Tag Archives: #Philadelphia

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They can’t handle the truth!

The Friday morning report from the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page shows the city on the edge of another milestone: with 299 souls sent early to their eternal rewards, the 300th murder will almost certainly happen sometime today, but the PPD only updates the site on weekdays; we will (probably) not get the totals until Monday morning. As of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, the city was seeing 1.5255 homicides per day, on pace for 557 for 2021, a number which is actually down slightly.

We have previously noted how some residents in Philadelphia have, in effect, put themselves in jail, by barring up their row homes to protect themselves from the bad guys who roam their streets. The image to the right, which the reader can enlarge by clicking on it, shows four row homes, out of six, in which the residents have caged themselves in at night.

Now comes Jabari K. Jones, the President of the West Philadelphia Corridor Collaborative, telling us of the effect that “gun violence” is having upon black business owners in the City of Brotherly Love:

    West Philly business owners have lost faith in the City to keep them safe

    I have spoken to countless West Philadelphia business owners who would love to be open longer each day, but they choose to close at nightfall because they have no confidence they will be safe.

    by Jabari Jones | July 14, 2021 | 9:00 AM EDT

    Visit one of our historic commercial corridors in West Philadelphia or any predominantly diverse community after sundown, and the sight is the same: silver shutter gates, dark storefronts, and empty businesses that have closed for the day.

    Now, on that same day, visit Center City after dark. Bars and restaurants are thriving, people of all ages stroll by storefronts, and everyone is open for business.

    The reason for the difference? Public safety.

    I have spoken to countless West Philadelphia business owners who would love to be open longer each day, but they choose to close at nightfall because they have no confidence in the City of Philadelphia to keep them or their patrons safe from the rising tide of gun violence.

    In the last two months, a Dunkin’ Donuts manager in North Philly was murdered as she was opening the store at dawn, and West Philadelphia fashion designer Sircarr Johnson, Jr. was shot and killed when his cookout was sprayed with over 100 rounds.

    According to the Pew Charitable Trust, only 2.5% of Philly businesses have Black owners, even though Black people represent nearly 44% of city residents. But data from the West Philadelphia Corridor Collaborative show that, on certain corridors in West Philly, Black people own a majority of businesses. A stroll through Center City, however, shows mostly larger corporate stores and white-owned businesses. For years, business and city officials have studied why the city’s racial demographics aren’t reflected in business ownership, and why BIPOC-owned businesses fail at higher rates.

There’s more at the original, and I’d really like to republish it all, but that would be plagiarism, and exceed Title 17 U.S.C., §107 “Fair use” standards. Briefly, Mr Jones tells the reader that “white-owned businesses” in Center City have several more hours per day in which they can be open, meaning several more hours per day in which they can sell their goods and services, and make money. I’d encourage people to follow the link and read the whole thing.

Nevertheless, Mr Jones still danced around the real issue. While pointing out that the economic damage was heavily skewed to black-owned businesses, in heavily black neighborhoods, he could not bring himself to point out that the city’s “gun violence” problem is a black “gun violence” problem. The black shooters aren’t just wounding and killing people, but black-owned businesses as well.

The next day came Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, with a similar sense of denial of reality:

    There’s nothing more progressive than stopping city kids from getting shot

    Progressives need to understand what’s behind rising city homicides and develop plans to reduce shootings — without yesterday’s police abuses.

    by Will Bunch | July 15, 2021

    The easiest part of writing this column was the beginning — finding the most up-to-date examples of the gun violence in Philadelphia that has steadily risen since the start of the pandemic and has lately spiked again, in the long hot summer of 2021.

    Just hours earlier — at 1 a.m. on an unseasonably muggy Thursday morning — a man bounded onto SEPTA’s Nite Owl bus on Broad Street near Chestnut, in the beating heart of Center City, and started shooting, critically wounding a 29-year-old man and utterly terrifying the 15 other passengers onboard. Just a few hours earlier, a car chase in the city’s Logan section had ended with a gunman from one car shooting and wounding two teenagers, aged 19 and just 14, from the other car after it had crashed into an SUV with four occupants. At roughly the same time in West Philadelphia, an unrelated shooting wounded a 15-year-old and 13-year-old.

