Tag Archives: #PhiladelphiaInquirer

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The murder rate in Philadelphia has dropped Has The Philadelphia Inquirer actually noticed?

I have frequently referred to ‘journolists’ as opposed to journalists at The Philadelphia Inquirer. The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias. I will admit to also using it to refer to reporters who just don’t look at all of the facts.

‘Silence, and then screams’: Panic and numbness amid Labor Day weekend shootings in Philadelphia

The unofficial end of summer didn’t slow a record year of gun violence. Between Friday and Sunday, at least 13 people were shot in Philadelphia, two fatally.

by Anna Orso | September 6, 2021

Forty minutes feels like an eternity when lives are on the line.

That’s how long it took Brandon Collins to get home from work Friday evening after his sister called frantically: Someone had sprayed bullets right outside their home on the 1500 block of South Cleveland Street in Point Breeze. And Collins was terrified for his 58-year-old mother’s safety.

She was physically unharmed, but Collins was left shaken. “Things happen in a split second,” he said.

Police said two men had been shot and were hospitalized in the incident — a 33-year-old hit in the arm and hip, and a 24-year-old struck in the foot. An SUV that belonged to an uninvolved resident was riddled with bullet holes. No one was arrested, and police haven’t determined a motive.

That was how Labor Day weekend began in Philadelphia as the city’s unrelenting gun violence crisis continued. Even as the Made in America festival packed Center City and some residents bolted for the Shore, others across the city were left fearful for their family’s safety, or their own.

You have to get down to the ninth paragraph, past two large photographs and two ads, before you come to this part:

    More than 1,500 people have been struck by bullets in Philadelphia this year, and the city has recorded 358 homicides, most by guns. Police officials said during a news conference last week that 179 people were shot over four weeks in August, a 23% decrease compared to the previous four weeks.

    But that decrease was from a historically high level of gun violence in July. And the 186 shooting victims in all of August was more than in any month between 2015 and May 2020, when shootings spiked dramatically.

Journalists know that the further down in a story you get, the fewer readers who began it are still reading.

The Philadelphia Police Department reported that, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Labor Day, September 6th, there had been 363 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love so far this year. With 249 days of the year having elapsed, that gives Philly an average of 1.4578 murders a day, which would yield 532 murders for the entire year, if that average was maintained.

As we reported on July 9th, the city then had a rate of 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year. Thus, even with the really, really bad part of the year in teh statistics, the ‘projected’ homicide total for 2021 has dropped by thirty souls.

But there’s more. Over the last 1½ months, the murder rate has really dropped. There had been 314 homicides as of July 22nd, the 203rd day of the year. Since that time, 46 days ago, there have been ‘just’ 49 murders, a rate of 1.0652 per day. With 116 days left in 2021, if that rate were maintained, there would be ‘just’ 124 more killings, for a total of 487 for the year, 12 fewer than last year, and 13 fewer than 1990’s all time record of 500. If that number was the final one, it would be 75 fewer homicides than the math had projected just two months ago.

Which raises the obvious question: why has the homicide rate decreased? After all, mid-July through Labor Day is part of the long, hot summer, when killings seem to be at their peak. Did a really bad gang or two just get completely wiped out? Did a few gangs come up with a truce? Whatever happened, this ought to be a question real journalists would attempt to investigate.

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Philadelphia sports writers might just explain Philly’s murder rate The Inquirer wants to influence the city's culture, but their sportswriters might be going about it the wrong way.

In the city that booed Santa Claus, and which piled heaps of scorn and abuse on Carson Wentz and Ben Simmons after every bad game, Philadelphia Inquirer sports writer Marcus Hayes wants to blame 76ers point guard Ben Simmons and (former) Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz for wanting to leave.

    Ben-edict Simmons, Carson Wentz deserve Philadelphia’s fury as they abandon Eagles, Sixers

    They should have spent the summer on their knees, begging forgiveness, promising to improve. Instead, they sabotaged their trade value and put your teams in peril. They completely warrant your wrath.

    By Marcus Hayes | September 4, 2021

    Philly can be an angry place. Just ask Santa.

    Sometimes that anger is misplaced, as Jayson Werth can attest. But, in this moment, every ounce of Philadelphia’s fury directed at Ben Simmons and Carson Wentz is justified.

