Tag Archives: #Philadelphia

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The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to make a 12-year-old punk who shot at police some kind of martyr.

Thomas J Siderio Jr

I have previously noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t like reporting on the not good guys who get gunned down in the City of Brotherly Love, but when an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl gets killed, the paper is full of stories. I noted when the Inquirer and reporter Anna Orso tried to make an innocent victim out of young Marcus Stokes. In her story on the impact that the murder of Marcus Stokes had on E Washington Rhodes School, Miss Orso wrote, very specifically, that young Mr Stokes “was fatally shot in North Philadelphia on his way to school“, but the evidence, as printed in the Inquirer, indicates that he was not actually on his way to school. He was sitting, with five other young people, in a parked, and possibly disabled, car, many blocks away, fifteen minutes after he was supposed to be in his homeroom at school.

Miss Orso knew those facts; she is listed as either the sole or one of two authors in each of the articles I have cited. Did no one, including she, ever ask themselves any questions about why these young people, “including other Rhodes students“, were sitting in that car, ask themselves what they were doing there?

Miss Orso isn’t a stupid woman. She was graduated from Pennsylvania State University, a highly selective college, that doesn’t accept dummies. She isn’t inexperienced, having worked in journalism for seven years now, including four with the Inquirer.

Now, the Inquirer is trying the same thing with Thomas Siderio, Jr, the 12-year-old shot by the police after Mr Siderio opened fire on them:

    South Philly community mourns TJ Siderio, 12-year-old fatally shot by Philadelphia police officer

    Friends and family mourned mourned TJ this week, holding each other up as the waves of grief often took them off their feet.

    by Rodrigo Torrejón | Thursday, March 10, 2022

    Some would call him Tommy. Others Tom Dog. But most in Thomas Siderio’s tight-knit constellation of friends and family just knew him as TJ.

    A name was important, Pastor Mandell Gross said Thursday morning at Lighthouse Baptist Church in South Philadelphia. It was important during TJ’s short life. And it was important as dozens of TJ’s loved ones gathered at his funeral to say their final goodbyes.

    One by one, Gross asked the young people there, TJ’s friends, to say their names. Though he lamented the reason the community had gathered, Gross told the young people there to mourn the loss that they must try to come together in brighter days too. In TJ’s name.

At that point, the paper included a photo of Mr Siderio, one obviously taken several years earlier.

Four plainclothes officers were in the area, due to the high crime rate in the neighborhood. When they spotted Mr Siderio, who was visibly armed, they illuminated their unmarked car, the boy then shot at the officers, and took off running. One officer was injured in both eyes from flying glass, one remained in the vehicle with him, and two others got out to pursue the perp.

    A lawyer for TJ’s father previously disputed the accusation that the child fired the gun, calling it “egregious speculation” that has not been confirmed by evidence. Video and audio recordings analyzed by The Inquirer show that the gun that police say TJ tossed after shooting into the police car was found five doors down — or roughly 60 feet — from where he was fatally shot.

Sixty feet equals twenty yards, a distance a physically fit 12-year-old boy, who was already at a dead run, could cover in two seconds, but the Inquirer does not mention that.

The sappy article concluded:

    Next to his casket was a sign with a final, loving message from his parents, Thomas Siderio and Desirae Frame.

The elder Mr Siderio, inmate number NS5455, is behind bars at the State Correctional Institute Coal Township, three years into a sentence with at least two more years to serve on gun charges stemming from a murder in 2017. He has prior convictions for resisting arrest, assault, and the attempted theft of a motorcycle. He wasn’t there to have kept his son from running with a bad crowd and carrying a weapon, but, then again, as a convicted felon, he might not have been the best role model.

    “Rest In Peace TJ my son. Love Daddy and Mommy always and forever.”

    After the short sermon finished Thursday morning, the pallbearers gathered to carry TJ to his final resting place at Fernwood Cemetery. Most of the pallbearers were young, just a few years older than TJ.

    They were the friends that became TJ’s family on the streets of South Philadelphia. And with TJ’s face on their chests, the friends gathered for one last picture together, holding the young boy’s memory in their hearts.

An alleged but unconfirmed photo of Thomas Siderio Jr.

Give me a break! Young Mr Siderio was armed, with a stolen laser-sight equipped 9mm Taurus semiautomatic handgun, and he responded to the police lights by raising the weapon and firing it at the cops. This is not the sweet little angel the Inquirer has tried to make him out to be!

What was 12-year-old Mr Siderio doing out on the street, armed and ready to kill? Where was his mother, that she allowed him to have a stolen firearm, that she allowed him to go out into the streets armed? The newspaper’s Editorial Board has already opined that the killing of a young, gun-toting punk who opened fire on police young Mr Siderio should “should make every Philadelphian outraged,” blaming the city for not having safer and saner recreational outlets for boys like Mr Siderio, and blaming the state government for not passing virtue-signaling gun control laws that infringe on the constitutional rights of law abiding citizens but do absolutely nothing to stop criminals, blaming everybody but his father, who provided such a poor role model, and his mother, who didn’t supervise her son, and the boy himself, who knew he was breaking the law, and who took a shot at the police.

