Tag Archives: #PhiladelphiaInquirer

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Hold them accountable! Cute white girl abducted, and the media are all over it; black woman shot in the face in Philly, oh, who cares about that?

Eliza Fletcher.

I have said it before: The Philadelphia Inquirer really isn’t all that concerned about murders unless the victim is an ‘innocent’, someone of some note, or a cute little white girl. This time it was five separate stories, albeit by the Associated Press, rather than Inky stories themselves, concerning the abduction and murder of Eliza Fletcher in Memphis, Tennessee.

A black woman was shot in the head at 4:11 AM on Saturday, September 3th in the Tacony section of the city, and all the Inquirer had was:

At 4:11 a.m., a 29-year-old woman was shot once in the face by someone she knew. No additional information was immediately available.

Police said the woman was in stable but critical condition at Jefferson Torresdale Hospital.

But, to be fair, the abduction of Mrs Fletcher was a national story; much of the credentialed media covered the story of the abduction of the pretty white woman.

Man charged in jogger abduction kidnapped attorney in 2000

The man charged with kidnapping a Tennessee woman jogging near the University of Memphis last week spent 20 years behind bars for a previous kidnapping

by Associated Press | Updated: Tuesday, September 6, 2022

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — The man charged with kidnapping a Tennessee woman jogging near the University of Memphis last week spent 20 years behind bars for a previous kidnapping.

U.S. Marshals arrested 38-year-old Cleotha Abston on Saturday after police detected his DNA on a pair of sandals found near to where Eliza Fletcher was last seen, according to an arrest affidavit. Police also linked the vehicle they believe was used in the kidnapping to a person at a residence where Abston was staying.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Memphis Police Charge Suspect With Kidnapping Billionaire Heiress

While Fletcher has not been found, Memphis police said in the affidavit they believe she was seriously injured in the abduction, which was caught on surveillance video. Authorities have said Fletcher, 34, was jogging around 4 a.m. on Friday when a man approached her and forced her into an SUV after a brief struggle. Fletcher was reported missing when she did not return home that morning.

Late Monday, police tweeted that a body had been found in a Memphis neighborhood but that the identity of that person and the cause of death was unconfirmed. The tweet made no reference to the Fletcher case, saying only that the investigation was ongoing. A large police presence was reported in the area where authorities reported finding the body just after 5 p.m., local news reports said.

It was later reported that the recovered body was indeed that of Mrs Fletcher.

Abston previously kidnapped a prominent Memphis attorney in 2000, the Commercial Appeal reported. When he was just 16 years old, Abston forced Kemper Durand into the trunk of his own car at gunpoint. After several hours, Abston took Durand out and forced him to drive to a Mapco gas station to withdraw money from an ATM. At the station, an armed Memphis Housing Authority guard walked in and Durand yelled for help. Abston ran away but was found and arrested. He pleaded guilty in 2001 to especially aggravated kidnapping and aggravated robbery, according to court records. He received a 24-year sentence. . . . .

Durand also detailed Abston’s lengthy history in the juvenile court system. In the years before the kidnapping, Abston had been charged with theft, aggravated assault, aggravated assault with a weapon, and rape, according to Durand’s statement.

Cleotha Abston

Mr Abston was sentenced to 24 years behind bars, but for some reason yet to be reported in the credentialed media, was released after just 20. We need to know: why was Mr Abston released early? Who took the decision to let him out, and did they have any choice under the law in the Volunteer State? And if there was a choice to keep him locked up, how can we hold the person or people who turned this guy loose early accountable for the consequences of their decision?

Remember: Mr Abston was sentenced to 24 years in prison in 2001; had he been serving his full sentence, he would have still been in prison on the day he (allegedly) abducted Mrs Fletcher. If the parole officials in Tennessee had any discretion to keep him locked up, then they bear the responsibility for him being out on the streets and able to kidnap and murder Mrs Fletcher.

One of the major problems in our criminal justice system is that we have the state legislatures, the representatives of the people, passing laws which specify very punitive sentences for criminals, real criminals, and then we have lenient prosecutors offering sweetheart plea bargains, judges who too often sentence convicted criminals to light sentences, and state parole boards who, when they have the option, release hardened criminals back onto the streets before their maximum sentences have been completed. All of this ignores the will of the voters, the people who elect our representatives, and the people who want to see criminals locked up.

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If the gun laws are the problem, why aren’t the homicide rates for Philly and the rest of the Commonwealth fairly similar?

