Tag Archives: #Philadelphia

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Jim Kenney: The Buck Doesn’t Stop Here! 'It's not my fault!' whines the Mayor of Philadelphia!

Bernard Samuel was the last Republican Mayor of Philadelphia, leaving office on January 7, 1952, when George VI was still King of England, Josef Stalin dictator of the Soviet Union, and Harry Truman President of the United States. Since then, there have been ten popularly elected Mayor of the City of Brotherly Love, all of them Democrats. That’s 70 years, 7 months, and 25 days of unbroken Democratic rule in Philly.

His Honor the Mayor is upset, very upset, at the number of shootings in his city, but, of course, it’s not really his fault, is it?

Pa. ‘a Backward State’, Philly Mayor Says in Criticism of State Gun Laws

Kenney’s latest comments came after a triple shooting on the grounds of an elementary school in the Kensington neighborhood left three young men wounded, including a 17-year-old, shortly before 1 a.m. Wednesday

By Rudy Chinchilla • Published August 31, 2022 • Updated on August 31, 2022 at 8:12 PM

Criticizing the state’s gun laws, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney on Wednesday called Pennsylvania a “backward state” and said its Legislature for the most part doesn’t care about its citizens.

Kenney made the comments in response to an NBC10/Telemundo 62 question about his support of stricter gun laws and a shooting that happened at a school in the predawn hours of Wednesday morning.

“We’re not gonna get gun control in Pennsylvania. This is a backward state whose Legislature for the most part doesn’t care about the health and welfare of its citizens,” Kenney said.

In the Pennsylvania, the state government sets the gun control laws, and the pre-emption law prohibits smaller jurisdictions from setting stricter restrictions or penalties on residents than the Commonwealth has in place. With one exception, a state law which allows felony rather than misdemeanor charges for illegal handgun possession, in Philadelphia alone, all of Pennsylvania is under the same firearms laws.

So, if the gun control laws are the pretty much uniform across the Commonwealth, and it is a lack of stricter firearms restrictions which has led to the homicide rate, shouldn’t the homicide rate be fairly similar across the Keystone State? As we noted just a few days ago, they aren’t:

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.

Here’s how the actual numbers work out: there were 510 homicides among 11,398,903 Pennsylvanians not living in Philadelphia, for a homicide rate of 4.474 per 100,000 population, while there were 499 murders among 1,603,797 Philadelphians, which works out to a homicide rate of 31.114 per 100,000. If the gun laws are the problem, why aren’t the homicide rates for Philly and the rest of the Commonwealth fairly similar?[1]Even as late as the end of August, I have been unable to find the ‘official’ statistics for the number of homicides statewide for 2021. With 562 murders in Philly in 2021, I’m sure … Continue reading

According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, there were 364 homicides in Philly as of 11:59 PM EDT on Wednesday, August 31st. That’s a 1.96% increase over the 357 on the same date last year, and 2021 not only set the city’s homicide record, but utterly destroyed the old record of an even 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990. Under His Honor the Mayor, Philly has seen two of the three highest murder totals since statistics were being kept. Yet, oddly enough, the gun control laws never changed! Oddly enough, under Mr Kenney’s immediate predecessor, Michael Nutter, murders decreased in the city, and as we noted on August 9th, Philly had surpassed the entire year’s homicide total for every single year under Mr Nutter’s eight years in office.

The current homicide rate in Philadelphia is 1.4979 per day. During Mr Nutter’s eight years in office, the city never averaged as high as 1.00 killings per day.

And in all of that time, the firearms laws in the Keystone State were the same.

Depending on how you do the math, the city is on target for 546.75 and 573.02 murders in 2022.[2]The 546.75 number is obtained by taking the current number of homicides per day, and multiplying by 365 days in the year. The 573.02 number is obtained by taking the percentage increase in homicides … Continue reading While we can’t know the final numbers yet, one thing seems certain: under Mayor Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, 2022 will ‘win’ either the gold or the silver medal for murders this year, and they’ll have three of the top four homicide numbers. Mr Kenney’s term doesn’t end until January of 2024, so, unless he resigns early, he’ll have yet another full year to lead the city to more than 500 murders.[3]Mr Krasner was re-elected in 2021, and his term doesn’t expire until January of 2026. Miss Outlaw has no fixed term, but serves at the pleasure of the Mayor.

The outgoing mayor has for some time been outspoken about gun control and critical of what he characterizes as Republican inaction on the issue, both at the state and federal level. He has also been blunt when asked about gun violence in the city, and at times seemingly overwhelmed when discussing the growing problem.

In July, he had to apologize after saying he would “be happy” when he is no longer mayor. Those comments came after gunfire during the city’s annual July 4th fireworks show on the Ben Franklin Parkway sent crowds running and left two police officers shot.

Yeah, well the entire city will be happy when Mr Kenney is no longer Mayor, but it really doesn’t matter: whomever is elected to replace him will be another Democrat, and will be just as frustrated and just as bad.

Most of those killings have come by way of gunfire. The city controller’s office lists at least 332 fatal shootings as of Aug. 30. It also shows at least 1,266 nonfatal shootings.

The city’s shooting victims database shows 1610 shooting victims as of August 31th of this year, but ‘only’ 1555 through August 31, 2021. There have been 55 more shootings, a 3.537% increase, and let’s face it: every shooting is an attempted murder.

There are, of course, no records of how many times people were shot at, but escaped without injury, or were so slightly wounded that they were able to flee the scene and treat their wounds without going to the hospital.

There’s actually a lot of blame to go around. The reaction to the unfortunate death-during-arrest of methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled convicted felon George Floyd turned loose the anger of the left, but that was two years ago, and killings in the City of Brotherly love have skyrocketed in the subsequent years. The election of a George Soros-sponsored defense attorney as the city’s top prosecutor has enabled a lot of bad guys to get away with slaps on the wrist . . . if even that much is also at fault. A stooge Police Commissioner with more interest in ‘diversity and inclusion’ than law enforcement, and who cannot attract new recruits to the police department only makes things worse.