Let me be plain about this: had young Mr Siderio gotten away, he’d still be out on the streets, still be carrying a firearm, and still be a menace to every law-abiding citizen in the city. In just two days, March 8th and 9th, 13 people were shot in the city, and three of them died, all of them black males, but the Inquirer didn’t care enough about any of them to have a single story on any of them. I guess there wasn’t anything there out of which the newspaper could portray the victims as somehow innocents or heroic.

Young Mr Siderio is no hero, and he is no martyr. He was a young punk who thought he was a big, tough man, and had he escaped, would almost certainly amassed a long and violent criminal record. It is unfortunate that the manner of his death will cost a good police officer his job, and possible criminal charges, but the odds are high that Philadelphia is better off with Mr Siderio having gone to his eternal reward.

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Killadelphia 2021 set a new record for killings in Philadelphia; 2022 is well ahead of last year's pace.

I had already known that this was a bloody weekend in the City of Brotherly Love, thanks to this tweet from former United States Attorney and Republican Gubernatorial candidate Bill McSwain:

I replied:

    Of course, the @PhillyInquirer, the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and supposedly the region’s newspaper of record, will ignore most of this.

I was only partially right, as the Philadelphia Inquirer did have one story on the killing:

    Three killed in West Oak Lane shooting

    Police responded to reports of gunfire at the intersection of Cedar Park Avenue and Haines Street on Saturday night.

    by Jenn Ladd | Sunday, March 6, 2022

    Three men were killed in a shooting in the city’s West Oak Lane section late Saturday, police said.

I normally quote the first four paragraphs of a story, but had I done so this time, I would have quoted the entire story. Three lives taken, two men in their twenties, and a third in his thirties, all shot multiple times, all dead at the scene, none named, and their lives, and deaths, reduced to four paragraphs in the Inquirer.

Though the Philadelphia Police Department specified that all three victims were black males, the Inquirer’s story only told us that the victims were male. I would say that I wonder why that is, but I really don’t.

That was just three of the killings. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is normally updated only Monday through Friday, during normal business hours, so I was surprised to find, on Saturday morning, that it had been updated, to indicate 88 homicides as of 11:59 PM on Friday, March 4th, up one from the previous day. It was not updated on Sunday, but this morning showed the seven more, 95 lives cut short by bullets or blades, on the 65th day of the year. On the same date in 2021, ‘only’ 86 people had been murdered, and ‘just’ 67 in 2020.

To put that in perspective, 2020 saw 499 homicides, which was, at the time, the second highest total ever, topped only by the 500 homicides in 1990, in the midst of the crack cocaine wars. 2021 blew those records out of the water, hitting 500 murders on the day before Thanksgiving, and finishing the year with a staggering 562.

And 2022 is now 9 killings ahead of last year’s bloody pace. What a fine job Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw have done!

As a bit of a numbers geek, I did the math, and if the current rate of increase over 2021 is maintained over the rest of the year, Philadelphia is on track for 622 homicides this year! Donald Trump has been out of office for well over a year, COVID-19 restrictions are almost gone, the economy is doing well enough that workers are in demand, all of the excuses that the left used to blame the homicide rate on anything other than bad people doing bad things are gone.

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How far from the tree did the apple fall?

Thomas J Siderio Jr

A kid shoots at Philadelphia Police Officers, in a crime-ridden neighborhood, and winds up dead. Naturally the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading at The Philadelphia Inquirer want to make it police brutality!

Mystery deepens on whether 12-year-old boy was armed when police shot him in the back

The family of Thomas “TJ” Siderio prepares to bury the 12-year-old boy as investigators examine whether he tossed the gun before his was fatally shot by police.

by Barbara Laker, David Gambacorta, Craig R. McCoy, and Ryan W. Briggs | Friday, March 4, 2022

While the family of Thomas “TJ” Siderio prepares to bury the 12-year-old boy shot and killed by Philadelphia police, investigators are examining whether he had tossed a gun moments before a fatal bullet struck him in the back.

Notice that both the headline and the first sentence state that the dead delinquent was 12 years old, something the police officers almost certainly did not know during the incident — it was at night — and that he was shot in the back. You have to read further to learn that young Mr Siderio was armed and fleeing the police.

Two plainclothes officers chased TJ on Tuesday night after they heard gunfire and a rear window shattered in their unmarked car near 18th and Barbara Streets in South Philadelphia.

They fired toward TJ, who they said was holding a handgun and fled east on Barbara Street.

New details reveal that the officers fired four shots in total, according to police sources.

