Tag Archives: #Philadelphia

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We need to stop pretending that #BlackLivesMatter . . . . . . because in the City of Brotherly Love, it's very apparent that they don't.

The Current Crime Statistics released by the Philadelphia Police Department note that, as of 11:59 PM EDT on October 21st, 391 souls had been sent to their eternal rewards. That isn’t the record, of course, but 2007 is the base year on the Current Crime Statistics website, and that was the number of people killed that year in Philly. This year has now matched that total . . . with 71 days left in the year.

The math is simple: 391 people killed in 295 days so far equals 1.325 people killed every single day. With 71 days left in the year, at that rate the city should see another 94 people sent to their deaths before the ball drops in New York City.

391 + 94 = 485.

That would not be a new record; 1990 holds that dubious honor with 505, killings, and 1989 comes in second with 489, but 485 would be solidly in third place!

According to the Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard, since 2015, 6,129 shooting victims in the city had been black males; that’s 75.59% of them. Another 518 (6.39%) were black females. 1,102 of the shootings, 77.77%, which were fatal were of black males; while black females added another 72, or 5.08%.

I have noted previously that the Philadelphia media aren’t overly concerned with murder victims anymore, unless the victim is a cute little white girl. I suppose that’s reasonable, because the killing of white women is pretty rare: since 2015, only 15 white women were shot to death, 1.06% of the total. Sixty-two white males were killed in that same time frame, 4.38%. A black woman is more likely to be murdered than a white male in the City of Brotherly Love.

At least as of 4:30 PM, The Philadelphia Inquirer hadn’t noted this ‘milestone’ in city killings, but it sure had a big story, from yesterday, still up on the main page:

‘We’re not going to disappear’

Philadelphia Black Lives Matter activists say they’re building the movement beyond protests — they’re confronting the disparities that put people in the criminal justice system in the first place

by Oona Goodin-Smith, Anna Orso and Raishad Hardnett | October 21, 2020

For the umpteenth time this year, they assembled under the ivory glow of Philadelphia City Hall, cardboard signs and megaphones in hand. The air was crisper than when they began the crusade for George Floyd 116 days prior, but the unrelenting chant from the crowd in September was familiar.

“Say her name, Breonna Taylor.”

“Is my brother next?” one woman’s sign read. “This isn’t change,” declared another. “This system has got to go down!” a demonstrator yelled to the crowd.

For activists like Christopher Bowman, protesting is only the beginning.

“The final step is just community advancement,” said Bowman, a Philadelphia teacher who was teargassed and detained on I-676 in June and inspired to cofound I Will Breathe, an organization fighting racial injustice.

The #BlackLivesMatter activists are very, very worried about the cops:

After Philadelphia’s summer of protests against police brutality and systemic racism, activists are moving into a new season. They’re sustaining momentum by expanding their objectives and establishing their own community group model, working in the neighborhoods they want the city to invest in.

But the numbers say that the police aren’t the black community’s problem in Philly. Using the same site, and selecting for “Officer Involved,” we find 23 such shootings in 2015 and 2016, dropping to 13, 12, 9 and 8 (so far) in subsequent years. (The site does not correct for fatal vs non-fatal in this option.)

Eight officer involved shootings thus far in 2020, out of 1,684, which is 0.475% of the total.

The problem isn’t police brutality; it’s brutality within the black community, because the vast majority of the black people in our cities who are murdered are murdered by other black people.

“Our solutions live within ourselves and not within the system,” said YahNé Ndgo, a core organizer with Black Lives Matter Philly. As she sees it, activists are themselves building programming that’s “making a positive difference in our community.”

“We’re not being antipolice. We’re being antiviolence and pro-health and pro-community,” she said. “And [others] will see that we’re building toward all those things and not seeking to remove something and leave a vacuum, but to replace something that is not healthy for our community.”

Some activists spent the summer calling for police abolition, while others believe policing should remain, but have ideas for reform. Across the city, dozens of groups — new and established — protested, and each had unique priorities.

Are there no mirrors in the black community in Philadelphia? The problem isn’t the police, but the members of their own communities. But no one is willing to say that, because, why, that could sound raaaaacist.