    Wentz forced a disastrous trade this spring to the Colts after logging one of the worst seasons in NFL history. Simmons, gun-shy in the playoffs, is trying to trump that unholy departure by strong-arming the Sixers, according to an Inquirer report Wednesday.

    They should have returned to the Eagles and Sixers, rehabilitated their images, and enhanced their trade values. They could not, and cannot. They fear competition. They abhor accountability. They see themselves as victims. So, instead, they sabotaged their trade values, which crippled the Eagles, and which probably will cripple the Sixers. That, on its own, should infuriate fans, even if the pair’s dismissiveness didn’t.

    Wentz and Simmons should have spent the summer of 2021 down on their knees, begging for your forgiveness, working on their flaws, willing to accept whatever role their bosses decided would best help the team. They should have apologized to their teammates for their shortcomings and for the distractions they caused. They should have pledged to, in the future, actually earn the millions of dollars that you lavish upon them — paying to watch them on TV, online, or in person; parking your cars and buying beers at the stadiums; purchasing their jerseys and shoes online.

There’s more at the original.

Mr Simmons grew up in Australia, where people aren’t treated the way Philadelphia fans, and sports writers, treat sports stars. Mr Wentz grew up in North Dakota, where people aren’t, you know, [insert plural slang term for the rectum here], yet somehow, some way, people there expect them to have Philly thick skins.

Of course, there are a lot of Philadelphians who don’t have such thick skins, which is why people keep getting shot in the City of Brotherly Love, but I digress.

Mr Simmons is an incredible athlete, but he has one glaring weakness as a basketball player: he just can’t shoot. So, with all that he can do, Philadelphia fans, and sports writers, had to jump on his biggest weakness, and forgot about all of the good things he can do. Philly fans, and sports writers, wanted him to play beyond his skill set, and trashed him when he couldn’t. Even before the playoffs, there were plenty of articles in the Inquirer about him taking very few three point shots. (I remember one in which it was noted that, at the time, Shaquille O’Neal had more career three-pointers than Mr Simmons.)

The pressure got to Mr Simmons, and he had a terrible series against the Atlanta Hawks, shooting just 33.3% . . . from the free throw line! Then, with just 3:30 left in the game, and the 76ers trailing by two, Mr Simmons, who is 6’11” tall, passed up a wide-open dunk over 6’1″ Trae Young. The game, as the announcer said, had gotten in his head.

Mr Simmons was rightly criticized, but Philly fans, and sports writers, went way, way overboard.

Mr Wentz? He was well appreciated, until last season, when he played behind a destroyed-by-injuries offensive line, had no rushing game, and second-quality receivers. His top target, Zach Ertz, was out for five games, yet Philly fans, and sports writers, expected Mr Wentz to be Superman anyway. I wasn’t a particularly good football player, but even in high school I knew that there were eleven guys on the field, all of whom are necessary to make plays, and it doesn’t matter how good your quarterback is, if his receivers aren’t getting open, and his line isn’t keeping the defensive rush off of him, he’s not going to have a good game. Even Tom Brady can’t make great plays when he’s underneath a 260 lb blitzing linebacker.

The article was all about Messrs Simmons and Wentz having no loyalty to their Philadelphia teams, but, in reality, Philly fans, and sports writers, had no loyalty to those players. Mr Hayes is like the abusive husband who gets all urinated off and blames his wife for filing for divorce.

When I think of the homicide rate in Philly, which actually has been coming down of late, it seems to me like the Inquirer sports writers, writ large. People getting pissed off, for reasons that really aren’t that important, and overreacting in the extreme. Mr Hayes, of course, is being paid to overreact, even by the very #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 Inquirer, but, in his own small way, he is contributing to the attitude which so frequently spills out onto the city’s mean streets. Through the end of August, 357 people had been murdered in Philly, which means that there were more murders there than any entire year from 2008 through 2019.

Is that fair to Mr Hayes? He might not think so, but the homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love is, in the end, an issue of culture, and the Inquirer is, and wants to be, both an element of, and contributor to, the culture of the city. When published Elizabeth Hughes wrote that the newspaper was trying to become “an anti racist news organization,” she was saying that she wanted her newspaper to become a leader in the community, to make the city a better place in which to live. Thus, it has to be asked: do columns like Mr Hayes’, in which he wrote of Messrs Simmons and Wentz, “So yes, this pair warrants your wrath,” lower the rhetoric, dampen down the anger, reduce the tendency to violence? When he wrote, “Ben-edict Simmons and Ginger Jesus are Philly sports’ version of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,” wasn’t he asking for an extreme reaction? If players like Messrs Simmons and Wentz, who have virtually nothing to do, personally, with the vast, vast majority of people in Philly, deserve the “wrath” and “fury” of Philadelphia fans, then doesn’t the guy down the block, who stole your girl, or dunked in your face on the playground, or cut you off in trying to grab a parking space, or sold drugs on your corner, deserve your “wrath” and your “fury” even more?

