Tag Archives: #PhiladelphiaInquirer

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Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye And then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

Alas! I have been severely, severely! taken to task by Robert Stacy McCain for one of my failures!

Mr McCain’s story:

Aspiring Rapper Update: ‘Slowkey Fred’ Busted for Philly Gun Trafficking Ring

by Robert Stacy McCain | Wednesday, April 13, 2022

More federal felony charges than he’s got hit records:

An Atlanta rapper is one of 11 people facing federal charges in connection with an alleged straw-purchasing scheme that trafficked hundreds of guns from Georgia to Philadelphia.

Agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives traced nearly 300 firearms purchased in Georgia from dozens of gun retailers to Fredrick Norman — aka “Slowkey Fred” — and three other suspects, after some were found at crime scenes and in the possession of convicted felons in Philadelphia, according to records and interviews with federal law enforcement.

In an interview with ATF agents in 2020, one of the suspects, Brianna Walker, admitted to buying 50 to 60 guns in order to sell them without a dealer’s license, according to a search warrant affidavit — a violation of federal law. Norman allegedly admitted to buying more than 100, according to federal records.
The federal investigation expanded to include 11 suspects in Georgia and Pennsylvania, all of whom face a conspiracy charge. Kenneth Burgos, 23, and Edwin Burgos, 29 — brothers accused of brokering sales in Pennsylvania — are also charged with dealing firearms without a license, officials said.

In addition to “Slowkey Fred” and the Burgos brothers, the suspects in this interstate gun-trafficking operations also included:

  • Brianna Walker a/k/a “Mars, 23, of Atlanta, GA;
  • Charles O’Bannon a/k/a “Chizzy,” 24, of Villa Rica, GA;
  • Stephen Norman, 23, of Villa Rica, GA;
  • Devin Church a/k/a “Lant,” 24, of Villa Rica, GA;
  • Roger Millington, 25, of Philadelphia, PA;
  • Ernest Payton, 30, of Philadelphia, PA;
  • Roselmy Rodriguez, 22, of Philadelphia, PA; and
  • Brianna Reed, 21, of Shippensburg, PA.

You can read the rest at Mr McCain’s original.

In my defense, not only did I have two family functions yesterday, but The Philadelphia Inquirer, the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, while it still has a three-day-old story about Daniel Whiteman, 36, having been arrested for using a 3D printer to manufacture parts for ‘ghost guns’, had nothing on this story.

I have thus far been unable to find a mugshot of Mr Whiteman, though I suspect he has been appropriately surnamed, but it is not much of a surprise to me that the Inquirer would not be all that motivated to publish a story about defendants named Muhammad Ware, Haneef and Jabreel Vaughn, Roselmy Rodriguez, two separate chicks named Brianna, or a “rapper” faux named “Slowbrain Slowkey Fred”. To do that would be raaaaacist!

The Inquirer even had, on its website main page, a blurb, shown at the right, leading to this story:

Subway attack adds to fears that New York City has grown dangerous

The attack will intensify the disquiet among New Yorkers about violence in the nation’s largest city, including an increasing number of shootings and rising crime in the subways.

by Emmanuel Felton and Joanna Slater, Washington Post | Wednesday, April 13, 2022

NEW YORK — When Nick Laforte heard about Tuesday morning’s shooting at the 36th Street subway station, he first thought of his wife and daughter. Each day, they board the train at that very stop, one bound for Manhattan and the other heading further into Brooklyn.

After a spike of fear, Laforte was relieved to learn both women were safe. But the incident left him deeply uneasy. “It feels like things are getting out of control,” said Laforte, a retiree and Brooklyn native: “I love New York, there’s no place like this.” Still, for the first time, he found himself thinking about leaving.

Tuesday’s shooting in Brooklyn was a commuter’s worst nightmare, with panicked riders fleeing a subway car full of smoke and gunfire. According to local hospitals, nearly 30 people were treated for injuries, 10 of them with gunshot wounds.

The attack will intensify the disquiet among New Yorkers about violence in the nation’s largest city, including an increasing number of shootings and rising crime in the subways, the city’s lifeblood.

There’s more at the original, and here’s the link to The Washington Post’s original, in case the Inquirer’s paywall stops you. But it’s sadly humorous that the Inquirer would be telling us how much more dangerous the Big Apple has become: New York City had seen, through April 10th, 101 murders, compared to 116 on the same date in 2021.

Through the same date, Palm Sunday, the City of Brotherly Love had seen 129 homicides, compared to 138 on the same date in 2021. But while New York City has an estimated population of 8,177,025, Philadelphia has an estimated 1,585,480 residents. With 5.16 times Philly’s population, NYC has seen 28 fewer murders.

In 2021, New York saw 488 total homicides, compared to Philly’s 562. In 2021, NYC’s homicide rate was 5.97 per 100,000 population, while Philly’s was 35.46 per 100,000. Philadelphians were facing a homicide rate 5.94 times that of New Yorkers! Of course, as we already know, and as the Inquirer has admitted, in very internally segregated Philadelphia, you aren’t in that much danger if you are a non-Hispanic white or Asian. Through the first ten days of April, there have been 68 shootings in Philly; 57 of the victims were black, 9 were listed as Latino white, and two were non-Hispanic white. New York City’s subway passengers are a far more diverse and integrated population.

Leave it to the Inquirer to highlight the violence in other cities!

Matthew 7:3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

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The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer tell us just how racist they are I don't think that they ever realized what they did

As we noted on Thursday, a poll by the Pew Charitable Trust found that 70% of Philadelphians believe that public safety is the most important issue facing the city. As of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, April 7th, 127 people had been murdered in the City of Brotherly Love[1]The referenced site is updated weekdays during normal business hours, so if you check it on a day after this has been posted, the number you see may be higher..

And on Friday, the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer have told us that segregation is the problem:

In a segregated city, race determines safety. That’s unacceptable. | Editorial

Segregation is at the core of so many of Philadelphia’s problems. How do we move from moral indignation to meaningful action?

by The Editorial Board | Friday, April 8, 2022 | 9:30 AM EDT

In his budget address last month, Mayor Jim Kenney listed the issues facing the city — “a global pandemic, political turmoil at the national level, and intensified violence” — and proclaimed: “We are facing those challenges together.”

That might be true in spirit, but in practice, Philadelphia is not facing all of its challenges together. That is the reality of a segregated city.

A new poll by the Pew Charitable Trusts, again, demonstrates this disparity with a statistic that is unacceptable: The percentage of Black and Hispanic Philadelphians who feel unsafe in their neighborhood is double the percentage of white Philadelphians.

With this, the Editorial Board have admitted what the Inquirer does not like to say out loud: the problems of crime, especially violent crime, are problems primarily among black and Hispanic Philadelphians. The city’s Shooting Victims statistics indicate that, for April, through April 7th, there were 39 victims in Philadelphia, 31 of whom were black, and 8 of whom were white. Of the 8 white victims, 6 are listed as Latino. White Philadelphians are relatively safe.