During the first two blasts, TJ was holding a gun. But the last two shots — one of which was fatal — are “concerning,” the sources said, because TJ may have tossed his weapon before he was hit.

In any normal story, the subject is referred to by his last name in second and subsequent mentions; but here the Inquirer writers refer to him by his nickname, a not-so-subtle attempt at making him a sympathetic character. The boy shot at the police!

“(B)ecause TJ may have tossed his weapon before he was hit,” huh? Note that the first sentence says “moments before a fatal bullet struck him in the back,” emphasis mine. It would seem that if he tossed his firearm, it was almost immediately prior to being struck, too quick for officers to have noticed it and taken it into account.

Four officers were sitting in an unmarked car when the episode began around 7:20 p.m. They were Edsaul Mendoza, Kwaku Sarpong, Robert Cucinelli, and Alexander Camacho, according to police records obtained by The Inquirer. They were staking out the area because a 17-year-old boy and 20-year-old man had been seen on social media brandishing weapons, police sources said.

The officers approached TJ and a 17-year-old, who were on bicycles, police said, because they believed one of them had a handgun. They turned on their flashing lights, then heard gunfire. Camacho was injured in both eyes by shards of glass, police records show.

Apparently the officers were right: young Mr Siderio did have a handgun. They illuminated, and then a bullet was fired at them, with Officer Camacho injured by a shattered window in the vehicle. Two of the officers then exited the vehicle and took off chasing Mr Siderio. A loaded 9mm semi-automatic handgun was recovered at the scene, as were five shell casings.

According to Police Department policy, an officer would not be justified in using deadly force solely if a suspect resisted arrest or attempted to escape. Other factors are supposed to be taken into consideration, such as whether a suspect was armed, or posed an immediate threat to an officer. Officers should not shoot at a fleeing suspect “who presents no immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury,” the policy states.

Mr Siderio was armed, and his willingness to fire at police officers shows that he was an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury. To me, shooting at an armed suspect, who had fired first at police officers, fits well within the ‘other factors’ to be taken into consideration.

Naturally, the 17-year-old at the scene claimed that the police did not turn on their lights or identify themselves before shots were fired, but even if that were the case, Mr Siderio shot first. As for believing a 17-year-old delinquent over the police, nope, not going to do that.

In the last six months, there were 652 crimes reported in the South Philly area where TJ was shot and killed, according to city police statistics. The area — bounded by Snyder Avenue south to I-76, and Broad Street west to 25th Street — saw two homicides, 36 robberies, and 23 aggravated assaults in that time period.

So, the police were there because it’s a bad neighborhood.

You might be asking, “How did a 12-year-old have a semi-automatic 9MM handgun? Where were his parents?” Well, his father, Thomas J Siderio Sr., inmate number NS5455, is behind bars at the State Correctional Institute Coal Township, three years into a sentence with at least two more years to serve on gun charges stemming from a murder in 2017. He has prior convictions for resisting arrest, assault, and the attempted theft of a motorcycle.

How far from the tree did the apple fall?

KYW Channel 3, the CBS owned-and-operated station in Philadelphia spoke with the mother of the 17-year-old who was with Mr Siderio when the incident happened:

“He had no chance in life and now, he’s gone before he could even get a chance in life,” the mother of the 17-year-old boy said.

Actually, he did have a chance at life, and he used that chance at life to try to take the life of someone else, a police officer. Naturally, there’s plenty of sympathy for young Mr Siderio, but he had his chance at life, and squandered it.

I’m enough of an [insert slang term for the rectum here] here to ask the obvious question: what if, rather than shooting at the fleeing delinquent, officers had let him get away? Then there’d be another 12-year-old carrying a gun on the streets of the City of Brotherly Love. Had the officers not fired at Mr Siderio, we’d have been reading about him soon enough in the future, perhaps the next time when he killed an innocent victim.

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.
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“I’m from the government and I’m here to help!”

Remember the halcyon days of 2020 and 2021, in which Philadelphia, among most major cities, allowed restaurants which had been otherwise closed to indoor dining, to expand, where they physically could, to outdoor dining facilities? A challenging problem in a city which experiences severe winters, outdoor dining and increased carry-out ordering enabled many restaurants to survive.

Philly quietly added surprise fees and ‘burdensome’ rules for restaurant streeteries

“It’s a bureaucratic mess,” said Councilmember Allan Domb. “This is basically the administration saying ‘we don’t want outdoor seating.’”

by Max Marin | Tuesday, Match 1, 2022

Philadelphia city officials quietly released regulations governing the city’s new streetery law after months of anticipation, and some restaurant owners say the proposed red tape could spell doomsday for outdoor dining across the city.