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

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

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Ignoring a very, very large elephant in the room

Do reporters for The Philadelphia Inquirer read their own news paper?

Inquirer reporter Harold Brubaker, who specializes in the business side of health care and nonprofit sector, reported on the Keystone State’s attempts to revise nursing home regulations, but somehow he managed to miss the elephant in the room:

‘Insulting and dumb.’ That’s how a nursing home manager labeled criticism of Pa.’s new staffing proposal

Advocates say more staffing is desperately needed. But nursing home executives say Medicaid rates won’t support it.

by Harold Brubaker | August 28, 2021

Anne Clauss hates to imagine what her mother would have endured at a nursing home in Langhorne if she or another relative hadn’t visited daily during her stay from 2017 to 2018.

One evening Clauss found her mother at the end of a hallway facing away from her room, where she had been stuck for a few hours, another resident told her. Other times, staff — whom she called underpaid and overworked — forgot to bring her mother her meals.

Her mother died at a hospital in 2018. But that experience prompted the Levittown resident to comment in favor of a Pennsylvania Department of Health proposal to increase the homes’ minimum level of direct care to 4.1 hours daily per patient, up from the current 2.7 hours.

“I hope regulations can be updated to help our elderly live out their lives well cared for and treated respectfully,” Clauss wrote to the Independent Regulatory Review Commission, which will review the comments and eventually hold a public hearing. It’s not clear how quickly the commission will act.

Let’s tell the truth here: nursing homes are dreadful places, facilities in which to warehouse the elderly who can no longer care for themselves, but who can, and do, live on with nursing care and physical assistance. It’s a truth all of us know, but no one is willing to say out loud, because so many people fear that they will one day have to warehouse their aging parents in such a facility.[1]My family has been fortunate in that regard; such a decision was never one we faced. And I cannot imagine that any of us do not dread the thought of having to be in a nursing home themselves. I’m very thankful that I’m very healthy, but who can know what the future holds.

There’s a lot more at the original, and Mr Brubaker did a thorough job in his story, save for one thing. He noted that nursing homes have real difficulties in attracting staff, and that Medicaid payments for patients work out to roughly $8.00 an hour, which is significantly less than certified nursing assistants are paid. To provide more hours of patient care, more nursing staff would have to be hired, but there’s simply not enough money paid to nursing homes to do so. For the details, read Mr Brubaker’s original.

The effort is coming to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic in which over 13,000 people have died in Pennsylvania’s nursing homes.

This is where Mr Brubaker’s story fails. He mentions the COVID-19 panic just this once, and that’s it. But, as we previously noted, and as Mr Brubaker’s own newspaper has reported, Philadelphia’s Acting Health Commissioner, Dr Cheryl Bettigole, has mandated that all health care workers in the City of Brotherly Love must be vaccinated against COVID-19 by October 15th. Dr Bettigole has noted that more than a dozen long-term care facilities in Philadelphia have less than 50% of their staff vaccinated.

If you’re more committed to not getting the vaccine than to the safety of your patients, it’s time to do something else. Health care is not for you.

This is something that Mr Brubaker should have mentioned: not only are patients in nursing homes getting fewer hours of care than they should, Dr Bettigole and the city of Philadelphia want to fire the CNAs and RNs who refuse to get vaccinated.

Oh, they won’t put it that way — though the Commissioner came close — but that’s the result of the policy. The city obviously wants to force the reluctant to get vaccinated, and some will probably concede, but if over half the staff have resisted vaccination, in an industry which has been continually pushing for it, it has to be expected that at least some, quite probably a significant percentage of them, will continue to refuse to comply.

From an article referenced by the much nicer Dana on Patterico’s Pontifications:

As of last night, there were 102 people waiting for an ICU bed in the greater Houston area.