Following a couple of paragraphs in which the Board tell us what we already knew, that while city residents felt much safer, and that the bullets flying around the city hadn’t flown in their neighborhoods, we get to the money line:

This disparity is only possible because Philadelphians of different races don’t share the same neighborhoods — despite more than half a century of lip-service to integration as the policy of the United States.

It’s certainly true that Philadelphia is one of our most internally segregated big cities, something the Inquirer has previously reported, complete with colorful — pun most definitely intended — graphics.

But if zip code 19118 — Chestnut Hill — is 2/3 white, doesn’t that mean that it really is integrated?

Of course, Chestnut Hill is an expensive place to live. Home to Chestnut Hill College and several tony private schools — Springside Chestnut Hill Academy’s tuition rates are currently $33,250 for grades 1-4, $39,700 for grades 5-8, and $44,150 for grades 9-12 — and with a median family income of $50,554 in zip code 19138 — primarily West Oak Lane and East Germantown — there can’t be too many families there who could afford Chestnut Hill Academy.[2]Full disclosure: while working in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, I did some concrete work at Chestnut Hill Academy. It’s a beautiful place.

The Board continue on to tell us about the Kerner Commission warning us that continued segregation risked prolonging social unrest, and that President Lyndon Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act. My mother, who was a mortgage company employee, end eventual vice president, told me about the non-discrimination restrictions under which she had to operate. Even though we lived in the Bluegrass State, my mother grew up in Maine, and segregation was something foreign to her.[3]The house she bought, in Mt Sterling, Kentucky, had a restrictive covenant on it, disallowing sale of the property to anyone who was black, but by that time restrictive covenants were legally … Continue reading

The Kerner Commission’s report was sadly prophetic. The only thing it failed to anticipate was gentrification and how white city dwellers would go on to create segregated pockets within the heart of big cities. More than half a century after the Kerner Commission and the Fair Housing Act, Philadelphia remains one of the nation’s most diverse and most segregated cities.

It seems that the Board are opposed to gentrification, but gentrification means, among other things, white people moving into and improving homes in what have frequently been heavily minority areas. These are white people who have no objections to having black neighbors. I previously noted a Lexington city task force recommendation which stated:

The Task Force was created out of concern about neighborhood change when that change includes:

  • Properties turning over at an accelerated rate;
  • Most new owners being more affluent and differing from the traditional residents in terms of race or ethnicity.

Really? The city is going to work to stop integration of neighborhoods?

The Board cannot be supporting increased integration, to fight violent crime, and be opposed to white people moving into primarily non-white areas.

What does it mean to be a segregated city in a gun violence crisis? According to the Controller’s Office’s gun violence mapping toll, the zip codes of Rittenhouse Square and Chestnut Hill, where about 70% of the population is white, haven’t experienced a fatal shooting since before 2015. Contrast that with nearly 200 fatal shootings in North Philadelphia-Strawberry Mansion, where more than 90% of the population is Black, or nearly 240 in the Kensington-Port Richmond area, with a Hispanic population of 50%.

Rittenhouse Square is a beautiful park — and a safe one. The Black and Hispanic neighbors of McPherson Square and Hunting Park deserve to feel equally safe in public spaces near their homes.

The Board illustrated their editorial with a photograph of people, all white people as far as could be discerned, enjoying a “balmy March afternoon” in Rittenhouse Square.

Segregation is at the core of so many of Philadelphia’s problems — including gun violence, which to this day almost perfectly aligns with the borders of the redlining maps created by the federal government to keep, particularly, Black home buyers out of certain areas.

How do we move from moral indignation to meaningful action? How do we deliver on the promise of fair housing such that we implement what the Kerner Commission called “the integration choice?”

The first step is to retain affordable housing options that already exist (some are being lost now in University City) and creating alternatives to predatory financial institutions for those seeking home loans (such as creating a public bank). But fundamentally, segregation will persist as long as Philadelphia continues to fail to provide basic amenities to all neighborhoods. Good schools, clean streets, open libraries and recreational centers — those shouldn’t be a privilege for the few who can afford it, but a feature of life for all Philadelphians, regardless of zip code.

Until the recent Bidenflation, conventional mortgage loans could be found, fairly easily, for under 3%. Of course, a conventional loan required 20% of the purchase price as a down payment, and that means people have to be disciplined enough to save their money for that purpose, and if someone can’t be that disciplined, can he really be trusted to make his mortgage payments? It wasn’t that long ago that we saw a major economic recession caused by the subprime mortgage crisis.

Gun violence is both a disease and a symptom. It’s crucial that our city’s goal be twofold: ensuring that all Philadelphians feel safe, and that the ranks of those who do not isn’t determined by skin color. Only when that is the case can Philadelphia truly say it is facing its challenges together.

For what are the Board asking here? They have already let us know that they don’t like gentrification, wealthier white people moving into predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and fixing up distressed homes; that, they claimed, led to segregated white pockets in the city. Somehow, no one seems to see the increased values in gentrifying areas lifting the net worth of the homes of black and Hispanic people living in those areas, or the value of white residents who are completely accepting of living in an integrated neighborhood. The Board seem to want more black residents in Chestnut Hill and Rittenhouse Square, but unless those residents can afford to move there, either the city, or someone, will have to provide the same subprime mortgages that caused the crash, or build ‘affordable housing’ in places which would then see other people’s property values decline due to it.

There is, of course, a not-so-subtle undertone to the Board’s editorial, the theme that white people make places safer, while blacks and Hispanics make areas more dangerous. The members would deny that, of course, but it is right there, obvious to anyone who reads what they wrote.

References

References
↑1 The referenced site is updated weekdays during normal business hours, so if you check it on a day after this has been posted, the number you see may be higher.
↑2 Full disclosure: while working in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, I did some concrete work at Chestnut Hill Academy. It’s a beautiful place.
↑3 The house she bought, in Mt Sterling, Kentucky, had a restrictive covenant on it, disallowing sale of the property to anyone who was black, but by that time restrictive covenants were legally unenforceable. It would, however, have cost legal fees to get the covenant language removed.
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The people in Philly can feel in their bones what The Philadelphia Inquirer won’t report

Another soul was sent untimely to his eternal reward in the City of Brotherly Love yesterday, but Philadelphia, which had been one ahead of its daily total for last year, fell behind by two, as four people were murdered on April 6, 2021. The numbers remain so close that no conclusions can reasonably be drawn as to whether 2022 will see more homicides than last year, but unless there is a very drastic change, 2022 will certainly exceed 2020’s 499 murders.

    70% of Philadelphians believe public safety is the most important issue facing the city, poll finds

    The number of residents who said crime, drugs, and public safety was the No. 1 issue — about 70% — has increased by 30 percentage points compared to August 2020.

    by Anna Orso | Wednesday, April 6, 2022

    More than half of Philadelphia residents do not feel safe in their neighborhoods at night, two-thirds have heard gunshots in the last year, and an overwhelming majority see public safety as the biggest issue facing the city.