Well, the #BlackLivesMatter protesters got what they wanted, even before this year’s protests, with the election of Democrat Larry Krasner as District Attorney. When the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer, surprisingly, endorsed Republican Beth Grossman over Democrat Larry Krasner for District Attorney. Daniel Denvir waxed wroth:

The Philadelphia Inquirer just endorsed mass incarceration

by Daniel Denvir | October 17, 2017

In May, Philadelphians went to the polls and made history, voting by a large margin to back civil rights attorney Larry Krasner in the city’s Democratic primary for district attorney. On Sunday, residents awoke to find that the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial board had endorsed Krasner’s Republican opponent, Beth Grossman, a former top prosecutor in the District Attorney’s Office.

Krasner rallied Philadelphians to an upstart, radical campaign calling for an end to the era of mass incarceration and impunity for police misconduct. The city’s struggling paper of record endorsed a candidate who presided over a nationally infamous civil asset forfeiture program through which prosecutors seized homes and other property from city residents, oftentimes poor and working-class, black and Latino. At least, the editorial gushed, she has “a welcome hesitancy to go for the death penalty.”

Philadelphians want change. The Inquirer board ploddingly declared itself for the enervating cause of defending an intolerable status quo that will most likely be defeated on election day.

But points for consistency: Grossman is the second candidate for top prosecutor the paper has endorsed who has also been backed by the city’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #5, an unapologetically reactionary officers union headed by a man who recently called Black Lives Matter protesters “a pack of wild animals.” That first FOP-backed candidate the Inquirer endorsed was Rich Negrin, one of Krasner’s primary opponents. Oddly, the board’s praise for Negrin included a note that the “criminal justice pendulum has been swinging in a new direction for some time, away from ‘tough on crime,’” but failed to mention that it was Krasner’s insurgent, movement-based campaign that had swung the primary field to the left.

After a few more paragraphs of such drivel, Mr Denvir wrote:

In reality, the board’s rationale is a pretext to protect an office that has long prized convictions and lengthy sentences regardless of the costs or whether the outcomes comport with any sense of justice. The Inquirer praises Grossman for her career going “after drug dealers, gunslingers, thieves, and blighters” and her “passion for defending the rights of crime victims.” Not a word about mass incarceration. To editorialize in favor of such a brutal status quo is an insult to the Philadelphians on whose behalf the board purports to be writing.

Well, Mr Denvir got his wish: Larry Krasner won the election. And rather than Mrs Grossman going “after drug dealers, gunslingers, thieves, and blighters,” the City of Brotherly Love has a District Attorney who does not do that, who fired a whole slew of veteran prosecutors upon taking office, and who certainly doesn’t believe in “mass incarceration.”

The result? In 2018, Mr Krasner’s first year in office, city homicides jumped from 315 to 353, a 12.06% increase. The following year, homicides held almost steady, rising to 356, but so far this year, 391 people have been murdered in Philadelphia, a 39.64% increase over the same day  last year.

The cost of Mr Krasner’s victory, and the policies Mr Denvir wanted to see put in place, has been written in blood. Philadelphia has seen more murders, many more murders than New York City, which has more than five times Philly’s population.

Philadelphia’s daily average inmate population was 6,409 when Mr Krasner took office, and was down to 4,849 on August 31, 2019. That’s the end, sort of, of ‘mass incarceration,’ but it sure hasn’t resulted in less violence on the city’s streets. The problem isn’t mass incarceration; the problem is that not enough criminals are incarcerated.

Black lives don’t matter, at least not in Philadelphia, because the black community apparently does not care enough about them to address the problem within itself.

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Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner has done what he set out to do

For the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer, it isn’t brutal criminals or gangbangers or thugs that kill people, but the nonsense term “gun violence,” as though guns magically roam the streets, firing themselves. Oddly enough, I have never seen a gun which just went off by itself, but maybe I’m just not as smart as the editors of what RedState writer Mike Miller laughingly called the Philadelphia Enquirer.

Multiple victims wounded in Strawberry Mansion shooting as gun violence continues in Philly

by Robert Moran and Julie Shaw, Updated: 5:19 PM EDT

Multiple people — possibly six — were wounded in a shooting Tuesday afternoon in the city’s Strawberry Mansion section, police said.