It was no surprise that six more murders occurred in the City of Brotherly Love over the weekend, including Friday. Since the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is not updated on Saturday or Sunday, we don’t get Friday’s ‘official’ numbers until Monday morning, though this tweet let me know earlier that the carnage was on.

Well, it was 10:45 AM EDT on Monday morning as I began, and as always, I checked our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, the 17th largest in terms of circulation, The Philadelphia Inquirer, to check their coverage.

4-year-old shot in Olney barbershop

The child was struck by a single round following an argument. He is currently hospitalized and in stable condition.

by Ryan W Briggs | Sunday, August 28, 2022

A 4-year-old was wounded by gunfire following an altercation at a barbershop in the city’s Olney section — the latest of nearly 150 minors shot in Philadelphia this year.

The boy — whom police are not identifying because of his age — was with his father getting a haircut at a barbershop on the 5000 block of Rising Sun Avenue on Sunday afternoon. About 5:15 p.m., police say, they believe another patron got involved in an unrelated argument, pulled a gun, and opened fire inside the tiny salon.

Police say the boy was struck once in the right shoulder. Medics took the boy to nearby Einstein Medical Center, and he was then transferred to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and placed in stable condition.

No weapon was recovered and no arrests had been made. Police are now reviewing surveillance footage.

There’s more at the original, but it’s a story about a young boy shot, but not killed. It was also the only story on either the Inquirer’s website main page or specific crime page I could find on any of the weekend shootings. Oh, there was a week-old story about 2 killed, 1 shot in Midtown neighborhood, from Atlanta, Georgia, and Oklahoma sheriff deputy serving eviction papers shot, killed, along with several other, older stories, but not one single word about the six Philadelphians who spilled out their life’s blood on the city’s mean streets.

I’ll be blunt here: none of the six slain could have been non-Hispanic whites, because, as we noted on Saturday, the newspaper which publisher Elizabeth Hughes vowed to make “an antiracist news organization” provides plenty of coverage when white guys get killed, but mostly ignores homicides when the victims are black, because to cover that would reinforce stereotypes that blacks are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime.

Of course, readers already know that, and mostly assume that both victims and perpetrators of murder in Philly are black, unless told otherwise. There really are no secrets being kept here.

However, while the Philadelphia Police Department report six killed, the city’s shooting victims database tells me that nine people were shot to death over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, August 26th through 28th. The nine fatal shootings,[1]The embedded link will take you to the city’s original. However, the city’s chart is formatted horribly, so I downloaded it and pasted it into a Microsoft Excel file, hid some columns and … Continue reading highlighted in yellow, include seven black males and two Hispanic white males.

It is possible that three of those killed were shot in self-defense, or some other justifiable situation, which could explain the discrepancy between the database and the Police Department’s numbers.

The Editorial Board of the Inquirer likes to blame a lack of gun control laws for the increased killings:

Lawmakers in Philadelphia have long tried to pass gun safety measures, only to get rebuffed by state courts and the recalcitrant Republican-controlled legislature in Harrisburg. Just last week, a majority-Republican panel of the Pennsylvania appeals court rejected Philadelphia’s latest attempt to overturn the state law that prevents the city from enacting its own gun regulations.

Mayor Jim Kenney rightly said the city would appeal the wrongheaded decision to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

There we have the Editorial Board telling us that Philadelphia is under the same gun control laws as the rest of Pennsylvania.

In 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.

Here’s how the actual numbers work out: there were 510 homicides among 11,398,903 Pennsylvanians not living in Philadelphia, for a homicide rate of 4.474 per 100,000 population, while there were 499 murders among 1,603,797 Philadelphians, which works out to a homicide rate of 31.114 per 100,000. If the gun laws are the problem, why aren’t the homicide rates for Philly and the rest of the Commonwealth fairly similar?[2]Even as late as the end of August, I have been unable to find the ‘official’ statistics for the number of homicides statewide for 2021. With 562 murders in Philly in 2021, I’m sure … Continue reading

Yeah, I know: math has now been deemed racist by some on the left, but numbers are numbers, and the math is really pretty simple. The problem is not the gun laws; the problem is something specific to Philadelphia and our other large, urban areas.

References

References
↑1 The embedded link will take you to the city’s original. However, the city’s chart is formatted horribly, so I downloaded it and pasted it into a Microsoft Excel file, hid some columns and moved others, so the reader could see the data in an easier to read format.
↑2 Even as late as the end of August, I have been unable to find the ‘official’ statistics for the number of homicides statewide for 2021. With 562 murders in Philly in 2021, I’m sure the statistical disparities would be even worse, but I cannot work with numbers I do not have available.
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In Philadelphia, Black Lives Don’t Matter!