    That’s according to a new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which surveyed 1,541 Philadelphians in January on issues related to crime, policing, and the twin impacts gun violence and COVID-19 have had on residents’ outlook. It was conducted after 2021 saw record numbers of people killed or injured by gunfire.

    Among Pew’s starkest findings was that the number of residents who said crime, drugs, and public safety was the No. 1 issue — about 70% — has increased by 30 percentage points compared with August 2020, the last time Pew conducted such a survey. It’s the highest percentage any topic has received since Pew started polling more than a decade ago, said Katie Martin, senior manager of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia research and policy initiative. . . . .

    And while more than half of Black and Hispanic residents said gun violence has had a major effect on quality of life in their neighborhoods, less than 20% of white residents said the same.

There’s a lot more in the original, and while Philadelphia Inquirer articles are hidden behind a paywall, you can see a few free articles a month.

The last quoted paragraph I included reflects the city very well. Though the Inquirer has referred to Philadelphia as a “black city”, the  2020 census found that just 38.3% of the city’s population were non-Hispanic black, and Hispanics, who can be either black or white, made up 14.9%. Between non-Hispanic whites, 34.3%, Asians, 8.3%, and “other groups,” 4.3%, the city is 46.9% non-black, and it doesn’t take a terribly large percentage of the Hispanic population being white to get the city to majority non-black. The non-Hispanic white population of the city have certainly declined, but they are hardly gone. If white residents do not see crime as the most serious problem, the way black and Hispanic Philadelphians do, much of that can be attributed to the fact that, while the city’s overall population are quite “diverse” — a word I’ve come to despise — internally the city is highly segregated.

In being highly segregated, white residents can afford to see crime as a less serious problem, because crime hits white residents far less frequently. The Inquirer is very, very good at covering stories in which the victim was clearly an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or, most importantly, a cute little white girl. When Samuel Sean Collington, a Temple University student approaching graduation was murdered. Mr Collington was a white victim, allegedly by a black juvenile in a botched robbery. On December 2, 2021, the Inquirer published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him. Five separate stories about the case of a murdered white guy. The newspaper even broke precedent when it came to Mr Collington’s murder by including the name of the juvenile suspect in the case, and delving into his previous record.

Oh, it’s not as though the Inquirer doesn’t publish stories about black victims, at least when it comes to black victims who are ‘innocents’. The murder of Samir Jefferson merited two stories, and four stories about the killing of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes.[1]I did note my suspicion that young Mr Stokes might not have been quite the innocent the Inquirer, and writer Anna Orso, made him out to be. A story is merited if the victim was a local high school basketball star, and cute little white girls killed get tremendous coverage: a search of the newspaper’s website for Rian Thal returned 4855 results! But for the vast majority of black victims, Inquirer coverage is a couple paragraphs, mostly in the late evening, and which have disappeared from the main page of the newspaper’s website by morning, if even that much.

Why? It’s simple: reporting about black bad guys getting killed by other black bad guys, in the words of the Sacramento Bee, “perpetuat(es) stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.” In her “apology to black Philadelphians and journalists,” publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes did not use those specific words, but the effect has been the same: no reporting of stories which might tell readers what they already know: that the vast majority of the murder victims, and their killers, in the City of Brotherly Love are black males who have been involved in the gang or criminal lifestyle.

However, despite the Inquirer’s attempt at minimizing crime in black neighborhoods, while reporting on it more diligently when the victims and perpetrators are white, because under Miss Hughes the newspaper is determinedly “anti-racist,” nobody is fooled. Part of the issue is that the newspaper’s paid circulation is pathetically low: the Philadelphia metropolitan area has roughly 6,108,000 people, meaning that the Inquirer’s circulation is paid for by a whopping 1.67% of what ought to be its service area. The circulation numbers are total, but even if all of its circulation was in the city itself, it would be paid for by just 6.35% of the population.

Pretty poor for the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper!

An Inquirer graphic shows how concerned Philly residents are. The people who are more heavily impacted by violence are more concerned, and most white residents simply are not; the gang bangers are shooting up Kensington and Strawberry Mansion, not Rittenhouse Square or Society Hill. The newspaper might not report much on killings in minority neighborhoods, but the people who live there know what happens. And while the Inquirer deliberately eschews publishing the photos of black victims and perpetrators, the television stations there are not so reticent.

Television is, after all, a heavily visual medium, and the television news broadcasts reach far more people than the Inquirer: the Inquirer itself reported that WPVI drew 287,000 viewers for it’s 6:00 PM local newscast, in February of 2018, and 163,000 for the 11:00 PM news show, while the newspaper had a circulation of 101,818 daily copies in May of 2019. WPVI, which has higher ratings than the other Philadelphia stations, is still only one of four.

Of course, local television news is free — although most people are paying for cable subscriptions — while newspapers cost money, but it would seem that a lot more people watch the local news on television than read the newspaper. There is something to be said for providing your customers what they want.

The Inquirer, under Miss Hughes and Executive Editor Gabriel Escobar, deliberately censor their coverage, to meet their “anti-racist” goals, but the truth leaks through. When the newspaper reported on the shooting of a 13-year-old boy at the intersection of 49th and Hoopes Streets, simply printing the location told Philadelphians that it was in a heavily black neighborhood, and while the newspaper didn’t report it, the victim was, in fact, black. When the paper reported on the targeted shooting death of a 15-year-old boy near Tanner Duckrey School, just printing the victim’s name, Juan Carlos Robles-Corana, told readers that the victim was Hispanic.

And so we have the report on how people feel about the issues in the city, and with the Inquirer publishing it, we can see that the propaganda the paper is trying to push has not resulted in people being misinformed. They know what is happening around them!

Also see: Republican registrations surge in Pennsylvania in warning sign for Democrats

Perhaps even more pathetically, white Philadelphians are contributing to the crime wave. Yes, the city is plurality non-Hispanic black, and yes, black voters traditionally give around 90% of their votes to Democrats, but softer-than-soft on crime District Attorney Larry Krasner was re-elected with 71.81% of the vote in November of 2021. That number has to include a whole lot of votes from the liberal white areas, from the voters who saw the impact of violence on the quality of their lives as having a minor (49%) or no (33%) impact. It’s easy to be sympathetic to liberal causes when it’s not in your back yard.

I have complained, more than once, that the Inquirer tries to hide the full truth, because the full truth does not match their editorial philosophy, but, in one very obvious sense, they really haven’t hidden the truth from the black and Hispanic populations of the city; those residents can see and hear and feel what has been happening around them. It’s actually the white residents of Chestnut Hill and Manayunk who have been deceived.