Read more: Hundreds of restaurants got excluded by Philly’s new ‘streetery’ zones — some by less than a block

Many restaurant owners realized new rules passed by City Council in December would require them to clean up access-blocking patio structures and get designs approved by the city for outdoor dining structures built over parking spaces.

But in implementing that law, Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration is adding new regulations that create significant and unexpected hurdles for restaurateurs still struggling to recover from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

There’s a lot more at the Philadelphia Inquirer original, but the new regulations all boil down to one thing: the city charging more money, for permits, for bonds, and for construction requirements.

The timeline:

  • March 16, 2020: City orders all non-essential businesses closed
  • September 8, 2020: Indoor dining allowed at a maximum of 25% of seating capacity
  • November 20, 2020: City again bans all indoor dining in restaurants
  • January 16, 2021: City again allows indoor dining at a maximum of 25% of seating capacity
  • June 2, 2021: City removes seating capacity restrictions
  • August 12, 2021: City imposes mask mandates for all indoor businesses
  • January 3, 2022: City requires proof of vaccination for all restaurant employees and patrons
  • February 16, 2022: City drops vaccination proof requirements, continues mask mandates

All of these restrictions were either imposed or relaxed as the city saw surges in COVID-19 infections, the original, the Delta variant, and lastly, the Xi Omicron variant. Omicron peaked very rapidly, and with a far greater number of cases, than either Alpha or Delta, with more than thrice the average number of daily cases in Philly — because vaccinations and masks were virtually useless against Omicron — but one thing is obvious: if COVID-19 has been going through all of these mutations, there is no particular reason to think that Omicron will be the last. The odds are that there will be a Pi variant — though maybe some will call it the Putin variant, given today’s news — which may or may not be serious, but if another serious variant arises, wouldn’t the availability of outdoor dining be something Philadelphia would want?

Even without a new variant, there are still plenty of people panicked by COVID-19, and would choose to dine outdoors if the option is available. Given that the city believe that masks are still necessary indoors but not outside, why wouldn’t the city want to encourage the continuation of outdoor dining where feasible?

But nope! The city are going to go for the dollars rather than make it easier for the outdoor dining areas to continue. There’s a reason why, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” is dismissed as a skeptical meme.
___________________________
Update: 3:15 PM EST

Philadelphia ends its indoor mask mandate

“The metrics that we’re following have reached the level where the Health Department feels it is safe to stop enforcing the indoor mask mandate,” a health department spokesperson said.

by Jason Laughlin | Ash Wednesday, March 2, 2022 | 3:00 PM EST

The end of Philadelphia’s indoor mask mandate came Wednesday with a promise to ease virtually all remaining COVID-19 safety rules in the city in the coming days, signaling a big step toward normalcy in the city after almost two years of lock downs and restrictions.

Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole hesitated to say COVID had reached an endemic stage, but acknowledged that Wednesday’s announcement marked a new stage in the pandemic.

“I think talking about regaining as much normal life as we can … is better framing for me,” she said. “I’m hoping we have enough immunity in the city that we really are at an end point.”

Philadelphia was the only place in the state still maintaining a general indoor-masking requirement.

There’s more at the original, but it sure sounds to me like Commissioner Bettigole didn’t approve of the decision, but was overruled by Mayor Jim Kenney.

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Philly continues the tyranny

The heavily politicized Center for Disease Control have finally eased some of their masking guidelines, but, of course, the petty little dictators in the City of Brotherly Love want to keep Philadelphians wearing the symbols of authoritarian control.

CDC loosens COVID-19 masking guidance, but Philly is keeping its mask mandate for now

The city’s health department said it would review the CDC’s new guidance, but the safety restrictions in place in the city are based on local conditions and “months of data specific to Philadelphia.”

by Jason Laughlin and Kasturi Pananjady | Friday, February 25, 2033

A change in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance for mask-wearing Friday means federal authorities no longer recommend indoor masking as a COVID-19 precaution for much of Southeastern Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia.

Whether that will change masking policy set by the health department in Philadelphia, the only place in the region with an indoor mask mandate, is uncertain.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, which loves mandates and dictatorial control of the plebeians, illustrated their article with a photo of sheep “guests at the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall last December,” all dutifully masked up.

We have previously reported on the city’s Health Commissioner, Dr Cheryl Bettigole, saying, on Groundhog Day, that Philadelphia lifting COVID-19 restrictions was “probably several months away.”

“Our team is actively discussing what an off-ramp looks like,” Bettigole said when asked about easing restrictions. “If you think about where we are with this particular wave and case rates right now, we’re probably several months away from a place where we will have the kind of safety to drop all the current restrictions.”

The city did end its vaccine mandate for indoor dining on the 14th, but retained the mask mandate. To me, it’s obvious: the city was depending upon cute college coeds working as hostesses to enforce the vaccine mandate, and who can know how reliable that was, especially if confronted by a large, scary man. But masks? It’s obvious to anyone who can see whether someone is wearing one; they are the very visible symbols of submission.