Police received their first report of a shooting just before 4 PM in the vicinity of 30th and York Streets. Victims were taken by private vehicle to Temple University Hospital.

Police were investigating several locations as possible crime scenes.

Earlier Tuesday, two boys were injured by gunfire in separate incidents, and an undercover narcotics officer was fired upon as gun violence continued in the city.

The concluding paragraph:

Over the weekend, 30 people were shot in the city, including five people at a party to honor a victim of gun violence.

I guess the only good news is that the gang bangers are such lousy shots. But at what point do the editors recognize that the problem isn’t guns, but bad people?

Let’s go back to 2017. The editors, surprisingly, endorsed Republican Beth Grossman over Democrat Larry Krasner for District Attorney. Daniel Denvir waxed wroth:

The Philadelphia Inquirer just endorsed mass incarceration

by Daniel Denvir | October 17, 2017

In May, Philadelphians went to the polls and made history, voting by a large margin to back civil rights attorney Larry Krasner in the city’s Democratic primary for district attorney. On Sunday, residents awoke to find that the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial board had endorsed Krasner’s Republican opponent, Beth Grossman, a former top prosecutor in the District Attorney’s Office.

Krasner rallied Philadelphians to an upstart, radical campaign calling for an end to the era of mass incarceration and impunity for police misconduct. The city’s struggling paper of record endorsed a candidate who presided over a nationally infamous civil asset forfeiture program through which prosecutors seized homes and other property from city residents, oftentimes poor and working-class, black and Latino. At least, the editorial gushed, she has “a welcome hesitancy to go for the death penalty.”

Philadelphians want change. The Inquirer board ploddingly declared itself for the enervating cause of defending an intolerable status quo that will most likely be defeated on election day.

But points for consistency: Grossman is the second candidate for top prosecutor the paper has endorsed who has also been backed by the city’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #5, an unapologetically reactionary officers union headed by a man who recently called Black Lives Matter protesters “a pack of wild animals.” That first FOP-backed candidate the Inquirer endorsed was Rich Negrin, one of Krasner’s primary opponents. Oddly, the board’s praise for Negrin included a note that the “criminal justice pendulum has been swinging in a new direction for some time, away from ‘tough on crime,’” but failed to mention that it was Krasner’s insurgent, movement-based campaign that had swung the primary field to the left.

After a few more paragraphs of such drivel, Mr Denvir wrote:

In reality, the board’s rationale is a pretext to protect an office that has long prized convictions and lengthy sentences regardless of the costs or whether the outcomes comport with any sense of justice. The Inquirer praises Grossman for her career going “after drug dealers, gunslingers, thieves, and blighters” and her “passion for defending the rights of crime victims.” Not a word about mass incarceration. To editorialize in favor of such a brutal status quo is an insult to the Philadelphians on whose behalf the board purports to be writing.

Well, Mr Denvir got his wish: Larry Krasner won the election. And rather than Mrs Grossman going “after drug dealers, gunslingers, thieves, and blighters,” the City of Brotherly Love has a District Attorney who does not do that, who fired a whole slew of veteran prosecutors upon taking office, and who certainly doesn’t believe in “mass incarceration.”

The result? In 2018, Mr Krasner’s first year in office, city homicides jumped from 315 to 353, a 12.06% increase. The following year, homicides held almost steady, rising to 356, but so far this year, 276 people had been murdered in Philadelphia, a 31.43% increase over the same day (August 17th) last year. If the homicide rate of 1.2 killings per day continues, Philly should see 439 murders by the end of the year.

The cost of Mr Krasner’s victory, and the policies Mr Denvir wanted to see put in place, has been written in blood. Philadelphia has seen more murders, many more murders than New York City, which has more than five times Philly’s population.

Philadelphia’s daily average inmate population was 6,409 when Mr Krasner took office, and was down to 4,849 on August 31, 2019.

One of the people who wasn’t in jail on Friday, March 13, 2020, was Hassan Elliot, 21. How did the District Attorney’s office treat Mr Elliot, a known gang-banger?