But Mayor is the top job, the ultimate responsibility, and Jim Kenney, who served on the Philadelphia City Council for 23 years before running for Mayor — at 64 years of age, he has been running for or serving in city government for 32 years, half of his life, now — ought to know that. He asked for that job, and that responsibility. Yet he is shirking all responsibility, blaming everyone, or at least every Republican, but himself, for the downward slide of our nation’s sixth most populous city, a city with a proud and storied history that predates the founding of our nation, the city in which our Declaration of Independence was approved and signed, a city founded in 1682 by William Penn. Mr Kenney can throw shade at anyone and everyone he wishes, but in the end, he has been an utter failure, and everyone knows it.

References

References
↑1 Even as late as the end of August, I have been unable to find the ‘official’ statistics for the number of homicides statewide for 2021. With 562 murders in Philly in 2021, I’m sure the statistical disparities would be even worse, but I cannot work with numbers I do not have available.
↑2 The 546.75 number is obtained by taking the current number of homicides per day, and multiplying by 365 days in the year. The 573.02 number is obtained by taking the percentage increase in homicides as of August 31st and multiplying that by 562, the number of total homicides in 2021. As we reported on September 7, 2021, there was a significant decrease in the daily homicide rate in the city between July 9th and September 6th, the end of the Labor Day holiday weekend. Subsequent to that, the homicide rate surged, to a whopping 1.7155 per day.
↑3 Mr Krasner was re-elected in 2021, and his term doesn’t expire until January of 2026. Miss Outlaw has no fixed term, but serves at the pleasure of the Mayor.
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In Philadelphia, Black Lives Don’t Matter!

The mission of journalism is to report the news, the truth, to the public, even if it means digging deeply into things that some people, particularly people in positions of power, do not want disclosed. Journalists must have an open mind, to see the truth, even if the truth is not what they wanted or expected, and report it accurately. 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, on the other hand, only see what they want to see.

Philly’s gun violence epidemic reaches a perilous new low as a 7-year-old is shot while playing video games | Editorial

The only thing more disturbing than the relentless pace of shootings in the city is the lack of action and outrage from those sworn to protect residents.

by the Editorial Board | Tuesday, August 23, 2022

In case city leaders have yet to realize that gun violence has reached epidemic proportions, consider the following: A 7-year-old boy was sitting in his bedroom playing video games Saturday night when he was shot in the thigh by a stray bullet from outside his home.

The shooting of a boy innocently playing in his bedroom should shake city leaders to their core and spark a full-throated call to action. So should the latest tally of weekend gun violence in Philadelphia: 21 people were shot between Saturday and Sunday.

At one point, the shootings were occurring minutes apart. An unidentified male was shot in the head at 12:21 a.m. on Sunday. Five minutes later, a 23-year-old man was shot in the back. Just 24 minutes later, a 59-year-old man was shot in the buttocks and left thigh.

The only thing more disturbing than the relentless pace of shootings that continues unabated across the city is the lack of action and outrage from those sworn to protect residents. What will it take for Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, and City Council to do something — anything — to try to stem the flow of blood?

On May 9, 2021, the same Editorial Board which expressed such outrage, endorsed Larry Krasner for re-election. It wasn’t that the Editorial Board did not know what the city had in Mr Krasner; on that same May 9, 2021, the City of Brotherly Love suffered its 183rd murder of the year, an average of 1.4186 per day, a whopping 46 more than on the same date in 2020.

In 2020, the city saw 499 murders, just one short of the record set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990.

On May 9, 2021, the Editorial Board knew that it was Mr Krasner and his office which let Hasan Elliot out on the streets, when they could have locked him up for a parole violation, and that Mr Elliot then killed Philadelphia Police Corporal James O’Connor. The Editorial Board know that under Mr Krasner prosecution of arrests for illegal firearms possession have dropped dramatically. Yet now that are asking, “What will it take,” for Mr Krasner “to do something — anything — to try to stem the flow of blood?”

“Something” and “anything” apparently does not include something really radical like locking up criminals. In their endorsement of Mr Krasner, the Board wrote:

A complex, relatively recent spike in gun violence isn’t a reason to return to the mass incarceration regime of yesteryear, but a challenge to do better.

Oddly enough, the “mass incarceration regime of yesteryear” was coincident with a significant reduction in murders in Philly. As we noted on August 9th, under Philadelphia under Mayor Jim Kenney and District Attorney Larry Krasner have led the city into more homicides so far in 2022 than any entire year under previous Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey.

Are the Editorial Board now willing to try “mass incarceration” again? That would certainly fall under trying “anything” “to try to stem the flow of blood,” wouldn’t it?

How about “stop and frisk”? With the ever-mounting toll of shootings and death, City Council President Darrell Clarke floated the idea of a return to the “stop and frisk” policies. The Editorial Board didn’t like that idea, either:

The rise in gun violence has prompted some City Council members to call for the Police Department to reexamine its stop-and-frisk policy. While the idea is well intended, it should be a nonstarter.

The Philadelphia Police Department has a long history of racial discrimination and brutality aimed at the Black and Latino communities.

In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the city, alleging police used racial profiling to illegally stop, search, and detain thousands of people. To settle the lawsuit, the Police Department agreed to collect data on all stop-and-frisks and train officers in the use of the tactic.

In the years since, the practice has continued with significant modifications — chief among them: Officers must have sound legal suspicions to make stops. As a result, the number of stops has fallen precipitously: In 2015, police made nearly 400,000 pedestrian stops; this year, officers are on track for about 10,000 stops.

Also in 2015: Philadelphia saw 280 homicides. Since then, the city has seen 277, followed by 315, 353, 356, 499 and 562 murders each subsequent year, and 352 so far this year. We can’t know that the reduction from 400,000 to about 10,000 pedestrian stops has contributed the huge rise in murders, but the numbers do seem rather stark.

That’s another “something,” “anything” the Editorial Board don’t want the city to try.

The problem is that the Editorial Board are too blind to see the problem! The police do not stop crimes; the police respond to crimes, clean up the mess left behind by crimes, and try to arrest the perpetrators of crimes. Yes, the very short-staffed Philadelphia Police Department are not solving enough crimes, and yes, the George Soros-sponsored District Attorney is not prosecuting crimes seriously enough, both of which reduce the deterrent to the bad guys when it comes to committing crimes, but the actual prevention of crime is not something the city government can do.