The Philadelphia Department of Public Health said it would review the CDC’s new guidance, but the safety restrictions in place in the city are based on local conditions and “months of data specific to Philadelphia,” said Matt Rankin, a spokesperson for the department.

“At this time we plan to continue the implementation of these current response levels as the pandemic unfolds,” he said. . . . .

The CDC changed its guidelines for masking Friday because easy access to vaccines and testing, better treatments for COVID-19, and widespread immunity have “moved the pandemic to a new phase,” the agency said in a news release. The agency’s recommendations were also being widely disregarded, with states increasingly ending COVID precautions despite 95% of U.S. counties falling into the CDC’s old definition of substantial or high transmission. The new guidelines break COVID-19 risk levels into categories of high, medium, and low by county. Indoor masking is recommended only at the high risk level.

Very widely disregarded. I have previously noted the masks required sign at the entrance to the Kroger grocery store on Bypass Road in Richmond, Kentucky, and, shopping there just Friday morning, I saw what has been the case all along: significant disobedience to the sign. I certainly wasn’t wearing a mask, and neither were at least three-quarters of the other shoppers. Why should they? We already know that the face masks most people use just don’t stop Omicron, and the so-called experts recommend a N-95 mask. That recommendation was on January 10th, and now, just 46 days later, the CDC are relaxing their masking guidance? One wonders if they listen to each other?

Of course, elected politicians do listen to their constituents, and they know that the public are just plain tired of all of the authoritarian decrees, and those decrees were subject to widespread disobedience; that’s why so many places had weakened or dropped their mandates well before the CDC decided that they must find their people, so they could lead them.

Philadelphia? Completely controlled by the Democrats, to the point where the last Republican mayor left office while George VI was still King of England, so the Democrats running the city aren’t in the least bit worried about losing in the general elections; any real action comes in the Democratic primaries. In 2008, there were 57 entire precincts in which Republican presidential nominee John McCain didn’t get a single vote; in 2012, there were 59 entire precincts in which Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney didn’t get a single vote. In 2020, Joe Biden carried Philadelphia with 81.44% of the vote. You can see why Democrats in Philly aren’t concerned.

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Three more dead in Philly, and the Inquirer doesn’t care But Larry Krasner and the Inquirer sure do care about cops who are exonerated!

As both of our regular readers know, I check the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page on weekday mornings, and the news was pretty depressing. As we noted on Wednesday, the city had crept to one above the same-day homicide total for 2021. But as of 11:59 PM EST on Wednesday, February 23rd, the total had jumped by three to 79 homicides, vis a vis ‘just’ 75 on the same date last year, and 53 in 2020.

Make no mistake here: 2020 was a bloody year, finishing with 499 murders, just one short of the then-record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990. But 2021 didn’t just surpass the old record; 562 homicides blew it out of the water.

Wednesday’s killings? There wasn’t a single story on any of them either on the main page or the crime page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, something which was no surprise at all. There were, however, a couple of related stories which caught my attention. In one, “The Inquirer’s look at itself ignores the paper’s history of exposing racial injustice: The sweeping claims in ‘Black City, White Paper’ are overly broad and shamelessly short-sighted, writes Huntly Collins, a reporter who spent 18 years at the newspaper,” a LaSalle University journalism professor and former Inquirer reported responded to the newspaper’s crying 21st century judgement about its 19th and 20th century history. Though he avoided the use of the term #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, he was clearly referring to them as he made it clear that the paper’s history needed to be viewed through the lens of the circumstances of the times. He noted that perhaps the paper could have hired more minority staff, but also noted that newspapers in general had been shedding journalists’ positions for a couple of decades now, and union contracts specified that, in layoffs, the last hired were the first fired.

The Inquirer’s look at itself also glossed over the economic crisis facing local newspapers as they strive to hire more minority journalists at a time when newspaper jobs are in steep decline. Since 2004, some 1,800 newspapers have folded, including 60 dailies. Nationwide, newspaper employment of editorial staff has plummeted to just 30,000, down a whopping 57 percent from 2008. The Inquirer once employed some 680 reporters, editors and other editorial staff. Today, that number is down to about 200. Even the best laid plans to diversify the staff falter when confronted with economic forces that shrink the size of the pie rather than enlarging it.

Publisher Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes has basically told readers that the newspaper she runs will not report on things which could lead to a negative image of minority populations, that the newspaper she runs will self-censor the truth in favor of “anti-racism” and social justice.[2]Commenter Lavern Merriweather stated that I must be racist for noting that the Inquirer hides the racial aspect of the news even in the stories that it covers, and that, not being black myself, I … Continue reading The plain truth, the unvarnished truth, is apparently a bad thing.