  • Mr Elliott, then 18 years old, was arrested in June 2017 on gun- and drug-possession charges stemming after threatening a neighbor with a firearm. The District Attorney’s office granted him a plea bargain arrangement on January 24, 2018, and he was sentenced to 9 to 23 months in jail, followed by three years’ probation. However, he was paroled earlier than that, after seven months in jail.
  • Mr Elliot soon violated parole by failing drug tests and failing to attend his meetings with his parole officer.
  • Mr Elliott was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine on January 29, 2019. This was another parole violation, but Mr Krasner’s office did not attempt to have Mr Elliot returned to jail to finish his sentence, nor make any attempts to get serious bail on the new charges;he was released on his own recognizance.
  • After Mr Elliot failed to appear for his scheduled drug-possession trial on March 27, 2019, and prosecutors dropped those charges against him.

On that Friday the 13th, Police Corporal James O’Connor IV, 46, was part of a Philadelphia police SWAT team trying to serve a predawn arrest warrant on Mr Elliott, from a March 2019 killing. Mr Elliot greeted the SWAT team with a hail of bullets, and Corporal O’Connor was killed. Had Mr Elliot been in jail, as he could have been due to parole violations, had Mr Krasner’s office treated him seriously, Corporal O’Connor would have gone home safely to his wife that day. The Inquirer reported:

Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 president John McNesby also has criticized Krasner, saying his policies led to the killing of O’Connor. “Unfortunately, he’s murdered by somebody that should have never been on the street,” McNesby said.

McNesby also said FOP members and police officers formed a human barricade to block Krasner from entering the hospital Friday to see O’Connor’s family.

The numbers don’t lie. Under Mayor Jim Kenney, who has managed to make past Mayors John Street and Michael Nutter look great, District Attorney Krasner and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw (who, to be honest, is really just Mayor Kenney’s puppet), Philadelphia has become measurably much worse. Mr Kenney has been in office since the beginning of 2016, and Mr Krasner since the start of 2018, and Philly is now much more dangerous. Their policies were put into governing practice, and, unless chaos and death was the goal all along, they failed miserably.

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What Are Mayor Jim Kenney and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw Doing About Open Air Drug Markets in Philly?

According to Wikipedia, the Philadelphia Badlands

 is a section of North Philadelphia and Lower Northeast Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, that is known for an abundance of open-air recreational drug markets and drug-related violence. It has amorphous and somewhat disputed boundaries, but is generally agreed to include the 25th police district.

Usually, it is widely understood to be an area between Kensington Avenue to the east and Broad Street to the west, and between Hunting Park Avenue to the north and York Street to the south, mostly coinciding with the neighborhoods of Fairhill, Glenwood, Hunting Park, Harrowgate, Stanton, North Central, West Kensington, Hartranft, and Kensington.

The term “The Badlands” was popularized in part by the novel Third and Indiana by then Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Steve Lopez. The neighborhood also was featured in several episodes of ABC’s Nightline. The intersection of 3rd Street and Indiana Avenue was listed number two in a 2007 list of the city’s top ten drug corners according to an article by Philadelphia Weekly reporter Steve Volk.

The term Badlands was first used by Lt. John Gallo, who headed the East Division Narcotics Task Force. Its use spread, with many people attempting to take credit for the moniker. It was Gallo’s work along with ASAC Billy Retton that worked about a dozen long-term investigations in the 25th and 26th Police Districts that preceded “Operation Sunrise”. Ted Koppel, Geraldo Rivera, 20/20 and 48 Hours all rode with Gallo at one time or another, and it was during this time that Gallo was able to make the name stick.

I wrote yesterday about the open-air drug market publicized by The Philadelphia Inquirer. I had thought that maybe, just maybe, the publicity would push Commissioner Danielle Outlaw and the Philadelphia Police to raid the place, to arrest the drug dealers — and hopefully the addicts as well, but I really didn’t expect that — and seize the illegal drugs and guns found there.

So, at 11:40 AM EDT this morning, I did Google searches for police raid drug market and police raid drug market Philadelphia. I found a few stories about law enforcement raids in Missouri and even incompetent Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago:

Feds bust open-air drug market in Humboldt Park, charging 18

Undercover agents allegedly made about 80 purchases from the market during a year-long investigation dubbed “Operation Monticello’s Revenge.”