    Go back to the night before, or the night before that, and you’ll find similarly grim stories: Philadelphia teenagers — their names, along with their stories and their humanity, rarely identified — wounded or even killed by the latest burst of gunfire. Of the more than 1,200 people shot so far in Philadelphia in a year that’s barely half over, more than 100 have been children. With 297 people murdered so far, there’s a more than decent chance that the so-called City of Brotherly Love will pass its all-time homicide record of 500 back in 1990. This is a human-rights crisis in America’s sixth-largest — and founding — city.

    And yet, as many conservatives and mainstream-media contrarian types have been so quick to point out, rising murder rates — occurring right now in most American big cities — haven’t been a front-burner for the political left in 2021. Indeed, there’s been a habit, at least on social media, of tsk-tsking the problem by pointing to “if it bleeds, it leads” media sensationalism (a real thing) or noting that overall crime rates, including the violent crime category, haven’t really spiked and remain near historical lows. This seems prompted by fears that making urban gun violence a top-tier issue will both hurt the movement against social injustices like police brutality and mass incarceration, and also distract from other issues on the progressive to-do list.

I have to give Mr Bunch credit here: whether he realized it or not, he told the truth: many credentialed media sources fear telling the truth, because the truth goes against the liberal narrative. We have previously noted, many times, that the Inquirer doesn’t bother to report on murders in Philadelphia unless the victim is an innocent, like Christine Lupo, a “somebody,” like a local high school basketball player, or a cute little white girl, like the 2,782 site search results for Rian Thal. For the Inquirer to actually tell the truth would be for that publisher-directed “anti-racist news organization” to undermine its political direction.

Mr Bunch called “mass incarceration” a “social injustice,” yet had Delaware Superior Court Judge Vivian L. Medinilla been perhaps a little less concerned with “mass incarceration,” Christine Lugo and several other people in Philly and New Castle County, Delaware would almost certainly still be alive today. Mr Jones, in his column, had noted Jovaun Patterson was given a sweetheart plea deal, dropping an attempted murder charge, for shooting and permanently crippling a West Philly shop owner, 3½ to 10 years,[1]Perhaps they should be satisfied with what they got, given that, in 8,500 Philadelphia shootings since 2015, suspects have been charged in 1 out of 5 cases and convicted in just 9%. by District Attorney Larry Krasner, whom the Inquirer incredibly endorsed for re-election. Mr Bunch, and in part Mr Jones, didn’t want to see the one program which actually does reduce shootings and killings: keeping the bad guys locked up, for as long as the law allows.

Let’s tell the truth here: in a city that is only 42.13% black, according to the Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard, 75.53% of all shooting victims are black males, and another 6.72% are black females; 82.25% of all victims are black. Just 4.06% are white males, with 0.86% being white women.

If the problem is the availability of firearms, as the Inquirer so often tells us, why aren’t white people, 40.66% of the city’s population, shooting and killing each other at rates similar to blacks?

If you don’t tell the truth to yourself about the problem, you can never solve the problem! And the truth is that there is something in the urban black culture in the City of Brotherly Love — and let’s be honest here, in other large cities as well — which tells young black men that shooting each other is acceptable behavior.[2]The Inquirer has reported that, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males.” There’s … Continue reading The killing of Sircarr Johnson, Jr, which the Inquirer did cover because he was a ‘somebody,’ had the shooters fire off more than 100 rounds toward a crowd at a cook-out, about as indiscriminate a killing action as one can imagine.

The Inquirer doesn’t report the truth because 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 there can’t handle the truth.