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo told Begnaud that she was prepared to open a field hospital, but as of Friday morning, hospitals in the Houston area were telling her they had extra beds — but not enough nurses. Seven hundred nurses arrived last week, but it’s still not enough to meet the demand.

Of course, that article, too, failed to address the elephant in the room:

Houston hospital workers fired, resign over COVID-19 vaccine

By Jamie Stengle | June 22, 2021

DALLAS (AP) — More than 150 employees at a Houston hospital system who refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine have been fired or resigned after a judge dismissed an employee lawsuit over the vaccine requirement.

A spokesperson for Houston Methodist hospital system said 153 employees either resigned in the two-week suspension period or were terminated on Tuesday.

The case over how far health care institutions can go to protect patients and others against the coronavirus has been closely watched. It’s believed to be the first of its kind in the U.S. But it won’t be the end of the debate.

It’s not a case of some health care workers may quit, or may be fired, for refusing vaccination, but that some have already quit, some have already been fired.

I get it: the editorial position of the Inquirer is strongly in support of vaccination, and perhaps noting that the city’s vaccine mandate will actually cost the city’s nursing homes employees isn’t something a biased newspaper like the Inquirer wants to report.[2]I take publisher Elizabeth Hughes opinion piece as an admission that the Inquirer has, and will continue to have, a bias toward the left. But for an article like Mr Brubaker’s to fail to note the potential loss of nursing home employees, just as he is noting that the Commonwealth might require more, is simply poor journalism. It wasn’t just a missed point, but ignoring a very, very large elephant in the room.

References

References
↑1 My family has been fortunate in that regard; such a decision was never one we faced.
↑2 I take publisher Elizabeth Hughes opinion piece as an admission that the Inquirer has, and will continue to have, a bias toward the left.
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Haven’t the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer noticed the numbers? Homicides and shootings in the city have dropped significantly

We have previously noted the recent decrease in the number of homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. We noted, on July 9th, that there had been 291 killings as of 11:59 PM on July 8th. 291 ÷ 189 days in the year, = 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year. If I recall correctly, that 562 number was my highest projection for the year.

But then, as of the 221st day of the year, 325 homicides had been recorded. 325 ÷ 221 days in the year, = 1.4706 homicides per day, for a projected 537 for the year. That number stayed fairly consistent, as a week later, with ‘just’ 339 homicides in 228 days, Philadelphia was seeing ‘only’ 1.4868 homicides per day, which works out to ‘just’ 543 over the course of 2021.

As of 11:59 PM on Sunday, August 22nd, the Philadelphia Police Department reported that there had been 345 homicides in the city. 345 ÷ 234 days = 1.4744 per day, or 538 projected for the year. The big news is that, over the past 31 days, a full month, if not a calendar month, there have been ‘just’ 31 homicides, ‘just’ 1.00 per day. With 131 days remaining in 2021, if that rate could be maintained, there would be ‘only’ 476 killings in Philly for the year. If The Philadelphia Inquirer has noticed that decrease, I haven’t seen it mentioned. It certainly doesn’t seem as though their Editorial Board has noticed.

    In Philly, someone has been shot every day since Jan. 2 as multiple crises plague the city

    January 2nd was the only day in 2021 in which no person was shot in Philadelphia.

    by The Editorial Board | August 23, 2021

    If you’re looking for ways to quantify the depths of the gun violence crisis in Philadelphia, there may not be many bleaker statistics than this: There’s only been one day so far this year — Jan. 2 — when not a single person was shot in the city.

    Since then, nearly 1,500 people have been shot in Philadelphia, including 295 fatalities. At least 50 other people were murdered by an assailant who used a weapon other than a gun.

    Gun violence drives Philadelphia’s murder rate, which is on pace for a record this year, but it’s essential that the city also address three other factors if officials hope to stem a seemingly unrelenting tide of killings — increasing the rate at which murders are solved, fostering more cooperation from witnesses in criminal prosecutions, and rooting out corrupt officers whose bad practices later lead to convictions being overturned.

    In Philadelphia, murderers have a better chance of winning a coin toss than being arrested. Last Wednesday, during the most recent briefing on the city’s response to gun violence, the police presented data showing that through Aug. 15, only 43% of homicides this year led to an arrest. That homicide clearance rate, or the percentage of killings that lead to an arrest, is on par with recent years.

Am I wrong in thinking that the Editorial Board ought to be noting that fewer people are being killed?

