Tag Archives: #Philadelphia

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44 murdered in Philly in January . . . which is actually an improvement!

Well, January is over, and the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page has the numbers: as of 11:59 PM EST on January 31st, 44 people had lost their life’s blood in the city’s mean streets. That’s a pretty horrible number, but it’s better than last year’s total of 50 in January.

44 homicides ÷ 31 days = 1.4194 per day, x 365 days in the year = 518.0645 projected killings, if that rate is maintained throughout the year. That would be well short of the record of 562, set in 2021, but above 2020’s 499, and the old record of 500 set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990.

It’s still too early in the year to really draw any conclusions from the numbers: the 50 in 2021 worked out to a projected homicide total of 588.7097, which was well above the final numbers, while the 38 killings in January of 2020 worked out to a projected 448.6452 for the year, which was well under the carnage for the year.

But it’s still the same old, same old at The Philadelphia Inquirer: neither the newspaper’s website main page, nor its specific crime page, indicates a single story, even a brief few paragraphs, on any of the five homicides committed since Thursday, January 27th,[1]The Current Crime Statistics page is only updated during normal business hours, Monday through Friday, so we do not get reports on the end of the day on Friday and Saturday. which leads me to conclude one thing: all of the victims were young black males, because the “anti-racist news organization” into which publisher Elizabeth Hughes has turned the nation’s third-oldest continuously published daily newspaper, to report the unedited truth would, in itself, be racist.

What has anti racism really become? At least in Philadelphia, it has become the acceptance of an urban black culture in which the killing of young black men by other young black men is just plain expected, and the Inquirer goes right along with that.

References

References
↑1 The Current Crime Statistics page is only updated during normal business hours, Monday through Friday, so we do not get reports on the end of the day on Friday and Saturday.
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What good are gun control laws when Larry Krasner won’t enforce them? The 'racial justice' advocate doesn't like locking up criminals

Sometimes even the innocuous jargon used in government documents can tell a large truth, From the Philadelphia City Council’s 100 Shooting Review Committee Report:

There appears to be a trend in the criminal justice system where gun cases are treated more leniently than in earlier years. It is particularly concerning that the reoffending rate for another gun offense during a VUFA (Violations of Uniform Firearm Act) open case has increased, when the bail posting percentages have increased and overall sentences have become lighter. The current analysis was limited to arrested offenders; it is important to also take into account the network of criminals; they communicate. Criminals see and hear from their peers.[i]

While the office of the George Soros-funded District Attorney, Larry Krasner, did participate in the committee and its findings and recommendations, the document noted that “all of these recommendations are not unanimous,[ii] a rather curious grammatical construct, which I think means that none of the recommendations was unanimous. It’s difficult to believe that Mr Krasner and his stooges would have agreed to that finding. Specifically, the quote is from the section entitled “Last 100 Shooting Data Analysis: Analysis Result by PPD (Philadelphia Police Department)”, so the District Attorney and his office would very much not like that point.

Comprehensive gun violence strategies should have equally balanced elements of enforcement, intervention, and prevention. As for enforcement, classical deterrence theory suggests three elements for deterrence: severity, swiftness, and certainty. Enhanced sentencing will not be the sole solution; however, being lenient against gun crimes at the time of the gun violence crisis should perhaps be scrutinized. Swiftness of the criminal justice system has always been a limitation to deterrence, but court closures during the pandemic as well as increasing number of gun cases coming in (an average of 7 VUFA arrests per day in 2021) will only aggravate this, unless dedicated and increased resources are allocated. Simply increasing the frequency of stops in hopes for strengthening the (perceived) certainly of arrests is not the solution either. Deterring illegal firearm possessions should be holistically addressed by implementing changes in policing, prosecution, and courts, as discussed in the recommendation section of this report.[iii]

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that the DA’s office won’t like that!

The Police Department put together a graphic which showed just what the shooting victims and alleged shooters were like, and it isn’t pretty.[iv] The chart specifically excluded those charges the District Attorney chose not to pursue, and previous charges were limited to the year 2000 and more recently.

Note the obvious: two thirds of the shooting victims had criminal records, most with violent felony records, most with prior firearms charges. The majority of the arrested shooters had violent felony records, had prior firearms charges, and PWID – possession of drugs with the intent to distribute – charges.

These are people who do not obey gun control laws, these are people to whom firearms are simply the tools of their trade, and who are going to carry weapons because, to them, they need those weapons. That most have prior criminal records demonstrates what ought to be obvious to anyone with any common sense: that their actions are illegal doesn’t bother them in the slightest, other than the possibility of getting caught.

There is another graph, on page 21[v] of the report: 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 VUFA 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.