The prevention of crime comes from children being reared right, in stable, two-parent homes, but it’s far, far, far too politically incorrect to say that. And when the city government, and The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Editorial Board, and all of its opinion columnists, and all of the media coverage support the killing of children who are simply too inconvenient to be allowed to live, can it really be a surprise that that message is getting through to the teenagers and twenty-somethings on the street?

The left look for the problem everywhere but where it is. Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong wrote, on July 20th, Philly needs new solutions to prevent gun violence. Not conversations. And not parties. In it, she wrote:

After putting it off for years, I finally got around to participating in the Beer Summit put on by Global Citizen, the nonprofit group that organizes the Martin Luther King Day of Service.

Billed as a “conversation on race, class, and power,” the annual gathering — which began in 2009 when President Barack Obama convened a “beer summit” at the White House with Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley, after Gates’ arrest — was virtual this year, so I could watch the recording at my leisure.

There was lots of good commentary. As Temple University’s David Brown pointed out, “The whole notion of the Beer Summit is to bring different people from different perspectives along and [focus] on a common challenge in a community.”

This year’s theme was gun violence sparked by white supremacy.

She has got to be kidding. Yes, there have been a few mass shootings by supposed “white supremacists,” but the number of their victims pales in comparison to the numbers of black Philadelphians being killed by other black Philadelphians. Unlike Philadelphia, St Louis, our most murderous city, breaks down its homicide cases on race. In a city in which slightly less than half the population are black, 121 out of 130 homicides as of August 24th had black victims, and out of 84 known suspects, 83 are black.

It isn’t “white supremacy” killing all of those black victims in the Gateway City, and it hasn’t been “white supremacy” killing all of those victims in Philly. But Jenice Armstrong, the Editorial Board, and almost everyone else can’t bring themselves to tell the truth: the blood being spilled by the mostly black victims of shootings has been spilled by black assailants.

Me? I can say it, because I’m retired, and I can’t be ‘canceled,’ can’t lose my job for doing something really radical like telling the truth. As horrible as the homicide rates have been in Philly, in St Louis, in Baltimore and Chicago, they really aren’t that bad for white people.

In Philly, black lives don’t matter, or at least they don’t matter as much as the left keeping their mouths shut as far as telling the truth is concerned. The key to reducing the carnage is to stop supporting the social policies and tolerances which have produced it.

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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Killadelphia

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain noted the drive-by shootings at the Shepard Recreation Center in West Philadelphia, complete with a link back to our story on the gunfire. 🙂

Mr McCain posited his story Sunday evening, concluding:

Like so much else in the “progressive” agenda, the soft-on-crime policies of Soros-backed District Attorney Larry Krasner are hurting the people whom Democrats imagine to be the beneficiaries. All this talk about “civil rights” and “social justice” won’t help you if you’re dead, and 346 people have already been murdered this year in Philadelphia, which is on pace to break the homicide record the city set last year.

Alas! The Philadelphia Police Department only updates their Current Crime Statistics Page during ‘normal business hours’ Monday through Friday, so Mr McCain’s statistics are behind the times; the weekend’s toll pushed it up to an even 350 dead bodies.

350 murders ÷ 233 days elapsed in the year = 1.5021 homicides per day, x 365 = 548 projected killings for the year. While the city is six murders ahead of the same date last year, last year saw a bit of a ‘lull’ in the killings between July 9th and the end of the Labor Day holiday, at which point the murder rate really picked up from 1.4578 to 1.7715 per day.

Many on the left, following the unfortunate death of methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled convicted felon George Floyd as he resisted arrest in Minneapolis demanded that cities “defund the police,” something Philadelphia’s city government made noises about but, in the end, did not do; the police department’s budget grew by $30 million this year. Trouble is, the Philadelphia Police Department has been defunded, not by government action, but by officers leaving the force:

The Philly Police Department is short 1,300 officers. Here’s why the situation is about to get worse.

Police leaders have blamed both the city’s uniquely stringent hiring requirements and a national shortage of people who want to become police officers.

by Anna Orso and Ryan W. Briggs | Friday, August 19, 2022

The Philadelphia Police Department has faced a critical shortage of officers for months — one that’s all but certain to get worse as hundreds more cops plan to leave.

With the police force already operating about 20% below its target staffing level, more than 800 officers and civilian employees have set retirement dates within the next four years by enrolling in the city’s deferred pension program.

The decades-old program helps officials prepare for the departure of longtime employees by allowing city workers to begin collecting on pension benefits four years before they retire. Fresh pension records analyzed by The Inquirer show the number of Police Department enrollees doubled in four years.

The figures mean officers are leaving faster than the department can recruit them. The force is virtually guaranteed to see about 200 retirements for each of the next four years. But this year, just 120 cadets will be eligible to graduate from the police academy.

Part of the reason I didn’t note this story previously was that it was subscribers’ only content, and linking back to it still meant that readers of The First Street Journal still couldn’t see it, and could not check to see that I had quoted the story accurately. However, WPVI-TV, Channel 6, the ABC owned-and-operated station in the City of Brotherly Love, had at least a brief story on the same subject.

While cities across the nation are experiencing a loss of municipal workers, possibly due to mayors imposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates — as we noted earlier this month, Mayor Jim Kenney has already fired 15, and there are 68 more set to be terminated — Philadelphia being no exception, the PPD under Commissioner Danielle Outlaw is hemorrhaging personnel faster than other city departments. In a city in which the Police Commissioner does not stand behind her officers, and the District Attorney takes far more delight in prosecuting police officers than actual criminals, who would want to be a cop in Philly? In a city in which Larry Krasner could get not just elected on an anti-police and refusing to prosecute some offenses platform, but re-elected, by landslide margins in both the primary and general elections after the city’s homicide rate soared, what incentive can there really be to strap on your equipment only to be shot at from all sides, from the criminals to the District Attorney’s office to The Philadelphia Inquirer and its constant attacks on officers?

