Tag Archives: #Philadelphia

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Chicago thinks it’s the nation’s murder capital. Philadelphia laughs and says, “Hold my beer!” The good people of those two fine cities are getting exactly that for which they voted.

A police officer places makers on evidence on the 3900 block of Poplar Street 18-year-old Nasir Marks was fatally shot on Tuesday, May 25, 2021. Steven M Falk, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer. Click to enlarge.

According to the Chicago Tribune, as of Sunday, December 19th, there had been 783 murders in the Windy City thus far in 2021, 34 more than on the same day last year. As of the same day, 540 homicides had occurred in Philadelphia. The 19th being the 353rd day of the year, that works out to 2.2181 homicides per day in Chicago, and ‘only’ 1.5297 per day in the City of Brotherly Love.

But, according to the 2020 census, there were 2,746,388 people living in Chicago, and 1,603,797 in Philly. Using the homicide rates, that works out to a projected 558 killings in Philly and 810 in Chicago. Murder rates are calculated based on 100,000 population, meaning that Chicago is headed for a homicide rate of 29.4933 per 100,000, while Philadelphia is looking at 34.7924. Philadelphia is far deadlier than Chicago!

We noted that Philadelphia tied its 1990 homicide record of 500 the day before Thanksgiving, and at that point, the city was actually seeing slightly fewer killings per day than it was on December 19th. And guess what: with 547 homicides as of the end of Thursday, December 23rd, the rate has crept up slightly again, to 1.5322 per day, making the projected number of killings 559!

I will admit to a sort of grim fascination with the numbers, but murder in Philadelphia has really changed things. One murder, it has been said, is a tragedy, but 547 is just a statistic, and to the leadership of the city, and the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer, that’s all it is, a statistic, a number that they can attribute of “gun violence,” but never examine the real problem: bad people!

In Ironic Justice: Two Anti-Police Lawmakers Get Carjacked, Robert Stacy McCain noted that two Democratic politicians, one in Chicago and one in Philly, who supported the “reform” of policing — meaning: getting even softer on crime — were carjacked within 24 hours of each other.

Illinois state Sen. Kimberly Lightford (D-Maywood) was targeted in suburban Chicago on Tuesday night, while Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) was carjacked Wednesday afternoon after an event in South Philadelphia.

Well, it seems that, given that Representative Scanlon is a sitting congresswoman, the feds are getting involved:

“The investigation into this incident is in its very initial stages, and we are continuing to investigate and evaluate charging decisions,” said U.S. Attorney Williams. “Armed carjacking is a serious federal crime. There have been a rash of violent crimes like this recently, and while there were national security implications to this particular incident, we are always working collaboratively with our local partners to evaluate if cases should be taken federally. Working together means more resources, more tools, more intelligence. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If you pick up a gun and use it to commit a crime, together, we will come after you. And we are very good at what we do.”

In point of fact, however, if armed carjacking is a “serious federal crime,” when was the last time the feds got involved in such a case? Just two weeks ago, Philadelphia police said the city has seen an 80% increase in carjackings this year, and what had United States Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams done in response? Nothing, until a Democratic congresswoman got carjacked in — sweet irony! — FDR Park.

Seriously, go look through the press release archive at the U.S. Attorney’s web site and tell me if you find a case where they previously prosecuted a carjacking. I went back as far as April and didn’t find one, so if the Biden DOJ was making it a priority to “come after” carjackers before this week, they weren’t very successful at it. But then again, success really hasn’t been a hallmark of the Biden administration, has it?

Mr McCain was employing sarcasm, but there’s a not-so-veiled slam at Philadelphia’s District Attorney, Larry Krasner, a George Soros-financed stooge whose main goal is getting the bad guys released, not jailed. At some point, you’d think Philadelphians would get tired of all of the crime and violence in their city’s streets, but not tired enough: Mr Krasner was re-elected last month!

The good people of those two cities are getting exactly that for which they voted.

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36

A man’s life, reduced to four paragraphs. From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

    Coroner releases name of man, 21, who died after shooting in Lexington

    by Karla Ward | Saturday, December 18, 2021 | 12:44 PM EST | Updated: 1:48 PM EST

    A 21-year-old man died after being shot in a neighborhood near downtown Lexington late Friday.