 

Of course, the analysis by the District Attorney’s Office (DAO) didn’t look at it the same way at all.  The DAO’s opening statement was:

The urgency of Philadelphia’s crisis of fatal and non-fatal shootings will not be met by looking away from shootings. As noted above, City Council has led a valuable “100 Shooter Review,” a title that makes clear what we already know: that shootings are the primary issue. Our efforts must be focused on preventing shootings and holding people who commit shootings accountable, and we should not accept arrests for gun possession as a substitute.[vi]

This is very much in line with Mr Krasner’s statement:

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.[vii]

That sounds fairly typical for a ‘social justice’ and ‘racial justice’ warrior, someone more concerned with keeping people out of jail than locking up the bad guys.

Gun possession arrests that involve no violent acts present a secondary and important frontier in curbing gun violence, but must be targeted to distinguish between drivers of gun violence who possess firearms illegally and otherwise law-abiding people who are not involved in gun violence. On the one hand, the cases of people charged with 6105[viii] (prohibited person in possession of a firearm) are carefully scrutinized to do individual justice, which will usually look like vigorous prosecution. On the other hand, another criminal charge that applies to people who have no felony conviction (carrying a gun in Philadelphia without having obtained a permit in Philadelphia) is only a felony in Philadelphia. The exact same offense in every other county in Pennsylvania (carrying a firearm without a permit to carry) is only a misdemeanor offense.[ix]

I am one who believes that the Second Amendment means what it says, that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and that requiring a permit to carry a weapon ought to be considered wholly unconstitutional. It is, however, a statement wholly at odds with the Democratic Party’s insistence on gun control legislation.

As for ‘racial justice,’ there isn’t much such justice by the demographics:

Offender and victim demographics resemble each other: for the arrested shooters, 94% were male, 95% were people of color (74% Black Male), and the peak age was in late adolescence and young adulthood (18-30 years old). Similarly, for victims, 86.5% were male, 88.5% were people of color (61.5% Black Male), and the peak age was in young adulthood to mid-thirties (21-35 years old).[x]

It is the black population, primarily young black males, who are both the shooters and the victims. In Mr Krasner’s zeal to establish racial justice in the City of Brotherly Love, those who are paying the price for that are primarily black people.

“The role of the District Attorney’s Office is to vigorously, justly, and accurately prosecute people who commit serious and violent crimes,” the DAO wrote.[xi] No, the role of the District Attorney’s Office should be to vigorously, justly, and accurately prosecute people who commit all crimes, not just the ones a particular person believes to be serious. At the point at which the District Attorney and his minions decide that certain crimes are not serious, and should not be prosecuted, they have assumed the function of the state legislature, and declared certain crimes, determined through the constitutional process of legislation and gubernatorial assent, to not be crimes at all.

 

It’s actually pretty simple: even if someone has no previous record, and is committing only the crime of possessing a firearm without a license, 18 Pa.C.S. § 6106, he is knowingly committing a felony, and he must have a reason for that, normally not a very good one. By not prosecuting such people, Mr Krasner and his minions are allowing them to not have criminal records, which means that when they do shoot someone, they’ll have no priors.

As we have previously noted, the Philadelphia Police have charged Steven Thompson, who shot and killed a man trying to steal the catalytic converter from his car, with a firearms violation. I guess that we’ll see if Mr Krasner’s office will prosecute Mr Thompson for ridding the city of yet another criminal.

 

There’s a lot more to the report than I have included here, and much of it is liberal pablum, from the Defender Association of Philadelphia, a group of defense attorneys who represent the indigent and who want to get the accused off, and from the Department of Public Health, which sees the shootings and killings as a public health situation rather than what they actually are, crimes committed by criminals. Access to the document, 196 pages in the .pdf file, is free at this link.

The simplest way to reduce crime is to convict and lock up actual criminals when you catch them; Mr Krasner and his stooges don’t like doing that, and they have helped produce a Philadelphia which saw 353 homicides in 2018, Mr Krasner’s first year in office, an increase of 38 killings, up 12.06% from the previous year, followed by 356 in 2019, then 499, a 30.17% jump, in 2020, just one short of the all-time record of 500 set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990, and finally 562, a 12.63% increase in 2021. As of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, January 27th, the city has seen 39 people bleeding out their life’s blood in the cold, mean streets.

How many of those people would be alive today if Mr Krasner and his office had done the job that they were supposed to do, actually prosecute criminals, rather than deciding that some crimes were just not serious and turned people actually in custody loose?

