wondering: will the city hit 500 when the statistics are published again on Monday?

The left don’t like conservatives using the crime statistics for political gain, but conservatives can use the crime statistics that way for one reason, and one reason only: what the left have been doing simply has not worked. But for the left to admit that they have not worked is to challenge their entire mindset, their entire political philosophy.

So, they do the only thing that they can: they hide their heads in the sand and deny reality. For the left, they’d rather keep their governing philosophy, and if that means ignoring over 500 homicides a year in Philly, well that’s just what they’ll do.

References

References
↑1 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.

↑2 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 With over 100 "suspicious" deaths recorded, the real numbers could be much higher than the official ones

We had previously noted that, despite the occurrence of a documented murder, the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page numbers hadn’t moved.

Now we are informed that it had been a computer glitch, which has now been fixed, and the update is a big one: eight new homicides reported. The First Street Journal had reported, on December 7th, that there was a statistical possibility, at the margin of error, that Philadelphia had an outside chance of finishing the year with fewer than 500 homicides. That didn’t last long, and by the 12th, it had vanished, as the city was on a clear path to between 509 and 516 homicides.

We’re so far into the year now, December 15th having been the 349th day of the year, that one or two homicides don’t move the statistics much, but eight homicides in four days? That has moved the average daily killings number up to 1.4212, which puts the city on pace for 519 killings, 518.7393 to be more precise.

There’s more. There had been a seeming downturn after Hallowe’en, and that was what had made me hopeful that the city might, just might, finish under 500. But now there have been 51 homicides in the 45 days since October 31st, 1.3333 per day, and that works out to 18.13333 for the sixteen days remaining in the year, or a total of 514.

Two ways of calculating the trends, and the projected numbers are drawing ever closer. However, the Christmas holidays always seem to be big ones for killings — Peace on Earth, and all of that — and during the last 16 days of 2021, there had been 27 homicides. If the City of Brotherly Love hit that pace again, Philly would finish with 523 murders.

Retired Philadelphia Police Sergeant Mark Fusetti reported that, according to his sources, there have also been 110 “suspicious” and 76 “other” deaths recorded by the Philly Police Department. While there are supposedly no bodies attached to the 76 “other” cases, there are to the 110 “suspicious” ones. Some of the suspicious may be self-defense claims that have not yet been assigned that status, and would not be part of the homicide numbers, but others could be actual murders, but ones which the police have not yet developed sufficient evidence to call them such. Now that Ben Mannes of Broad + Liberty has broken the story of the large number of suspicious deaths — a story that our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper has thus far ignored — one wonders if, as those suspicious deaths get reclassified, will they be added to the ‘official’ homicide totals?

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Killadelphia What, did somebody recover from being dead?

We have already noted that there are questions concerning the homicide numbers in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page reported that there had been 488 murders as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, December 11th.

At 9:21 AM EST on Monday, December 12th, Stevee Keeley of Fox 29 News tweeted:

Identity & age of Philadelphia’s 489th homicide victim in 2022 still not known yet to @phillypolice A 16 year old was shot twice in same shooting incident in Northeast Philadelphia 3:46am @FOX29philly.

Mr Keeley’s tweet included an image of the police press release.

So, a male of unknown age was pronounced dead at the scene, and another person was shot there, yet no weapon was recovered, nor was anyone arrested. Obviously a firearm was used, and just as obviously, someone fled the scene.

So, when I checked the Current Crime Statistics page this morning, I expected to see at least 489 homicides. Maybe I’m not the greatest mathematician around, but 488 + 1 = 489, right?

Well, apparently not, because the Philadelphia Police Department are now reporting that there were 488 homicides through 11:59 PM EST on Monday, December 12th. What, did somebody recover from being dead?

Is it any wonder that some people have no confidence at all in the city’s statistics?

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw is on her way out. A political appointee of Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia), following stints in Oakland, California, and as Chief of Police in Portland, Oregon, and supposedly once considered to have become Police Commissioner of New York City, when Mr Kenney’s term is over at the end of next year, Miss Outlaw is almost certainly out as well. With 499 murders in the city in 2020, her first year — and remember: 502 was the number first reported, and then scaled back — followed by 562 in 2021, and almost certainly between 509 and 516, good for second place all-time this year, it’s difficult to see any of Philly’s mayoral candidates wanting to keep her around. Former Councilwoman Helen Gym Flaherty, the furthest left, and therefore most probable winner of the Democratic primary, is an ally of District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Mr Krasner and Miss Outlaw do not exactly get along. Even if another Democrat wins the primary — and no Republican has ever won a direct mayoral election in Philadelphia — they are all looking at how Let ’em Loose Larry has won by a landslide in his election.

In other words, Miss Outlaw’s got to go.

This is the time, with only a year left in office, for the Commissioner to do something really radical and tell the truth. If she’s going to have to leave anyway, she could at least do so honestly.

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Killadelphia Is The Philadelphia Inquirer trying to keep the truth hushed up to protect Democrats?

I noted, just five days ago, that I saw a mathematical possibility, at the margin of error, that the City of Brotherly Love could finish very slightly below 500 homicides in 2022. That was based upon the decrease in the rate of killings since Hallowe’en.

Alas! while the rate of killings still isn’t in the 2021 range, it has picked up once again, and the math makes it seem impossible now. With 488 killings as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, December 11, 2022, Philly is now seeing 1.4145 murders per day; that works out to 516.29 murders for the year. And with at least six homicides over the last three days, the city has seen 43 murders in the 41 days since Hallowe’en. At that rate, 1.0488 per day, times thee 20 days left in the year, yields 20.98 homicides in these last three weeks. If there are 21 homicides in the last 20 days, that would end the year with 509 murders.

But that is working with the official homicide numbers, and Broad + Liberty, along with other outlets, broke the story of the uncounted deaths in the city, showing at least 101 “suspicious” deaths, in a photo taken just before Thanksgiving. That the credentialed media didn’t want to report that is evidenced by the fact that, since the story broke, The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, and the supposed newspaper of record for the area, and one which believes it is so important that the federal government should subsidize it, has nothing on that story, even though it was published four days ago, on a subject that would seem pretty serious and significant. Checking the Inquirer’s website main page, specific crime page, and doing a site search for suspicious deaths, as of 9:45 AM EST today showed no stories on the subject at all. Did the Inky investigate at all? Did Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw tell them that it was nothing, don’t worry about it? Did the top officers clam up?

You’d think that a leak like this, from someone inside the Philadelphia Police Department, would have piqued the interest of real journalists, especially the police-hating #woke of the Inquirer, but if you actually thought that, you’d be wrong, wrong, wrong!

Who knows, perhaps the unauthorized leak from someone in the Police Department was a fake, a political attack. If so, wouldn’t the journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading want to expose that? After all, it’s a serious accusation, one which attacks the political leadership of the Police Department and the city as a whole . . . and Philadelphia hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Harry Truman was President.

Oh, wait, that’s it: the editors of the Inky don’t want anything which could hurt the Democrats made public.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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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.