Simply put, the Philadelphia Police Department has been defunded, not by the city, but by the actions of the people of Philadelphia. Fewer crimes get solved, police presence is diminished, and many criminals actually arrested don’t get prosecuted, and thus we come back to the city’s crime rate. With fewer crimes solved, deterrence of crime decreases. With fewer police officers on the streets, fewer potential incidents of bad guys just opening fire on other bad guys — the majority of city homicides — are prevented.

All of this is exactly what the people of Philadelphia want, as indicated by how they actually vote.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer conceals a truth that everyone already knows Is the Inky actually perpetuating a stereotype it wishes to avoid?

We have noted, many times before, that The Philadelphia Inquirer censors the news because publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes demands it. But it has to be asked: does their deliberate censorship actually reinforce the stereotype they are trying to avoid?

‘I’m grateful to be alive.’ Victim of West Philly rec center shooting heals as three accused gunmen face charges.

Tahmir Pinckney, Azyear Sutton-Walker, and Marlon Spurell, who are all 22 years old, were arraigned overnight Thursday on charges including attempted murder and jailed on $3 million bail each.

by Chris Palmer and Mensah M. Dean | Thursday, August 18, 2022 | 1:15 PM EDT

Photo via 6ABC News Click to enlarge.

Three of the men accused of opening fire during a drive-by shooting outside a West Philadelphia rec center this week — an incident that left five people wounded, two of them critically — have been charged with crimes including attempted murder, aggravated assault, and conspiracy, court records show.Tahmir Pinckney, Azyear Sutton-Walker, and Marlon Spurell, who are all 22 years old, were arraigned overnight Thursday and jailed on $3 million bail each, court records show. All were being represented by the Defender Association, which declined to comment Thursday morning.

Police said the men were among six people who began shooting out of a white Dodge Durango around 7 p.m. Tuesday on the 300 block of North 57th Street, just steps from the Shepard Recreation Center, where dozens of people were outside playing basketball, football, or otherwise enjoying a summer evening.

The Inquirer doesn’t print mugshots, because Miss Hughes believes that being an anti-racist news organization just won’t allow that.

But the Inky isn’t the only news source in town, and the television stations did show the mugshots. Television news is, of course, is a medium much more dependent upon the visual, so it’s understandable that, regardless of how #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 the management are, pictures have to be published. The Inquirer, which has a far smaller circulation than the television stations have viewers, certainly didn’t keep the public from seeing the mugshots, and noting what Miss Hughes desperately wants not noted, that the suspects were all black — something most people would have inferred anyway, given the names of the suspects — but at a certain point, one has to ask: is the Inky, 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?

I’m sure that’s not the intention of the journolists[2]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 who work for what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[3]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., but it has to be considered a possibility. The stereotype that most criminals are black certainly exists, and by censoring the news where race is concerned, isn’t the Inky contributing to that stereotype? When the newspaper declines to publish something like this, won’t most of the readers simply assume what the Inky refuses to tell them? I’m guessing that there are at least some criminals in the City of Brotherly Love who are white, but the newspaper doesn’t tell us that.

The original article title in the Inquirer was “Tahmir Pinckney, Azyear Sutton-Walker, Marlon Spurell charged over West Philly shooting near Shepard rec center,” which you can see if you hold your cursor over the tab of the Inky article. An editor changed that, which wasn’t a terrible idea, since part of the article focused on the victims, but at least it wasn’t front-and-center on the newspaper’s website main page. Their names, however, were prominently featured in the subtitle.

The Enquirer Inquirer did tell us, in a sort of offhand way, that both the shooters and the victims were gang-bangers, without using the word “gang”:

an ongoing feud between groups of young men — with the shooters in the car on one side of the dispute, and the victims on the other. One of the victims shot Thursday had also been shot several weeks ago,

At least some of the targeted victims were armed themselves, and returned fire.

Mr Spurell was awaiting trial — or, more probably, having the charges dropped by Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner — on a drug trafficking charge from four months ago, while Mr “Pinkney pleaded no contest to a drug charge in 2019 and was sentenced to a year of probation.” I’m actually surprised that the newspaper told us that, because it will lead more readers to assume that the arrested men are actually guilty; these are some bad dudes!

The Inquirer includes short, first person, biographies of its writers at the bottom of its articles. I have to wonder: how does Mr Palmer focus on how criminal justice and law enforcement are “evolving and impacting communities during a moment of reform”? How does Mr Dean “report on law breakers, those they impact, and how the criminal justice system interacts with both” when he is required to censor part of the news? Both reporters are actually contributing to the stereotypes that Miss Hughes wants to avoid, though I’ve no doubt that such is required by editorial guidelines, regardless of what their personal inclinations might be.

Wouldn’t actually telling the whole truth serve better?

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 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.
↑3 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.
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The problem is not mass incarceration; the problem is that not enough people are incarcerated, for not a long enough time

Larry Krasner, the police-hating defense attorney sponsored by George Soros to become District Attorney in Philadelphia, really, really doesn’t like putting criminals in jail. He is a strong believer in “restorative justice,” and his office issued, on May 26, 2022, a paper claiming that their “restorative justice” programs have worked just spectacularly well.

So it is no surprise that Mr Krasner doesn’t like it when independent studies show that his policies have led to increases in crime!

New study by former DA links Philadelphia’s high homicide rate to a drop in criminal sentencings

Deprosecution practices started well before DA Larry Krasner’s time in office, research shows

by Kristen Johnson | Monday, August 15, 2022 | 7:25 AM EDT

PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philadelphia’s high homicide rate may be linked to a rise in deprosecution practices, according to a recent study by the former district attorney of Chester County.

For the third year in a row, homicides in Philadelphia are at an all-time high, and fewer criminal acts are being charged or sought in the city.

According to prosecution research — specifically, sentencing data — former Chester County DA Tom Hogan found prosecutions had dropped 70% over the course of about five to six years in Philadelphia.

“The results that we come up with is that there was an increase of roughly 74 homicides per year from 2015 to 2019 in Philadelphia associated with deprosecution,” he explained.

Hogan, who is also a former criminal defense attorney, served as DA of Chester County from 2012 to 2020. He now works in private practice and is seeking a Ph.D. in criminology next year at the University of Cambridge.