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References
↑1 Perhaps they should be satisfied with what they got, given that, in 8,500 Philadelphia shootings since 2015, suspects have been charged in 1 out of 5 cases and convicted in just 9%.
↑2 The Inquirer has reported that, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males.” There’s something wryly amusing that the Inquirer follows the Associated Press stylebook change, in which the AP noted that they would capitalize “black” in reference to race, but not “white,” and in this case, the writers capitalized “black” but not “brown”. As per our stylebook, we do not capitalize ‘colors’ when referring to race.
↑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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It isn’t the guns; it’s the culture

5439 Race Street, Philadelphia

Race Street in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia is not the worst neighborhood in the City of Brotherly Love, but it isn’t Society Hill, either. The photo is not specified as the crime scene, but is designed to show readers what the neighborhood looks like.

In doing my almost daily research on crime in the city, I happened upon a six-day-old story by Philadelphia Inquirer nighttime breaking news reporter Robert Moran. It says little, because his information was (probably) a sparse report from the Philadelphia Police, but it actually says a whole lot:

3 wounded in West Philly shooting

More than 50 shots were fired shortly before 10 p.m.

by Robert Moran | July 7, 2021

Also from the Inquirer: DA Larry Krasner aims to keep teen offenders out of criminal justice system with new restorative program. What a great idea to leave wannabe thugs on the street!

Two men and a woman were wounded in a shooting Wednesday in West Philadelphia, police said.

Shortly before 10 p.m., a barrage of shots were fired from 60 feet away at a group of people standing on the porch of a residence on the 5400 block of Race Street across from the Nichols Park playground, said Chief Inspector Scott Small.

A 22-year-old man was struck several times throughout his body. A 20-year-old man was shot in the leg and a 29-year-old woman was hit in the shoulder. All three were transported by police to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where they were reported in stable condition, Small said.

Someone on the porch returned fire at the one or more shooters, Small said.

Mr Moran’s report simply says that the crime scene was in the 5400 block of Race Street, across from the playground. The photo to the left, which may be enlarged by clicking on it, is more of a panorama of Race Street across from that park.

The police reported that they found “more than 50” shell casings at the crime scene, and that there were 10 to 15 people on the porch or inside the home.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain 64 Shots: Londre ‘KTS Dre’ Sylvester Gunned Down Outside Chicago Jail

The “one or more” shooters were aiming at a specific person, with whom he, or they, had a specific reason to kill. Someone on the porch was armed and returned fire. “More than 50” expended shell casings, and only three people were hit?

I can do something really radical here and tell the truth. The victims almost certainly knew who the shooters were, and that’s the case in the vast majority of Philadelphia shootings and killings, that’s the case in almost every such incident in big cities all over the country. Yet these crimes are being solved at a decreasing rate, because the residents won’t talk to the police. They’re too afraid of the gangs, they don’t like the police in the first place, and, let’s be honest again, they depend more on street justice than anything from law enforcement.

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Why won’t The Philadelphia Inquirer report on neighborhood conditions?

I am shocked, shocked! I tell you, that The Philadelphia Inquirer covered the shootings in the City of Brotherly Love over the weekend.

First, the numbers. The Philadelphia Police Department reported that there have been 294 homicides as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, July 11th. Over 192 days in the year, that works out to 1.53125 per day, on pace for 559 murders for the entire year. That’s a 34.25% increase over the same day last year.

On the same day last year, the numbers worked out to a projected 415 killings, and we know that the city actually finished with 499. The record of 500 was set in 1990, during the height of the crack cocaine wars.

If the city continues on the same pace as established yesterday, it will tie the record of 500 on the 327th day of the year. That would be Tuesday, November 23rd, two days before Thanksgiving, with 5½ weeks left in the year.

15 people shot — one 14 times, another 11 — in a weekend of gun violence in Philly

Last week, the city’s total of those killed or wounded in shootings since 2015 surpassed a staggering 10,000 people, The Inquirer reported.

By Diane Mastrull | July 11, 2021

A sextuple shooting in North Philadelphia, during which one man was shot 14 times, was just one of eight episodes of gun violence from late Saturday night into early Sunday morning involving 15 victims, two of whom died, police said.

Killed were a man of unknown identity and age who was shot multiple times inside a business on the 1600 block of West Cumberland Street in North Philadelphia at 10 p.m. Saturday and a 23-year-old man shot 11 times in the back, chest, leg, arm and neck on the 100 block of Leverington Avenue in Manayunk at 12:54 a.m., according to police reports.