By David Struett @dstru312 | July 20, 2020 | 5:58 PM CDT

The feds have charged 18 men who allegedly worked at an open-air drug market in Humboldt Park, where undercover agents allegedly made about 80 purchases during a year-long investigation dubbed “Operation Monticello’s Revenge.”

Most of the men were arrested last week on charges of federal drug conspiracy in connection to the drug market in the 1000 block of North Monticello Avenue, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago announced Monday.

According to a criminal complaint, Sam Howard and Kelvin Franklin worked as street-level managers of the market, coordinating the sale of fentanyl-laced heroin, and personally sold drugs to undercover officers more than a dozen times each.

Oops! Sorry, it was federal agents, not the Chicago Police who did that; no credit goes to Mayor Lightfoot.

In Philly? I found this story about a police raid on drug markets . . . last February. Then there was another raid in April:

Police Arrest 60 Buyers/Dealers in Massive Drug Sweep in Philadelphia; Release Mugshots and Names

by: iradioal | started: 04/04/15 8:30 am | updated: 04/04/15 8:30 am

Philadelphia Police have arrested 60 people and seized two dozen vehicles in a massive drug sweep in Fairhill on Thursday. The department’s east division set up in multiple locations in the 25th district near the intersections of Waterloo and West Cambria streets, North Front and West Cambria streets, North Swanson and East Somerset streets, Rosehill and East Cambria streets, and East Tusculum and East Somerset streets. Those arrested ranged in age from 17 to 67. Forty were alleged buyers and twenty were alleged sellers. Out of those arrested about 35% are from the suburbs who came to the neighborhood’s open air drug markets looking to buy or sell a variety of drugs including pills, heroin, crack cocaine and marijuana.

Philadelphia Police Insp. Melvin Singleton wants to close down the drug market and dissuade anyone from coming to the 25th district (which also includes North Philly, Feltonville, Fairhill, and Hunting Park). “If you think it’s a good idea to come to Philadelphia to buy drugs…if you think it’s a good idea to come to Philadelphia to sell drugs, you will be arrested. Your vehicle will be confiscated.” The police say these kind of arrest operations will continue around the city.

The area raided today was only blocks away from other drug hot beds in neighboring Kensington. Neighbors want to see the entire area cleaned up so that children can walk to school, people can feel safe on their own blocks, and the streets no longer are occupied by dealers selling and addicts getting high.

There was even a major raid just before last Christmas in the Fairhill and Kensington neighborhoods, including Allegheny Avenue, mentioned in yesterday’s Inquirer article. But nothing yesterday.

The Philadelphia Badlands exist because the city government and law enforcement allow them to exist. Crime ridden neighborhoods exist because law enforcement doesn’t shut them down. Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg cleaned up New York City with a harsh attitude toward crime and the ‘broken windows’ policing philosophy, but Philadelphia never followed suit, and that’s why the Badlands exists. George Soros poured over a million dollars into getting an anti-police, anti-law enforcement District Attorney, Larry Krasner, elected, and that’s what Philadelphia got: a contracted, weakened Police Department and a soaring crime rate.

As of 11:59 PM EDT yesterday, 276 homicides were recorded in the City of Brotherly Love. That’s a 31% increase over the same day last year, more than the entire year’s murder totals in 2013 and 2014, and just one fewer than the entire year total for 2016.¹

In 230 days, Philadelphia has seen 276 homicides. That’s 1.2 murders per day. With 136 days remaining, if the average holds, that’s an additional 163 homicides, for a projected total of 439 people. There were 280 people murdered in 2015, Mayor Michael Nutter’s and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey’s last full year in office; if their regime could get the murder rate down, as it did, then the blame has to fall on Mayor Kenney, DA Krasner and Commissioner Outlaw.

Well, who knows? Perhaps Commissioner Outlaw is planning a big raid in the Badlands, now that the Inquirer has publicized the problems, and it’s just taking a few days to get the planning and organization done. Mayor Kenney might be very incensed, since the photos in the Inquirer showed the junkies not wearing facemasks!

