Tag Archives: #Philadelphia

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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.

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Killadelphia The bad guys are just as bad, but the good guys have gotten a bit better

I will admit it: I was a bit, a bit, mind you, more optimistic when I saw the article by Robert Stacy McCain screencaptured at the right yesterday evening. I’m something of a numbers geek, because numbers, at least accurate numbers, tell a truth not shaded by human lies.

Mr McCain’s article began with a screen capture of his own, of an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer — archived version here, to get around the newspaper’s paywall — noting yet another gruesome killing in the City of Brotherly Love. This story actually made the Inky because it was different from the usual gang “clique of young men” being shot by a “rival street group,”[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 so that is at least interesting.

Mr McCain’s article did something that what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[2]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. naturally did not: he included a mugshot of the suspect, Ahmad Shareef.

Ahmad Shareef, photo via The Other McCain. Click to enlarge.

Mr McCain wryly implied that, with a name like Ahmad Shareef, most readers would automatically think that the suspect was black. I asked the question more directly a few months ago: is the Inquirer actually perpetuating a stereotype it wishes to avoid? Is the newspaper, by censoring all mugshots, contributing not only to the stereotype that most criminals are black, but actually pushing a message, that all criminals are black?

Mr Shareef is not black. Rather, he is Syrian. The Inquirer would probably say that he is “brown” if the #woke[3]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 writers there were asked, but he’s clearly Caucasian.

When I said, at the beginning of this article, that I was actually a bit optimistic when I first read Mr McCain’s original, it was expressed in this comment on his article:

Surprisingly enough, Killadelphia’s murder pace has slacked a bit, with ‘just’ 478 homicides in 339 days, which puts the city on pace for ‘only’ 514.66 murders for the year.

However, since Hallowe’en, there have been just 33 killings, in 35 days. If that particular rate continued through the end of the year, there would be ‘just’ 23.57 more murders, which works out to ‘only’ 501.57. Just a couple off from that average, and the City of Brotherly Love could actually finish at 499 for the year!

Alas! it didn’t take but this morning’s check of the city’s homicide statistics to dampen that optimism. Two more homicides, which once again raises the numbers. 480 killed ÷ 340 days elapsed = 1.411764705882353 homicides per day x 365 days in the year = 515.2941176470588 projected murders for 2022.

Taking just the reduced homicide rate since Hallowe’en, 35 killings in 36 days yields 0.9722222222222222 homicides per day. With 25 days remaining in the year, that works out to 24.3055555555555556 more in December, or a total of 504 killed.

The chances of the city seeing fewer than 500 homicides starts to get beyond any margin of error.

Nevertheless, the numbers are fairly starkly different. In 2021, there were 41 killings between December 7th and the end of the year, a completely different pace than we are seeing now.

That different pace, however, isn’t indicative of what it might seem. According to the Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard, there had been 2,187 shooting victims in the city through December 5th, compared to 2,183 on the same date in 2021. It’s not that the cliques of young men blasting away at rival street groups have slacked off; it’s just that they haven’t been quite as successful in killing rather than wounding their enemies. Much of that is due to the Philadelphia Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy of placing shooting victims in patrol cars and taking them directly to the emergency room rather than waiting on the ambulance, along with even more experience in dealing with gunshot wounds by emergency personnel.

In other words, the bad guys are just as bad, but the good guys have gotten a bit better.

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.” If you think you’ve read this footnote previously, you have: its mocking nature is such that I have it saved for frequent use.
↑2 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑3 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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#HelenGym Flaherty wants to do for all of Philadelphia what Larry Krasner has done for law enforcement

The City of Brotherly Love finished the 11th month of the year with 472 homicides, 38 fewer than the total on November 30, 2021, a 7.45% decrease. That’s the good news, though 472 murders can hardly be considered as anything good.  That’s still 1.4132 per day, for a projected 515.81 for the year. Yet, as we have previously noted, homicides have been falling this fall — pun very much intended — and have been nothing like the surge seen between Labor Day and New Year’s Eve in 2021.

With 445 homicides at the end of Hallowe’en, there have been slightly less than one murder per day for November, actually 0.9 per day. If that rate continued through December, it works out to 27.9 more killings in 2022, which would put the city at ‘only’ 500 murders for the year, perhaps even 499 or 498, depending upon the vagaries of chance and just pure, dumb luck. That would leave 1990’s old record of an even 500 homicides in second place.