But it’s not just that fewer people are being killed. According to data provided by the city, there were 272 shootings during the 31 days of July, and ‘only’ 145 through the first 22 days of August. If that rate of 6.59 shootings per day holds up for the rest of the month, there would be 204 total shootings in August, a 33.33% decrease.

There’s more at the original, but, if you remember when publisher Elizabeth Hughes said she was going to make the Inquirer “an anti-racist news organization“, you won’t be surprised that the Editorial Board turned quickly to a Larry Krasneresque condemnation of the Philadelphia Police Department, noting Mr Krasner’s ongoing attempts to overturn what they claim are false convictions.

    These exonerations, as well as recent reporting by The Inquirer, have shed light on the coercive and illegal tactics detectives used to get false confessions. This month, Krasner charged three former homicide detectives for lying in the 2016 retrial of Anthony Wright, whose murder conviction was vacated due to DNA evidence.

    Also this month, Krasner asked a judge to hold the Philadelphia Police Department in contempt for failing to turnover police misconduct records.

    Philadelphia’s twin crises of gun violence and homicides are multilayered and intertwined. To reduce the number of unsolved murders in the city, the homicide clearance rate needs to go up. For the homicide clearance rate to go up, witnesses need to have faith that the system is actually seeking justice — not simply trying to improve its statistics by throwing another person in prison.

I’m trying to figure out how the Editorial Board are trying to give witnesses “faith that the system is actually seeking justice” by continually slamming the performance of the Police Department, and so far, I’ve got nothing. When the Board say that the Police Department needs to be “rooting out corrupt officers,” the impression the #woke at the Inquirer are giving — and, I suspect, trying to give — is that most of the city police officers are corrupt.

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The left blame evil reich wing Republicans for lower vaccination rates, but black Americans are the least vaccine compliant

It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s Twitter photo was taken in a bar.

Whenever I need a good chuckle, I will go to see what new articles Amanda Marcotte has posted on Salon. She wrote, at 1:07 PM EDT on Thursday, August 12th, It’s OK to blame the unvaccinated — they are robbing the rest of us of our freedoms. As usual, Miss Marcotte has blamed the evil reich-wing Trump supporters as the problem:

    I really wanted to get back to my spin class. And for a couple of months, I did just that. Exercising at home for the past year was fine, but nothing beats a 45-minute spin class for leaving one red-faced and sopping wet with sweat. But it’s that “sopping wet” part that became a problem this week when the gym sent out a memo bringing back their indoor mask mandate. This isn’t a 5-minute jaunt in a grocery store with a mask. Exercising with a sweat-soaked mask is like being waterboarded. So I canceled my class and sent a polite but angry note to my gym. Philadelphia’s new regulations allow businesses to choose between mask and vaccine mandates, and they chose poorly, penalizing those who did the right thing to coddle those who refuse. Masking the already vaccinated to protect the unvaccinated helps a little, but is a little like trying to cover someone in a rainstorm by holding an index card over their head.

Miss Marcotte is just hopping mad that her rights are being violated! Of course, she wants other people’s rights, their privacy rights — something, as an abortion-up-until-the-final-contraction supporter she otherwise strongly supports — to take a back seat to her being able to go to her spin class. When it comes to other people’s rights, she’s kind of like Dirty Harry. Continue reading →

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If it’s just those evil reich wing Trumpelstiltskins who are refusing to be vaccinated, why doesn’t Philadelphia have an 80% vaccination rate?

Our good friends on the left love to blame evil reich wing Republicans for lower COVID-19 vaccination rates than they believe are acceptable. Of course, only 100% vaccination compliance is acceptable to the left, because the needs of the state outweigh the rights of the individual.

Surprisingly enough, that “anti racist news organization,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, loath as they are to print anything which could be construed negatively on BIPOCs[1]Black, indigenous, people of color., included an interactive map of city vaccination rates by zip code:

Philadelphia’s least-vaccinated zip codes at the beginning of the summer remain its most undervaccinated now, despite door-to-door outreach, targeted clinics, a lottery, and advertising to encourage people to get COVID-19 inoculations.

As the delta variant spreads, and the threat of other variants looms, these parts of the city are the most vulnerable to serious illness and death.

Five of the city’s zip codes had less than 40% of their residents fully or partially vaccinated as of Aug. 9, according to city data — rates that are on par with Arkansas and Louisiana.