But the drug raids of the past haven’t done anything; they got a few bad guys off the streets, recovered some drugs and cash and weapons, but all of that is back in place now. Philadelphia needs the law enforcement raids, yes, and a lot more funding for the Police Department, but what it really needs is a change of attitude among the city leadership, a no nonsense, zero tolerance attitude toward crime, toward all crime, and toward illegal drugs. Mayor Kenney was re-elected in 2019, so he still has 3½ years remaining.² He was just great at raising a ‘sugary drink tax,’ to take a bigger bite out of a Big Gulp, but on making Philly safer, not so much.

District Attorney Krasner was elected in 2017, meaning he won’t face the voters until 2021. Wikipedia noted of Mr Krasner:

In his first week in office, Mr Krasner fired 31 prosecutors from the District Attorney’s Office, including both junior and career supervisory staff. Up to one-third of the homicide prosecutors in the office were dismissed. Those fired represented nearly a 10% reduction in the number of Philadelphia assistant district attorneys.

In February 2018, Krasner announced that law enforcement would no longer pursue criminal charges against those caught with marijuana possession. That same month, Krasner instructed prosecutors to stop seeking cash bail for those accused of some misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. Krasner said that it was unfair to keep people in detention simply because they could not afford bail. He also announced that the DA’s office had filed a lawsuit against a number of pharmaceutical companies for their role in the city’s opioid epidemic. Krasner instructed prosecutors to stop charging sex workers who had fewer than three convictions.

In March 2018, it was reported that Krasner’s staffers were working on creating a sentence review unit–the first of its kind in the country–to review past cases and sentences, and seek re-sentencing in cases when individuals were given unduly harsh punishments. Also in March 2018, it was reported that Krasner instructed prosecutors to: “Offer shorter prison sentences in plea deals. Decline certain classes of criminal charges. And explain, on the record, why taxpayers should fork over thousands of dollars per year to incarcerate people.” He said,

Fiscal responsibility is a justice issue, and it is an urgent justice issue. A dollar spent on incarceration should be worth it. Otherwise, that dollar may be better spent on addiction treatment, on public education, on policing and on other types of activity that make us all safer.

The statistics seem to indicate that the esteemed Mr Krasner’s policies have not made Philadelphians safer. But that’s what happens when you put a social justice warrior in office.

You might ask: why do I care? After all, I don’t live in Philadelphia, and I moved out of Pennsylvania entirely three years ago. I don’t vote in Pennsylvania and I don’t pay taxes to the Keystone State.

But I worked in the Philadelphia area, traveling all around the city and the suburbs doing quality control work for a ready-mixed concrete company. Even after I left that position and started working further north, I picked up a copy of The Philadelphia Inquirer every day on my way to work.³ Philly is the city in which the Continental Congress met, in which our Declaration of Independence was signed. I want to see good for the city, but good isn’t happening there.

Now, Philadelphia is a warning, a warning for all who love our country, who want to see good for the United States, a warning as to what can and will happen if “progressives” and their cockamamie ideas achieve governing power. Philadelphia is an experiment in liberal and lax government, an experiment gone horribly wrong. I want to publicize what is happening there, to hopefully help others to step back, and see what a nightmare it has become.
_______________________________________
¹ – The statistics in yesterday’s report from the Philadelphia Police were 261 murders; since there wasn’t a 15-man massacre yesterday, I have to assume that a significant update in the statistics occurred in the postings.
² – This being his second consecutive term, Mr Kenney is term limited out.
³ – The men at the plant always complained, saying that I should have picked up the Allentown Morning Call instead, because it was closer to local news for them.
______________________________________
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The nanny state prepares to strike again

As William Teach pointed out, it’s rather humorous that the Pyrite State is so worried about sugary drinks, yet legalized marijuana usage. From the Los Angeles Times:

Is gulping soda as bad as smoking? California seems to think so

By The Times Editorial Board | March 4, 2019 | 3:10 AM PST

In California, soda is the new tobacco — at least from a public policy point of view.

Adopting some of the same methods that have been employed to reduce smoking, California legislators have put together an ambitious package of bills aimed at curbing consumption of sodas, energy drinks and other beverages that have added sugar.

The proposals, which are sponsored by the California Medical Assn. and California Dental Assn., include levying a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, mandating warning labels on their bottles and restricting how they are promoted and displayed in stores, as well as limiting the serving size of fountain drinks. The proceeds from the tax (the amount is yet to be determined) would fund programs to prevent obesity, diabetes and other health problems associated with the overconsumption of sugar.

