Tag Archives: #Philadelphia

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Killadelphia It's not just that the raw number of homicides is increasing; the rate of killings has increased as well

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated Monday through Friday, during normal business hours, so when last I saw it, the police had indicated that there had been 513 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, December 2nd. This morning, that number had jumped to 521 killings as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, December 6th.

That’s eight homicides in three days!

Forget the “long, hot summer” when it comes to murder in Philly. As of the end of Labor Day, September 6th, the 249th day of the year, Philly had seen 363 homicides. 363 ÷ 249 = 1.4578 homicides per day × 365 days in the year = 532.1084 homicides projected for the year.

Well, that was then, and this is now. 521 homicides ÷ 339th day of the year = 1.5369 killings per day, × 365 = 560.9587 projected murders.

But it gets worse. Labor Day is the ‘traditional end of summer’, even if it’s not autumn astronomically. Since the end of Labor Day, there have been 158 killings, in just 90 days. That works out to 1.7556 murders per day. If that rate is maintained through the end of the year, that’s another 45.6444 souls sent untimely to their eternal rewards, for a projected 567 dead bodies littering the city’s mean streets.

Yeah, I’m something of a number’s geek on this subject, but I’m also a writer, and there have been so many murders in Philadelphia that I’ve been struggling to come up with different words to use, to avoid redundancy in my prose. Perhaps that explains why The Philadelphia Inquirer has nothing on their website main page, at least as of 10:15 AM EST, not a single thing, on the eight killings over the past three days.

In reality, the editors of the Inquirer don’t want to hear about homicide in the city, not in any nitty-gritty way. I submitted the article Being taught about white privilege, by The Philadelphia Inquirer, to the newspaper as a prospective OpEd piece on Friday, December 3rd, and though I did not really expect them to print it, I did hope that maybe, just maybe, upon reading it, the editors would realize just how biased they’ve been on the reporting of the carnage in the city’s streets.[1]At least as of 10:15 AM this morning, I have neither been contacted nor received a rejection email from the Inquirer.

The American Free News Network did print it.

Of course, the Inquirer is concerned about homicide, in macro terms:

In that last one, the Editorial Board noted just how concerned they are that #BlackLivesMatter, because pregnant black women are five times more likely than white women to terminate their pregnancies. Nothing quite says black lives matter than wanting to see them being snuffed out before birth!

But none of it makes sense. In their own stories, the Inquirer noted that Latif Williams, the (alleged) killer of Samuel Collington, was a juvenile, with a criminal record, and could not be legally carrying a gun . . . but he was. They reported that Donavan Crawford, charged with the murder of Sykea Patton, was “charged overnight with murder and multiple counts of illegally carrying a gun.” Somehow, some way, the highly educated and experience editors and reporters for our nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper never noticed that the people committing crimes with guns are almost never holders of firearms permits, almost never carrying firearms legally, and, shocking, I know, aren’t that interested in obeying the law in the first place.

This is the problem that the left simply cannot see, because they are unwilling to see it. It is not a matter of guns, but the people using the guns. Since the people using guns to kill others are disproportionately black, to admit that it’s the people who are the problem is to recognize that homicide in our major cities is primarily a black problem, and that the #woke[2]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 just cannot do.

But if you cannot admit what the problem is, you can never hope to solve the problem. And the left would rather ignore the truth than deal with the truth.

References

References
↑1 At least as of 10:15 AM this morning, I have neither been contacted nor received a rejection email from the Inquirer.
↑2 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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Hold them accountable!

Latif Williams, photo by, Philadelphia Police Department, via KYT-TV, Philadelphia.

As we noted just a few days ago, murder is not usually an entry-level crime. Killers usually have a string of leading in crimes, of increasing seriousness, before they finally blow someone’s brains out. And it seems that 17-year-old Latif Williams was having quite the run of criminal activity before he (allegedly) shot Temple University student Samuel Sean Collington to death during a botched carjacking attempt.

I will admit to having gotten it wrong when I stated, “Since juvenile records are normally sealed, we’ll probably never know if he was treated over-leniently by District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office.” But it seems that the rules are different when a black juvenile (allegedly) kills a white student, especially one who was well-known and well-liked by several people in the city government:

    Suspect in killing of Temple student Samuel Collington — who had been arrested and released after a July carjacking — surrenders to police

    Latif Williams was in custody earlier this year in connection with a gunpoint carjacking. He was released on house arrest, and charges were later withdrawn when a witness failed to show in court.

    By Anna Orso | Wednesday, December 1, 2021 | 9:12 PM ST

    The teenage suspect in the killing of Temple University student Samuel Collington during a botched carjacking over the weekend surrendered to police Wednesday, officials said in a statement without elaborating.

    Earlier, officials had identified Latif Williams, 17, of Olney, as the person they said shot the 21-year-old Collington on Sunday on the 2200 block of North Park Avenue, near the school’s North Philadelphia campus. The student had just returned after spending the Thanksgiving holiday with his family in Prospect Park, Delaware County.

    Samuel Sean Collington, photo shared by his mother with Channel 10, and from this tweet. Click to enlarge.

    Officials on Wednesday identified Latif Williams, 17, of Olney, as the person they said fatally shot Collington, 21, of Prospect Park, Delaware County, on the 2200 block of North Park Avenue, near the school’s North Philadelphia campus, on Sunday. Investigators said they used video and forensic evidence found at the scene to link Williams to the killing, and law enforcement sources said he is under investigation in connection with several armed robberies in the area.