References

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The Philadelphia Inquirer complains about television’s news coverage, while censoring the news themselves. Maybe the Inquirer ought to do some of that in-depth reporting themselves?

The maxim “If it bleeds, it leads” has long been a part of journalism. Many of the Google search returns for If it bleeds, it leads want to put that as something unique to television news broadcasts, but it long predates television news, and has frequently been used by newspapers as well.

We have often noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer, the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, doesn’t like to tell its readers the unvarnished truth, likes to censor what its readers see. The Inquirer only rarely reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. I’ve told the truth previously: unless the murder victim is someone already of note, or a cute little white girl, the editors of the Inquirer don’t care, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the murder of a young black man in Philadelphia is not news.  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?

And now, the Inquirer, with so few readers that circulation is paid for by a whopping 1.67% of what ought to be its metropolitan service area,[1]Full disclosure: even though I no longer live in the Keystone State, I am a digital subscriber to the Inquirer. and wants the public taxed to support it, is criticizing the media which do report the news the newspaper will not:

    A 35-year-old won’t let Tyrone Williams forget the day Action and Eyewitness News trucks rolled down his block.

    “I remember July 27, 1987, a Saturday, like it was yesterday,” Williams said, “because, at this time, I’m scarred for life from this stabbing.”

    Williams was 20 years old when a group of white men and teenagers attacked him and his family outside their Olney home. One of the attackers, he remembered, used the N-word before jumping his brother Barry and attempting to stab their mother. Williams was trying to protect her when a knife went into his torso, puncturing his lung.

    “I could’ve died,” Williams, now 55, recalled.

    His attackers targeted the family in a case of racist mistaken identity after they’d exchanged words with a different group of African American men and boys near the now-shuttered Fern Rock Theater, Williams said.

    There’s been trouble like this many times before. It’s just that no one bothered to report it. That was how Eyewitness News reporter Joyce Evans summed up coverage of the white-on-Black beating that put Williams in the hospital. When Action News’ Vernon Odom covered the same crime that evening, surviving footage described the area, then predominantly white, as “one of the town’s most racially explosive neighborhoods.”

There’s a lot more at the original, but this is the introduction to the story’s documenting that KYW-TV, Channel 3, the CBS local owned-and operated station, originated Eyewitness News in 1965, and WPVI-TV, Channel 6, the ABC local owned-and-operated station, began Action News in 1970.

    The institution of local broadcast news is a young one, but among the most ubiquitous in the United States. It’s a pair of routines that unfold each night: As Americans gather to wind down their days, the medium has worked to deepen racial tensions and reinforce racial stereotypes about communities of color.

    This format launched in Philadelphia, first with the birth of Eyewitness News in 1965, and then with Action News in 1970. Over the next few generations, the pervasive and seductive twin broadcasts would spread to stations across the country — and with them, negative narratives about neighborhoods that would effectively “other” certain groups based largely on race, class, and zip code.

    More than half a century later, the impact of this efficient and pioneering approach remains, but continues to be condemned as harmful, as critics call for a reimagining of stories that tell a fuller story of communities, one that more accurately captures the humanity and dignity of all who live there.

To what does the Inquirer object? It seems that local television stations do radical things like send cameras and reporters to local breaking news stories and, Heaven forfend! take pictures and video at the scene.

    There “when something blew up” could have been a tagline for the nightly programs that have defined local television news since 1965, when an up-and-coming Philadelphia news director named Al Primo rolled out the nation’s first episode of Eyewitness News.

    The new breed of local news would transform how Americans received the day’s headlines. It would even change the substance of the news itself. Before Eyewitness appeared on America’s small screens, local television news hardly existed, with national stories dominating the day’s headlines as anchors vied for spots at big-city network markets. And it was delivered largely behind a desk, by a suited white man in a series of passive sentences.

    Primo repackaged the day’s events as infotainment — a fast-paced series of vignettes delivered by a “news family,” complete with a male-female pair of attractive, bantering anchors and intrepid reporters interviewing sources on the scene.

    The station quickly climbed the ratings charts and inspired imitators nationwide. Soon, the networks were drawn to a new approach that hooked viewers with a mix of sensational headlines and emotional human interest stories.

Must’ve been what the audience wanted: the Inquirer itself reported that WPVI drew 287,000 viewers for it’s 6:00 PM local newscast, in February of 2018, and 163,000 for the 11:00 PM news show, while the newspaper had a circulation of 101,818 daily copies in May of 2019. WPVI, which has higher ratings than the other Philadelphia stations, is still only one of four.

Of course, local television news is free — although most people are paying for cable subscriptions — while newspapers cost money, but it would seem that a lot more people watch the local news than read the Inquirer. There is something to be said for providing your customers what they want.

    As local TV news ratings rose and ad earnings rolled in through the end of the 20th century, Philadelphia lost hundreds of thousands of white residents to the suburban locales seen in newcast commercials for four-door sedans, Ethan Allen bedroom sets, and real estate brokerages. Images of white families in tidy subdivisions and spacious homes broke up dispatches that more often than not cast the city and its Black residents in a negative light.

LOL! “(C)ommercials for four-door sedans, Ethan Allen bedroom sets, and real estate brokerages”? Kind of dripping with condescension there! Perhaps the author doesn’t believe that black Philadelphians might want Ethan Allen bedroom sets?

    Network executives had figured out how to extract news that entertained and attracted viewers with a familiar story line: An endless loop with scenes of dangerous urban streets.

    Most of the time, those cameramen were documenting crime in certain neighborhoods where poverty and decades of failed social policies had given way to higher rates of crime and population loss.

Note that the author was blaming “higher rates of crime and population loss” on “poverty and decades of failed social policies,” rather than the people, the criminals, committing the crimes! The not-so-subtle message: it’s not really their fault that they are out there shooting people.

Oddly enough, even though I grew up poor, I still knew that shooting people was wrong, and, amazingly enough, even though I owned a rifle and a shotgun as a teenager, I never shot anyone.

And here we come to the crux of the newspaper’s complaint, at least the crux other than Philadelphians paying more attention to television news than the paper:

    Longtime Action News reporter Mike Strug, who joined the station in 1966 and went onto spend four decades in local television news, recalled reporting shifts spent sitting in a police vehicle at the corner of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, waiting for a crime to occur. The working-class, multiracial neighborhood has struggled with drugs, addiction, violence, and poverty for decades.

    The format didn’t often encourage reporters to return to the scene of the crime, follow up on root causes or the lives affected, or document the good in complex neighborhoods like Kensington— where, just like everywhere else, people live, work, and play.

If Mr Strug spent nights sitting in a police car at Kensington and Allegheny, waiting for a crime to occur, doesn’t that say that a lot of crime occurs in that area? The Philadelphia Badlands are notorious enough to have a separate Wikipedia entry, and the Inquirer itself reported, on August 17, 2020, on the open air drug market there:

    In Philadelphia’s Kensington district, home to one of the largest open-air drug markets in the United States, crowds of sellers and buyers flock to corners as if there never were a pandemic.