It’s an intriguing approach that has already sparked a backlash from the soda industry and a public discussion about what role the government should play in grocery store purchases. Now the onus is on public health officials to make a clear and compelling case about the dangers — and to explain why sugary drinks deserve as harsh a regulatory response as cigarettes.

There’s much more at the original.

Full disclosure: I love Mountain Dew, and I had been consuming mass quantities of it since I was a teenager in the 1960s. It was nothing for me to drink four bottles or cans of Dew in a day, and on a particularly hot summer day, the count could go higher. When we lived in Pennsylvania, I even had my own, separate Dew refrigerator in the basement, because Mrs Pico continually complained that I had the regular ‘fridge set too cold, and was freezing the produce and eggs.

On July 1, 2017, when we moved back to the Bluegrass State, I gave up soda, cold turkey. I really haven’t missed it.

But, I digress. There is little question that soda isn’t particularly good for you; the Times’ editorial board was simply making the case that it hadn’t been proven bad enough for you for California to attempt to regulate and tax into disuse. I find it interesting that a state which has legalized the recreational use and sale of pot, has passed an assisted suicide law, tried to (but shelved) ban homosexual conversion therapy, and makes millions off of advertisements and product placements for the consumption of alcohol, is so very worried that you might drink a Pepsi.

But one of the proposed measures that could show results is definitely worth exploring: taxes on drinks with added sugar. Last week, a three-year study of the tax on sugar-sweetened beverages imposed by Berkeley in 2014 — the first in the nation — found that people in low-income neighborhoods bought fewer sugary drinks after the tax was imposed, while consumption trends remained the same in neighboring cities that didn’t have such a tax. The study also found that the people who drank fewer sugary beverages consumed more water during the same period.

This finding mitigates the argument that such a regressive levy would hit low-income people the hardest. Poorer people, many of them black and Latino, would still suffer, economically and physically, if they continued to drink copious amounts of sugar-sweetened drinks. But black and Latino Californians have higher rates of obesity than other populations, so if the higher cost encouraged them to switch to healthier (and untaxed) water, it would be a double benefit to them.

Translation: yes, it would have a disparate impact on minorities, but it’s for their own good, so that doesn’t matter!

The obvious question has to be asked: why is it any of the government’s business to “encourage” people to change their choices and habits? The city of Philadelphia imposed a special tax on sugary drinks, and part of the effect was to cut revenue to retailers near the city limits when their customers could, and did, easily drive to stores in neighboring Bucks and Montgomery counties to buy Mountain Dew without paying the ridiculous tax. It seems that customers were willing to spend a little more in gasoline to buy what they chose.

Of course, alcohol consumption is worse, far worse, than that of sugary drinks, and nobody in the Pyrite State is (seriously) trying to ban or reduce that. The editors of the Los Angeles Times even advocated changing state law to allow businesses which serve alcohol to continue serving until 4:00 AM rather than the 2:00 last call specified by state law:

California is still hewing to a 1935 law dictating that alcohol sales stop from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., and that blanket prohibition no longer makes sense for cities with thriving music and nightlife scenes that compete for investment and tourism with the likes of New York City, Las Vegas and other late-night cities.

Heaven forfend! We wouldn’t want the “thriving music and nightlife scenes” to be stifled by not having people drinking during the very wee hours of the morning, would we? At best, I found some California sites which want to help people who drink too much alcohol to moderate their intake, but it seems that nobody wants to curtail it back to zero. The National Institute for Health said:

An estimated 88,0008 people (approximately 62,000 men and 26,000 women) die from alcohol-related causes annually, making alcohol the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States. The first is tobacco, and the second is poor diet and physical inactivity.

Yet California’s legislature doesn’t seem to care much about that!

The truth is that sugary drinks aren’t good for you, tobacco isn’t good for you, alcohol isn’t good for you, and, let’s be honest here, casual sex isn’t good for you, but you sure won’t find the home state of Hollywood trying to discourage the hook up culture!

Governments should just stay out of people’s personal decisions about what to put in their mouths. Yeah, a lot of things people do put in their mouths aren’t good for them, but those are decisions, intelligent or otherwise, which ought to belong to individuals, not politicians.