Then there was this gem:

DA Krasner denounces dismissal of charges against two officers charged with beating man with special needs

Krasner said he sees “a disturbing pattern” of judges dismissing charges against police officers.

by Mensah M Dean | Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner on Tuesday criticized the decision by a judge to dismiss charges against two police officer brothers whom he charged in April with chasing and beating a man with special needs after falsely accusing the man of tampering with cars in their far Northeast neighborhood.

Krasner, who pledged after taking office in 2018 to hold accountable officers who break the law, suggested that the decision by Municipal Court Judge William Austin Meehan Jr. during a preliminary hearing to clear the two brothers — former Police Inspector James Smith and former detective Patrick Smith — was part of a larger pattern of judges going easy on accused police.

“We are seeing a disturbing pattern of criminal cases against police officers getting charges against them thrown out by judges during the preliminary hearing phase, only to be reinstated on appeal. The law applies equally to everyone,” Krasner said. “Philadelphians should ask why some judges are finding no accountability at a preliminary hearing for police when they commit the same crimes that get everyone else held over for trial.”

Krasner, who has frequently clashed with the officers’ labor union, added: “My office will consider all possible avenues for seeking justice in this matter, and to hold accountable the individuals who chased, terrorized, and assaulted a young and innocent man with Asperger syndrome.”

There’s more at the original, but Judge Meehan heard the testimony of the alleged victim, and then dismissed the charges against the tweo former police officers.

“The court dismissed all charges…because the evidence presented by the prosecutor failed to prove that a crime was committed,” said defense attorney Fortunato Perri, who represented James Smith. “Inspector Smith and Detective Smith have dedicated decades of their lives proudly protecting and serving the citizens of Philadelphia. They look forward to continuing those efforts in the future.”

Of course, the District Attorney ought to be familiar with dismissed charges, because that’s what he does very frequently: since District Attorney Krasner took office, the percentage of firearms charges resulting in convictions has dramatically decreased. In Mr Krasner’s first year in office, 2018, 57% of Violations of Uniform Firearm Act only arrests resulted in convictions, with 35% having the charges dismissed. Those trend lines crossed the following year, with a larger percentage of charges dismissed, 47%, than resulting in convictions, 43%, and only got worse in 2020 and 2021, 49%/42%, and 62%/36% respectively. In their attempts to get illegal firearm possessions off the streets, the Philadelphia Police Department increased the number of VUFA arrests each year, and each year Mr Krasner’s office let the (alleged) malefactors off the hook in increasing numbers. Mr Krasner said:

This office believes that reform is necessary to focus on the most serious and most violent crime, so that people can be properly held accountable for doing things that are violent, that are vicious, and that tear apart society. We cannot continue to waste resources and time on things that matter less than the truly terrible crisis that we are facing.

The alleged injuries that the officers’ alleged victim suffered included “a black eye and abrasions on the back of his head, elbows, and knees,” pretty much the type of crimes the District Attorney doesn’t care about prosecuting anyway . . . unless they are committed by a police officer.

So, we have seen 79 homicides in 54 days, 1.4630 per day, ahead of the pace set last year, and at least at the time of writing this article, 10:38 AM EST on Thursday, February 24th, the Inquirer hadn’t even noticed, but was still promoting the softer-than-soft on crime, George Soros-sponsored District Attorney’s story from two days earlier. I have said it before: to the “anti-racist” Philadelphia Inquirer, black lives — and if any of the victims had been white, the paper would have been all over the case — really don’t matter.

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 Commenter Lavern Merriweather stated that I must be racist for noting that the Inquirer hides the racial aspect of the news even in the stories that it covers, and that, not being black myself, I have no right to comment on the black community in the City of Brotherly Love.
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Killadelphia Ho hum: the killing rate in Philly has crept higher than last year's

Jonathan Akubu, mugshot by Philadelphia Police Department, and is a public record. Click to enlarge.

The good, anti-racist Philadelphia Inquirer would not, of course, publish the mugshot of an accused murderer with a long past criminal record, but Steve Keeley of Fox29 did.

The Inquirer did have the story on his arrest:

The suspected leader of a Philadelphia carjacking ring has been arrested for two murders

Jonathan Akubu, suspected of leading a carjacking operation, has also been charged with committing two shootings and may be connected to dozens of other incidents.

by Chris Palmer and Anna Orso | Tuesday, February 22, 2022

A 28-year-old man who police say led a loosely organized carjacking ring has been charged with committing two murders and two shootings as part of a weeks-long crime rampage — and investigators are probing whether his group is connected to dozens of other crimes.

Jonathan Akubu of Drexel Hill was arrested Saturday in connection with the fatal carjacking of a 60-year-old man killed Feb. 6 in Northeast Philadelphia. He is also charged with killing another man, a 28-year-old car locksmith, less than a week later in the city’s Eastwick section.