We did note, at the beginning of the month, that the city had initially posted 2020 as seeing 502 murders, something which, alas!, I failed to screen capture for documentation . . . but fortunately another person did not. I do not know, but I strongly suspect that someone in the city government did not want the number of murders to reach 500, and it was close enough for the city to push the number down somehow, by moving some to 2021, or by perhaps reclassifying three deaths as ‘suspicious’ rather than homicides. Thus, I have little real confidence that 2020 ended below 499, but, of course, I can’t prove it. Nevertheless, if 2022 can finish with just 500, or perhaps even a couple fewer homicides, that would be something of a victory.

However, the city is still seeing more shootings than last year, 2,154 so far in 2022, versus 2,144 through the end of November last year. It’s not that the gang-bangers, oops, I’m sorry, “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, aren’t just as violent, but that they’re poorer shots, and the Philadelphia Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy of putting shooting victims into patrol cars and taking them to the emergency rooms themselves, rather than waiting for an ambulance, along with even more hard-earned experience dealing with gunshot wounds, may have reduced the death toll somewhat.

Now comes former city councilwoman Helen Gym Flaherty[2]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., who wants to reverse that:

Helen Gym makes it official and launches a run for Philadelphia mayor on a pledge to address gun violence

The now-former Council member and leader of the city’s progressive movement launched her run at the William Way LGBT Community Center in Center City.

by Anna Orso | Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Former City Councilmember Helen Gym announced Wednesday that she will run for Philadelphia mayor on a pledge to address the city’s alarmingly high rate of gun violence, saying, “Everything is at stake right now.”

In remarks to a room of about 350 supporters gathered at the William Way LGBT Community Center, Gym centered her message on public safety, vowing to declare a state of emergency on her first day in office and prioritize improving homicide clearance rates.

I am amused that Mrs Flaherty chose a homosexual ‘Community Center’ as the place in which she announced her long-anticipated candidacy.

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.”

There’s more at the original.

Naturally, I went to Mrs Flaherty’s campaign website, to see how she had addressed the issues . . . and found out that she hadn’t; there was no specific “issues” page. Thus, we are left with secondary sources as to what she would do as Mayor.

Gym has opposed tax cuts for businesses and corporations, and has been critical of the Police Department, championing legislation to ban the use of tear gas on protesters and rejecting calls to bring back stop-and-frisk. In 2020, she voted against a planned increase to the Police Department’s budget — along with a majority of Council, including Green.

And here’s what Mrs Flaherty tweeted in 2019.

I support reducing the prison population by 50% from 2019 levels, We must center transformative and restorative justice practices in Philadelphia.

Can any policy have failed as badly as District Attorney Larry Krasner’s ‘decarceration’ program has failed the city since then? Murders get the most attention, and yes, they’re down a bit, but shootings, and every non-self-defense shooting is an attempted murder, are up. A Twitter friend who goes by the handle Over Salted Pretzel — and really, there’s no such thing as an over salted pretzel, though there are certainly under salted ones — did a lot of the research, and has the graphs here.

Mrs Flaherty apparently wants to move Mr Krasner’s policies into City Hall as well.

It may be smart politics: despite the huge increase in murders, the vast majority of them in Philadelphia’s “black and brown” neighborhoods — and Philly is our second most internally segregated large city, so there really are segregated “black and brown” neighborhoods — Mr Krasner was re-elected in 2021, with his greatest support coming from those areas of the city. As Mrs Flaherty appears to be running on the same things as Mr Krasner has, and to the left of the other candidates, she might very well win the Democratic primary, which, in Philly, is virtually the same thing as winning the election.

There are really only two possibilities:

  • The candidate truly believes the things she has said in the past, which proves that she is just boneheadedly stupid; or
  • The candidate knows that those policies not only do not work, but are actively harmful, but she doesn’t care because she thinks they’ll win her votes, in which case she is actively evil.

You can choose for yourself which one you believe is correct.

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“
↑2 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.
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Killadelphia Things aren't as bad as last year, but they're sure not good

The weekend is over, and we’ve finally got the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page updated reliably. The news, though certainly bad enough, is a lot less bad than last year. Homicides are down 6.56% from the same date last year, and while a murder rate of 1.4199 per day (470 ÷ 331) works out to 518.2779 homicides for the year, that’s not only lower than last year by a significant amount, but lower than the 534.2928 the numbers at the end of October projected.