    “The blocks [where drug dealing takes place] never closed,” said Christine Russo, 38, who’s been using heroin for seven years. She waited Friday near Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, at the heart of the city’s opioid market, while a friend prepared to inject a dose of heroin. “Business reigns. The sun shines.”

The newspaper even included a photo of what appears, from the back, to be a man injecting drugs right out on Kensington Avenue, in front of SEPTA’s Allegheny Station.

Here’s where the Inquirer’s introspection fails: if television news doesn’t do much in the way of follow-up on crime stories, is that not a niche that the newspaper itself should fill? What we’ve actually seen is the paper trying to make martyrs out of 12-year-old Thomas J Siderio, Jr, who opened fire on the police, including trying to get the officer who shot and killed the punk himself killed, by investigating and publishing his name after Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw refused to disclose it for the officer’s safety, and 13-year-old Marcus Stokes, whom the paper falsely said “was fatally shot in North Philadelphia on his way to school“, when, in actuality, he was sitting in a parked, and possibly disabled, car, eleven blocks from his school, a quarter of an hour after he was supposed to be in school.

What we should see are stories in the newspaper about those shot and killed, where they lived, what their families were like, and how they lived their lives, but those types of stories seem limited to white victims like Jason Kutt and Samuel Collington. As of 2:19 PM EDT on Tuesday, March 29th, the paper has no such story on 15-year-old Sean Toomey, another supposedly innocent victim, gunned down in what was probably a wayward shot from another crime.

Of course, if the Inquirer actually reported in depth on the victims in Killadelphia’s combat zones, it would find that most of the victims were bad guys themselves, gang-bangers or wannabes, and, to be brutally honest, mostly black. That is something that Executive Editor Gabriel Escobar and Published Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes absolutely do not want to publicize.

As of Monday, March 28th, there have been 495 people reported as having been shot in the City of Brotherly Love, 373 of the victims being black (of which 55 were reported as being Hispanic), 116 white (of which 18 were reported as being Hispanic), 4 (including one listed as Hispanic) Asian, and 2 listed as being of unknown race.

It’s difficult to ignore those numbers: in a city that’s only 38.27% non-Hispanic black, 64.24% of all shooting victims are non-Hispanic black. Black Philadelphians including those who are Hispanic constitute 75.35% of all shooting victims.

The Inquirer laments that local television news is actually covering the news, but doesn’t cover the news in depth. Yet the paper itself not only ignores many of the stories superficially, but declines to cover the crime stories in depth, because those stories just don’t fit Teh Narrative.

References

References
↑1 Full disclosure: even though I no longer live in the Keystone State, I am a digital subscriber to the Inquirer.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to ramp up sympathy for the drunk driver who killed three men

Jayana Webb mugshot, via Fox29 News.

On early Monday morning, March 21, 2022, 21-year-old Jayana Webb killed 29-year-old Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Brendan Sisca, 33-year-old State Trooper Martin Mack, and 28-year-old electrician Reyes Rivera Oliveras. No, Miss Webb didn’t pull a gun and shoot them; she used a Chevy Captiva.

    On I-95, four lives converged in a crash that left three dead and a young person facing steep consequences

    Communities are mourning the deaths of two Pennsylvania State Police troopers and a ‘happy’ man. The driver’s friends are reckoning with her alleged crimes.

    by Ryan W. Briggs , Rodrigo Torrejón, and Max Marin | Friday, March 25, 2022 | 7:52 PM EDT

The story begins with brief biographies of the slain State Troopers and Mr Oliveras, which you can see if you follow the link to the Philadelphia Inquirer original. I have omitted quoting that part here, because I don’t want to cross the line into plagiarism. It’s further down that the infuriating part begins:

    Then there was Jayana Webb, 21, a track star-turned-hair stylist, barreling toward them in a silver Chevy Captiva.

    At 12:47 a.m., Webb wrote on Twitter that she had been stopped “doing 110 in a 50″ mile-per-hour zone. While state police have neither confirmed nor denied the stop, multiple news outlets reported that Mack and Sisca stopped the woman for speeding on the interstate that night.

    Around the time of the tweet, state police said the troopers were abruptly redirected to assist a man apparently attempting to cross the highway near Lincoln Financial Field. The troopers bolted south, and found Oliveras.

In other words, Miss Webb was about to get away with going 60 MPH over the speed limit. That’s more than just speeding; that’s reckless driving. Unfortunately, reckless did not translate into wreckless.

    Webb, who prosecutors said admitted to drinking Hennessy cognac that night, proceeded south on I-95 and crashed into the three men at such a speed that the impact ripped the doors off their stopped state police SUV and sent the troopers flying over a highway divider.

The troopers and Mr Oliveras were in the left hand median; to have struck them, Miss Webb had to have been driving down the “hammer” lane, the left-hand passing lane. She got away with speeding, and she was speeding again.

    All three men were pronounced dead shortly afterward. Webb and a passenger survived, and, according to police audio recordings, attempted to walk away but were escorted back to the scene.

    The ensuing investigation shut down I-95 for nearly eight hours, as investigators attempted to piece together what happened. But days later, why Oliveras was on I-95 at 1 a.m. Monday, and how Webb came to be speeding toward him and the troopers, remain largely a mystery.

It’s not a mystery how Miss Webb came speeding toward the scene: she got away with the initial stop by sheer dumb luck, and then used that luck to prove how dumb she really is.

    Webb now faces three counts of third-degree murder and potentially decades in prison. Her friends are reckoning with how a popular and promising young entrepreneur ended up in jail without bail over the deaths of three men.

“(A) popular and promising young entrepreneur”, huh? Here the Inquirer is trying to humanize her, to make her sympathetic character, not a killer, not a murderess, but just some poor thing who happened to make a mistake.

    Image of tweet, via Fox29 News. Click to enlarge.

    By the time Webb’s mugshot hit national news, she had already shown indications of reckless driving. Tweets from before the crash quickly emerged in which she bragged about drinking and driving. One January post read: “If you ask me, I’m the best drunk driver ever.”

    Some in her social circle, meanwhile, were in shock. How could Webb — a track-and-field star with no past DUIs and a hair-braiding business — be responsible for the deaths of three people?

    Some said Webb deserves what’s coming. Others, sometimes posting under the hashtag “#TeamJay,” said Webb made a terrible error, egged on by a pervasive culture of casual drunk driving.

    “What she did was not right,” said a friend, who spoke to the The Inquirer on condition of anonymity due to the high-profile nature of the case. “But at the same time we’re all human and we all make mistakes.”

Jayana Webb perp walk, via Fox29 News. Click to enlarge.

There’s more at the original, and it’s utterly disgusting. The Inquirer let us know what a wonderful person she really was, someone who just happened to get caught up in a culture of drinking, partying hearty, and driving drunk. Remember: the Inquirer also tried to make a martyr out of 12-year-old Thomas Siderio, Jr, who fired a shot at Philadelphia Police officers, and wrote about the killing of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes as though he was an innocent kid just walking to school, when he was not.