Detectives used ballistics and cell phone records to connect Akubu to at least five incidents in the last two months. He was arrested at an apartment in Lansdowne, where police found a stolen handgun and an AK-47-style rifle.

Akubu is so far the only defendant charged in each case. Homicide Capt. Jason Smith said Tuesday that investigators believe his carjacking operation targeted Toyota SUVs and involved at least three other people in their teens or early 20s who are at large.

There’s more at the original, including the fact that Mr Akubu is being held without bail on multiple counts of murder, aggravated assault, conspiracy, robbery, theft, and illegal possession of firearms.

The Inquirer article then gives us several paragraphs detailing Mr Akubu’s alleged crimes, before getting to this:

Akubu has several past arrests, records show, including in Chester County in 2020 for charges that included robbing a car. But nearly all counts were dismissed in municipal court, the records show. It was not immediately clear why. Akubu pleaded guilty to a summary charge of harassment, the records show.

Years before that, Akubu pleaded guilty to committing a 2013 aggravated assault in Southwest Philadelphia. According to charging documents, he fired shots at someone in a car using a gun he was barred from possessing. He was sentenced to 38 to 96 months in jail plus 17 years of probation, court records show, and in 2018 was sent back to jail for violating his probation.

Larry Krasner was the District Attorney in Philadelphia in 2018. Clearly, he shouldn’t have been released, and should have served out the rest of the seventeen year sentence. Unfortunately, the Inquirer doesn’t give us the details. How many of those 38 to 96 months in jail did he actually serve? Obviously not all eight years, or he wouldn’t have been on the street in 2018.

In 2015, Akubu filed a federal lawsuit against the city, saying that a prison guard beat him and bit him on the head while he was handcuffed, an incident that was captured on surveillance video. The city settled with Akubu for $99,999, which was paid in November 2015.

From the Inquirer’s embedded link:

Attorney Guy Sciolla says inmate Jonathan Akubu was being escorted through a common area, he was handcuffed, hands behind his back, when he was overpowered and punched repeatedly by correctional officer James Weisback.

According to prison documents, Officer Weisback claimed Akubu threatened and spit in his face, but Sciolla says there’s no evidence of that.

Sciolla and co-counsel in this case, Patrick Link, say they will also refer this case to the District Attorney for possible criminal action.

Akubu is in prison charged with a shooting. His attorneys say it was domestic in nature and no one was injured. A source says Akubu has accumulated nearly 20 disciplinary infractions while in custody.

Well, of course his attorney is going to minimize Mr Akubu’s actions; that’s what he’s paid to do. How Mr Akubu could afford sharks like Messrs Sciolla and Link was not indicated. “Nearly twenty” disciplinary problems while in prison seems like it would be a testament to Mr Akubu’s character.

District Attorney Krasner could have had Mr Akubu still behind bars when he (allegedly) killed George Briscella, but didn’t. Mr Krasner did not pull the trigger, three times, resulting in Mr Briscella’s death. But Mr Krasner might as well be named an accomplice, given that his actions allowed Mr Akubu to be out on the streets earlier this month, (allegedly) jacking cars shooting people.

In related news, with 76 homicides as of 11:59 PM EST on Tuesday, February 22nd, the City of Brotherly Love has moved one ahead of the killings pace set in 2021’s record-setting year. Nothing to see here, folks. Please, just move along.

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Philadelphia 12-year-old charged with murder Why do we have to rely on the New York Post to tell us what The Philadelphia Inquirer will not?

This site has noted many times previously the Lexington Herald-Leader’s refusal to print mugshots of people accused of crimes, even violent crimes, if they are black. The Philadelphia Inquirer takes it further, and, as far as I can tell, doesn’t print mugshots at all, which means that, in the case of 16-year-old Qiyam Muhammad, readers of the Inquirer don’t know what he looks like, and cannot help the Philadelphia Police Department find young Mr Muhammad, who, as of Friday morning, was still on the lam.

We shouldn’t have to go to the New York Post for the information, but we do:

    Teens and boy, 12, charged with murder in Philadelphia carjacking

    By Joshua Rhett Miller | Friday, February 18, 2022 | 10:22 AM EST | Updated 10:46 AM EST

    John Nusslien. Photo by Philadelphia Police Department, and is a public record. Click to enlarge.

    A 12-year-old boy and two teens are facing murder charges in the savage beating death of an elderly man during a carjacking in Philadelphia, authorities said.

    The trio of young suspects are accused of attacking Chung Yan Chin, 70, during a violent carjacking in the city’s Mayfair section on Dec. 2, police said.

    Prosecutors allege the youngsters walked up to Chin and knocked him to the ground as they started punching and kicking him to the face, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

    Police said “unknown offenders” then took off with Chin’s Toyota Camry.

    Chin was rushed to a hospital in critical condition with a brain injury and facial fractures, court documents show. He died from his wounds weeks later on Dec. 21.