We can’t know that, but we do know that Samuel Collington and Philadelphia Police Corporal James O’Connor IV would still be with us.
______________________________________

[i] – 100 Shooting Review Committee Report, page 17 of the document, page 19 of the .pdf file.
[ii] – ibid, page 9 of the document, page 11 of the .pdf file.
[iii] – ibid, page 17 of the document, page 19 of the .pdf file.
[iv] – I was unable to copy the internal chart, and had to reproduce it via Microsoft Excel.
[v]  – op cit, page 21 of the document, page 23 of the .pdf file.
[vi] – ibid, page 30 of the document, page 32 of the .pdf file.
[vii] – Original citation: “‘A terrible crisis’: Krasner discusses Philly’s gun violence after officer’s son gunned down”, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Monday, January 24, 2022.
[viii] – There are two main categories of illegal gun possession cases in Philadelphia: Possession of a firearm by a person who has been prohibited from carrying gun due to a past serious conviction or other prohibition (18 Pa.C.S. § 6105), and possession of a firearm without a license (18 Pa.C.S. § 6106). The former is generally viewed as the most serious illegal gun possession statute, while the latter is generally viewed as less serious than possession by a prohibited person. Both are non-violent offenses only related to illegal possession of a gun. Footnote copied from footnote 16 on page 31 of the document, page 33 of the .pdf file.
[ix] – op cit, page 30-31 of the document, page 32-33 of the .pdf file.
[x] – ibid, page 20 of the document, page 22 of the .pdf file.
[xi] – ibid, page 31 of the document, page 33 of the .pdf file.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch is horrified that some Democrats want to actually fight crime!

Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s hard, hard left columnist, really hates the police and radical things like, oh, people having to obey the law!

You can already see it: the distinguished Mr Bunch is more worried about “mass incarceration”, “wrongful convictions,” and “police brutality” than he is about actual crime in the streets. The hysterical, boldfaced parts of his comments? Those are in Mr Bunch’s original; I did not add them.

Have there been brutality cases and wrongful convictions? Yup, sure have; no system of law enforcement is now, or ever will be, perfect. But those cases are far, far, far fewer than criminal acts on the streets. Mass incarceration? No; the problem there is that not enough people have been incarcerated! As we noted yesterday, there have been a lot of cases in which far more serious crimes have been committed by men who could, and should, have been behind bars for less serious crimes, but crimes, though less serious than rape or murder, were still treated too leniently.

Has Mr Bunch forgotten about Latif Williams, who (allegedly) murdered Samuel Collington near Temple University, in a botched carjacking? He had been released by a soft-headed judge on an unsecured bond, but could have been in custody when Mr Collington was killed, a crime which incensed the Inquirer so much that they published Mr Williams’ name, even though he is a juvenile?

Has Mr Bunch forgotten about Hasan Elliot, whom District Attorney let slide on probation violations and drug charges, before he killed a Philadelphia Police Corporal?

Oh, wait, I’m sorry: there is little evidence that Mr Bunch would be all that upset about a police officer being killed.

    That both political parties tripped over each other in racing to hire more and more cops, lengthen prison sentences, and wage an over-the-top “war on drugs” made it all the more stunning in the spring of 2020 when millions of Americans took to the streets after the police murder of George Floyd to demand radical change. For a remarkable — and remarkably brief — moment, most Democrats rushed to embrace a new world order in which cops wouldn’t just operate under stricter rules but policing itself would be downsized in favor of social services.

    The poster child of this pivoting ideology was arguably the then-Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden. He was a key architect of the 1994 federal crime bill that put a U.S. stamp of approval on mass incarceration, but when taking office in 2021, President Biden promised “to root out systemic racism in our criminal justice system and to enact police reform in George Floyd’s name.”

    But the echo of 2020′s bold promises had barely died down when the murder rate spiked across much of America, driven heavily, experts increasingly believe, by rage and ennui over the endless COVID-19 pandemic. Terrified by fear that the activists’ chants of “defund the police” would cost their party the 2020 and 2021 elections, top Democrats are now scurrying back to the old playbook by calling for more cops.

Does anyone think that maybe, just maybe, the public actually want more cops on the street, more police protection, when Philadelphia fell just one murder short of its all-time record in 2020, the year of the summer of riots and hate, and then completely blew that record out of the water in 2021? Might it just be possible that the public, in Pennsylvania, might be a bit more concerned now that the City of Brotherly Love is slightly ahead of the homicide pace it set last year?

    Pennsylvania’s Democratic candidate for governor, Attorney General Josh Shapiro is leading the way. The veteran Montgomery County politician needed no big push to stand with officers — the controversial Philadelphia Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police donated $25,000 to Shapiro’s 2020 AG campaign — and the lack of a primary challenger has allowed him to drift to the center-right, months before the general election.

    “We need more police … more police with time to form relationships in the community that they serve,” Shapiro said last month in West Philadelphia. Although Shapiro tempers his remarks with a call for community policing and calls for other services besides law enforcement, his emphasis on more cops — including a plan for hiring bonuses of $6,000 for new recruits — have grabbed headlines early in his campaign.