    Williams was in custody in August after he was charged in a gunpoint carjacking. According to court records, a man told police that late on July 31, he was giving Williams and a second male a ride to a restaurant when Williams pointed a gun at his head and told him to get out of the car. . . .

    Williams was arrested Aug. 14 and charged with aggravated assault, robbery, and related counts. His bail was initially set at $200,000 and he was detained. At a bail hearing less than a week later, Municipal Court Judge Joffie C. Pittman III allowed Williams’ release on unsecured bail, meaning he would need to pay bail only if he violated the terms of his release. Pittman ordered him released on house arrest.

So, Judge Pittman released an accused carjacker, who (allegedly) threatened his victim with a gun, with unsecured bail, which is to say: no bail at all. Mr Williams was released to house arrest, but there is no indication in the Inquirer story that young Mr Williams was placed under electronic monitoring.

    In September, prosecutors dropped the charges before a preliminary hearing at which they would have had to show that there was probable cause to believe Williams had committed a crime.

Note that the prosecution dropped this case well after Judge Pittman released Mr Williams with no bail. The prosecution was dropped because a “key witness” failed to appear. Does the District Attorney’s office make any effort to look up these witnesses before court dates, to get them to appear? We are not told in this story.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: ‘Killadelphia’ D.A. Turned Loose Teen Carjacker Who Murdered Marxist Student

It seems as though, when young Mr Williams was already in custody, law enforcement failed! First we had an idiot judge who basically turned loose a suspect charged with armed robbery and aggravated assault with no bail. Then, when a preliminary hearing was scheduled, the District Attorney’s office failed to ensure that their key witness would be present.

The result? If Mr Williams is indeed the killer, the actions, or inactions, of Judge Pittman and Larry Krasner, directly led to the murder of Mr Collington. If Mr Williams is proven to be the murderer, is there any reason why Judge Pittman and District Attorney Krasner shouldn’t become young Mr Williams’ cellmates? Is there any reason that the “key witness” who failed to appear, whose refusal to provide the evidence needed to keep Mr Williams locked up, shouldn’t be held legally responsible for the murder of Mr Collington?

We need to hold law enforcement officials and judges accountable for the consequences of their decisions! Because nobody stood up and did the right thing, Mr Collington is stone cold graveyard dead.

It’s simple: hold idiotic judges like Mr Pittman, and soft-hearted, soft-headed prosecutors like Mr Krasner, responsible for the consequences of their decisions, and other judges and prosecutors will quickly fall into line.

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Were they not paying attention? It seems that black lives really don't matter to Temple University students

936 West Somerset Avenue, from Google Maps streetview. Click to enlarge.

I will admit it: it has been a long time, over ten years, since I last drove down Broad Street in Philadelphia. At least during that last time, long stretches of Broad Street were the combat zone in the City of Brotherly Love. Now, the Google Maps steetview shows a North Broad Street that has, itself, been fixed up some, but when I look at some of the side streets, like West Somerset Avenue, or 9th Street, things don’t look so hot.

But, though I hate the idiotic term #WhitePrivilege, boy, do some of these Temple University students exhibit it! With 510 homicides in Philadelphia as of 11:59 PM EST on Tuesday, November 30th, the vast majority of which were black victims murdered by black killers, what really, really bothers the Temple students is that a white student was shot to death.

    Temple’s campus is on edge after a student was shot to death: ‘Students are afraid’

    Philadelphia’s growing gun violence and more than 500 homicides, which came painfully close to home for Temple students in the last couple weeks, have put the campus on edge.

    by Susan Snyder and Ellie Rushing | Wednesday, December 1, 2021

    It was an emergency meeting, held one day after the killing of a Temple student outside his apartment in an apparent robbery and carjacking attempt.

    Some student government members who would normally show up in person tuned in to Monday’s meeting by Zoom instead. They didn’t feel comfortable walking at night after Samuel Collington was shot in the middle of the day within a block of campus, said student government president Bradley Smutek.

    “Students are afraid. Parents are afraid. Parents are afraid for students’ safety,” Smutek said.

    Latif Williams, photo by, Philadelphia Police Department, via KYT-TV, Philadelphia.

    Police on Wednesday said they identified a suspect, 17-year-old Latif Williams, in connection with Collington’s killing. As Williams remained at large, Philadelphia’s growing gun violence crisis, with more than 500 homicides this year — including the Nov. 16 shooting death of an 18-year-old three blocks from the North Philadelphia campus — has hit painfully close for Temple students. It has put the campus on edge, and increased the university’s urgency to initiate safety measures to protect its young people.

    Temple president Jason Wingard in an email message to the campus Tuesday night promised over the next days and weeks to increase security, including working with the city Police Department to establish more patrols in nearby student residential areas and aiming to boost the 115-officer campus police force by 50%. The university also intends to upgrade lighting, cameras, and emergency phones and increase the availability of shuttle service and its walking escort program, he said.

There’s a lot more at the original, but look what’s been done here: the Philadelphia Police Department released a prior mugshot of the suspected gunman, a 17-year-old juvenile, when juvenile suspects are almost never named, and their mugshots almost never released. The article noted, further down, that the suspect “was involved in prior crimes,” which would be why the police already had a mugshot of him. Since juvenile records are normally sealed, we’ll probably never know if he was treated over-leniently by District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office.[1]Since Mr Krasner has already been in office for four years, unless young Mr Williams was younger than 13 at the time he (allegedly) committed his first offense, it would be Mr Krasner’s office … Continue reading

2700 block of North 9th St, near Temple campus.