The mission of journalism is to report the news, the truth, to the public, even if it means digging deeply into things that some people, particularly people in positions of power, do not want disclosed. Journalists must have an open mind, to see the truth, even if the truth is not what they wanted or expected, and report it accurately. Journolists[1]The 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 … Continue reading, on the other hand, only see what they want to see.

Philly’s gun violence epidemic reaches a perilous new low as a 7-year-old is shot while playing video games | Editorial

The only thing more disturbing than the relentless pace of shootings in the city is the lack of action and outrage from those sworn to protect residents.

by the Editorial Board | Tuesday, August 23, 2022

In case city leaders have yet to realize that gun violence has reached epidemic proportions, consider the following: A 7-year-old boy was sitting in his bedroom playing video games Saturday night when he was shot in the thigh by a stray bullet from outside his home.

The shooting of a boy innocently playing in his bedroom should shake city leaders to their core and spark a full-throated call to action. So should the latest tally of weekend gun violence in Philadelphia: 21 people were shot between Saturday and Sunday.

At one point, the shootings were occurring minutes apart. An unidentified male was shot in the head at 12:21 a.m. on Sunday. Five minutes later, a 23-year-old man was shot in the back. Just 24 minutes later, a 59-year-old man was shot in the buttocks and left thigh.

The only thing more disturbing than the relentless pace of shootings that continues unabated across the city is the lack of action and outrage from those sworn to protect residents. What will it take for Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, and City Council to do something — anything — to try to stem the flow of blood?

On May 9, 2021, the same Editorial Board which expressed such outrage, endorsed Larry Krasner for re-election. It wasn’t that the Editorial Board did not know what the city had in Mr Krasner; on that same May 9, 2021, the City of Brotherly Love suffered its 183rd murder of the year, an average of 1.4186 per day, a whopping 46 more than on the same date in 2020.

In 2020, the city saw 499 murders, just one short of the record set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990.

On May 9, 2021, the Editorial Board knew that it was Mr Krasner and his office which let Hasan Elliot out on the streets, when they could have locked him up for a parole violation, and that Mr Elliot then killed Philadelphia Police Corporal James O’Connor. The Editorial Board know that under Mr Krasner prosecution of arrests for illegal firearms possession have dropped dramatically. Yet now that are asking, “What will it take,” for Mr Krasner “to do something — anything — to try to stem the flow of blood?”

“Something” and “anything” apparently does not include something really radical like locking up criminals. In their endorsement of Mr Krasner, the Board wrote:

A complex, relatively recent spike in gun violence isn’t a reason to return to the mass incarceration regime of yesteryear, but a challenge to do better.

Oddly enough, the “mass incarceration regime of yesteryear” was coincident with a significant reduction in murders in Philly. As we noted on August 9th, under Philadelphia under Mayor Jim Kenney and District Attorney Larry Krasner have led the city into more homicides so far in 2022 than any entire year under previous Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey.

Are the Editorial Board now willing to try “mass incarceration” again? That would certainly fall under trying “anything” “to try to stem the flow of blood,” wouldn’t it?

How about “stop and frisk”? With the ever-mounting toll of shootings and death, City Council President Darrell Clarke floated the idea of a return to the “stop and frisk” policies. The Editorial Board didn’t like that idea, either:

The rise in gun violence has prompted some City Council members to call for the Police Department to reexamine its stop-and-frisk policy. While the idea is well intended, it should be a nonstarter.

The Philadelphia Police Department has a long history of racial discrimination and brutality aimed at the Black and Latino communities.

In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the city, alleging police used racial profiling to illegally stop, search, and detain thousands of people. To settle the lawsuit, the Police Department agreed to collect data on all stop-and-frisks and train officers in the use of the tactic.

In the years since, the practice has continued with significant modifications — chief among them: Officers must have sound legal suspicions to make stops. As a result, the number of stops has fallen precipitously: In 2015, police made nearly 400,000 pedestrian stops; this year, officers are on track for about 10,000 stops.

Also in 2015: Philadelphia saw 280 homicides. Since then, the city has seen 277, followed by 315, 353, 356, 499 and 562 murders each subsequent year, and 352 so far this year. We can’t know that the reduction from 400,000 to about 10,000 pedestrian stops has contributed the huge rise in murders, but the numbers do seem rather stark.