There’s more of Mr Bunch’s cry of outrage at the original, but Josh Shapiro has already won a statewide election, and, one would presume, has at least some idea what Pennsylvania’s voters might want. The Attorney General even cut District Attorney Krasner out of the loop with significant gun and drug trafficking charges, at least in part because he thought that Mr Krasner wouldn’t prosecute the (alleged) malefactors seriously.

    Look, no one is disputing that the increase in murders — including a record in Philadelphia last year, with horrific headlines about little kids struck by stray bullets or the Asian woman pushed in front of a New York subway train — demands full and prompt attention from our political leaders. But is there any evidence that hiring more cops is the answer? Especially when many high-profile killings — involving domestic violence or road rage — happen in places and ways that defy traditional police methods.

Here is where Mr Bunch really veers into the weeds. The high-profile cases might not be affected, but the vast majority of murders, in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in St Louis, are low-profile, so low-profile that they rarely make the pages of Mr Bunch’s newspaper, the killings of the young black males who are blowing each other away with such alarming frequency. Those are the murders which would be reduced if lower-level crimes were treated seriously, if the gang-bangers who could have been locked up for lesser crimes had been locked up, had been treated seriously.

Of course, as I’ve said before, black lives don’t really matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer. And the price for doing things the way that Will Bunch wants would be measured in the blood in the city’s mean streets.

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The Philadelphia Police solve one murder

The killing, the 33rd of the year in the City of Brotherly Love, was, as most are, totally senseless.

    A man accused of beating a woman to death with pipes inside an Old City office was charged with murder

    Jeffrey Stepien, 48, is accused of killing Samantha Maag, 31. He is being held without bail after being charged with murder.

    by Chris Palmer | Thursday, January 20, 2022 | 2:39 PM EST

    Jeffrey Stepien, photo from 6ABC in Philadelphia. Click to enlarge.

    A 48-year-old man has been charged with murder for beating a woman to death inside an Old City office building on Wednesday, according to police.

    Jeffery Stepien was being held without bail and has also been charged with possessing an instrument of crime, according to court records.

    He is accused of attacking Samantha Maag, 31, of Gloucester Township, Camden County, who police said was seated at a reception desk on the eighth floor of an office building on the 300 block of Chestnut Street around 2:15 p.m. when Stepien attacked her from behind, striking her in the head with a pipe.

    Maag was taken to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 3:16 p.m. Attempts to reach her relatives Thursday were not immediately successful.

Of course, The Philadelphia Inquirer did not publish Mr Stepien’s mugshot, even though it was freely available, and published by both WPVI-TV, Channel 6, the ABC owned-and-operated Philadelphia station, and KYT-TV, Channel 3, the CBS owned-and-operated affiliate.

Samantha Magg, photo from KYT-TV. Click to enlarge.

Mr Stepien has a prior criminal record, for simple assault (18 § 2701 §§ A(1)), “attempts to cause or intentionally, knowingly or recklessly causes bodily injury to another”, and recklessly endangering another person (18 § 2705), both of which are second degree misdemeanors, to which he was sentenced to the maximum, one to two years in the penitentiary. He pleaded guilty to the offenses, and the case was disposed of on May 5, 2011, so this was not an instance of a criminal who could have still been behind bars.

Police stated that Mr Stepien had rented space in the Old City office building, and may have been living there at the time, and may have been angered about being asked to move out of a non-residential space, but the crime remains under investigation. It was captured on surveillance video.

This makes two stories in the Inquirer, and I have to wonder: will there be more? After all, the victim was not just another gang-banger, but an innocent, and a cute white woman, both of whom tend to generate Inquirer stories.

Mr Stepien is being represented by the Defender Association of Philadelphia, which had no comment at press time. They will, of course, try to get him off with as little jail time as possible, but, if Mr Stepien is convicted of this, he should spend the rest of his miserable life behind bars at SCI Phoenix maximum security prison.

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A sad update A man shoots and kills a criminal in the act, and now he's facing firearms charges

We noted the story of a Philadelphia car owner shooting and killing the man who was trying to steal the catalytic converter from his automobile. The initial report was that the owner had a license for his firearm; that report was erroneous:

    A Philly man shot someone who was trying to steal his car. Now he’s charged with gun violations.

    Police arrest car owner who fatally shot a would-be car thief Tuesday morning.

    by Mensah M Dean | Wednesday, January 19, 2022 | 6:03 PM EST

    The Cobbs Creek car owner who fatally shot a man who was trying to steal his car or its catalytic converter on Tuesday morning has been charged with carrying a gun without a license, Philadelphia police said Wednesday.