There’s a photo accompanying the Philadelphia Inquirer article referenced above, obviously taken during warmer weather, showing us a nice, clean scene, full of (mostly) white students, what appears to be a black attendant beside a service truck, and a (seemingly) black campus police officer on a bicycle, protecting that heavily white campus[2]Temple’s student demographic breakdown: 53.6% white; 12.0% Asian; 12.2% black; 7.1% Hispanic. The 2021 tuition & fees of Temple University are $16,970 for Pennsylvania residents and … Continue reading, students who are now worried because an apparently innocent white student was murdered during what appears to be a robbery.

All of those times that I’ve said that black lives don’t matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer? It seems that those black lives don’t matter to Temple students, either, because they haven’t gotten upset about those 510 mostly black murder victims in the city, but are scared fecesless now that a white student was sent untimely to his eternal reward.

And the University? In a city in which the community hate the police, and many on the left have wanted to defund the Philadelphia Police Department, Temple is planning to increase the 115-officer campus police department by 50%! If there is a clearer example of “a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged” than that, it hasn’t occurred to me!

The left, including many Temple University students, have been shouting #BlackLivesMatter! but, to me, actions speak far more truthfully than words, and to Temple University, black lives haven’t mattered very much.

References

References
↑1 Since Mr Krasner has already been in office for four years, unless young Mr Williams was younger than 13 at the time he (allegedly) committed his first offense, it would be Mr Krasner’s office which handled any prosecution of him.
↑2 Temple’s student demographic breakdown: 53.6% white; 12.0% Asian; 12.2% black; 7.1% Hispanic. The 2021 tuition & fees of Temple University are $16,970 for Pennsylvania residents and $29,882 for out-of-state students. The 2021 graduate school tuition & fees are $17,846 for Pennsylvania residents and $24,236 for others.
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The mindlessness of the leftist elites Their ideas enable more crime

Seth Rogen is a Canadian comedian, actor, screenwriter, film producer, and voice actor who, according to the site Celebrity Net Worth, has a net worth of $80 million. I suppose that when you can put together 80 million bucks, getting your car broken into and your stuff therein taken, it isn’t really that big a deal to you. Maybe that makes it easier for you to accept the unacceptable, to tolerate the intolerable.

Business Insider noted:

California remains the state with the highest poverty level in the US, according to a September 2021 report from the US Census Bureau.

In the report, three-year poverty level averages were calculated for each state and the District of Columbia using the supplemental poverty measure, which found that 15.4% of California residents lived in poverty from 2018 to 2020. Only the District of Columbia had a higher rate of poverty — 16.5%.

The supplemental poverty measure expands on the official poverty measure, which was developed by Social Security economist Mollie Orshansky in the 1960s, by accounting for cost of living, work and medical expenses, tax credits, and government programs designed to assist low-income families and individuals.

By comparison, California’s three-year poverty level average has considerably decreased from 17.2 % in 2019, and 18.1% in 2018.

It’s worse than just the numbers: the poverty rate in the Pyrite State would be much higher without welfare and the COVID-19 stimulus payments, the latter of which should eventually disappear.

Social Security transfers and stimulus payments prevented a combined 38.2 million individuals across the US from falling into poverty, while medical expenses caused the largest increase of the number of individuals in poverty, according to the Census Bureau report.

Californians benefited the most from government programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit, CalFresh, and Child Tax Credit, each of which lowered poverty rates in California by more than 1% in 2019, research from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) found.

So, if the esteemed Mr Rogen thinks that getting robbed is just “called living in a big city,” maybe he ought to think of those Los Angelenos who don’t have $80 million bucks.

His Wikipedia biography described his politics as very left wing, a description he has used for himself. Yeah, and that might describe his brains as well.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) guesstimated that the city had at least 63,706 homeless persons, blaming “in part, poverty, lack of affordable housing, employment discrimination, substance abuse or mental health challenges, LGBTQ kids who are rejected by family, domestic violence, lack of familial ties, and kids who age out of foster care.” That’s ‘only’ 0.612% of the population of Los Angeles County, but that’s still over 60,000 people having to pee and poop out in the streets, having no safe place to stay, and perhaps living in their cars . . . if they have cars.

Mr Rogen isn’t homeless. He lives on a 10-acre estate in the West Hollywood Hills, having sold, for $2.16 million, another West Hollywood home behind high hedges and a tall, metal fence. ‘Twould seem that, despite his seemingly cavalier attitude toward petty robbery, he does care about security for his property and himself.

And so it is with the City of Brotherly Love. District Attorney Larry Krasner. a George Soros-financed #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 prosecutor who is opposed to “mass incarceration” and who has helped preside over a record 500 homicides in Philadelphia, was recently re-elected by a wide margin, and his votes did not all come from the poor and downtrodden; the well-to-do white liberals in Chestnut Hill voted for him, too.