    “Justice has to be done,” Mayfair resident Amy Ford told WPVI. “It is just not fair. It is sickening. It is terrible. It is too close to home.”

    Qiyam Muhammad. Photo by Philadelphia Police Department, and is a public record. Click to enlarge.

    John Nusslein, 18, of Northeast Philadelphia, was charged last month in Chin’s slaying, while an arrest warrant has been issued for Qiyam Muhammad, 16, police told The Post.

    The 12-year-old boy, who has been charged with murder as an adult, is not being identified by The Post due to his age.

    Both Nusslein and the 12-year-old are being held without bail and attorneys representing them did not return calls seeking comment, the Inquirer reported.

Note that the Philadelphia Police Department had a mugshot of Qiyam Muhammad on hand, which tells us the obvious: young Mr Muhammad had been arrested previously.

Will District Attorney Larry Krasner really continue to charge the 12-year-old as an adult? I would guess not, because Mr Krasner is both soft-hearted and soft-headed. And it is always possible that the presiding judge will refuse to accept an adult charge for a 12-year-old. Would the courts accept a charge which could keep a 12-year-old locked up for the rest of his miserable life? Any competent attorney hired by the boy’s parents — assuming that he has any — or appointed by the court, would move to transfer the charges to the juvenile justice system.

Murder is not normally an entry-level crime, so I have to wonder: is this the 12-year-old’s first (alleged) crime? He was, again, allegedly, running with an 18-year-old and a 16-year-old, obviously out to commit a violent crime, even if they never intended to kill the victim. Normally, boys the ages of Messrs Muhammad and Nusslien don’t run gang with 12-year-olds.

There’s more to this story than we have been told.

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Could Philly be ending its COVID mandates soon?

Cheryl Bettigole, from BillyPenn.

We noted, on February 3rd, that Philadelphia’s Health Commissioner, Cheryl Bettigole, said that lifting the city’s COVID-19 mandates would likely be several months away.

Of course, Dr Bettigole has an appointed position, not an elected one, and it seems that the elected Democrats who control the City of Brotherly Love might be moving somewhat faster than she would like:

The vaccine mandate for dining inside restaurants was being enforced by restaurant hostesses, and one has to wonder just how diligently these minimum wage workers were doing so. As we have previously noted, there was a theft of some 5,000 blank vaccination cards from the Penn Medicine Clinic in Philly’s Center City, and two nurses in Amityville, New York were arrested for selling faked COVID-19 vaccination cards. How could anyone expect poorly-paid restaurant hostesses to scrutinize vaccination cards, and spot fakes? And how would anyone not think that a $20 bill, presented when the hostess asked, “Ihre Papiere, bitte,” would often get prospective diners through?

The city government was depending on people who were not their employees, and encouraging a black market in faked cards at the same time. And I will be honest here: I absolutely support people forging vaccination cards, and hope that there are thousands upon thousands of those black marketeers, and that no more of them get caught.

    And if cases continue to decline, the mask mandate could also lift some time later.

    The benchmarks would create a novel system where restrictions could ease when overall illness falls and be reimposed in the event of a COVID-19 resurgence. The effect could ease the bite on hotels and restaurants, which have lost significant business during the pandemic, while also protecting people’s health and reducing the burden of illness on hospitals and caregivers.

    Relaxed mandates won’t be welcomed universally in the city. Jennifer Kolker, associate dean for public health practice at Drexel University, said last week she thought states were moving too quickly to end their vaccine mandates. “I would love to see them maintain the vaccine mandate,” she said before the city’s plan came to light.

Well, of course she would; the Karens of our society always want stuff like that.

Further down:

    Business was down 37% in Philadelphia’s leisure and hospitality industry through the second quarter of 2021 compared to the same time in 2019, before the pandemic began, according to a report last week by the Pew Charitable Trusts. That’s greater than the national drop over the same time period of 13%. The industry is the city’s fourth-biggest job sector and 76% of its workers live in Philadelphia.

    (Ben) Fileccia (director of operations & strategy for the Philadelphia Restaurant and Lodging Association) and others in the industry said there have been hotels that have lost events and conferences to competitors in the city’s suburbs because those areas did not have mandates.

In other words, people are tired of the mandates and restrictions, and have been voting with their actions, and their wallets, against them. The greatest victims? The hospitality industry’s workers, three-quarters of whom live in Philly, the poorest of the 10 most populous U.S. cities, and the only big city with a poverty rate above 20%.

Of course, for highly paid people like Commissioner Bettigole and Dean Kolker, for people like Mayor Jim Kenney, the struggles of the working class are abstractions, something that they can neatly measure against the probabilities of contracting the virus. To them, the need to put food on the table is no different from the goal of not contracting the virus, but to the single mother with hungry kids to feed, the need to feed her children is far more immediate than the probabilities of contracting COVID-19.