    Steven Thompson, 54, who shot and killed one of three men who were tampering with his Acura as it was parked in front of his home in the 5800 block of Cobbs Creek Parkway, was charged with two counts of firearms violations.

    On Tuesday, police incorrectly said Thompson had a permit to carry the gun he used to shoot the would-be car thief, Satario Natividad, 51, just after 8:15 a.m.

Further down:

    Sherell Natividad welcomed news of an arrest in the death of her husband, a father of eight children and stepchildren.

    “I’m getting a little bit of justice,” she said. “That’s good news to hear. You just can’t go shooting people and not expect there’s going to be consequences behind that.”

    But she said murder charges were in order.

    “He took my children’s father away from them. He took my husband away from me,” she said. “I want more. He murdered my husband. Even though he was doing wrong, he still murdered him. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t do nothing.”

Sorry, Mrs Natividad, but your husband, the father of your children, was out breaking the law, was out stealing from people, and people defending their property might just do so violently. Replacement catalytic converters can cost over $1,000, so it’s not as though your husband stole a newspaper off someone’s porch. The Inquirer article noted that “Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said police found catalytic converters, tools and a handgun inside the Honda Accord.” That’s catalytic converters plural, so Mr Natividad and his fled-on-foot partners-in-crime had robbed at least two other car owners, had the tools to do so — which means that this was thought-out, and not a spur-of-the-moment thing — and had a firearm to boot. One assumes that the bad guys were prepared to meet any resistance with deadly force.

It’s not just that Mr Natividad “was doing wrong,” it was that he was a bad guy, a criminal.

Was this Mr Natividad’s first venture into crime? He was 51-years-old, not normally the age at which someone starts out on a felony theft career.

There is, of course, the obvious question: was Mrs Natividad aware of her husband’s criminal activities? Was she tolerating a criminal as her husband?

The only justice in this case would be dropping all of the charges against Mr Thompson: he took a criminal off of the streets of Philadelphia.

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Killadelphia! 2022 begins where 2021 left off in the City of Brotherly Love!

Nineteen days into the new year might be a touch early to draw conclusions from the numbers, so this can be taken with a large grain of coarse kosher salt.[1]This is what we use in the Pico household, which is why I put it that way. There is no additional meaning implied by that.

As of 11:59 PM EST on Wednesday, January 18th, the Philadelphia Police Department reported that there have been 32 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love so far in 2022. That compares to ‘just’ 27 on the same date in 2021, a year which saw a record-shattering 562 murders in the city.

As both of my regular readers know, I’m kind of a numbers geek, so I did the math: 32 killings in 18 days works out to 1.7778 per day.

There was a bit of a lull in city murders in late July and August of 2021, but the killing rate picked up after Labor Day. Beginning the Tuesday after Labor day, September 7, 2021, there were 199 killings in the city, in 116 days, which works out to 1.7155 per day. The homicide rate in the city has actually picked up slightly this year. We can only hope that this year’s current murder rate is an early aberration, because it projects out to 649 homicides in the city!

I noted, just a few days ago, that The Philadelphia Inquirer had a positive story on Oliver Neal, the retired postman, who defended himself against a carjacker using his legally licensed firearm. I noted that I expected an Inquirer OpEd piece, or even a main editorial, telling us that Mr Neal’s actions, though legal, were unwise, but at least thus far, such hasn’t been posted on the newspaper’s website.

Now comes another story:

    Police: Southwest Philly homeowner fatally shot a man trying to steal his car or parts from it

    Police say a homeowner fatally shot a thief who was tampering with his car in the 5800 block of Cobbs Creek Parkway Tuesday morning.

    by Mensah M Dean | Wednesday, January 18, 2022

    For the second time in as many weeks, a Philadelphia citizen licensed to carry a gun shot a would-be thief, police said Tuesday.

    The 8:15 a.m. shooting in the 5800 block of Cobbs Creek Parkway happened when a neighborhood resident discovered three men trying to steal his car or its catalytic converter, police said.

    The owner stepped out of his front door and fired at least one shot at the three men, who tried to flee in a gray Honda Accord but ended up crashing into the side of a yellow Radnor Township school bus. Medics transported the wounded man to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead just after 9 a.m.

    Relatives who gathered at the crime scene, crying and embracing one another, said the shooting victim’s name was Satario Natividad, 51. The two other men who were with him fled on foot and remained at large.

    Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said that homicide detectives are heading up the investigation and that it is too early to make a decision on if the shooting was justified or not. They did not identify the car owner.

This is the kind of case in which I could see social justice District Attorney Larry Krasner wanting to charge the owner with something. We’ll probably find out — if the media report it — that Mr Natividad already had a criminal record; people don’t normally enter a life of crime at age 51.

Of course, the relatives of the dead criminal demand justice!