It’s really not her fault, you know, she just made a mistake.

A mistake that left three men, three men with families, three apparently hard-working men, stone cold graveyard dead.

The joy that Miss Webb apparently found in doing 110 MPH on I-95, in “tearing up Kelly Drive,” was not mirrored in her face during her perp walk. Even soft-hearted and soft-headed District Attorney Larry Krasner can’t let this slide, though he’ll probably go for sentences less than the maximum. The penalty for third-degree murder in Pennsylvania is 10 to 20 years in prison. Three consecutive 20-year sentences puts her behind bars until she’s 81 years old, but we all know that Mr Krasner won’t go for that. Watch for a lenient plea bargain from the District Attorney.

Me? I have exactly zero sympathy here. If Miss Webb is found guilty, she should get out of jail when Troopers Sisca and Mack and Mr Oliveras come back to life.

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A very minor omission in The Philadelphia Inquirer The difference between journalism and journolism

I use the term ‘journolism’ to refer to heavily biased reporting. It’s not a misspelling: my of spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. Many times biased journalism comes not from stating something false, but the omission of pertinent information, and boy, did Philadelphia Inquirer writers Ximena Conde, John Duchneskie, and Aseem Shukla do that here!

    Chart from The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 25, 2022. Click to enlarge.

    Philly had its largest one-year population decline since 1975: See charts that show the factors

    The drop in total population follows almost a decade of population growth for Philadelphia.

    by Ximena Conde, John Duchneskie, and Aseem Shukla | Friday, March 25, 2022

    Philadelphia lost almost 25,000 residents in a year, according to new census data looking at a full year of the pandemic released Thursday.

    The drop in total population between July 2020 and July 2021 is the largest one-year decline since 1975 and follows almost a decade of population growth for Philadelphia, which topped 1.6 million residents in 2020. The losses were driven primarily by the residents who moved out of the city, which exceeded the number of people moving into Philly.

    In the U.S. Census Bureau’s 12-month snapshot, Philly saw the highest disparity since 2001 between people moving in and those moving out. That difference led to a net loss of more than 28,000 residents, doubling what census numbers showed for the year prior.

There’s a lot more at the original, which you can read by following the link embedded in the headline.

The article gives some of the reasons for the city’s guesstimated population loss:

  1. A desire to flee crowded urban centers, something which will disappoint the global warming climate change activists, who see pushing more people into urban areas as a way to decrease CO2 emissions due to automobile traffic.
  2. Young adults moving back in with parents, in part due to the recession caused by responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Philadelphia persisted with restrictions after many other areas had dropped them, though much of that occurred after the data for this study was collected.
  3. More affluent residents leaving to second homes; the article makes no mention as to why such people wouldn’t be counted among current population numbers if they did not sell their city homes.
  4. City dwellers leaving cosmopolitan life in exchange for green space. The COVID-19 shutdowns and lockdowns produced a greater desire for having your own backyard.
  5. Immigration into the city decreased while President Trump was in office, but the article suggests that it will increase again now that Joe Biden is in office.
  6. A significant narrowing of the gap between live births and deaths.

The article writers noted that the population estimates are not as accurate as the actual census counts, so the data are at least questionable.

But despite the “few possible factors driving the Philly departures” given, one was conspicuous in its absence: the writers never mentioned Philadelphia’s huge crime rate! 2020, the first year of the panicdemic pandemic, saw the city’s homicide numbers jump from 356 in 2019 — which was already the highest since 2007 — to 499, good for second place all time, and only one short of the record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990. Then, in 2021, that record was blown to smithereens, with 562 murders.

The police were hobbled by a social and racial justice prosecutor who is more interested in finding malfeasance among the police than he is with prosecuting actual criminals, the idiotic #BlackLivesMatter protests which further alienated the population from the police, and the Inquirer itself, which, under “anti-racist” publisher Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes and new Executive Editor Gabriel Escobar, has editorial policies very much in tune with District Attorney Larry Krasner’s philosophy of soft-peddling crime stories because they might negatively impact and stereotype the black community in the city.

According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, there have been 115 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, March 24th, three more than the same date last year, meaning that Philadelphia is on a path to come very close to, and possibly exceeding, the 562 record. Fortunately, the latest man killed was a criminal attempting to rob a Dollar General store, shot dead by the store manager after the would-be robber made threatening moves with what turned out to be a toy gun in his jacket pocket.

As Robert Stacy McCain would say, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

    In other gun violence Thursday night, a 15-year-old boy was shot in the head and right side of his body around 9:10 p.m. in the city’s Wissinoming section, police said.

    The shooting occurred in the area of Mulberry and Devereaux Streets. The teen was taken by police to Jefferson Torresdale Hospital. He was reported in extremely critical condition.

    Police received preliminary information that two males suspected in the shooting also attempted a gunpoint robbery a short time earlier in Mayfair.

Philadelphians see stories like this every day, perhaps not in the Inquirer, but the local television stations carry the stories. In a city in which the quality of life is spiraling downward, in which the voters have just re-elected a softer-than-soft on crime District Attorney, in which Dollar General store managers feel the need to carry a firearm to protect his employees and himself because, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away, how is it that three well-educated and well-paid Inquirer reporters can simply omit the fact that Philadelphia is wracked with crime and violence as one possible reason that people are moving away?

Well, perhaps I’m being unfair in blaming the three reporters; it’s entirely possible that they did include it, but Editor Gabriel Escobar or one of his minions blue penciled it.[1]Yes, I know: I’m showing my age! But, whoever is responsible is showing the journolism of the Inquirer, while Mr Escobar and Miss Hughes and the Lenfest Institute which owns the paper scratch their heads, wondering why the newspaper is losing readers.

References

References
↑1 Yes, I know: I’m showing my age!
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The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to make a 12-year-old punk who shot at police some kind of martyr.

Thomas J Siderio Jr

I have previously noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t like reporting on the not good guys who get gunned down in the City of Brotherly Love, but when an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl gets killed, the paper is full of stories. I noted when the Inquirer and reporter Anna Orso tried to make an innocent victim out of young Marcus Stokes. In her story on the impact that the murder of Marcus Stokes had on E Washington Rhodes School, Miss Orso wrote, very specifically, that young Mr Stokes “was fatally shot in North Philadelphia on his way to school“, but the evidence, as printed in the Inquirer, indicates that he was not actually on his way to school. He was sitting, with five other young people, in a parked, and possibly disabled, car, many blocks away, fifteen minutes after he was supposed to be in his homeroom at school.

Miss Orso knew those facts; she is listed as either the sole or one of two authors in each of the articles I have cited. Did no one, including she, ever ask themselves any questions about why these young people, “including other Rhodes students“, were sitting in that car, ask themselves what they were doing there?