The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer noted the numbers, in a kind of weird way:

As of Tuesday, there have been 465 homicides in our city. All but 30 have been fatal shootings. The tally of the nonfatal kind, the kind that can leave physical and emotional scars that last a lifetime, stands at 1,688.

That includes four Overbrook High School students who were shot Wednesday morning after the West Philadelphia school let out early for Thanksgiving.

If we stay under last year’s record of 506 shooting deaths, it may be a victory of luck — an inch to the left, an inch to the right — or of the talented professionals at our overworked trauma centers. Either way, Philadelphians will be left holding their breath, wondering what next year will bring.

I notice that the police-hating Editorial Board gave no credit to the Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy of loading shooting victims into the initial patrol car on the scene and rushing them directly to the hospital rather than waiting for an ambulance. I can’t say that I find that surprising at all.

Looking at those numbers, there were 506 out of 562 total homicides in Philly last year, meaning that 56 murders, 9.96%, were committed by other means. This year, according to the Inky’s statistics, only 30 homicides, 6.45%, were committed with something other than a gun.

The numbers work out to 1.3344 shooting deaths per day, 487.0399 for the year, so the “inch to the left” argument tells me that the Editorial Board didn’t bother to actually do the math, but that’s another thing I don’t find a surprise.

Of course, even with the reduction in total homicides anticipated, it still means that the law enforcement team of Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia), District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw will have supervised five of the six bloodiest years since 2007. The only years Mr Kenney had that weren’t at the top of the chart was when Mr Krasner was not District Attorney, but I’m certain, certain! that that has nothing, nothing at all, to do with it.

The Census Bureau guesstimated Philadelphia’s population, as of July 2021, to be 1,576,251, a drop from the 2020 census figure of 1,603,797. Using those numbers, Philly had a homicide rate of 31.11 per 100,000 population in 2020, and 35.65 in 2021. Using 2021’s population guesstimate, and a projected homicide total of 518, the 2022 numbers work out to 32.86 per 100,000, but that’s provisional. It’s an improvement over last year, but certainly nothing about which to brag.

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The useful dead

Five people were murdered, with another 18 wounded, in a mass shooting in a Colorado Springs nightclub which catered primarily to homosexuals, and it’s a crisis unlike any we’ve ever seen before! Horrors! A mass shooting! “LGBTQI+ people are under attack! They’re not safe!”

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg is a homosexual male, so naturally this is on his radar, just like it is for all of the left who will never let a “crisis” go to waste.

In the meantime, as of 11:59 PL EST on Monday, November 21st, 464 people had poured out their life’s blood in the mean streets of the City of Brotherly Love, and nobody says a damned thing, because the vast majority of the victims, and of their killers, are black. According to the Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard, out of 2,746 fatal shootings in the city from 2015 through November 18, 2022, 2,114, or 76.79%, of the victims were black males, with another 153 (5.56%) being black females. That’s 82.35% of all fatal shooting victims over an almost eight-year period being black, in a city which is only, when Hispanics are counted as a separate category, 38.3% non-Hispanic black.

Hispanic males were the victims in 282 fatal shootings (10.24%), while 31 (1.13%) Hispanic females were shot to death. Using the formulation so loved by The Philadelphia Inquirer, that means that “Black and brown” people were the victims in 93.72% of all fatal shootings, and, other than when an “innocent” is killed, nobody really cares.

And while to-date homicides are actually down 6.45% from 2021’s record-shattering numbers, shootings are up, 1.16%. The Philadelphia Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy, of getting shooting victims into patrol cars and rushing them to the hospital rather than waiting on an ambulance appears to have had a significant effect in reducing the percentage of those shot expiring.

I guess that I have to give Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw credit for something, anyway, though I don’t give her credit for much.

But I have to ask: why are the five people killed in Colorado Springs more important than the 464 slaughtered in Philly? For every person killed in that nightclub, 93 were murdered in Philly!

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Crazy People Are Dangerous: No Motive Yet in Colorado Springs Shooting

Of course, the nightclub gunman can be demonized as someone who hated homosexuals — despite the fact he had a previous criminal incident which had nothing to do with them — and will be charged with a “hate crime”, while the Philly killers are mostly indistinguishable from their victims as far as race or ethnic group is concerned; there are no political points to be gained by demonizing the people who killed them. For the left, the nightclub victims are somehow deader than the people slaughtered in Philadelphia.  At the very least, they are far more useful dead than ordinary people in Philly.