    “He did not have to come out and shoot him,” she said. “It was a car! All he had to do is call the police. Once someone turns their back, they are no longer a threat. He still has his car, but we do not have [Natividad]. It’s a material thing. They need to charge him. He’s in his doorway. You don’t shoot someone out in the street over a car.”

Actually, in a city like Philadelphia, where the police have no control over crime, and the District Attorney doesn’t like to prosecute the criminals who do get caught, yeah, you do shoot someone out in the street over a car. Inspector Vanore said, “Just from vision you could see catalytic converters, some tools, and what appears to be a firearm.” Robert Stacy McCain would say, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” and Mr Natividad played a stupid game. Naturally, Mr Natividad’s relatives have been defending him, but the simple fact is that he was a criminal, caught in the act, and he won’t be stealing any more catalytic converters.

In my attempt to see if the Inquirer had written something to criticize Mr Neal’s actions, I found this main editorial:

    A new year requires a better plan to tackle gun violence crisis

    One of this board’s resolutions for the new year is to remain vigilant in our coverage to ensure that city efforts to reduce gun violence are working.

    by The Editorial Board | Monday, January 3, 2022

    It took about 90 minutes for Philadelphia to experience its first homicide of 2022.

    By 1:30 a.m. on Jan. 1, a 33-year-old had been fatally shot in Feltonville. Less than 20 minutes later, four miles away near Temple University, a 16-year-old was shot and killed. The first two homicide victims of 2022 were among 14 people who were shot on the first day of the new year.

    The grim statistics hardly do justice to the mounting toll of gun violence in our city: 562 lives lost last year and another roughly 1,800 people who were shot and survived.

    In 2021, the city reached a bleak milestone in notching a record number of homicides. Now, the question city officials should be asking themselves is: How do we keep it from happening again in 2022?

Of course, the Editorial Board blame all sorts of things: the coronavirus pandemic, burned out streetlights, not enough public libraries, no new gun control legislation by the state government, really on everything but the criminals themselves.

    One of this board’s resolutions for the new year is to remain vigilant in our coverage to ensure that the city’s efforts to reduce gun violence are working. We propose a new year’s resolution for every entity in city government: Before every action, decision, or new program, ask how it contributes to reducing gun violence — and communicate the answer. That’s the kind of commitment a crisis of this magnitude requires.

No, what a crisis of this magnitude requires is correctly identifying the problem, requires telling the truth about what the problem really is, and this an “anti racist news organization” like the Inquirer will not do. The Editorial Board want to blame everything but the criminals themselves, because to blame the criminals is to say aloud the part everyone knows: the homicide problem in Philadelphia, and in all of our major cities, is a black homicide problem!

Of course, it’s raaaaacist to point that out, but until that is pointed out, until that is addressed, the problem can never be solved.

References

References
↑1 This is what we use in the Pico household, which is why I put it that way. There is no additional meaning implied by that.
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A good guy in Philadelphia

Screen capture of tweet from Danielle Outlaw.

I will admit to being stunned. We noted, on Thursday, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw’s tweet telling the people of the city what they should do if accosted by a carjacker, which was surrender:

  • If you are confronted by a carjacker, give up your car & leave the scene
  • Avoid verbal and physical confrontations
  • Make a mental note of suspect and their vehicle’s description
  • If there is a child in the vehicle, let the carjacker know “my child is in the car”

The Commissioner’s advice was simple: your car can be replaced, but you can’t be.

On Friday, we reported that some Philadelphians are not going so quietly, and are fighting back, and that a 60-year-old man in Mt Airy refused to be a victim, and shot the punk who tried to jack his car.

So, why am I stunned? Because The Philadelphia Inquirer published a very positive story about the victim who refused to be a victim!

    Grandfather recounts how he survived a shootout with a teen carjacker

    “I thought I got shot. That’s how close the bullet came to my head,” said Oliver Neal, 60, a retired U.S. Postal Service employee from Northeast Philly.

    by Mensah M Dean | Friday, January 14, 2022 | 6:00 PM EST

    As Oliver Neal stood on the sidewalk watching his white Pontiac being loaded onto a AAA flatbed truck Friday afternoon, he was still having trouble hearing in his left ear, he said.

    “I thought I got shot. That’s how close the bullet came to my head,” Neal, 60, said less than 24 hours after surviving an attempted carjacking in West Mount Airy. The 16-year-old gunman was shot in both legs and is hospitalized, according to police. They have not released his name.

    Neal, who has a license to carry a gun, was not charged with a crime.

    Other than the ringing in his ear and a small mark under his left eye, possibly caused by gunshot residue, he believes, Neal was uninjured despite being just several feet from the gunman during multiple exchanges of gunfire.