Miss Orso isn’t a stupid woman. She was graduated from Pennsylvania State University, a highly selective college, that doesn’t accept dummies. She isn’t inexperienced, having worked in journalism for seven years now, including four with the Inquirer.

Now, the Inquirer is trying the same thing with Thomas Siderio, Jr, the 12-year-old shot by the police after Mr Siderio opened fire on them:

    South Philly community mourns TJ Siderio, 12-year-old fatally shot by Philadelphia police officer

    Friends and family mourned mourned TJ this week, holding each other up as the waves of grief often took them off their feet.

    by Rodrigo Torrejón | Thursday, March 10, 2022

    Some would call him Tommy. Others Tom Dog. But most in Thomas Siderio’s tight-knit constellation of friends and family just knew him as TJ.

    A name was important, Pastor Mandell Gross said Thursday morning at Lighthouse Baptist Church in South Philadelphia. It was important during TJ’s short life. And it was important as dozens of TJ’s loved ones gathered at his funeral to say their final goodbyes.

    One by one, Gross asked the young people there, TJ’s friends, to say their names. Though he lamented the reason the community had gathered, Gross told the young people there to mourn the loss that they must try to come together in brighter days too. In TJ’s name.

At that point, the paper included a photo of Mr Siderio, one obviously taken several years earlier.

Four plainclothes officers were in the area, due to the high crime rate in the neighborhood. When they spotted Mr Siderio, who was visibly armed, they illuminated their unmarked car, the boy then shot at the officers, and took off running. One officer was injured in both eyes from flying glass, one remained in the vehicle with him, and two others got out to pursue the perp.

    A lawyer for TJ’s father previously disputed the accusation that the child fired the gun, calling it “egregious speculation” that has not been confirmed by evidence. Video and audio recordings analyzed by The Inquirer show that the gun that police say TJ tossed after shooting into the police car was found five doors down — or roughly 60 feet — from where he was fatally shot.

Sixty feet equals twenty yards, a distance a physically fit 12-year-old boy, who was already at a dead run, could cover in two seconds, but the Inquirer does not mention that.

The sappy article concluded:

    Next to his casket was a sign with a final, loving message from his parents, Thomas Siderio and Desirae Frame.

The elder Mr Siderio, inmate number NS5455, is behind bars at the State Correctional Institute Coal Township, three years into a sentence with at least two more years to serve on gun charges stemming from a murder in 2017. He has prior convictions for resisting arrest, assault, and the attempted theft of a motorcycle. He wasn’t there to have kept his son from running with a bad crowd and carrying a weapon, but, then again, as a convicted felon, he might not have been the best role model.

    “Rest In Peace TJ my son. Love Daddy and Mommy always and forever.”

    After the short sermon finished Thursday morning, the pallbearers gathered to carry TJ to his final resting place at Fernwood Cemetery. Most of the pallbearers were young, just a few years older than TJ.

    They were the friends that became TJ’s family on the streets of South Philadelphia. And with TJ’s face on their chests, the friends gathered for one last picture together, holding the young boy’s memory in their hearts.

An alleged but unconfirmed photo of Thomas Siderio Jr.

Give me a break! Young Mr Siderio was armed, with a stolen laser-sight equipped 9mm Taurus semiautomatic handgun, and he responded to the police lights by raising the weapon and firing it at the cops. This is not the sweet little angel the Inquirer has tried to make him out to be!

What was 12-year-old Mr Siderio doing out on the street, armed and ready to kill? Where was his mother, that she allowed him to have a stolen firearm, that she allowed him to go out into the streets armed? The newspaper’s Editorial Board has already opined that the killing of a young, gun-toting punk who opened fire on police young Mr Siderio should “should make every Philadelphian outraged,” blaming the city for not having safer and saner recreational outlets for boys like Mr Siderio, and blaming the state government for not passing virtue-signaling gun control laws that infringe on the constitutional rights of law abiding citizens but do absolutely nothing to stop criminals, blaming everybody but his father, who provided such a poor role model, and his mother, who didn’t supervise her son, and the boy himself, who knew he was breaking the law, and who took a shot at the police.

Let me be plain about this: had young Mr Siderio gotten away, he’d still be out on the streets, still be carrying a firearm, and still be a menace to every law-abiding citizen in the city. In just two days, March 8th and 9th, 13 people were shot in the city, and three of them died, all of them black males, but the Inquirer didn’t care enough about any of them to have a single story on any of them. I guess there wasn’t anything there out of which the newspaper could portray the victims as somehow innocents or heroic.

Young Mr Siderio is no hero, and he is no martyr. He was a young punk who thought he was a big, tough man, and had he escaped, would almost certainly amassed a long and violent criminal record. It is unfortunate that the manner of his death will cost a good police officer his job, and possible criminal charges, but the odds are high that Philadelphia is better off with Mr Siderio having gone to his eternal reward.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to get a police officer killed! If the officer is injured or killed, his blood will be on the hands of Gabriel Escobar and Elizabeth Hughes

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, who has presided over an ever-increasing homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love, had promised an impartial investigation into the shooting death of 12-year-old Thomas “TJ” Siderio, who shot at police officers, then turned and fled, with a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol in his hand, when he was shot and killed. About the only thing not clear was whether young Mr Siderio had tried to ditch his weapon “moments before a fatal bullet struck him in the back”.

The Commissioner has now announced that the officer will be fired.

The Philly police officer who fatally shot a 12-year-old boy will be fired, Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said

Outlaw declined to identify the officer, citing potential threats to the officer’s safety.

by Chris Palmer, Max Marin, and Rodrigo Torrejón | Tuesday, March 8, 2022

The Philadelphia police officer who fatally shot a 12-year-old boy in the back last week will be fired, Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said Tuesday.

Outlaw said the officer will be suspended for 30 days with intent to dismiss, the process by which officers are typically removed from the force.

So much for that fair and impartial investigation! Of course, the appropriately-named Commissioner Outlaw is really just Mayor Jim Kenney’s stooge, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that she was just following orders. If the police officers union decided on a job action over this, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

But here’s where The Philadelphia Inquirer really messes up!

She declined to identify the officer, citing potential threats to his safety. But police sources with direct knowledge of the investigation said the officer was Edsaul Mendoza, a five-year veteran assigned to a task force in South Philadelphia. Attempts to reach him for comment Tuesday were unsuccessful, and the police officers’ union representing him declined to comment.

So, the Commissioner at least attempted to keep the officer’s name private, due to threats to his safety, threats on his life, but the Inquirer investigates, determines who the officer is, and then publishes his name!

If Gabriel Escobar, Senior Vice President and Executive Editor of the Inquirer, and Elizabeth Hughes, the Publisher and Chief Executive Officer, wanted to get the officer targeted and killed, what would they have done differently? And does anybody believe that the article authors, Chris Palmer, Max Marin, and Rodrigo Torrejón, would have included his name if Mr Escobar had not approved?