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I suppose that it is much easier to be a ‘progressive’ when you don’t look at the facts

One would think that an actual Philadelphian, even if she’s lived there only a few years, would have a better grasp on the facts in the City of Brotherly Love, but when that Philadelphian is named Amanda Marcotte, you’d be very, very wrong.

Hours before it was announced that Democrats have won a majority in the state House for the first time in 17 years, the lame duck legislature in Pennsylvania made its last stand for MAGA by impeaching Larry Krasner, the district attorney in Philadelphia. While understandably unknown to most people outside Pennsylvania, Krasner has become a favorite punching bag in right-wing media, for his anti-racist and progressive views on fighting crime. Republicans paint him as “soft on crime” and blame him for the rise in gun violence in Philadelphia, even though a likelier culprit is the lax statewide gun laws passed by Republicans.

As always, Miss Marcotte doesn’t look more deeply into the question. Pennsylvania law states is that no subordinate governmental unit may impose firearms control restrictions stronger than those under state law. Thus, while there might be a couple of tiny tweaks in there, the City of Brotherly Love is under the same firearms laws as the rest of the Commonwealth.

I lived in Jim Thorpe for 15 years, and during those 15 years we had two murders in Carbon County, one in 2004 and another in 2006. If there was another one, I never heard of it, and I did search through the data, which is, regrettably, by township and borough in the county, and found only the two mentioned. And, as I recall, neither involved a firearm!

So, if the problem is the Commonwealth’s firearms control laws, why are the homicide rates so very, very different in Philly?

I previously wrote that in 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.

It got worse last year: with 562 homicides in Philly, out of 1027 total for Pennsylvania, 54.72% of all homicides in the Keystone State occurred in Philadelphia. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, was second, with 123 killings, 11.98% of the state’s total, but only 9.52% of Pennsylvania’s population.

The other 65 counties, with 78.11% of the state’s total population, had 33.30% of total murders. It should also be noted that in comparing 2018 with 2021, the homicide rate for the 65 counties which are not Philadelphia and Allegheny (where Pittsburgh is), barely increased, from 3.38 per 100,000 population, to 3.42, a 1.12% rise, in Philadelphia it jumped from 22.31 to 35.53 per 100,000 population, a 59.21% increase.

For some reason, a reason Miss Marcotte did not choose to explore, Philadelphia is simply different from the rest of Pennsylvania, at least in terms of its crime rate. Pennsylvanians in the rest of the Commonwealth are not shooting and killing each other at nearly the rate seen in Philly. Of course, to have investigated that more deeply would have been to ruin Miss Marcotte’s entire point.

As we noted on Friday, there’s more to the story. Under Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, Philly’s tremendous homicide rate was brought down dramatically. Sorted by total homicides for the year, five of the six deadliest years from 2007 through this year were under the terms of Mayor Jim Kenney and District Attorney Krasner. When Mr Kenney  had Mr Williams as his DA, murders were significantly lower.

Mr Krasner’s campaign website itself tells people what we already knew: he doesn’t like to lock up criminals:

When Philadelphia voters elected Larry Krasner as its District Attorney in 2017, he promised to end the failed tough-on-crime policies of the past, work to support victims and the community, and hold the powerful accountable. He has kept his promises. It hasn’t been easy. Larry inherited an office committed to incarceration regardless of the cost, even when this policy endangered and devastated our communities.

But in just three years, he has upended the office culture and implemented policies that put people first. Under Larry’s leadership:

  • The county jail population has decreased by 40% and this summer fell to its lowest level since 1985.
  • The amount of time people will spend in prison has dropped by over 18,000 years.
  • Years under probation or parole have decreased by 57% overall, 65% for drug offenses and 70% for property offenses in the most oversupervised big city, Philly, and the second most oversupervised state, Pennsylvania.

A rational observer might just wonder: have Mr Krasner’s ‘progressive’ policies actually worked to reduce violence and crime in the city?

