District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), one of the George Soros-funded stooges who took office in some of our major cities with the explicit promise to reduce prosecutions, tried to tell people that yes, crimes with firearms had increased, but other crimes were down. That, of course, was bovine feces.

There are two different types of crime, crimes of evidence, and crimes of reporting. Murder is a crime of evidence, because it leaves a dead body, and dead bodies get found. It’s hard to dispose of 100 to 300 pounds of dead and decaying flesh and bone and muscle and fat unless someone has carefully planned how to do it.

But assaults, or robberies, or rapes? Assaults and rapes can be crimes of evidence, if the victim goes to the hospital for treatment. But if the victims is not seriously enough injured to seek medical care, or if the rape victim chooses not to report it, then those crimes become crimes of reporting, and if they are not reported to the police, then as far as the police are concerned, as far as the statistics measure, the crimes never happened. Yet, while the statistics vary, it seems that fewer than half of all “violent victimization” are reported to the police, and rape appears to be the least reported crime. According to the survey, only 32.5% or rapes or sexual assaults were reported in 2015, and that dropped to 23.2% the following year.^[1]See Table 4. In a city, in communities, in which the vast majority of crimes which are known about go unsolved, why would people who are already distrustful of the police, people who have low expectations that the crimes will actually be solved, even bother reporting the crimes? Why would residential burglaries be down 22% but non-residential burglaries up 15%? Same crime, just different targets, but different conditions for the owners. Commercial owners who find their businesses burgled^[2]Though “burglarize” is apparently a real word now, I refuse to use it. have a far greater possibility of getting an insurance recovery, while residents do not, so of course the victims of commercial burglaries are more likely to report the crimes. Residential burglaries? With so many unsolved crimes, and distrust of the police high, reporting such a crime must seem mostly useless to people.

Aggravated assault? The total number of aggravated assaults increased 14.58%, using the city’s own numbers; it’s simply that the tools used were more heavily included firearms than before.

And now we have this, from Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

Police arrest Philly teens wanted in carjackings and Wawa robberies

The arrests come amid an unprecedented surge in carjackings. The rate of such attacks doubled in 2020 and again in 2021 — and 2022 is off to an even more dangerous start.

by Samantha Melamed | Sunday, February 6, 2022

Philadelphia police on Saturday night arrested two teens, aged 14 and 18, who they said had been wanted in a series of armed carjackings in the city, as well as the robberies of two Wawa stores in Upper Darby.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Man killed in Philadelphia carjacking.

Officers on patrol around 8 p.m. near Broad and Wallace Streets in the city’s Spring Garden neighborhood recognized the suspects during a vehicle stop, police said. Both teens were armed and attempted to flee on foot, according to police. The 14-year-old was quickly apprehended, while the older suspect fled into a house on the 1200 block of Wallace Street, causing police to report a barricade situation. SWAT was called in and he, too, was arrested. Police recovered two loaded handguns, one from the car and the other from the house.

“These two arrests are a result of cooperation between the Philadelphia Police Department and also neighboring agencies,” Inspector D.F. Pace told 6ABC, which reported that authorities are investigating whether the two may be implicated in additional crimes. Charges were still pending as of Sunday morning, police said.

And here’s the money line:

The arrests come as Philadelphia is grappling with an alarming spike in carjackings: The rate nearly quadrupled from 2019 to 2021, when there were 840 such attacks. This year, there have already been 140 carjackings, putting the city on an even more perilous pace.

Carjackings are a pretty serious, violent crime, and while people might just throw up their hands and say, “Forget it,” when their home is burgled, because they think it fruitless, cars are big, important and cost a lot of money; when someone’s car is stolen, he loses a lot of capacity, to get to work or school, to carry home groceries, really to do much in society that involves travel.

Yet we are supposed to believe that crime, overall, has decreased in the City of Brotherly Love. well, no, I don’t believe it, don’t believe it at all.

Now, happily enough, one crime has decreased: murder. As of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, February 6^th, there had been 50 homicides reported by the Philadelphia Police Department, compared to 54 on the same date last year, and 39 in 2020. Homicides are running behind 2021’s record 562 killings, but ahead of 2020’s 499, which is the city’s third worst year, with the 500 killings during the crack cocaine wars of 1990.

So, is it an improvement that the city might see fewer murders than in 2021, but is still ahead of 2020’s pace? I guess that Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw would call it an improvement if there are ‘only’ 543 homicides, but that would be pretty much damning with faint praise.

“This is like the new way of stealing a car, and it’s become very dangerous,” Chief Inspector Frank Vanore, told The Inquirer last week.

Of course, the Inquirer tried to blame guns:

Philadelphia is hardly alone in experiencing an unusual surge in the crime. Although it’s not tracked by all police departments nationally, cities including Chicago, New York, New Orleans, and Minneapolis have all reported skyrocketing numbers of carjackings in recent months.

Officials have offered varying explanations: Young people taking joyrides. Cars being targeted for parts. The Chicago Sun-Times quoted one anonymous carjacker saying vehicles were sometimes stolen and then used in other crimes, including drive-by shootings.

Motive aside, the dramatic rise in carjackings has come as gun sales have exploded over the past two years.

No, the great rise in gun sales have been to law-abiding people, people who have to go through a background check, to defend themselves from crime! The law-abiding aren’t the ones out there jacking cars. As we have previously noted, a couple of good citizens took out the thieves, though sadly one of the good guys didn’t have his weapon properly registered.

The real reason for the increase in carjackings? It’s because the perps simply aren’t very afraid of being caught, or, if they’re caught, being seriously punished, not with a ‘social justice’ District Attorney in charge of prosecutions. And it’s because so many of the kids in Philadelphia simply aren’t being reared properly. I’ve said it before: you show me a rotten kid, and I’ll show you a lousy parent.

 

The killing, the 33^rd 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.

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.

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.

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 18^th, 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.

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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