That’s another “something,” “anything” the Editorial Board don’t want the city to try.

The problem is that the Editorial Board are too blind to see the problem! The police do not stop crimes; the police respond to crimes, clean up the mess left behind by crimes, and try to arrest the perpetrators of crimes. Yes, the very short-staffed Philadelphia Police Department are not solving enough crimes, and yes, the George Soros-sponsored District Attorney is not prosecuting crimes seriously enough, both of which reduce the deterrent to the bad guys when it comes to committing crimes, but the actual prevention of crime is not something the city government can do.

The prevention of crime comes from children being reared right, in stable, two-parent homes, but it’s far, far, far too politically incorrect to say that. And when the city government, and The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Editorial Board, and all of its opinion columnists, and all of the media coverage support the killing of children who are simply too inconvenient to be allowed to live, can it really be a surprise that that message is getting through to the teenagers and twenty-somethings on the street?

The left look for the problem everywhere but where it is. Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong wrote, on July 20th, Philly needs new solutions to prevent gun violence. Not conversations. And not parties. In it, she wrote:

After putting it off for years, I finally got around to participating in the Beer Summit put on by Global Citizen, the nonprofit group that organizes the Martin Luther King Day of Service.

Billed as a “conversation on race, class, and power,” the annual gathering — which began in 2009 when President Barack Obama convened a “beer summit” at the White House with Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley, after Gates’ arrest — was virtual this year, so I could watch the recording at my leisure.

There was lots of good commentary. As Temple University’s David Brown pointed out, “The whole notion of the Beer Summit is to bring different people from different perspectives along and [focus] on a common challenge in a community.”

This year’s theme was gun violence sparked by white supremacy.

She has got to be kidding. Yes, there have been a few mass shootings by supposed “white supremacists,” but the number of their victims pales in comparison to the numbers of black Philadelphians being killed by other black Philadelphians. Unlike Philadelphia, St Louis, our most murderous city, breaks down its homicide cases on race. In a city in which slightly less than half the population are black, 121 out of 130 homicides as of August 24th had black victims, and out of 84 known suspects, 83 are black.

It isn’t “white supremacy” killing all of those black victims in the Gateway City, and it hasn’t been “white supremacy” killing all of those victims in Philly. But Jenice Armstrong, the Editorial Board, and almost everyone else can’t bring themselves to tell the truth: the blood being spilled by the mostly black victims of shootings has been spilled by black assailants.

Me? I can say it, because I’m retired, and I can’t be ‘canceled,’ can’t lose my job for doing something really radical like telling the truth. As horrible as the homicide rates have been in Philly, in St Louis, in Baltimore and Chicago, they really aren’t that bad for white people.

In Philly, black lives don’t matter, or at least they don’t matter as much as the left keeping their mouths shut as far as telling the truth is concerned. The key to reducing the carnage is to stop supporting the social policies and tolerances which have produced it.

References

References
↑1 The 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. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer conceals a truth that everyone already knows Is the Inky actually perpetuating a stereotype it wishes to avoid?

We have noted, many times before, that The Philadelphia Inquirer censors the news because publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes demands it. But it has to be asked: does their deliberate censorship actually reinforce the stereotype they are trying to avoid?

‘I’m grateful to be alive.’ Victim of West Philly rec center shooting heals as three accused gunmen face charges.

Tahmir Pinckney, Azyear Sutton-Walker, and Marlon Spurell, who are all 22 years old, were arraigned overnight Thursday on charges including attempted murder and jailed on $3 million bail each.

by Chris Palmer and Mensah M. Dean | Thursday, August 18, 2022 | 1:15 PM EDT

Photo via 6ABC News Click to enlarge.

Three of the men accused of opening fire during a drive-by shooting outside a West Philadelphia rec center this week — an incident that left five people wounded, two of them critically — have been charged with crimes including attempted murder, aggravated assault, and conspiracy, court records show.Tahmir Pinckney, Azyear Sutton-Walker, and Marlon Spurell, who are all 22 years old, were arraigned overnight Thursday and jailed on $3 million bail each, court records show. All were being represented by the Defender Association, which declined to comment Thursday morning.

Police said the men were among six people who began shooting out of a white Dodge Durango around 7 p.m. Tuesday on the 300 block of North 57th Street, just steps from the Shepard Recreation Center, where dozens of people were outside playing basketball, football, or otherwise enjoying a summer evening.