There’s more at the original, and I really wish I could relate more of it here, but that starts to become copyright infringement. All I can do is suggest that you should follow the embedded link to the original and read it yourself.

Mr Neal doesn’t believe that he is a hero, but to many people, he is now. He not only protected himself and his property, but he took a 16-year-old delinquent off the streets, albeit not permanently. ‘Social Justice’ District Attorney Larry Krasner will probably not allow the punk to be charged with anything serious, so unless his leg wounds wind up to be crippling, he’ll be back sticking guns in people’s faces to steal their stuff.

There is a bigger picture here, however. The 16-year-old might just learn his lesson, and straighten up and try to fly right. Trouble is, in Philly, he’s more likely to learn the lesson to just shoot first, and not give a future victim time to defend himself. Othe potential carjackers might hear of this, and take that same lesson.

The Inquirer? I expected an OpEd, or perhaps even a main editorial, telling readers just how unwise Mr Neal’s actions were. He could have died, we will (probably) be told, he could have killed that misguided young man, some pundit might say — as if that’s a bad thing! — and someone will probably rail about how this situation wouldn’t have escalated into violence if Mr Neal hadn’t been allowed a concealed carry permit, as though the fact that the assailant was carrying a weapon he wasn’t legally allowed to have was meaningless. Had the carjacker been killed, we’d soon be treated to stories from his wailing mother and aunts about how he was such a good boy and he shouldn’t have been killed over a simple, teenaged mistake.

But, at least so far, the pundits have been silent.
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Philadelphians are fighting back!

On Thursday morning, we noted Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw’s tweet about what Philadelphians should do if someone attempts to steal their car. Well, on Thursday night, a brave man acted against the Commissioner’s advice. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

    Man, 60, shoots suspected carjacker, 16, in West Mount Airy

    Philadelphia has experienced a dramatic surge in carjackings with 757 in 2021 compared to 404 in 2020.

    by Robert Moran | Friday, January 14, 2022

    Intersection of Sharpnack and Cherokee Streets, from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

    A 60-year-old man shot and wounded an armed teen during a carjacking Thursday night in the city’s West Mount Airy section, police said.

    The incident occurred around 7:45 p.m. at Sharpnack and Cherokee Streets, where the 16-year-old boy attempted to take the man’s white Pontiac at gunpoint, police said.

    A gun battle ensued and the suspect was shot once in each leg and grazed in the chest. The teen was later apprehended in the area of Germantown Avenue and Slocum Street and taken to Einstein Medical Center, where he was listed in critical condition.

    At the crime scene, police found two firearms — one belonging to the driver on the hood of the Pontiac and the other on the ground in front of the car, as well as 13 spent shell casings.

Fortunately, the teenaged punk was a lousy shot; the car owner was not injured. Also fortunately, the owner had a license to carry a concealed firearm. And the Inquirer story also tells us why Commissioner Outlaw made her ‘don’t resist’ tweet: Philadelphians have been fighting back!

I had not seen those stories previously, and it’s not a surprise: the last three links were not to Inquirer stories, but to stories from the local television stations. Why, it’s almost as though the Inquirer doesn’t want people to know about carjacking victims fighting back. And the Police Commissioner certainly doesn’t want fighting back encouraged.

But law-abiding Philadelphians, people who go through the channels and have obtained permits to carry firearms, are fighting back, because the city and its law enforcement agencies, the Police Department and the District Attorney’s office, have not been fighting against crime very successfully. Commissioner Outlaw wrote:

    Last year, there were 757 reported carjackings in Philadelphia, an increase of 34% over 2020. Out of those 757 reported carjackings, police arrested 150 individuals, clearing 93 investigations through those arrests.

93 ÷ 757 = 0.1228533685601057. The Commissioner has just told people that the Philadelphia Police Department cleared by arrest a whopping 12.29% of carjackings in the city. How many of those 150 people arrested were actually convicted of anything under the George Soros funded District Attorney, Larry Krasner, was not told to us.

Crudely put, if you want to jack a car in the city, you have nine chances out of ten of getting away with it.

The City of Brotherly Love is one of the oldest in America. Founded in 1682 by William Penn, to be the capital of Pennsylvania Colony, if any city in America ought to be civilized, it should be Philly. Instead, it has become Dodge City, because under decades of Democratic rule, under a District Attorney more interested in exonerating criminals and going after police officers, and a Police Commissioner brought up in the soft-on-crime cities of Oakland, California and Portland, Oregon, the city is fighting for “social justice” rather than actual justice.

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Law enforcement in the City of Brotherly Love

Screen capture of tweet from Danielle Outlaw. Click on image to go to original.