All shootings took place between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. Two were doubles, as Philadelphia continued on a trend seen in cities across the country. Last week, Philadelphia’s total of those killed or wounded in shootings since 2015 surpassed a staggering 10,000 people, The Inquirer reported. July was off to a violent start with 77 people struck by gunfire in the first eight days of the month, according to the report.

The one involving six victims was reported around 11:30 p.m. at West Butler and North Ninth Streets, in the city’s Hunting Park section. The victims were all males, ages 22, 23, 28, 31, 34 and 41. Four were in stable condition and two in critical condition Sunday at Temple University Hospital, police said. The 23-year-old was shot 14 times, they said.

According to police, a surveillance video shows two males walk up to a group gathered on the 900 block of West Butler Street and begin firing before fleeing in an unknown direction. A search for them continued Sunday evening.

901 West Butler Street. Screen capture from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

Well, at least the Inquirer didn’t tell us that two inanimate guns levitated and shot these people themselves. A photo in the Inquirer shows the scene, with two police evidence people working the scene, amidst dozens of evidence markers, and what appears to be three neighborhood loiterers. The photo to the left shows the address, a bodega at 901 West Butler Street, and it isn’t exactly a middle-class area.

This was a targeted hit: shooting one guy 14 times isn’t some sort of accident, and two “males” — note, not “white males” or “black males” or “Hispanic males”, describing either the shooters or their victims[1]Note that in one of the internally referenced stories in the Inquirer, it states, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. … Continue reading — walking up and opening fire isn’t just “gun violence,” but clearly attempted murder. The shooters knew who their targets were, and had a pretty good idea where to find them.

If the survivors decide to tell the police who shot them, and odds are very great that they know their assailants, we’ll eventually find out that the shooters have long rap sheets, and District Attorney Larry Krasner treated them leniently.

909 West Butler. Click to enlarge.

A photo just a couple of buildings away shows that this is an unsafe neighborhood, as the residents at 909 West Butler Street spent good money to completely bar in their front porch. 909 looks like someone has been trying to take care of his row house, but there are a lot of buildings in view with peeling paint and other signs of not being well maintained.

721 West Butler Street. Click to enlarge.

A couple blocks down the street, at 721 or 723 West Butler, the owners have completely barred in their property. Why, it’s almost as though they don’t feel safe in the neighborhood, as though they don’t trust the people there.

This is the part that the Inquirer doesn’t report. People are virtually locking themselves in jail to protect their families and themselves.

Use Google Maps for 3810 North Franklin Street, near 721 West Butler, and toggle up the street. The photos show a racially integrated neighborhood, but one in which several row homes, including three in a row, at 3846, 3848, and 3850 North Franklin, have barred in their front porches. Why doesn’t the Inquirer ever report on that? The paper loves to blame ‘systemic racism,’ but the photos from Google Maps show white people as well as black, show an integrated area.

These neighborhoods are overwhelmed not by inanimate guns, but by bad people living in a bad culture. They are relatively poor, but are trying to protect what little they have, not just from guns, but from theft, from assault, and from rape . . . but all that the “anti-racist news organization” reports on is “gun violence,” because the #woke staff are just deathly afraid of blaming bad people.

References

References
↑1 Note that in one of the internally referenced stories in the Inquirer, it states, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males,” but the Inquirer story won’t tell you that about the victims in the reported shootings. I wonder why that is. There’s something wryly amusing that the Inquirer follows the Associated Press stylebook change, in which the AP noted that they would capitalize “black” in reference to race, but not “white,” and in this case, the writers capitalized “black” but not “brown”. As per our stylebook, we do not capitalize ‘colors’ when referring to race.
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Killadelphia The killers are playing catch up; The Philadelphia Inquirer is not

It was just yesterday that we noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t seem to pay much notice to the murders of young black males in the City of Brotherly Love. I pointed out, in the footnote, that with 287 homicides in 188 days (as of 11:59 PM on July 7th) equaled 1.5266 homicides per day, projecting a total of 557 for the year.