Steve Keeley of Fox29 news reported on a triple murder in the West Oak Lane neighborhood, and included the press release from the Philadelphia Police Department. The press release identified the victims as three “black males.”

Yet, when the Inquirer reported on it, writer Jenn Ladd, though she took the descriptions of the victims’ injuries almost verbatim from the police report, eliminated the fact that the victims were black. The “anti-racist” Inquirer once again censored the news Miss Hughes and Mr Escobar don’t want the public to know!

The Inquirer enjoys absolute freedom of the press, as it should. Perhaps Miss Hughes and Mr Escobar believe that revealing the accused officer’s name falls under the notion of the public’s “right to know.” But given the newspaper’s nearly everyday censorship of crime stories — Miss Hughes stated, directly, that the paper was “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,” — it would seem that the Inquirer is not nearly so concerned with the public’s “right to know” if it’s not information the publisher and executive editor want people to know.

Of course, a triple, clearly targeted fatal shooting in West Oak Lane? Everybody who knows anything about the city knew that the victims were black! By self-censoring that detail, the newspaper was inviting readers to guess, to speculate, and we all know what their guesses and speculations would be.

When it came to the officer’s name, however, most of the public couldn’t guess . . . and the Inquirer made sure that it wasn’t necessary to guess.

The Inquirer’s Editorial Board had already opined that the killing of a young, gun-toting punk who opened fire on police young Mr Siderio should “should make every Philadelphian outraged.” I guess that outrage means that the Inquirer ought to put a target on the officer, to try to get him killed, because that’s exactly what they have done.

If the officer named is assaulted, if he is shot and wounded or even killed, his blood will be on the hands of Gabriel Escobar and Elizabeth Hughes.

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How far from the tree did the apple fall?

Thomas J Siderio Jr

A kid shoots at Philadelphia Police Officers, in a crime-ridden neighborhood, and winds up dead. Naturally 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 want to make it police brutality!

Mystery deepens on whether 12-year-old boy was armed when police shot him in the back

The family of Thomas “TJ” Siderio prepares to bury the 12-year-old boy as investigators examine whether he tossed the gun before his was fatally shot by police.

by Barbara Laker, David Gambacorta, Craig R. McCoy, and Ryan W. Briggs | Friday, March 4, 2022

While the family of Thomas “TJ” Siderio prepares to bury the 12-year-old boy shot and killed by Philadelphia police, investigators are examining whether he had tossed a gun moments before a fatal bullet struck him in the back.

Notice that both the headline and the first sentence state that the dead delinquent was 12 years old, something the police officers almost certainly did not know during the incident — it was at night — and that he was shot in the back. You have to read further to learn that young Mr Siderio was armed and fleeing the police.

Two plainclothes officers chased TJ on Tuesday night after they heard gunfire and a rear window shattered in their unmarked car near 18th and Barbara Streets in South Philadelphia.

They fired toward TJ, who they said was holding a handgun and fled east on Barbara Street.

New details reveal that the officers fired four shots in total, according to police sources.

During the first two blasts, TJ was holding a gun. But the last two shots — one of which was fatal — are “concerning,” the sources said, because TJ may have tossed his weapon before he was hit.

In any normal story, the subject is referred to by his last name in second and subsequent mentions; but here the Inquirer writers refer to him by his nickname, a not-so-subtle attempt at making him a sympathetic character. The boy shot at the police!

“(B)ecause TJ may have tossed his weapon before he was hit,” huh? Note that the first sentence says “moments before a fatal bullet struck him in the back,” emphasis mine. It would seem that if he tossed his firearm, it was almost immediately prior to being struck, too quick for officers to have noticed it and taken it into account.

Four officers were sitting in an unmarked car when the episode began around 7:20 p.m. They were Edsaul Mendoza, Kwaku Sarpong, Robert Cucinelli, and Alexander Camacho, according to police records obtained by The Inquirer. They were staking out the area because a 17-year-old boy and 20-year-old man had been seen on social media brandishing weapons, police sources said.

The officers approached TJ and a 17-year-old, who were on bicycles, police said, because they believed one of them had a handgun. They turned on their flashing lights, then heard gunfire. Camacho was injured in both eyes by shards of glass, police records show.

Apparently the officers were right: young Mr Siderio did have a handgun. They illuminated, and then a bullet was fired at them, with Officer Camacho injured by a shattered window in the vehicle. Two of the officers then exited the vehicle and took off chasing Mr Siderio. A loaded 9mm semi-automatic handgun was recovered at the scene, as were five shell casings.

According to Police Department policy, an officer would not be justified in using deadly force solely if a suspect resisted arrest or attempted to escape. Other factors are supposed to be taken into consideration, such as whether a suspect was armed, or posed an immediate threat to an officer. Officers should not shoot at a fleeing suspect “who presents no immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury,” the policy states.

Mr Siderio was armed, and his willingness to fire at police officers shows that he was an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury. To me, shooting at an armed suspect, who had fired first at police officers, fits well within the ‘other factors’ to be taken into consideration.

Naturally, the 17-year-old at the scene claimed that the police did not turn on their lights or identify themselves before shots were fired, but even if that were the case, Mr Siderio shot first. As for believing a 17-year-old delinquent over the police, nope, not going to do that.

In the last six months, there were 652 crimes reported in the South Philly area where TJ was shot and killed, according to city police statistics. The area — bounded by Snyder Avenue south to I-76, and Broad Street west to 25th Street — saw two homicides, 36 robberies, and 23 aggravated assaults in that time period.

So, the police were there because it’s a bad neighborhood.

You might be asking, “How did a 12-year-old have a semi-automatic 9MM handgun? Where were his parents?” Well, his father, Thomas J Siderio Sr., inmate number NS5455, is behind bars at the State Correctional Institute Coal Township, three years into a sentence with at least two more years to serve on gun charges stemming from a murder in 2017. He has prior convictions for resisting arrest, assault, and the attempted theft of a motorcycle.

How far from the tree did the apple fall?

KYW Channel 3, the CBS owned-and-operated station in Philadelphia spoke with the mother of the 17-year-old who was with Mr Siderio when the incident happened:

“He had no chance in life and now, he’s gone before he could even get a chance in life,” the mother of the 17-year-old boy said.

Actually, he did have a chance at life, and he used that chance at life to try to take the life of someone else, a police officer. Naturally, there’s plenty of sympathy for young Mr Siderio, but he had his chance at life, and squandered it.

I’m enough of an [insert slang term for the rectum here] here to ask the obvious question: what if, rather than shooting at the fleeing delinquent, officers had let him get away? Then there’d be another 12-year-old carrying a gun on the streets of the City of Brotherly Love. Had the officers not fired at Mr Siderio, we’d have been reading about him soon enough in the future, perhaps the next time when he killed an innocent victim.

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.