Along with Chicago, New York and other racially diverse cities, Philadelphia has also become central to right-wing media efforts to blame crime on the Black Lives Matter movement. Even in his supposedly “serious” campaign announcement speech Tuesday, Trump made the grotesque claim that “The blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities are cesspools of violent crime.” In reality, the spike in crime in the past couple of years seems largely attributable to the pandemic. Gun sales rose during the lockdown and schools were closed, meaning the streets saw an influx of weapons and bored young people, an almost perfect prescription for rising crime. As the pandemic has begun to recede, homicides have also started to decline.

This is kind of laughable. Were people buying guns to shoot the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as one would expect if such was “largely attributable to the pandemic,” or was it because of the huge increase in the crime rate?

Now, it is true that the number of homicides is down, as I have previously mentioned, but, if the number of murders has decreased a bit, the number of attempted murders has increased: according to the city’s Shooting Victims Database, There were 2,107 shooting victims through November 16th of this year, compared to 2,069 people shot in the City of Brotherly Love through the same date last year. More people are surviving being shot, with much of the credit going to the Philadelphia Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy of quickly putting shooting victims into their patrol cars and taking them to the emergency room rather than waiting on an ambulance.

Again, had Miss Marcotte looked more deeply into the publicly available data, she’d have known that.

Krasner, for his part, is painting the impeachment as a direct attack on the right of Philadelphians to choose their own leaders. “History will harshly judge this anti-democratic, authoritarian effort to erase Philly’s votes — votes by Black, brown and broke people in Philadelphia,” he said in statement.

This impeachment of Krasner sews together two of the biggest and most racist themes that fuel the MAGA movement: A belief that anti-racist movements like Black Lives Matter are to blame for rising crime rates, and a belief that voters in racially diverse urban areas are “frauds” who are “stealing” elections from white conservatives.

While keeping in touch with my Pennsylvania conservative friends, I’ve yet to see any of them state that “anti-racist movements like Black Lives Matter are to blame for rising crime rates”. I’m the one who has been pointing out that, to the left, and especially The Philadelphia Inquirer, black lives don’t matter, not when talking about them might upset progressive politics. And if the impulse to impeach Let ’em Loose Larry is an effort to reduce the tremendous violence rate in Philly, the primary beneficiaries of such efforts would be black Philadelphians!

Miss Marcotte called Philadelphia a “racially diverse cit(y),” which is true enough, but only if you look at the city as a whole. As even the “anti-racist news organization” that is the Inquirer has reported:

  • The eight-county region’s Black-white residential segregation is the fourth highest among the 20 biggest metropolitan areas, as defined by the Census Bureau. The region is the sixth-most segregated between Hispanic and white residents.

  • Among the 30 biggest cities, Philadelphia is second only to Chicago in its level of residential segregation between Black and white residents, according to data from Brown University. Between Hispanic and white residents, it’s the sixth-most segregated.

  • Considering every U.S. county that has at least 10,000 people and a Black population of at least 5%, Philadelphia is more segregated than 94% of them.

  • While residential segregation between Black and white residents has declined nationwide over the last several decades, it’s happened much slower in Philadelphia. The city’s position near the top of rankings of segregated places has stayed almost the same since 1980.

These are things that one would expect a savvy political commentator like Miss Marcotte, who told us in 2019 that her boyfriend and she had moved to South Philly, would actually know something about the city in which she lives. If she actually read what is now her hometown newspaper, she’d have known that Philly’s ‘diversity’ is actually pretty superficial, but, once again, she doesn’t seem to look at these things in any depth. But, then again, to look at the facts in depth would challenge her progressive worldview and politics, and nothing which would do that should be allowed.

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To Solomon Jones, black lives really don’t matter To the left, black lives matter far, far, far less than progressive politics

I have not been exactly enamored of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, a movement started over the wholly justified killing of Michael Brown as he assaulted a police officer. Young Mr Brown had just roughed up a store clerk half his size in the course of a robbery. Several grifting incidents have been recorded concerning the Black Lives Matter organization.

Nevertheless, black lives do matter and should matter, just as all lives do matter and should matter. Yet it is becoming ever-clearer that, to the American left, black lives matter much less to them than do ‘progressive’ policies.

Solomon Jones, from his Twitter biography.