Well, it looks like the city’s thugs realized that they weren’t quite meeting their quota, because after two straight days of the Philadelphia Police Department reporting only one homicide, the gang bangers caught up: the Current Crime Statistics page shows 291 killings as of 11:59 PM on July 8th. 291 ÷ 189 days in the year, = 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year.

The Inquirer? Digging into several pages of their website at 8:30 AM — now at 4:42 PM, current update — this morning, I couldn’t find a single story, not so much as what Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas called a “handful of lines in a media alert,” although it’s possible I just didn’t dig into the right place.

Nevertheless, the editors and journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term … Continue reading at the Inquirer didn’t think that four homicides yesterday was worth noting on the website’s main page, where readers had a chance of spotting such.

Why? Because black lives don’t matter to the editors and staff of The Philadelphia Inquirer! Oh, they matter if taken by a white police officer, matter a very great deal, but when one black thug kills another black thug, which is what the vast majority of the city’s homicides are, it just doesn’t fit Teh Narrative that the “anti-racist news organization” wants to tell. Maybe it’s time for me to break out that Philadelphia Enquirer[2]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. logo once more.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑2 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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With just half the year gone, Philadelphia has already topped yearly homicide totals for 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 In promising to become "anti-racist," The Philadelphia Inquirer has become racist

We noted, just three weeks ago, that the City of Brotherly Love’s terrible homicide rate had topped the entire year’s total for 2013 and 2014:

    According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, as of the end of Tuesday, June 15th, the city hit what could wryly be called a milestone, it’s 250th murder. The math is pretty bad: 250 homicides ÷ 166 days = 1.506 per day, × 365 = 549.70 murders for the year. The evil, reich-wing Donald Trump has been out of office for just five days short of five months now, the very liberal, opposed to mass incarceration District Attorney Larry Krasner has been renominated, the pandemic restrictions have (mostly) been lifted, and Philly’s murder rate is increasing.

Well, as Mickey East, formerly a political science professor at the University of Kentucky used to say, to encourage students to get their work done, tempus is fugiting, and now, three weeks later, the Philadelphia Police Department is reporting 285 homicides as of 11:59 PM on Monday, July 5th. 285 homicides ÷ 186 days = 1.532 per day, putting the city on schedule for 559.27 for the year. Those 285 homicides now top the year’s totals for 2015 and 2016, 280 and 277 homicides, respectively. At least as of 5:15 PM, The Philadelphia Inquirer had taken no notice of that fact, at least on its website’s main page.

In just 20 days, the murder rate has increased enough to add 9 or 10 more dead bodies on Philly’s mean streets, but, as already noted, The Philadelphia Inquirer, “an anti-racist news organization” according to publisher Elizabeth Hughes, doesn’t care unless one of those killed was an ‘innocent,’ or a ‘somebody,‘ or a cute little white girl.

What did Miss Hughes say the Inquirer would do to make itself into that “anti-racist news organization” she wanted it to be?

    A month after the (Buildings Matter, Too) headline was published, the newsroom began a comprehensive process to examine nearly every facet of what our journalists do. Almost 80 staffers, more than a third of the newsroom, have convened every week since. In working groups, they discuss complex issues and make recommendations that are then considered by a steering committee made up of managers and frontline staffers. To date, all have been adopted.

    Here’s a sampling of what has been done or is close to being launched:

    • Producing an antiracism workflow guide for the newsroom that provides specific questions that reporters and editors should ask themselves at various stages of producing our journalism.
    • Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime.
    • Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.
    • Commissioning an independent audit of our journalism that resulted in a critical assessment. Many of the recommendations are being addressed, and a process for tracking progress is being developed.
    • Training our staff and managers on how to recognize and avoid cultural bias.
    • Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