Why? Like Mr Rogen, despite Philadelphia’s crime rate, the better off Philadelphians are largely insulated from city crime. Those 500 homicides? The vast majority are black, and, as we have noted so many times before, black lives don’t matter to the well-off whites in the city, or at least they don’t if we are to judge by the coverage of The Philadelphia Inquirer. It’s easy for well-to-do white liberals to cling to the oh-so-sympathetic policies, policies which reduce penalties for crime, policies which enable crime, because they are not personally affected by them. They might not have ten acres in the West Hollywood Hills like Mr Rogan, but they have their gated subdivisions, their security systems, and their neighborhoods, let’s be honest here, have few black residents. Philadelphia is highly ‘diverse’ as far as overall population figures are concerned, but far more internally segregated on a by-neighborhood basis.

Seth Rogen is simply a visible symbol, because he posted an incredibly stupid tweet.[2]Because someone a little bit smarter than Mr Rogan might persuade him to delete the tweet, what you see above is a screen capture of it, but if you click on the image, it will take you to the … Continue reading But there are millions more American liberals like him, perhaps not as well-to-do, but mired in the sympathy which enables higher crime rates.

Then they are shocked, shocked! when that crime occurs.

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 Because someone a little bit smarter than Mr Rogan might persuade him to delete the tweet, what you see above is a screen capture of it, but if you click on the image, it will take you to the original on Twitter.
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Killadelphia! The City of Brotherly Love has tied for the Gold Medal Philly has tied its all-time annual murder number, with 37 days left in the year!

That didn’t take long. It was just this morning I wrote about the city tying its second-place record of 499 homicides, set just last year.

    500th homicide: Woman, 55, fatally shot in South Philly

    It was the city’s 500th homicide so far in 2021, matching the worst year on record.

    by Robert Moran | Wednesday, November 24, 2021

    A 55-year-old woman was fatally shot Wednesday afternoon in South Philadelphia, police said.

    Her death was the 500th homicide in the city so far this year, matching the worst year on record — 1990 — and surpassing the total of 499 that occurred in 2020.

    Around 4:30 p.m., the woman was outside in the area of Seventh and Jackson Streets when she was shot three times in the chest. She was transported by medics to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 5:15 p.m.

Another murder in broad daylight.

    No arrests or other details were reported.

    Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw issued a statement Wednesday night:

    “Each and every homicide carries with it a profound sense of loss. However, for our City to have reached such a tragic milestone — 500 lives cut short — it carries a weight that is almost impossible to truly comprehend.”

    Outlaw continued: “There are not enough words to comfort our grieving families in their time of loss. However, I want these families to know that seeking justice for their loved one remains a top priority for the Philadelphia Police Department. We will continue to work with our local, state, and federal partners and other stakeholders to get ahead of the violent crime that is plaguing our beautiful communities.”

Of course, Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat, had complained earlier that afternoon, that it was the fault of the state legislature for not allowing the City of Brotherly Love to issue its own, stricter gun control laws:

    As Philadelphia records 500 homicides, Mayor Kenney takes aim at the state: ‘They don’t care’

    The administration convened the gathering hours before the city’s 500th homicide, tying to record for the most in modern history.

    by Anna Orso | Wednesday, November 24, 2021

    As Philadelphia approached a record number of homicides, Mayor Jim Kenney on Wednesday said the city is doing what it can to slow the bloodshed but is stymied by state law that keeps the city from enforcing stricter gun laws.

    “There are people making money selling these guns, making these guns,” he said, “and the legislature, they don’t care about people getting killed.”

    Kenney spoke during a morning news conference at City Hall alongside police brass, federal law enforcement officials, representatives from the District Attorney’s Office, and a handful of lawmakers from City Council and the state General Assembly. . . . .

    In taking aim at the state, Kenney was repeating his frequent criticism of a concept in state law known as preemption, which generally prohibits municipalities from passing laws that limit access to firearms. His administration last year sued the state, seeking to overturn the rule, and the case remains unresolved.

    If the city was not operating under preemption, Kenney said, officials would enforce regulations that target “straw purchasers,” or people who legally purchase firearms and then illegally sell them to others. Those include setting limits on how many guns someone can buy within city limits during a specific time period.

There’s more at the original.

In a story published just yesterday, reporter Anna Orso, who wrote the story immediately above, noted:

    Donavan Crawford, 28, of West Philadelphia, was arrested Monday and charged overnight with murder and multiple counts of illegally carrying a gun.

WPVI-TV reported the charges more specifically:

    Crawford is also charged with Violation Uniform Firearms Act -Former Convict, Violation Uniform Firearms Act -No License, Violation Uniform Firearms Act -On Streets, Possessing Instruments of Crime, Recklessly Endangering Another Person and Criminal Use of Communication Facility.

In other words, it was already illegal for Mr Crawford, a previously convicted criminal, to have a firearm. Just what good does Mayor Kenney think having more gun control laws will do when people like Mr Crawford are willing to (allegedly) break the gun control laws already on the books?

Those gun control laws were on the books in 2008, when Mayor Michael Nutter, a Democrat took office, and appointed Charles Ramsey to be his Police Commissioner. In 2008, under Mr Nutter, city homicides decreased from 391 to 331, and then made steady progress, to 302, 306, 326, 331, 246, 248, with an unfortunate jump to 280 in 2015, Mr Nutter’s and Commissioner Ramsey’s last year in office.

If the homicide rate could be reduced that much under the current gun control laws by Messrs Nutter and Ramsey, why has everything collapsed under Mayor Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Commissioner Outlaw? Under Messrs Nutter and Ramsey, the city averaged a still-too-high 296.25 killings a year, while, since they left office, the average has jumped to 383.33 per year, and, with 37 days left in the year, will go higher.