And thus I come to Solomon Jones, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the author of “Ten Lives Ten Demands: Life and Death Stories and a Black Activistʼs Blueprint for Racial Justice.” He also has a radio show weekdays from 7 to 10 AM on WURD 900 AM. The amazon.com description of his book states what it concerns:

Told through the powerful stories of Black lives that were ravaged by racism, this manifesto holds 10 demands to rectify racial injustice

Told through his perspective as an activist, acclaimed commentator Solomon Jones tells the stories of real people whose lives and deaths pushed the Black Lives Matter movement forward. He explains how each act of violence was incited by specific instances of structural racism, and details concrete and actionable strategies to address crimes committed by our “justice” system.

These stories and strategies are a critical resource for social justice activists looking to further their anti-racist education. These 10 demands form an actionable plan that is necessary to repair our racist past, change the racist present, and bring justice to the future:

  1. George Floyd: Pay financial reparations to Black communities that have been damaged by legalized racism.
  2. Michael Brown: Use consent decrees to reform police departments that demonstrate a “pattern or practice” of racism and police brutality.
  3. Hassan Bennett: Offer compensation for all those who are wrongfully imprisoned.
  4. Breonna Taylor: Require functioning body cameras and ban no-knock warrants.
  5. Eric Garner: All police disciplinary and dismissal records must be made public.
  6. Alton Sterling: Change federal law to allow prosecution of flagrant lawbreakers within police departments.
  7. Tamir Rice: Use independent prosecutors to eliminate prosecutorial conflicts of interest.
  8. Trayvon Martin: Eliminate stand-your-ground laws.
  9. Deborah Danner: Defund the police and move funds to trained social workers, mental health professionals, and conflict resolution specialists.
  10. Sandra Bland: End racial profiling.

It seems that Mr Jones has picked from a list of mostly bad people — Tamir Rice was just a kid, but a kid playing with a realistic-looking toy gun about whom a civilian called the police with a “man with a gun” report — on which to base his ‘ten demands. Mr Jones’ ninth demand is very specific about his goal: to reduce law enforcement.

However, it is Mr Jones’ Inquirer column of Friday which tells us just how much he values progressive politics over black lives:

What was Larry Krasner’s biggest offense? Correctly calling out a racist criminal justice system.

While Pa. lawmakers blame the district attorney for the increase in gun violence in Philadelphia, I suspect their true motive is to punish him as a white man who challenged a biased power structure.

by Solomon Jones | Thursday, November 17, 2022

The Republican-led Pennsylvania House has approved articles of Impeachment against Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, and while the Republicans claim the impeachment is about Krasner’s failure to stop gun violence, I’m convinced that it’s about his attempt to address racism.

Sadly for Mr Jones’ argument, the homicide rate in Philadelphia has soared since Mr Krasner, an anti-police defense attorney sponsored by a big campaign contribution from George Soros, became District Attorney. Since taking office on New Year’s Day of 2018, the number of homicides recorded in the City of Brotherly Love jumped from 315 the previous year to 353, then 356, then 499, and to 562 in 2021. Through Thursday, November 17th, the 2022 homicide total stands at 461, a 5.53% decrease from the same day last year, but one which is still on track to see 524 murders for the year, easily good for second-place all time in Philly.

However, if the number of murders has decreased a bit, the number of attempted murders has increased: according to the city’s Shooting Victims Database, There were 2,107 shooting victims through November 16th of this year, compared to 2,069 people shot in the City of Brotherly Love through the same date last year.

Since and including 2015, black males in the city have been the victims of 10,010 fatal and non-fatal shootings, a whopping 74.01% of all victims, with an even 1,000, or 7.39%, being black females. There have been 1,384 (10.23%) Hispanic males and 188 (1.39%) Hispanic females. For us evil white folks, there were ‘just’ 598 males (4.42%) and 131 (0.97%) females shot. While Mr Jones believes that the opposition to Mr Krasner is “about his attempt to address racism,” the effect, if removal of the District Attorney helped to reduce shootings and killings, would be to reduce the number of black victims. Wouldn’t Mr Jones like to see fewer black Philadelphians shot and killed? Or is it that, like The Philadelphia Inquirer for which he writes, that black lives really don’t matter, at least not as much as reinforcing progressive politics?

While state legislators publicly seek to blame Krasner for the increase in gun violence in Philadelphia, I suspect their true motive is to punish him as a racial traitor. Krasner, you see, is a white man who had the temerity to challenge a racist criminal justice system that routinely puts innocent Black people in jail. In the eyes of the individuals and institutions that thrive on the current power structure, Krasner has challenged racism itself, and for that, he must be punished.