And the result of all of that? Other than to criticize “gun violence,” a term which makes it sound as though inanimate firearms somehow levitate and shoot people all by themselves, the Inquirer almost never personalizes the actual shooters, never blames the people who pick up the guns and start firing.[1]A notable exception to that would be Keith Gibbson, but he is accused of killing an ‘innocent,’ Christine Lugo. Even saying that, the stories stopped after just two articles. In their great desire not to be racist, the Inquirer has become the racists they decry, examining everything through the prism of race, and deciding what to print, and not to print, based on its effects on race. That is, quite literally, discriminating on the basis of race! In “examin(ing) nearly every facet of what (their) journalists do,” they have become not journalists, but journolists![2]The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term … Continue reading

As I previously noted, I ran across a photo of the masthead of The Philadelphia Inquirer from February 25, 1953, and noticed the ‘taglines’ that it used: “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”. By Public ledger, the Inquirer was setting itself up as Philadelphia’s newspaper of record, which Wikipedia defines as “a major newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative.” That Wikipedia article named four newspapers of record for the United States: The New York Times (Founded 1851), The Washington Post (1877), The Los Angeles Times (1881) and The Wall Street Journal (1889). First printed on Monday, June 1, 1829, the then Pennsylvania Inquirer is older than any of them. “An editorial in the first issue of The Pennsylvania Inquirer promised that the paper would be devoted to the right of a minority to voice their opinion and ‘the maintenance of the rights and liberties of the people, equally against the abuses as the usurpation of power.’”

The newspaper, by its publisher’s own admission, no longer cares about anything as radical as the ‘public’s right to know,’ because knowing the truth, the unvarnished truth, might perpetuate stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.[3]That quote is specifically from the Sacramento Bee, and forms the basis of the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, but it is clearly a reflection of what the Inquirer does as well. But, at least the publisher has admitted what she wants to do; I, for one, will continue to point that out.

References

References
↑1 A notable exception to that would be Keith Gibbson, but he is accused of killing an ‘innocent,’ Christine Lugo. Even saying that, the stories stopped after just two articles.
↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑3 That quote is specifically from the Sacramento Bee, and forms the basis of the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, but it is clearly a reflection of what the Inquirer does as well.
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Killadelphia At least five people murdered in the City of Brotherly Love on the Fourth of July

I have said before that The Philadelphia Inquirer isn’t interested in covering homicides in the city unless the victim was an ‘innocent,’ or a ‘somebody,‘ or a cute little white girl.

Well, a somebody was killed, and the Inquirer published 815 words about him:

    A West Philly fashion designer and a state senator’s relative killed at a cookout are among 20 shot over the July 4th holiday

    Sircarr Johnson Jr., 23, was a father, a fashion designer, and the owner of Premiere Bande clothing store in West Philly.

    by Stephanie Farr | July 5, 2021

    Sircarr Johnson, Jr. From his Instagram account. Click to enlarge.

    Sircarr Johnson Sr. sat hunched in a chair in front of his son’s clothing store, Premiére Bande, in West Philadelphia on Monday morning, proudly dressed head-to-toe in an outfit designed by his 23-year-old son.

    The glass door to the store behind him was shattered by a bullet, one of dozens fired on the street less than 12 hours before.

    Johnson, who held Sircarr Johnson Jr. in his arms as his son died in the hail of gunfire Sunday night, was shattered, too.

    “How the bullet don’t hit me? How it don’t hit me?” he sobbed.

    Johnson’s son and namesake was one of two men killed when gunmen opened fire during a Fourth of July cookout that Johnson Jr. was having Sunday night at his store on 60th Street near Walnut.

    The second victim was identified as 21-year-old Salahaldin Mahmoud in a news release from State Sen. Sharif Street Office’s Monday afternoon. The release said Mahmoud was a first cousin of Street’s wife, April.

There’s a lot more at the original.

The article is primarily about Mr Johnson’s death, but did have some bare information about other murder victims. Besides Mr Mahmoud:

  • A 21-year-old man who was shot several times in his stomach and thigh on the 5900 block of Hazel Avenue in West Philadelphia at 1:53 a.m. Monday;
  • An 18-year-old man who was shot in his chest at 11:21 p.m. Sunday on the 2100 block of West Sedgley Avenue in North Philadelphia; and
  • A 21-year-old man who was found with a gunshot wound to his chest at 3:11 a.m. Sunday on a driveway along the 1300 block of Westbury Drive in Overbrook Park.