Mr Krasner, whom The Philadelphia Inquirer actually endorsed for renomination, has more of a history of letting criminals go free so that they can then go out and murder people. And while the police have been making more illegal gun possession arrests than ever, under Mr Krasner, a George Soros stooge, convictions for illegal possession of firearms have dropped dramatically:

    Inspector Derrick Wood, commanding officer of Southwest Division, attributes some of the spike in VUFA arrests to what he describes as a growing lack of fear among people carrying guns due to dropping conviction rates and lower bails set by bail commissioners.

    “What I see is that the city and the criminal justice system do not take illegally carrying firearms seriously,” Wood said. “There’s been an explosion of gun violence in the last three years, and there’s more than one reason — but I think one reason is we don’t take it seriously.”

    An Inquirer review of 2019 gun arrests from the 18th Police District, in Wood’s Southwest Division, showed that of the 82 people whose cases were resolved as of January 2021, more than half, 53%, had their charges withdrawn or dismissed.

    Wood and some of his officers contend that amid this reality, they are encountering the same suspects over and over again. Fed up, they began posting photos on social media of confiscated firearms and calling for stricter consequences for carrying them.

    “They know there’s no consequences for carrying a gun in Philly. It’s zero to none,” he said. “I don’t care what kind of programs you come up with, what kind of money you put in prevention — if people are not held accountable, then people are going to keep carrying guns.”

Then, further down:

    These problems existed long before Krasner took office, and yet none seemed to prohibit his predecessors from securing a higher conviction rate. . . .

    Krasner has built his administration on the idea that fewer people belong in jail — that he was sworn in to help unravel decades of misguided policy devastating communities of color and fueling more crime.

And there you have it: Philadelphia has a District Attorney who believes that fewer people should be in jail, and he’s doing just that, putting fewer people in prison. Mr Krasner blames his lower conviction rate on the police not bringing good evidence, but how much evidence is actually needed: man found with a gun, man not legally allowed to have that weapon, it ought to be case closed.

The problem is not what the left refer to as “mass incarceration,” but that not enough people who could already be behind bars are behind bars.

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Philadelphia ties for the silver medal! 499 homicides so far in 2021 matches 2020's second place all time murder numbers . . . with 38 days left in the year.

Starting this story at 7:15 AM, it’s a little bit early for the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page to have finished its updates, but the PPD are already listing 499 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. That would tie it for last year’s 499 dead, just one behind the all-time record of 500, set during the crack cocaine gang wars of 1990.

Philadelphia Inquirer overnight breaking news reporter Robert Moran clued me in with a three-paragraph story telling readers that an unidentified man was shot once in the head in the 6200 block of Woodland Avenue in Southwest Philly. Two paragraphs, three sentences, and that’s it, that’s all to sum up a man’s life.

The third paragraph? It pointed out that this was the 499th murder in Philadelphia, and hyperlinked to an Inquirer story from earlier on Tuesday:

    Almost 500 people dead: Philadelphia is about to set a grim record for homicides

    With nearly six weeks remaining in the year, the number of lives lost will likely far exceed the 500 people who were killed in 1990.

    by Anna Orso, Chris Palmer, and Dylan Purcell | Tuesday, November 23, 2021

    Nearly 500 people have been killed in Philadelphia in 2021, putting the city on pace to surpass the record for annual homicides in the coming days.

    Driven largely by skyrocketing rates of gun violence, the number of killings this year will be the highest since at least 1960, which is as far back as the Police Department said it kept statistics on homicides.

    With nearly six weeks remaining in the year, the number of lives lost will likely far exceed the 500 people who were killed in 1990 at the height of the crack-cocaine epidemic — the previous record, and the only other time the city has seen 500 killings in a year.

    And the relentless pace of homicides through Tuesday is 13% more than at the same point in 2020, when shootings swelled amid the global pandemic and the city ended the year with 499 homicide victims. The violence has struck overwhelmingly in underserved communities of color.

Of course, 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 writers for the inquirer have to come up with a cutesy phrase like “underserved communities of color,” but they’ll never point out that the vast majority of homicides are committed intraracially: black people killing other black people, and white people killing other white people.

It ought to be obvious: if a significant number of blacks in the city had been slain by white suspects, the Inquirer would be all over that story!

The writers referenced the murder of 32-year-old Jessica Covington and her unborn daughter, as well as that of 24-year-old Sykea Patton, shot in broad daylight in the 800 block of North Preston Street, while walking her sons home from school.

Donavan Crawford, mugshot published by WPVI-TV. Click to enlarge.

The Inquirer had a second story on the killing of Miss Covington and her unborn daughter, as well as one on the arrest of Donavan Crawford, 28, of West Philadelphia, for the murder of Miss Patton, his ex-girlfriend. That’s a lot more than we normally see on city homicides, but that’s because Miss Covington, her unborn child, and Miss Patton are innocent victims, and, as we have noted many times before, the Inquirer is concerned about homicides in the city only when the victims are innocents, someone already of some note, or a cute little white girl.

But, for most victims? As columnist Helen Ubiñas noted just 17 days short of a year ago, the vast majority of the murder victims get about as much attention as the unidentified victim at the top of this story.