Among the admittedly smaller circle of friends with whom I deal, I still cannot, over 69½ years of my life, a significant portion of which, 43 years, has been spent living in the South, ever remember a white person refer to another white person as a “racial traitor.”

In a city where the death penalty was once the order of the day under prosecutors like Lynne Abraham, Krasner has brought significant change. He has exonerated the wrongly convicted, eschewed the testimony of crooked cops, and charged police officers who have killed unarmed citizens from Philadelphia’s poorest, most marginalized communities.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, there have been only three executions in Pennsylvania since the restoration of capital punishment, all last century, only one of which was for a crime committed in Philadelphia. All three men executed were white, and all three were “volunteers,” meaning that they had voluntarily dropped all of their appeals to just go ahead and get it over.

Lynne Abraham was succeeded in office by Seth Williams. Like both Mrs Abraham and Mr Krasner, Mr Williams is a Democrat, but, unlike them, he is black. Somehow, I have a difficult time considering Mr Williams as someone who was supporting a racist system.

Mr Williams, who had legal problems of his own and was forced to resign in 2017, was part of the top three in law enforcement in Philadelphia, along with Mayor Michael Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, all of whom were black. And under those three men, the numbers of homicides dropped significantly. Does Mr Jones believe that those three black men were somehow racists, somehow prejudiced against blacks?

But, while all Democrats, they were just liberal Democrats, not ‘progressives,’ and not men who saw everything through some ‘racial justice’ lens.

There are several more paragraphs in Mr Jones’ original, and I have already quoted more of his column than with which I am comfortable, even though Fair Use standards allow such when fisking an article. Suffice it to say that Mr Jones uses the formulation “Black, brown and progressive” several times because his point is really a simple one: it’s racist to try to overturn the votes of minority citizens. Unhappily, I concluded a while ago that the voters of Philadelphia will, if he runs again in 2025, once again return Mr Krasner to office by a landslide margin, because his policies of not enforcing the law, of letting the less serious crimes go unpunished, is what a majority of the city’s voters really want. A homicide rate that has doubled from what it was under Messrs Nutter, Williams and Ramsey is apparently a price that the progressives are willing to pay to have fewer gang-bangers and wannabes locked up for rape, robbery and assault.

The only conclusion to which I have been able to come is that, in Philadelphia, black lives really don’t matter, not to Mr Krasner, nor to Mr Jones, nor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, nor to most of the voters.

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Ho hum! Another mass shooting in Philadelphia It was just Kensington, so who really cares?

It was August 17, 2020, when The Philadelphia Inquirer published the article “Even the pandemic doesn’t slow down Philadelphia’s drug markets: It’s unclear why COVID-19 hasn’t had much effect on Philadelphia’s drug market. But that’s not to say the drug supply here is or was predictable, even before the pandemic.” The article included a photo of what appears to be a young male shooting up — his back is to the camera — out in public, in broad daylight, on Kensington Avenue, right by the SEPTA train station. The street, one of Philly’s thoroughfares, is shown as being littered with trash. I noted that I was waiting for news that Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw organized a major sweep to clear the area, at least temporarily, of the drug dealers and junkies infesting the area, but I never heard of one.

After shooting in Kensington, some accuse city leaders of not doing enough to improve area’s conditions

Five people were critically wounded in an attack one political leader called the latest example of Philadelphia’s failure to address the depths of Kensington’s public health catastrophes.

by Ellie Rushing | Sunday, November 6, 2022

A shooting of nine people overnight in Kensington, a section of Philadelphia beset by gun violence and an open-air drug market, renewed community leaders’ criticisms of city leadership and heightened calls for a plan to address the neighborhood’s compounding crises.

The shooting Saturday near the intersection of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, ground zero for the city’s opioid epidemic, left all of the victims seriously wounded after police said at least three people jumped out of a car and fired more than 40 shots into a crowd shortly before 10:45 p.m. Eight men and one woman, ranging in age from 23 to 40, were struck and taken to Temple University Hospital.

Four of the men remained in critical condition as of Sunday evening, police said.

No arrests have been made and no weapons were recovered. Additional details were scarce, including what may have motivated the shooting.

Screen capture from The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 19, 2022.