He partnered with the University of Pennsylvania for this study and spent months researching deprosecution. The study found the spike started well before Philly’s current top prosecutor, Larry Krasner — who has faced criticism for his progressive practices — and actually began during DA Seth Williams’ time in office.

“The sentencings decrease by 35% in 2015 over prior trends,” said Hogan. “Then what you see by 2019 is sentencings in Philadelphia are down almost 70%, so that is a huge drop.”

The report makes it clear that the trends in reduced prosecutions and sentencing began under District Attorney Seth Williams, who was himself convicted in federal court. Faced with 29 counts, Mr Williams pleaded guilty to one count of bribery and was sentenced to five years in prison. Due to the completion of a drug rehabilitation program and time off for good behavior while in prison, he was released in just under three years.

Mr Krasner, who campaigned on reducing prosecutions for drug arrests, reviewing old cases to look for prosecutorial misconduct, and holding the police accountable, was elected in 2017, and took office on New Year’s Day of 2018.

So, what happened? While Mr Williams was District Attorney, homicides showed a slight increase from Lynne Abraham’s previous tenure, going from 302 to 306 in 2010, Mr Williams’ first year, then to 326 and 331, before dropping to 246, 248, 280, 277, and a final jump to 315 in Mr Williams last year. Michael Nutter began his two terms as Mayor in 2008, bringing Charles Ramsey along with him as Police Commissioner.

Under Mr Krasner, and Mayor Jim Kenney, homicides immediately jumped to 353 in 2018 and 356 in 2019. But here’s the kicker:

The study does not include 2020 or 2021 data due to anomalies caused by the pandemic and civil unrest.

Thud!

Homicides soared to 499, one short of the record of 500, in 2020, and then not only broke that record, but completely shattered it, rising to 562 in 2021. The study doesn’t include the worst of Mr Krasner’s term!

It’s August 17th, noy quite 2/3 through the year, so we don’t know what 2022’s final numbers will be, but as of 11:59 PM EDT on Tuesday, August 16th, the city is six murders ahead of the same date last year, 345 to 339, a 1.770% increase.

There are a couple of different ways to do the numbers. 345 ÷ 228, the number of days elapsed in the year, = 1.513 murders per day, multiplied by 365 = 552 projected killings. However, if you multiply 562, last year’s total murders, by the current 1.770% increase, the total jumps to 572.

Mr Krasner, of course, does not want to accept any responsibility for the huge surge in homicides:

Hogan said making fewer sentencings was a “policy choice” that started with Williams but “increased dramatically” under Krasner.

When asked, Krasner criticized the study.

“[Hogan] is a traditional prosecutor. He is not a scientist in his field,” said Krasner. “He does not deserve to be a scientist and we respectfully disagree.”

Uh huh, right:

Tom Hogan is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He writes on the issues of the criminal justice system, public safety, terrorism, quantitative analysis, and politics. Hogan has been published in numerous academic journals. In addition, he has been published in and/or quoted by media outlets including City Journal, RealClearPolitics, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Prior to becoming affiliated with the Manhattan Institute, Hogan has served in multiple roles. He practiced law at a major international law firm and litigation boutique, representing Fortune 500 companies and individuals in complex civil litigation and criminal investigations. He served as a federal prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice. He was elected twice as the Chester County District Attorney in Pennsylvania, a county with over 500,000 citizens. He was the chair of the Liberty Mid-Atlantic HIDTA group, coordinating drug law enforcement for state and local organizations across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. He has worked with elected officials at the federal, state, and local level on drafting legislation and addressing critical policy issues.

Hogan received his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College and his legal degree from the University of Virginia School of Law. While practicing law, he also received a Master of Science degree in Criminology from the University of Pennsylvania, concentrating on statistical issues and data science in the criminal justice system. He has taught lawyers, law students, and graduate students from multiple disciplines on issues including criminal procedure, trial advocacy, ethics, officer-involved shootings, and statistical problems.

In other words, Mr Hogan actually is an expert in his field. But, because Mr Krasner doesn’t like the numbers, he has decided that “He is not a scientist in his field,” and “He does not deserve to be a scientist.”

What Mr Hogan found was a strong statistical correlation between reduced prosecution and sentencing, with the greatly increased homicide rate. It’s an old, old truth: correlation does not prove causation, and the correlation Mr Hogan found does not prove that Mr Krasner’s soft-on-criminals policies have caused the homicide rate to increase. However, we have long accepted strong correlations as almost certain causes when it comes to things like smoking causing lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, even though not all smokers develop lung cancer or COPD.

But we already know that Mr Krasner’s lenient policies have caused the death of one Philadelphia Police Officer.

One of the people treated leniently by Mr Krasner and his office, and who wasn’t in jail on Friday, March 13, 2020, was Hasan Elliot, 21. How did the District Attorney’s office treat Mr Elliot, a known gang-banger?

  • Mr Elliott, then 18 years old, was arrested in June 2017 on gun- and drug-possession charges stemming after threatening a neighbor with a firearm. The District Attorney’s office granted him a plea bargain arrangement on January 24, 2018, and he was sentenced to 9 to 23 months in jail, followed by three years’ probation. However, he was paroled earlier than that, after seven months in jail.
  • Mr Elliot soon violated parole by failing drug tests and failing to make his meetings with his parole officer.
  • Mr Elliott was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine on January 29, 2019. This was another parole violation, but Mr Krasner’s office did not attempt to have Mr Elliot returned to jail to finish his sentence, nor make any attempts to get serious bail on the new charges; he was released on his own recognizance.
  • After Mr Elliot failed to appear for his scheduled drug-possession trial on March 27, 2019, prosecutors dropped those charges against him.

On that Friday the 13th, Police Corporal James O’Connor IV, 46, was part of a Philadelphia police SWAT team trying to serve a predawn arrest warrant on Mr Elliott, from a March 2019 killing. Mr Elliot greeted the SWAT team with a hail of bullets, and Corporal O’Connor was killed. Had Mr Elliot been in jail, as he could have been due to parole violations, had Mr Krasner’s office treated him seriously, Corporal O’Connor would have gone home safely to his wife that day. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:

Philadelphia Police Officers and FOP members block District Attorney Larry Krasner from entering the hospital to meet with slain Police Corporal James O’Connor’s family.


Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 president John McNesby also has criticized Krasner, saying his policies led to the killing of O’Connor. “Unfortunately, he’s murdered by somebody that should have never been on the street,” McNesby said. McNesby also said FOP members and police officers formed a human barricade to block Krasner from entering the hospital Friday to see O’Connor’s family.

James O’Connor is stone-cold graveyard dead because District Attorney Krasner and his minions, in their abhorrence of mass incarceration, let a repeat offender, one with a record of carrying firearms, using and selling drugs, and flouting his required probation meetings, off the hook. He was a guy who needed to be incarcerated, and who didn’t even need to be tried again to get him locked up, but Mr Krasner and his office left him out on the streets, even though the police had him in physical custody on January 29, 2019.

Did the lenient treatment do Mr Elliot any good? Had Mr Krasner and his minions treated Mr Elliot seriously, he’d have been in jail on that fateful Friday the 13th, but he’d also be looking at getting out of prison eventually. Now, Mr Elliot, and four of his goons, are looking at spending the rest of their miserable lives in prison.

Amazingly enough, the Editorial Board of the Inquirer actually endorsed Mr Krasner for re-election in 2021, saying:

A complex, relatively recent spike in gun violence isn’t a reason to return to the mass incarceration regime of yesteryear, but a challenge to do better.

Yes, it actually is a reason to return to mass incarcerations! Despite Mr Krasner’s, and the Editorial Board’s, assertions, we know one thing with 100% certainty: a criminal locked up in SCI Phoenix can’t shoot someone in Strawberry Mansion or Kensington.

I have said it before: mass incarceration isn’t the problem. The problem is that not enough people are incarcerated, for not a long enough time. Tom Hogan has just proved that.

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Killadelphia Do gun buyback programs work?

Tweet by Captain Joseph Busa, commanding officer, 39th Police District. Click to enlarge.

There is an episode of Blue Bloods, a television series about a fictional law enforcement family, “No Questions Asked,” about a gun buyback program, in which a very distinctive, pearl-handled pistol linked to a crime was turned in, in this case by the brother of the criminal. Detective Danny Reagan had to jump through all sorts of hoops to find the criminal, since the buyback program was not supposed to produce any evidence against anyone who sold the firearms. But, in a way, it showed that the only time such a buyback program produced a weapon actually used in a crime was when it was turned in by someone else.

Philly buyback events have yielded 1,000 guns in the last three years. None had been used in crimes.

“It’s political theater,” said Joe Giacalone, a former New York Police Department sergeant-turned-CUNY criminology professor.

by Ryan W. Briggs and Ellie Rushing | Saturday, August 13, 2022

As both shootings and gun sales in Philadelphia rose to unprecedented levels last year, a growing number of residents also turned their firearms over to the city’s Police Department, data show.

In 2021, during 16 gun-buyback events — in which people are typically offered $50 to $200 gift cards for each weapon — 558 handguns and 188 long guns were turned in. That’s a 532% increase over 2019, when just five such events were held, according to police data.

Yet of the more than 1,000 weapons turned in over the last three years, not a single one has been linked to a crime.

Ahhh, the journolism[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 of The Philadelphia Inquirer! The article headline states that none of the guns bought back “had been used in crimes,” but the article tells us that none have been linked to crimes. A gun could have been used in a crime, to threaten people, but never actually fired, in which case there would be no expended bullets recovered to test for ballistics which could link a particular weapon to a crime.

The number of buyback events — and media attention surrounding them — has grown in reaction to the city’s escalating gun violence crisis. But experts on the issue say the lackluster statistics show the events are not effective in reducing crime.

“It’s not reaching the area of the community that’s possessing illegal guns and using them,” said Joe Giacalone, a former New York Police Department sergeant-turned-CUNY criminology professor.

“It’s political theater.”

Philadelphia Police Capt. Frank Palumbo, who coordinates with community groups to staff buyback events, acknowledged that police generally do not expect crime guns to be turned in. But he said getting just one gun off the street could still potentially prevent a fatal shooting.

“It tends to be family people, mom-and-pop-type people” attending the events, he said. “It’s people that want to get a gun potentially out of the hands of a toddler that might frequent their homes, or get rid of a gun they don’t use or have the means to secure.”

And there you have it: even the Inky is admitting that these silly programs aren’t targeting the actual criminals. Captain Palumbo tells us that he knows that the bad guys, the ones who expect to use a firearm criminally, aren’t about to give up the tools of their trade.

‘Guns do not belong in the home’

Philadelphia is often credited with launching the first gun-buyback program. In 1968, amid a wave of interest in gun-control regulations nationally, City Council and the police commissioner-turned-mayor, Frank Rizzo, organized a “gun turn in” event, although initially no money was offered for the weapons.

Rizzo noted then that the program was not aimed at nabbing criminals but attracting “good citizens” interested in doing their civic duty to get guns out of circulation.

“Guns do not belong in the home,” Rizzo said. “Many homicides occur because a weapon was handy.”

Mr Rizzo presided over four straight years as mayor of over 400 murders per year, and an average of 349.5 for the four years of his second term.

Whatever the late Mr Rizzo’s views about firearms not belonging in people’s homes, it has become very apparent that Philadelphians have been buying weapons, and obtaining concealed carry permits, at a record pace because they have no confidence that the city and Philadelphia Police Department can or will protect them. The Police Department is seriously undermanned:

Shortages in the Police Department have been well-documented. The force, authorized to have 6,380 officers and nearly 1,000 more civilian staff, has 400 vacancies and hundreds more officers off-duty on injury claims. The department saw 195 uniformed officers retire last year, double from five years prior.

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw has repeatedly said the department is at its lowest staffing levels in years, hampering its ability to fight crime because it can’t replicate the work of a force that was at least 10% larger several years ago.

That’s a problem in a city that has, over the past two years, seen its highest rates of gun violence in generations. Reports of other crimes, including carjackings and auto thefts, have skyrocketed since the spring of 2020. In the meantime, average police response times jumped 20% in 2021 compared to the year before, according to an Inquirer analysis of department records.

There’s an old saying, “When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.” Well, in short-staffed Philadelphia, the police are, on average, 22 minutes away.