The Philadelphia Police reported that twenty people were shot between 1:53 AM on Sunday, July 4th, and 4:25 AM Monday morning; five of the twenty died.

    Four other shooting victims remained in critical condition, with the rest being listed as stable, including a 15-year-old boy who was shot in his leg and foot on the 6000 block of Walton Street in West Philadelphia at 10:36 p.m. Sunday.

    Two teenage boys were shot shortly before 5:30 p.m. Monday near North 33d Street and West Oxford Street in Strawberry Mansion. A 14-year-old boy was shot once in the head and listed in “extremely critical” condition, police said, and a 15-year-old boy was shot once in the foot and in stable condition.

The odious District Attorney, Larry Krasner, is going to address the issue, but, if the killers are actually caught — and odds are, they won’t be — it would surprise absolutely no one if the killers turn out to be someone who could and should have been in jail, but was treated leniently by the city’s softer-than-soft-on-crime District Attorney.

    Street’s office said the state senator will hold a news conference Tuesday morning at City Hall, along with Mahmoud’s family; District Attorney Larry Krasner; community leader Bilal Qayyum, president and executive director of the Father’s Day Rally Committee Inc.; and other elected officials and community leaders to “speak on this tragedy and the investigation.”

Of course, these people will blame ‘gun violence’ in general, as will the Inquirer, with barely a harsh word for the actual people who fired the shots that took so many victims. After all, talking about the people who pulled the triggers “disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community,” and we can’t have that, now can we?

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Journolism at its finest: The Philadelphia Inquirer and one-sided reporting

We learned it in high school, if not earlier, how the Bill of Rights protected our rights as the citizens of a free republic. The First Amendment to the Constitution states:

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The hand-written copy of the proposed articles of amendment passed by Congress in 1789, cropped to show just the text in the third article that would later be ratified as the First Amendment.

Over the course of our history, the Supreme Court has ‘incorporated’ most of the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, to include protections for the people from actions by states and local governments, and Americans alive in the 21st century are all used to the concepts of freedom of speech.

We have, sadly, noted how some of our major media sources are no longer so adamant about protecting our First Amendment rights.

Now comes The Philadelphia Inquirer, with a very slanted article about how some people have exercised their freedom of speech, and freedom of peaceable assembly, and how horrible it is! Continue reading →

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A black Philadelphia preacher dares to tell the truth Will the #woke listen?

It’s no surprise that the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading at The Philadelphia Inquirer don’t listen to an evil reich-wing conservative like me, but will they listen to black Philadelphians, to a black Philadelphia Protestant minister?

On Father’s Day Sunday, faith leaders struggle for answers to Philly’s gun violence

“We think we are evolving, but we are going down,” the Rev. Herb Lusk, pastor at Greater Exodus Baptist Church, said following an overnight during which eight people were shot, one fatally.

by Joseph N DiStephano | June 20, 2021

Father’s Day morning, as Philadelphia police searched to identify suspects who shot eight people, one fatally, overnight, Christian leaders struggled to respond to the record-pace city violence that has killed at least 255 people so far this year.

Some felt called to blame fathers, or the absence of them. In too many American families, “people right now are wishing mothers ‘Happy Father’s Day,’” as they try to do double duty, the Rev. Herb Lusk, the former Philadelphia Eagle running back, lamented in his sermon at Greater Exodus Baptist Church on North Broad Street.

He called missing fathers and the lack of their guidance and good example a factor in the way “we are still killing each other. Right now. Black on Black crime. We think we are evolving, but we are going down. We are killing our babies.”

Sunday’s shootings followed three on Saturday, including a triple in Overbrook in which two men were killed and a 3-year-old boy was shot three times in the right leg, which Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw denounced as “sickening”.

There’s much more at the original.