Just like the McClatchy newspapers, about which we’ve written, decline to publish mugshots of criminal suspects who happen to be black, the Inquirer did not publish the photo of Miss Patton’s suspected killer, but the Philly television stations, including WPVI-TV, channel 6, and KYW-TV, channel 3, did. Why won’t the Inquirer publish straight facts?

    The wave of homicides over the last two years is historically unique. In Philadelphia, other violent crime — including rape and assaults committed without a gun, which were already at decades-long lows — have continued to decline since 2019, even as shootings and killings rose.

This is where the Inquirer truthfully reports the statistics, but never questions them. Murder is not normally an entry-level crime.

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.[2]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?

And in the City of Brotherly Love, both the George Soros stooge District Attorney, Larry Krasner, and the nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper, have been working as hard as they can to undermine the police!

So, when Anna Orso, Chris Palmer, and Dylan Purcell tell me that “other violent crime — including rape and assaults committed without a gun, which were already at decades-long lows — have continued to decline since 2019, even as shootings and killings rose,” I believe that they are accurately reporting the statistics, but I don’t believe the statistics in the first place, and believe that real journalists ought to investigate what is behind those statistics.

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 See Table 4.
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The Editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer just can’t wrap their heads around the notion that criminals simply don’t obey the law.

In a surprise to absolutely no one who reads The Philadelphia Inquirer, the editors decided to use the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse to call for more gun control. Frist, Adam Garber, executive director of CeaseFirePA Education Fund, a gun violence prevention advocacy organization, was given OpEd space:

Amid a spike in shootings, Pa. legislators are giving us the kinds of gun laws that we don’t need

Gov. Wolf is expected to veto a bill that would allow state residents to carry concealed handguns without a permit. That the measure made it this far should alarm us all, writes Adam Garber.

by Adam Garber | Monday, November 22, 2021

Each year, roughly 1,500 Pennsylvanians lose their lives to a rapidly rising epidemic of gun violence. In our city, these deaths are hollowing out a generation of Philadelphians with 60% more shooting victims under 18 so far this year than in all of 2019. There isn’t a part of the commonwealth from York to Erie to Pittsburgh that isn’t seeing the same deadly violence. But instead of debating numerous evidence-based solutions, the Pennsylvania General Assembly voted this month to make our commonwealth an even less safe place to live.

Senate Bill 565, known as permitless carry, would allow anyone over age 18 to carry a loaded, concealed handgun in public without a permit.

Let that sink in a minute.

The person next to you on the subway, at the deli counter, or at the grocery store could have a hidden firearm. Such a law would dismantle the existing concealed carry permit process, which includes enhanced safeguards to help law enforcement ensure concealed firearm carriers do not endanger public safety. It would also allow for open carry of a firearm without a permit in the City of Philadelphia.

There’s more at the original, but Mr Garber’s statement that “The person next to you on the subway, at the deli counter, or at the grocery store could have a hidden firearm” ignores the obvious: in the City of Brotherly Love, the person next to you on the subway, at the deli counter, or at the grocery store might already have a concealed firearm, and not give a hoot that he doesn’t have a permit; he has his weapon because he wants his weapon.

Then there is this, from the Editorial Board:

In Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal, a lesson about laws that allow more guns to be carried in public

Advocating for more people to be armed in more situations does nothing to make Pennsylvania safer.

by The Editorial Board | Monday, November 22, 2021

The story of the night of Aug. 25, 2020, in Kenosha, Wis., is the story of an American dystopia — one that is induced by guns and one that Pennsylvania’s Republican lawmakers seemingly want to move the commonwealth closer toward by allowing permitless concealed carry of firearms.

It’s the story of a nation armed to the teeth.

It’s the story of, in the words of the Black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, a “double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals.”

In the midst of a summer marked by Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis, Kenosha police shot and severely injured Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man. The shooting sparked protests nationwide. Two days after the shooting, Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old white resident of Illinois, arrived in Kenosha armed with an AR-15-style automatic rifle. By night’s end, Rittenhouse had shot three people who’d participated in a protest, killing two.

Another bit of lying by not telling the whole truth. Yes, Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, and Gaige Grosskreutz “participated in a protest”, but Mr Rittenhouse did not shoot them for “participat(ing) in a protest”; he shot them in self-defense because they chased him down and attacked him! Mr Rittenhouse was legally armed; Mr Grosskreutz, who has a concealed pistol, was not; his concealed carry permit had expired. Mr Rittenhouse was there, with his AR-15, because the Mostly Peaceful Protesters had not been quite so peaceful the previous two nights.

Then again, who knows: perhaps the Editorial Board believe, as David S Cohen seems to imply, that arson is a legitimate part of a “racial justice protest.” The Inquirer did, after all fire get Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski to resign over the “Buildings Matter, Too” headline.

In Pennsylvania, there are more than 1,000 people serving life without the possibility of parole despite never having killed anyone — about 70% of them are Black.

Well, that’s true. It is also true that, in 2020, black victims accounted for about 86% of the city’s 499 homicide victims, and 84% of the 2,236 shootings. That 70% of roughly 1,000 people currently serving life without the possibility of parole are black doesn’t seem terribly out of line with the homicide rate among black Philadelphians is so high. The city is just three killings behind 2020’s 499, with five weeks left in the year!