I would say that the motivation is obvious: one gang clique 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 put out a hit on another clique of young men, and the police simply need to figure out which clique was targeted and which clique was responsible. It’s quite possible that not all of the people wounded were among the specifically targeted, and that even none of the wounded were among the targeted clique; these fine but misunderstood young gentlemen apparently accept that there will be some collateral damage as they set out on their missions.[2]Will Bunch, the Inquirer’s most off-the-wall leftist columnist, wrote: These twin blows came at the very end of a brutal autumn in which the right’s unified messaging — in so many ways the … Continue reading

Actually, I feel kind of sorry for Inquirer reporter Ellie Rushing. Her byline is on so many of the crime stories in the newspaper that it’s got to be at least a little bit depressing!

As we have previously noted, the Philadelphia Police Department believe that three of the teenaged suspects in the Roxborough High School shooting murdered another young man the previous day.

There is no neighborhood as burdened by shootings as Kensington, a section of the city plagued by an open-air drug market and high rates of deep poverty. Along the Kensington-Allegheny corridor, there are sprawling homeless encampments, and people in addiction openly use drugs.

Law enforcement officials have said dealers sell heroin, crack, and other drugs on more than 80 blocks in the neighborhood.

If the police know of these drug sale areas, why aren’t they sweeping through and arresting the dealers? Oh, that’s right:

Law enforcement officials say they cannot arrest their way out of the crises there.

They could at least try, since the city is apparently not doing anything else to solve the problems.

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw tweeted:

In other words, the Commissioner knows that the people of that neighborhood, and the city in general, do not believe that the Philadelphia Police Department really care about Kensington. Given that the Inquirer can report that drugs are being sold openly on “more than 80 blocks” there, and the police aren’t doing anything about it, what other impression would people have?

Of course, if the police did make a bunch of drug busts, District Attorney would refuse to prosecute the arrested seriously.

Miss Rushing wrote about the frustrations of Philly’s worst, most crime-ridden neighborhood, without showing any understanding about her subject. Kensington is the way it is not because of poverty, but because of the culture in that area, a culture which says that it’s perfectly fine to go out and blast away at your perceived enemies. Eastern Kentucky is just as poor, if not poorer, than Kensington, but while there is certainly crime here, and Kentucky’s firearms law are less restrictive than Pennsylvania’s, we don’t have the mass shootings or rampant killings seen in the City of Brotherly Love.

Miss Rushing was one of the Inquirer writers who told us that there were no gangs in Philadelphia, just those “cliques of young men”, and if she didn’t write those specific words herself, her name is still on it, demonstrating for us that those writers, Jessica Griffin, Ximena Conde, and Chris Palmer along with Miss Rushing, are simply in denial of what is going on in their fair city.

That, or they actually do know the truth, but are unwilling, or unable due to their editors’ dictates, to actually say it out loud.

The “city leaders” from Miss Rushing’s headlines really can’t do much to “improve (Kensington’s) conditions” because the people there are responsible for them. Yes, many of them are poor, but that doesn’t mean that they have to use drugs or tolerate drug use among others. The area’s open-air drug markets exist because the residents of Kensington allow them to exist. The filthy homeless camps and junkies strung out and laying wasted in the middle of the sidewalks exist because the neighborhood allow them to exist. The area is full of crime because the people who know who committed the crimes won’t tell the police, so crime continues, and gets worse, because there are few consequences.

Kensington’s consequences are the fault of Kensington’s people. The “city leaders” cannot change that; only the people themselves, hopefully encouraged by church pastors, block captains, and the mothers in the area concerned about their children, can change things.

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“
↑2 Will Bunch, the Inquirer’s most off-the-wall leftist columnist, wrote:

These twin blows came at the very end of a brutal autumn in which the right’s unified messaging — in so many ways the Powell Memo brought to life — is embraced by the icons of mainstream media like the New York Times, Washington Post or NPR. The fearmongering over cherry-picked crime stats or supposed migrant caravans, or an emphasis on high inflation over low unemployment, or cheap gas over deadly climate change that’s hatched in conservative think tanks and promulgated on Fox News has proved catnip to journalists so eager to prove their balanced objectivity — that they aren’t in the tank for Biden coming off the Donald Trump nightmare.

With 449 homicides in Philly so far this year, on a pace for 529 for the year, and total shootings at a higher pace this year than last. I’m not sure how “cherry-picked” those crime statistics are. The Inky’s writers seem to be living in denial.