    Lexington police said they were called to the shooting on the 800 block of Oak Hill Drive, off Loudon Avenue, at 10:56 p.m. When they arrived, police found the man inside a residence, Lexington police said in a news release Saturday.

    The Fayette County coroner’s office said the man, Devon Sandusky, was pronounced dead at the scene at 11:25 p.m.

    They said the investigation is ongoing. No suspect information was released.

There was a fifth paragraph, but one which simply told readers where to report information to the police. A sixth paragraph noted that this was the city’s 36th homicide of the year, a new record. The previous record was 34, set in 2020. At the current pace, Lexington is projected to see one or two more killings before 2021 is over.

To me, this was sadly reminiscent of the stories I see in The Philadelphia Inquirer, where a murder victim’s life is reduced to a few short paragraphs, often without even the victim’s name being published. But, unlike the Inquirer, the Herald-Leader will print more about the murder as more information is released. With ‘only’ 36 homicides on which to report, the newspaper’s staff can put a little bit more time into reporting on it; the Inquirer’s staff are overwhelmed, with 535 homicides through Thursday, December 16th, and the City of Brotherly Love on pace to record another 23 killings, for a total of 558.

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The powers that be in Philadelphia continue to blame each other for a problem about which they cannot tell the truth

There are times when I worry about being a bit of a broken record on the homicide rate in Philadelphia, and I skipped some recent stories, but the blame game in the City of Brotherly Love has gotten both hysterically funny and monumentally tragic.

Mayor Kenney acknowledges Philadelphia has ‘a gun crisis’ but sidesteps questions about DA Larry Krasner’s crime comments

District Attorney Larry Krasner drew criticism Monday when he said: “We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence.”

By Anna Orso | Wednesday, December 8, 2021 | 5:26 PM EST

Two days after District Attorney Larry Krasner stirred outrage by insisting the city isn’t in the midst of a crime or violence crisis, Mayor Jim Kenny and the city’s police commissioner sought Wednesday to gingerly wade into — or away from — the issue.

During their scheduled biweekly news conference, one that began this year in direct response to the rising number of shootings, Kenney and Commissioner Danielle Outlaw both said they do believe the city has a gun violence problem.

Both also declined to say more about Krasner’s comments or the ensuing pushback, including a blistering statement from Kenney’s predecessor, former Mayor Michael Nutter, who called Krasner’s remarks “some of the worst, most ignorant, and most insulting comments I have ever heard spoken by an elected official.”

Kenney on Wednesday said while he agrees “we’re in a gun crisis,” he would not “get involved in a back-and-forth between a former mayor and the DA.”

There’s more at the original.

Michael Nutter wasn’t the best mayor Philadelphia ever had, but, during his eight years in office, his Police Commissioner, Charles Ramsey, and he presided over a significant decrease in killings in the city. The city saw 391 homicides in Mayor John Street’s last year of 2007; that number was down 60, to 331, in Mayor Nutter’s first year in office, and though tied again in 2012, the numbers were generally down. In their last three years, 2013, 2014, and 2015, the city saw fewer than 300 murders, 246, 248, and 280, respectively.

Though that number dropped slightly, to 277 in Mayor Kenney’s first year, by the following year the numbers were above 300 again, at 315, 353, 356, and then last year’s whopping 499.

District Attorney Krasner, 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.

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.[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.

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

Of course, all of the politicians, all of the politically correct, want to talk about “gun violence,” as though those inanimate objects somehow levitate and shoot people all by themselves, all to push stricter gun control laws. 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 experienced editors and reporters for the Inquirer never noticed that the people committing crimes with guns are almost never holders of firearms permits, almost never carrying firearms legally, and, shockingly enough, 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[3]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, including Mayor Kenney, including Commissioner Outlaw, would rather ignore the truth than deal with the truth.

References

References
↑1 See Table 4.
↑2 Though “burglarize” is apparently a real word now, I refuse to use it.
↑3 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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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.
Posted on by

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.

Posted on by

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.