Inquirer reporter Anna Orso reported on a double homicide we mentioned Sunday:

Police are questioning a suspect in the killing of a pregnant woman in Northeast Philadelphia

Authorities said Jessica Covington, 32, was shot multiple times in the head and stomach. Detectives believe she had just left her own baby shower.

by Anna Orso | Monday, November 22, 2021 | Updated: 7:14 PM EST

Philadelphia police were questioning a suspect Monday in the weekend killing of a pregnant woman and her unborn child, but investigators say they were still collecting evidence and charges were not yet filed.

Also see: Killadelphia Update, by Robert Stacy McCain.

Authorities said Jessica Covington, 32, was shot multiple times in the head and stomach just after 8:30 p.m. Saturday on the 6100 block of Palmetto Street in Crescentville, where she lived. Detectives believe she had just left her own baby shower and was unloading gifts from her vehicle when shots rang out.

Joanne Pescatore, assistant supervisor of the homicide and nonfatal shootings unit in the District Attorney’s Office, said Monday that police had identified a suspect, but she would not identify the person or comment on a potential motive. She said investigators had recovered video footage from the block where the shooting occurred, but said several streetlights were out, and the video is “extremely” dark.

Police Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said homicide detectives were conducting “a lot of interviews,” but could not confirm a suspect was among them. He said they were executing search warrants and analyzing other evidence and described the investigation as “very active.”

According to District Attorney Larry Krasner, who said during a news conference that the slaying made him “sick,” it is “very likely” that whoever is charged in connection with the killing will face two counts of murder, one each for the mother and her unborn child. He said homicide detectives “have been working nonstop and doing an amazing job with this case.”

There’s more at the original, including a notation by the reporter that six people had been murdered in Philly over the weekend. According to the Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, there had been only five homicides, but perhaps the police were not counting Miss Covington’s unborn child, where Miss Orso, perhaps influenced by Mr Krasner’s statement, did.

But there’s an obvious question for the Editorial Board: do they think that the only reason Miss Covington could be murdered like that was because her killer had a concealed carry permit? If he didn’t have a permit, would that have meant that he wouldn’t have had a gun?

This is the point that seemingly baffles the left. It’s as though they just can’t wrap their heads around the idea that criminals don’t obey the law, and that if someone was willing to go out and deliberately murder Miss Covington and her unborn daughter — remember: she was shot in both the head and the abdomen, so the unborn child was targeted as well — that someone wouldn’t care one bit that he was carrying his firearm illegally.

—————————–

Update: Tuesday, November 23, 2021 at 8:20 AM EST

The Philadelphia Police Department’s morning tally has city homicides up to 497.

In looking at the Inquirer’s website this morning, I found no stories about anyone being murdered in the city yesterday, so it’s possible that the increase to 497 includes Miss Covington’s unborn daughter, but I don’t know that. What I did find was this ending paragraph from an overnight story by Robert Moran:

Gregory Keleman was charged with murder, attempted murder, and unlawful possession of a weapon.

It seems that Mr Keleman, assuming he is guilty of the charges, didn’t care much about not having a permit to carry a weapon. You’d think that the editors of the Inquirer would notice such things, and they would inform their opinions, but if you did think that, you’d apparently be wrong.

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Killadelphia A Philadelphia woman and her unborn child are deliberately murdered

I am stunned that this story is still listed on the main page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, but, then again, ‘innocents’ appear to be the victims in this case, and I’ve often said that the inquirer editors only care about homicides in the City of Brotherly Love if an innocent, a “somebody“, or a cute little white girl is the victim:

    Pregnant woman fatally shot; her unborn child also dies

    The 32-year-old woman, who was seven months pregnant, was shot in the head and stomach around 8:30 p.m. on the 6100 block of Palmetto Street in what police say appears to have been a targeted hit.

    by Diane Mastrull | Sunday, November 21, 2021

    A pregnant woman and her unborn child were killed Saturday night in a shooting in Philadelphia’s Crescentville section that police say appears to have been a targeted hit.

    The 32-year-old woman, who was seven months pregnant, was unloading baby shower gifts from a Kia Soul when she was shot in the head and stomach around 8:30 p.m. on the 6100 block of Palmetto Street, police said.

WPVI-TV had a longer report. The victims were shot multiple times, something the Inquirer story does not make clear. One witness said he heard seven shots, while the Philadelphia Police collected eleven shell casings. And while the police said that they did not have a motive, shooting a seven-month pregnant woman in the head and stomach, apparently several times each, means that it was definitely intended to kill the unborn child as well.

Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat, under whose regime the city has gone from the 280 homicides in Michael Nutter’s last year, 2015, to 277, then 315, 353, 356, and 499 last year, is having the city offer a reward, but notice his wording: he refers to “the victim’s loved ones,” not “the victims’ loved ones”. In this, he betrays the fact that he sees this as only one homicide, and not two. But, then again, he’s a Democrat, so an unborn child doesn’t really count.

I wonder whether the Philadelphia Police Department will count this as one or two killings.
___________________________

Updated: 5:10 PM EST

The Inquirer story was updated at 4:25 PM:

    While police did not update Philadelphia’s official homicide tally over the weekend, the fatal shooting on Saturday night would bring the total slain so far this year to about 494 — a toll already 13% higher than as of the same date last year.

    With murders running at an average rate of more than 50 a month this year, there is little doubt that the total number killed in Philadelphia in 2021 will exceed 500. This would be a grim milestone, topping the previous highest tally of 500 in 1990 when crack was new and turf wars among dealers were unusual.