Of course, there were a few guns not bought back in the City of Brotherly Love:

Pregnant woman shot in the head among 15 gun violence victims in Philly in less than 24 hours

The violence occurred over about 21 hours from noon on Friday through 9:30 a.m. Saturday, leaving at least three dead.

by Nick Vadala and Robert Moran | Saturday, August 13, 2022 | Updated: 8;25 PM EDT

A woman seven months pregnant who was shot in the head, a 6-year-old boy grazed by a stray bullet, and four people injured in a drive-by shooting were among at least 15 shooting victims in Philadelphia on Friday and Saturday, police said.

The violence occurred over about 21 hours, from noon on Friday through 9:30 a.m. Saturday, leaving at least three dead. Police reported no arrests.

Actually, it started earlier than that: a 64-year-old woman was stabbed to death, allegedly by a 16-year-old relative, in the early morning hours on Friday.

2626 North Bouvier Street. Click to enlarge.

The shootings happened as gun violence continues to surge in the city, with 338 homicides and 1,149 shooting victims as of Thursday — 3% more than on the same date last year, which ended in a record 562 homicides.

The pregnant woman, said to be in her 20s, remained in extremely critical condition Saturday at Temple University Hospital.

It was shortly after 10 p.m. Friday when at least two people — including one with a powerful rifle — started shooting at her and a 15-year-old boy while they sat in a white Honda on the 2600 block of North Bouvier Street in North Philadelphia, said Inspector D.F. Pace.

The teenager died a short time later, Pace said.

Police found 43 spent shell casings at the crime scene.

At least 43 rounds fired, in a very narrow street, and the woman is still alive?

The 2600 block of North Bouvier Street — really, one of the city’s very narrow, alley-like streets — isn’t exactly the greatest neighborhood in North Philly, adjacent to Strawberry Mansion. Zillow is telling me that 2626 North Bouvier Street sold for $133,000 on March 26, 2022.

The Inquirer article lists three dead from shootings. With the stabbing, I count four. That makes at least 342 murders in the city, and that’s only the early evening on Saturday night. Looks like the bad guys didn’t turn in their weapons for buyback.

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.
Posted on by

Congratulations to Jim Kenney!

Congratulations to Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney! He has just achieved more murders in the City of Brotherly Love so far this year than any full year in which his predecessor, Michael Nutter, held the office. George Soros-sponsored District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw certainly deserve credit as well!

Last night was a Monday night, not a weekend, but at a time in which you’d expect Philadelphia’s gang-bangers to slow down a bit, they haven’t. I’d point out that August 8th was a Sunday, end of the weekend, in 2021, the 32nd weekend of the year, and the same number of weekends have elapsed in 2022, so there’s no additional weekend bump in 2022.

Yes, math geeks like me notice things like that.

August 8th was the 220th day of the year. 337 ÷ 220 = 1.5318 homicides per day in Philly, which works out to a projected 559.107 killings in the city for the entire year. But wait: done another way, taking the percentage increase in homicides over last year, 4.0123, and multiplying that by last year’s 562 murders, we could also project 584.549 murders in Philly!

The difference? In 2021, the city actually saw a decrease in the rate of killings between July 9th and September 6th, the end of the Labor Day holiday weekend. That hasn’t happened so far this year, as July saw sixty homicides, while July of 2021 saw ‘only’ 48 murders.

The homicide rate picked up after the Labor Day weekend last year, from an average of 1.4578 per day — which projected out to 532 for the year — and the final 116 days of the year saw 199 homicides, an average of 1.7155 per day, which lifted the yearly average to 1.5397 per day for the year, and 562 murders. While last year’s mid- to late-summer lull hasn’t been seen so far this year, it has to be asked: will last year’s post Labor Day surge be repeated?

At least The Philadelphia Inquirer didn’t ignore the most recent killings, or the surge:

Philly shootings leave 3 dead, including man slain in Popeye’s lot

No arrests have been made, and a motive remains under investigation.

by Rodrigo Torrejón | Tuesday, August 9, 2022

One person was killed and two others were injured in a shooting late Monday night in the parking lot of a Popeye’s in Kensington.

Well, of course it was in Kensington!

Just after 11:15 p.m. Monday, officers responded to a call for a person with a gun on the 300 block of West Lehigh Avenue. When officers arrived, they found multiple people with gunshot wounds inside a red sedan. The victims had been shot in the parking lot of the nearby Popeye’s, 6ABC reported.

Police said that three suspects, all armed, came up to the sedan and fired 47 bullets into the car, 6ABC reported. After the shooting, the suspects took off on foot.

One victim, a man, had multiple gunshot wounds to his head and was pronounced dead shortly after at Temple University Hospital. Another victim, a woman, had several gunshot wounds to her body, and the third victim, a man, had multiple gunshot wounds to his back. They were taken to Temple University Hospital in stable condition.

North Orianna Street, via Google Maps, May 2022. Click to enlarge.

The Popeye’s Chicken restaurant is at the corner of West Lehigh Avenue and North Orianna Street. North Orianna Street in the blocks around West Lehigh Avenue is a neighborhood of older row homes, some with porches barred in to keep out the bad guys, vacant lots with concertina wire topping fences, and a generally poverty-stricken look.

One of the wounded, but not killed, victims, was an employee of the Popeye’s restaurant.

The Inquirer report stated that 47 shots had been fired, but that the police had no motive as of yet, but one thing is obvious: this was a targeted assassination. The newspaper also censored the fact, gleaned from the city’s shootings database, that all of the dead were black males.

Further down:

As of Sunday night, the city was ahead of last year’s pace for what ended in a record high number of 562 homicides for the year. By Sunday night, police reported that 333 people have been killed in Philadelphia so far this year.

There were 324 homicides by the same date last year.

Perhaps it’s a bit unfair for a math geek like me to point this out, but the Inky really needs to start looking at the numbers. I’d like to think that a former Pennsylvanian, now 635 miles away in eastern Kentucky, isn’t the only person actually running, and publicizing, the statistics.

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How not to sell Philadelphia!

I almost ignored this one, but I just can’t: the photo is just too, too funny!