You can click on the image, which is a screen capture, to enlarge it, but it is not interactive on this site. I did, however, rather painstakingly create a Microsoft Excel file of the of the data contained in the interactive file, including percentage having received at least one dose of vaccine, the median household income, racial demographics,[2]In the Inquirer’s interactive map, “white” is not capitalized, but “black”, “Latino” and “Asian” are. and the neighborhood names, something traditionally important in Philadelphia.

You can click on the image to enlarge it.

Of the 15 most heavily vaccinated zip codes, white Philadelphians are the plurality in 14 of them, with over 50% of the population in 12 of them, and 49% and 47% in the other two. Only in zip code 19104 are whites not the plurality.

In only two of the fifteen zip codes with the lowest rates of vaccination, 19116 and 19135, do white Philadelphians compose the largest racial/ethnic group. In nine if the fifteen zip codes with the lowest vaccination rates, blacks make up 70% or more of the population, and over 90% in zip codes 19132 and 19138.

It’s true enough that it takes an [insert slang term for the rectum here] like me to notice the racial disparity in those statistics, but I’d bet I’m not the only one. One wonders: just whom publisher Elizabeth Hughes will fire for looking up and printing those racially disparate statistics.

In the 2020 elections, Philadelphians gave 603,790 (81.44%) of their votes to Joe Biden, and only 132,740 (17.90%) to President Trump; Mr Biden’s margin of 471,050 votes in the city was far larger than his 81,660 statewide margin; without Philadelphia, President Trump would have carried the Keystone State by 389,390 votes.[3]This is clearly evidence that Philly needs to be walled off, like Manhattan in Escape from New York, all the inhabitants therein considered convicted felons and not be allowed to vote. If the vaccination resistance is all among the evil reich wing Trumpelstiltskins, why aren’t over 80% of people in the City of Brotherly Love vaccinated?

References

References
↑1 Black, indigenous, people of color.
↑2 In the Inquirer’s interactive map, “white” is not capitalized, but “black”, “Latino” and “Asian” are.
↑3 This is clearly evidence that Philly needs to be walled off, like Manhattan in Escape from New York, all the inhabitants therein considered convicted felons and not be allowed to vote.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer proves my point

We have said, umpteen times, that The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t really care about homicides in the City of Brotherly Love unless the victim is an innocent, a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl.

    Two young athletes were fatally shot this week, leaving West Philadelphia school communities shattered: ‘This can’t be normal’

    “This can’t be normal, this can’t be accepted,” a Boys’ Latin football coach said he told his players. “You have a victim, but you also have a family behind them that are left to pick up the pieces.”

    By Anna Orso | Friday, July 23, 2021

    It had been just a few weeks since K.J. Johnson got his driver’s license. He picked up friends, including his childhood pal Tommie Frazier, and headed to play basketball on Wednesday, a sunny afternoon in West Philly.

    The ride ended in tragedy. Johnson, 16, and Frazier, 18, were fatally shot just after noon while seated in a car on the 200 block of North 56th Street in West Philadelphia, after unidentified gunmen fired into the vehicle. Another 16-year-old was wounded by the bullets fired in broad daylight near a day care and a bus stop.

    As of Friday, no one had been arrested and homicide investigators were still searching for video and witnesses. Police said they found 17 shell casings at the scene.

There’s plenty more at the original, but it all boils down to the same thing we’ve written about before: the victims were good high school athletes, the victims were somebodies.

A previous story noted that:

    The shooting happened at 12:10 p.m. on the 200 block of North 56th Street, when unidentified gunmen opened fire on the teens as they sat in a car, said Deputy Commissioner Benjamin Naish.

    Two males, ages 16 and 18 — whom police did not identify — were pronounced dead at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center after each was struck several times. The other teen, a 16-year-old boy, was taken to Lankenau Medical Center in stable condition, police said.

Seated in a car, each struck several times, and the police recovered 17 shell casings at the scene. This wasn’t random; these victims were deliberately targeted.

Was Mr McCain telling me that I’ve been too much of a broken record on Philadelphia murders? 🙂

Next came another story:

    He ‘didn’t deserve to die this way,’ says family of the 22-year-old killed outside Pat’s Steaks

    Police have charged a Reading man with murder in connection with the killing of David Padro Jr., a 22-year-old from Camden.

    by Anna Orso and Mensah M. Dean | Updated: July 23, 2021

    David Padro Sr. expected to spend this weekend like he did the last one: surrounded by family and hanging out by his pool in South Jersey with his 22-year-old son.