Actually, there’s little doubt that they’ll top 500 by the end of November! But at least the Inquirer has noticed.

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Killadelphia A trauma nurse laments over all of the bodies which are brought into her emergency room

As I do every weekday morning, I checked the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, and I saw that three more people had been sent untimely to their eternal rewards yesterday. 486 homicides ÷ 320 days elapsed = 1.51875 per day x 365 days = 554.34375 projected homicides for the year. With only 14 more killings needed to tie the record of 500, at the current rate that should happen in just 9 days, or on November 25th, which is Thanksgiving Day.

Philadelphia Inquirer writer Robert Moran reported, briefly, on one of the killings:

A 67-year-old woman was fatally shot during an attempted robbery inside a check-cashing store Tuesday afternoon in the city’s Ogontz section, police said.

About 1:10 p.m., the woman, who was believed to be the owner, was shot in the chest inside Any Checks Cashed at 5812 Old York Rd., which is next door to a day-care center. She was pronounced dead at the scene by medics.

That’s it, that’s all, a 67-year-old woman’s life, and death, reduced to two paragraphs. There were a couple more which told readers that the police had very little information thus far. The story had been superseded by others, and was not visible on the Inquirer’s website main page.

But it was this article, blurbed on that main page as “I wake up every day knowing that I will have to watch another Black man take his last breath. And over what?” that caught my attention, though the title, when I opened it, was different:

A trauma nurse’s letter to a Philly shooter | Opinion

I wish you would wait before you pick up that weapon. I wish you could come talk to me. I would’ve begged you not to do this.

by Ruqiyya Greer, For The Inquirer | Wednesday, November 17, 2021

Dear Gunman,

When the alarm goes off, I know that first responders are on the way with your target.

We stand outside, dressed in plastic gowns, gloves, and bonnets. We are sweating profusely as we wait for your target’s arrival. We hear the sirens from a distance. They get louder as they get closer. They race down the hill and come to an abrupt stop. We can smell the burning rubber of the tires. The door swings open and there lays your target, bloody and unconscious.

We struggle to pull his lifeless body, covered with bullet holes and blood, out of the car. It becomes a struggle to get him out as the moisture from the blood makes it difficult to get a tight grasp.

We get your target to the trauma bay as we empty several code carts full of medical supplies, injecting several lifesaving medications into his still body. Techs stand in line taking turns performing chest compressions. The trauma team cracks his chest open to manually compress his heart to keep what little blood he has left circulating.

After we have exhausted all measures, the attending doctor announces, “time of death.” The techs bag his cut-up clothes as well as his body. Two tags are applied, one to his big toe and the other to the outside of the body bag.

There’s more at the original, describing what Ruqiyya Greer, the author and a trauma nurse in the emergency room at Temple University Hospital, sees and feels, practically every day, on the job. And she points out what Mr Moran’s brief stories, the Inquirer in general,[1]We have noted previously Elizabeth Hughes, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and her determination to make her newspaper “an anti-racist news organization,” has turned it into exactly … Continue reading and the Police Department figures, obscure, because it’s inconvenient reporting: the vast majority of the homicide victims in the City of Brotherly Love are young black males, sometimes men, and sometimes still boys.[2]The Philadelphia Tribune, a publication for the city’s black community, noted that, in 2020, black victims accounted for about 86% of the city’s 499 homicide victims, and 84% of the 2,236 … Continue reading

She concluded:

There’s so many times I want to walk away, but if I do, I will be deserting my community and my culture. I can’t do that. But these days it feels like I am a nurse in the middle of a war. I wake up every day knowing that I will have to watch another Black man take his last breath. And over what?

Our ancestors fought for our freedom; they were murdered for our freedom. I don’t think they risked it all for us to murder each other.

Please, before you pick up that gun again, placing your life at risk, risking your freedom and ending another life, talk to whoever plays a significant role in your life. A parent, uncle, pastor. You are about to make the worst mistake of your life.

I really don’t like quoting so many paragraphs from an Inquirer article, but Miss Greer’s concluding point is important: she is asking the potential shooters out there — people who will almost certainly never read her ‘letter’ anyway — to think before they act.

But they don’t think, at least they don’t think about the act itself. Oh, they may well think, and plot, and plan about how they are going to get away with it, but seem to give little thought or care about what will happen if they do get caught, very possibly spending the rest of their miserable lives locked up.

Miss Greer has been far more honest than most. While so many Philadelphia politicians want to blame the guns, she noted the people who “pick(ed) up that gun,” the people who shot, and frequently killed, other people, most often members of their own communities.

References

References
↑1 We have noted previously Elizabeth Hughes, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and her determination to make her newspaper “an anti-racist news organization,” has turned it into exactly that, a newspaper more concerned with racial identity and sorting out its news coverage that way than it has been about the “public’s right to know.” The vast majority of homicide victims in Philadelphia are black, but when one black gang banger kills another black gang banger, it isn’t really news anymore, not to the Inquirer. Instead, the paper paid more attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s four separate stories; how many do the mostly black victims get?
↑2 The Philadelphia Tribune, a publication for the city’s black community, noted that, in 2020, black victims accounted for about 86% of the city’s 499 homicide victims, and 84% of the 2,236 shootings; non-Hispanic black Americans make up only 38.3% of the city’s population. The current statistics for this year I have not been able to find.