Philly transplants have over $150,000 more to spend on homes than locals — and it’s driving up home prices

The migration of home buyers from more expensive cities to Philadelphia helps drive up prices across the market.

by Michaelle Bond | Thursday, August 4, 2022

For-sale sign outside a home in the Frankford section of Philadelphia in December 2021. The average person moving into Philadelphia has more money to spend on a house than a Philadelphian does, according to a Redfin analysis. | Alejandro A Alverez, Philadelphia Inquirer staff photographer. Click to enlarge.

Philadelphia may be an affordable big city compared to others on the East Coast and across the country — a draw for new residents — but that’s little comfort to locals who have watched prices rise.In the first half of 2022, people looking to move into Philadelphia searched for houses with a maximum price of $588,000 on average, according to the online brokerage Redfin’s analysis of searches on its website. Locals capped their searches much lower at $422,000.

As home prices continue to climb, people moving largely from more expensive cities have an advantage with an average of 39% more to spend. That, in turn, helps push up prices across the market.

There’s much more at the original.

I do not normally reproduce photos from The Philadelphia Inquirer, but this one struck me as hysterically funny. A reasonably well-researched article about how prices in Philly are lower than in places like New York City and the left coast, the Inky illustrated it with a photo of a home for sale, in which the property owners had effectively put themselves in jail, installing metal bars and a door on the front porch of their rowhome in the Frankford neighborhood, to keep the bad guys out of their property. I have noted this in some bad Philadelphia areas several times.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 16, 2021. Click to enlarge.

In an article noting that there are 57 city blocks where 10 or more people have been shot since 2015, the Inquirer included a graph showing the Kensington area as the worst, Frankford is also included as a not-so-great place. I do not know if the article author, Michaelle Bond, “an urbanism writer covering how people live in their homes, how the market directs choices, and how policies shape communities,” is the one who selected the photo with the article, but whoever picked it could not have done a much better job of turning off people on the idea of moving to the City of Brotherly Love.

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Killadelphia Black lives don't matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer

We noted, just yesterday, that Philadelphia, which as recently as June 30th, had been 14 homicides short of the same-day number in 2021, 257 versus 271, the year the City of Brotherly Love set its all-time homicide record of 562, but had caught up and passed the daily number by one murder.

Of course, being just one above 2021’s numbers means that just a couple of bloodless days could allow the killing rate to, once again, drop below 2021. At least for now, that isn’t what happened.

July ended with this year’s numbers closing in on 2021’s, but not quite there, with 317 vs 319 homicides, just a 0.627% decline, not statistically significant, but at least significant in that two fewer Philadelphians had spilled their life’s blood out in the city’s mean streets.

We pointed out yesterday that the nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper, which I will admit to having mockingly called The Philadelphia Enquirer,[1]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. had made no mention at all, at least not that I could find on the website’s main page or crime page, that the ‘trend lines’ had crossed, but that has changed now . . . sort of.

3 men killed, 2 others wounded in separate Philly shootings

The fatal shootings occurred in East Frankford, Germantown, and Kensington, police said.

by Robert Moran | Wednesday, August 3, 2022

Three men were killed and two others were wounded in separate shootings Wednesday night across Philadelphia, police said.

Shortly before 9:45 p.m. in East Frankford, an unidentified man was shot in the head while driving a Nissan sedan in the area of Josephine and Gillingham Streets, said Inspector D.F. Pace.

The Nissan crashed into a utility pole at a high rate of speed, Pace said. The victim, who appeared to be in his 20s, was pronounced dead at the scene by medics.

The victim was still wearing his seat belt and the tires of the crashed Nissan were still spinning and eventually disintegrated, Pace said.

A witness told police a man stumbled out of the sedan after the crash and fled in an unknown direction, Pace said.

A spent shell casing was found inside the vehicle and a gun was found under the car, Pace said.

Just before 6:50 p.m. in Germantown, a 28-year-old man was on the 200 block of Zeralda Street when he was shot in the head and torso, said Chief Inspector Scott Small.

The man, who had previously lived on the block, was taken by police to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 8:04 p.m., Small said.

The reporter, Robert Moran, really needs to work on his writing; too many short, one or two sentence paragraphs! They need to be combined a bit, to look more polished. As usual, Mr Moran, following what I have inferred to be the Inquirer’s guidelines, deleted all references to race when it came to the victims, but, according to the city’s shooting victims database, all three were black males.

There’s more at the original, descriptions of the other killings, which you can read if you follow the link embedded in the cited article’s title. But Mr Moran’s concluding paragraph was all that I could find about the city’s homicide numbers surpassing 2021’s:

As of late Tuesday night, the city officially reported 322 homicides so far this year — one more than the same period in 2021, which ended with Philadelphia suffering an all-time record 562 homicides.

In other words, piffle! Nothing serious there at all.

The shootings victims database tells us that there have been twenty reported shootings in the city in just the first three days of August, with seven fatalities: five black males, one black female, and one Hispanic white male. Of the total of twenty shooting victims, one was a black female, three Hispanic white males, and sixteen black males. The Enquirer Inquirer, that proudly anti-racist news organization for which #BlackLivesMatter doesn’t believe that that is news which should be reported.

There are times in which I worry that I have reported on this subject too much, and this is the 46th article on this website entitled Killadelphia; “broken recordism” really isn’t a good look. But when we have the city’s newspaper of record trying to hide the records, when the city’s mayor, James Kenney, a Democrat in an unbroken string of Democrats 70 years long and who is tried, worn out, and clueless, when the district attorney is a defense attorney rather than a prosecutor and won’t lock up the bad guys, and the police commissioner a left coast stooge who can’t attract recruits and has left the department seriously undermanned, I can’t help but to harp on this subject, because it is far-left #woke policy put into governing force, on what should be a national stage, and the results should be shouted to everyone: this is the result of liberal policies.

One thing Philly has accomplished is to make painfully clear that, despite their protestations, black lives don’t matter, or at least they don’t matter if telling the truth about how they are being wasted in the city’s streets daily might threaten leftist policies. The idea that conservative policies might make a positive difference is so appalling, is just plain anathema, to the left that they’d rather see blood, red blood mostly from black bodies, running in the city’s streets than to try something different.

References

References
↑1 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.