    Instead, he’s planning his son’s funeral.

    David Padro Jr., 22, was fatally shot early Thursday morning in South Philadelphia outside Pat’s King of Steaks, the famed cheesesteak joint where he had stopped for a bite. His father said Padro, of Camden, was in Philadelphia with his girlfriend to go to a nightclub when they stopped to eat and an argument broke out among patrons.

    Then, police say, Paul C. Burkert, a 36-year-old from Reading, pulled a gun. Padro was shot in the shoulder and abdomen and transferred to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead shortly after 1 a.m. Police said Burkert fled the scene and then turned himself in to National Park Police at Independence Mall.

Burkert faces murder and weapons charges. Court records show he pleaded guilty to a felony drug charge in Berks County in 2019 and was prohibited from possessing a firearm. No attorney for him was listed in court records Friday.

Gee, a convicted druggie, probably a drug dealer, carrying a handgun while out to buy a cheesesteak. He may have been from Reading, but that was real Philadelphia of him!

The Inquirer reported that, despite previous rumors that it was an altercation between Eagles and Giants fans, it was an altercation over a parking space. A photo accompanying the story shows just how crowded Philly’s narrow streets are in that area.

But both cases show what the Inquirer does. They pick some unusual aspect, high school basketball players, or out-or-towners who didn’t know each other, while the typical murders, one bad guy shooting another bad guy, get ignored, and they get mostly ignored because the city doesn’t want to face the real problem: it’s not guns, but a culture which says it’s perfectly reasonable to pull out your Glock and blast someone else.

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I’m surprised that the Usual Suspects aren’t already out protesting But, then again, the day is still young

An article not to be found on The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page:

    Man fatally shot by police in Kensington after allegedly firing at officers

    The shooting occurred on the 3000 block of North Water Street.

    By Robert Moran | July 22, 2021

    An unidentified man was fatally shot by police after he allegedly fired shots at two officers during a large neighborhood fight in the city’s Kensington section Thursday evening.

    The man, described as in his late 40s or early 50s, was shot in the shoulder and abdomen just before 6:30 p.m. on the 3000 block of North Water Street near Clearfield Street, said Chief Inspector Scott Small. The man was transported by police to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 7:30.

    The officers were undercover as part of a long-term narcotics investigation and were sitting inside an unmarked Nissan when the fight broke out, Small said. Some of the people involved in the fight jostled up against the unmarked vehicle and then the officers saw the man allegedly pull out a gun.

    Small said the officers got out of the vehicle and identified themselves as police. The man then allegedly fired at least two shots into the crowd and in the direction of the officers, who then returned fire.

North Water Street near Clearfield Street, Google Maps streetview.

There’s more at the original. I hope that the entire exchange was caught on tape, and I’m surprised that the Usual Suspects aren’t already out protesting.

If you look at the Google Maps street view of North Water Street, with Clearfield Street the intersection visible, you’re going to see a crime-ridden neighborhood. How do I know that? Even in this streetview of a racially integrated neighborhood, you can see at least six homes in which the owners have put themselves in jail, adding bars to the fronts of their houses to keep the bad guys out. Follow the link, and toggle through, and you’ll see plenty of others.

This is the part the Inquirer never points out. Yes, I know: the reporter, Robert Moran, doesn’t have this kind of investigation as part of his job, so I can’t blame him, but somebody, somebody! at the Inquirer ought to be out there, taking pictures and doing interviews on streets like this, an obviously poorer neighborhood, in which people are spending their too-few dollars on drugs — that’s why the police were conducting an undercover investigation there — and metal bars to keep their meager possessions safe from theft.

Perhaps the Inquirer might be asking, ‘Why, in a city in which jobs are going unfilled, are so many in this neighborhood poor?’ Perhaps the Inquirer might ask, ‘Why, in a neighborhood in which people are so obviously poor, are they wasting what money they do have on drugs?’

But the Inquirer won’t ask those questions, because the #woke editors and reporters already know the answers, and sure don’t want those answers made public.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Diane Mastrull | July 11, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

909 West Butler. Click to enlarge.

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

721 West Butler Street. Click to enlarge.

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

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

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

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

References

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