The main page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website was rather amusing on Thursday morning. The Inquirer referred to an article from just before the end of last year, on a date when the city recorded its 555th homicide, on its way to the record of 562 for 2021,[1]It’s early in the year, but things haven’t gotten any better. As of 11:59 PM EST on Wednesday, January 12th, there had been 20 homicides reported by the Philadelphia Police Department, up … Continue reading which told us, “Philly ranks No. 3 on a list of trendy and affordable cities: The Realtor.com report cited Philadelphia’s culture, history, and “quaint” neighborhoods.” I suppose that, based on median home prices and major urban amenities, it is. We’ve noted how aging hipster — can you really be a hipster at age 44? — Amanda Marcotte sang the praises of her new South Philadelphia neighborhood, saying that “Philly’s food scene is the hotness,” but if she’s ever written more about her new hometown, I’ve missed it. The Inquirer article touted the city’s “world-class food scene, and its many small businesses, shops and nightlife, walkability, and something-for-everyone offerings as reasons the city deserves its ‘trendy’ title.”

Yet, on Wednesday evening, the seemingly-appropriately named Police Commissioner for the City of Philadelphia, Danielle Outlaw, has tweeted out her advice to victims of carjackings. While there are some reasonable safety tips, one, “Make it a habit to start your car and drive away immediately,” is horrible: your engine needs a few seconds to pump the motor oil from the oil pan through the engine, so starting the engine and driving away immediately increases the wear-and-tear on it. But the Commissioner’s main advice was simply that, if someone attempts to steal your car, let him.

“Your vehicle can be replaced. You are irreplaceable!” the Commissioner tells Philadelphians, which is true enough, in the abstract sense, but for the people who live in the city’s more crime-ridden neighborhoods, their insurance might not replace that vehicle; having their car stolen means having no car, not just the inconvenience of having to get Flo from Progressive buy you a new one. Philadelphia has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, but so many of the city’s liberals are wholly insulated from it.

Of course, many of the comments on the Commissioner’s tweet were along the lines of this one, “Buy a legal firearm, get you concealed carry permit. When these thugs attempt to ‘jack you, introduce them to your two friends, Smith & Wesson,” but let’s tell the truth here: if you had a legally-possessed weapon, and you used it against a carjacker in Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner would charge you for defending your property with deadly force. If you did the city a favor and insured that yours was the last vehicle that the carjacker attempted to steal, Mr Krasner would charge you with murder.

However, the two points I’ve mentioned, Philly’s trendiness and its awful homicide rate, are easily explained by one simple fact: as the Inquirer itself reported, less than three months ago, “Philly remains one of the most racially segregated cities in America: People from different racial and ethnic groups live in different neighborhoods, and the pace of desegregation has slowed.” Miss Marcotte and her ‘partner,’ Marc Faletti, can walk around South Philly in reasonable safety and security, and enjoy the food scene:

Our South Philly neighborhood, on the other hand, is a blast for those who spend way too much of their income on dining out. Local breweries are abundant, as well as experimental restaurants like Bing Bing, which serves a modern American spin on dim sum. And unlike New York, where you often have to travel an hour by subway to find good places to find more traditional Mexican or Asian cuisines, we’re in walking distance of one of the best taquerias on the East Coast and a tiny but magnificent Indonesian place.

For vegetarians like myself, Philadelphia’s restaurant scene is particularly amazing. It’s not just the nearly limitless number of excellent vegan restaurants, either. Nearly every place you eat out at here has a substantial number of vegetarian or vegan dishes, in contrast to New York, where some restaurants don’t even bother.

It’s no skin off her nose, but not that far away, in West Philadelphia,[2]West Philadelpha and South Philadelphia are not separate cities, but simply the names of neighborhoods and areas. Philadelphia has a lot of named neighborhoods. trying that is an attempt at avoiding darker corners, the open ends of alleys, and where some black residents are opposing physical improvements to sidewalks and streets because that might bring more white people into the neighborhood.

Miss Marcotte, and Inquirer urbanism writer Michaelle Bond can write about the trendiness of Philadelphia, because they have insulated themselves from the grittier neighborhoods, they have segregated themselves away from most of the city’s crime.

Commissioner Outlaw needn’t have bothered with her tweet: the areas in which carjackings are more likely to occur already know what they need to do, and the less crime ridden neighborhoods, which are, to be brutally frank about it, the whiter neighborhoods, where the liberals and the #woke don’t see the crime close up, can close their eyes to the things happening in Kensington and Strawberry Mansion.

References

References
↑1 It’s early in the year, but things haven’t gotten any better. As of 11:59 PM EST on Wednesday, January 12th, there had been 20 homicides reported by the Philadelphia Police Department, up from ‘just’ 13 on the same day in 2021’s record-setting year.
↑2 West Philadelpha and South Philadelphia are not separate cities, but simply the names of neighborhoods and areas. Philadelphia has a lot of named neighborhoods.