The Philadelphia Police Department only updates its Current Crime Statistics page on weekdays, so the 255 homicides shown are accurate only through the end of Thursday, June 17th. The Inquirer article above sited one murder on Sunday and three on Saturday, with who knows how many on Friday. If the total is ‘only’ those four, for a total of 259 through 171 days, that’s still 1.515 per day, a number which has been slowly creeping up, and leaves the City of Brotherly Love on pace for 553 homicides for the year.

The Rev Lusk, himself a black man, dared to say what only conservatives have been saying, that this is “black on black” crime, that it is primarily young black men killing other young black men. The Rev Lusk dared to say what conservatives have long been saying, that absent sperm donors — I will not dignify a man male who abandons his children with the title of ‘father’ — are a significant cause of this.

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; black Americans make up only about 44% of the city’s population.

If the Rev Lusk can say this, why can’t the editors and staffers of the Inquirer, tell the truth? We have noted previously Elizabeth Hughes, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and her determination to make her newspaper “an anti-racist news organization,” but 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?

For the woke, for the left, mentioning that so much of the violent crime is black criminals preying on black victims simply does not fit Teh Narrative, in which black Americans are being victimized by ‘systemic racism’, it does not fit within the worldview that, Heaven forfend! we blame the actual criminals for their crimes.

A truly “anti racist news organization” would not report the news through the filters of race and political correctness; a truly “anti racist news organization” would report the unvarnished facts, because it is only with a solid consideration of the facts that solutions can be formulated. So far, the staff and editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer have not been willing to do that.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Killadelphia The not-so-subtle racism of an "anti-racist news organization"

As of 11:59 PM on Sunday, May 16th, there had been 196 homicides in Philadelphia. That having been the 136th day of the year, that worked out to 1.441 murders per day in the City of Brotherly Love, putting Philly on pace for 526 killings for 2021, if the average held.

That was a month ago. According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, as of the end of Tuesday, June 15th, the city hit what could wryly be called a milestone, it’s 250th murder. The math is pretty bad: 250 homicides ÷ 166 days = 1.506 per day, × 365 = 549.70 murders for the year. The evil, reich-wing Donald Trump has been out of office for just five days short of five months now, the very liberal, opposed to mass incarceration District Attorney Larry Krasner has been renominated, the pandemic restrictions have (mostly) been lifted, and Philly’s murder rate is increasing.

The city’s homicide record was 500, set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990; 2020 saw Philly win the silver medal, with 499. But if the current rate continues, and there’s no sign that it won’t, 550 bodies in the city’s mean streets will break the record by a solid ten percent. Yet, at least as of 3:15 PM, there wasn’t a single story on The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page about the three killings overnight, or the ‘milestone’ having been reached, though there was an important story on how the strategic use of wallpaper remains popular in area homes.

Another statistic: 250 homicides thus far in 2021 have eclipsed the entire year’s totals of 246 in 2013 and 248 in 2014, when Michael Nutter was Mayor, Charles Ramsey Police Commissioner and Seth Williams was District Attorney.[1]Seth Williams was convicted on one count of receiving bribes, so he isn’t exactly spotless, but his record as District Attorney was sound. Last year’s 499 homicides exceeded those two years’ total killings. Whatever Jim Kenney, Danielle Outlaw and Larry Krasner, whom the Inquirer actually endorsed for renomination, have been doing has not worked.

#BlackLivesMatter, we are told, and Elizabeth Hughes, the publisher of the Inquirer, has said that her goal is to make the newspaper “an anti-racist news organization,” but, as far as I can tell, black lives don’t matter to the Inquirer. It seems that the only stories the paper publishes are small police blotter reports, usually not on the website main page, unless the victim is an innocent, like Christine Lupo, a “somebody,” like a local high school basketball player, or a cute little white girl, like the 2,782 site search results for Rian Thal.

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?

It does not matter what Miss Hughes says about her goals, and it does not matter that the newspaper has its first Hispanic Executive Editor in Gabriel Escobar; the paper’s coverage shows us what they consider newsworthy. And black lives wasted are simply not newsworthy.

References

References
↑1 Seth Williams was convicted on one count of receiving bribes, so he isn’t exactly spotless, but his record as District Attorney was sound.