The Inquirer doesn’t print mugshots, because Miss Hughes believes that being an anti-racist news organization just won’t allow that.

But the Inky isn’t the only news source in town, and the television stations did show the mugshots. Television news is, of course, is a medium much more dependent upon the visual, so it’s understandable that, regardless of how #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 the management are, pictures have to be published. The Inquirer, which has a far smaller circulation than the television stations have viewers, certainly didn’t keep the public from seeing the mugshots, and noting what Miss Hughes desperately wants not noted, that the suspects were all black — something most people would have inferred anyway, given the names of the suspects — but at a certain point, one has to ask: is the Inky, by censoring all mugshots, contributing not only to the stereotype that most criminals are black, but actually pushing a message, that all criminals are black?

I’m sure that’s not the intention of the journolists[2]The 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 … Continue reading who work for what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[3]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt., but it has to be considered a possibility. The stereotype that most criminals are black certainly exists, and by censoring the news where race is concerned, isn’t the Inky contributing to that stereotype? When the newspaper declines to publish something like this, won’t most of the readers simply assume what the Inky refuses to tell them? I’m guessing that there are at least some criminals in the City of Brotherly Love who are white, but the newspaper doesn’t tell us that.

The original article title in the Inquirer was “Tahmir Pinckney, Azyear Sutton-Walker, Marlon Spurell charged over West Philly shooting near Shepard rec center,” which you can see if you hold your cursor over the tab of the Inky article. An editor changed that, which wasn’t a terrible idea, since part of the article focused on the victims, but at least it wasn’t front-and-center on the newspaper’s website main page. Their names, however, were prominently featured in the subtitle.

The Enquirer Inquirer did tell us, in a sort of offhand way, that both the shooters and the victims were gang-bangers, without using the word “gang”:

an ongoing feud between groups of young men — with the shooters in the car on one side of the dispute, and the victims on the other. One of the victims shot Thursday had also been shot several weeks ago,

At least some of the targeted victims were armed themselves, and returned fire.

Mr Spurell was awaiting trial — or, more probably, having the charges dropped by Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner — on a drug trafficking charge from four months ago, while Mr “Pinkney pleaded no contest to a drug charge in 2019 and was sentenced to a year of probation.” I’m actually surprised that the newspaper told us that, because it will lead more readers to assume that the arrested men are actually guilty; these are some bad dudes!

The Inquirer includes short, first person, biographies of its writers at the bottom of its articles. I have to wonder: how does Mr Palmer focus on how criminal justice and law enforcement are “evolving and impacting communities during a moment of reform”? How does Mr Dean “report on law breakers, those they impact, and how the criminal justice system interacts with both” when he is required to censor part of the news? Both reporters are actually contributing to the stereotypes that Miss Hughes wants to avoid, though I’ve no doubt that such is required by editorial guidelines, regardless of what their personal inclinations might be.

Wouldn’t actually telling the whole truth serve better?

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

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

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 The 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. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑3 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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Killadelphia Black lives don't matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer

We noted, just yesterday, that Philadelphia, which as recently as June 30th, had been 14 homicides short of the same-day number in 2021, 257 versus 271, the year the City of Brotherly Love set its all-time homicide record of 562, but had caught up and passed the daily number by one murder.

Of course, being just one above 2021’s numbers means that just a couple of bloodless days could allow the killing rate to, once again, drop below 2021. At least for now, that isn’t what happened.

July ended with this year’s numbers closing in on 2021’s, but not quite there, with 317 vs 319 homicides, just a 0.627% decline, not statistically significant, but at least significant in that two fewer Philadelphians had spilled their life’s blood out in the city’s mean streets.

We pointed out yesterday that the nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper, which I will admit to having mockingly called The Philadelphia Enquirer,[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. had made no mention at all, at least not that I could find on the website’s main page or crime page, that the ‘trend lines’ had crossed, but that has changed now . . . sort of.

3 men killed, 2 others wounded in separate Philly shootings

The fatal shootings occurred in East Frankford, Germantown, and Kensington, police said.

by Robert Moran | Wednesday, August 3, 2022

Three men were killed and two others were wounded in separate shootings Wednesday night across Philadelphia, police said.

Shortly before 9:45 p.m. in East Frankford, an unidentified man was shot in the head while driving a Nissan sedan in the area of Josephine and Gillingham Streets, said Inspector D.F. Pace.

The Nissan crashed into a utility pole at a high rate of speed, Pace said. The victim, who appeared to be in his 20s, was pronounced dead at the scene by medics.

The victim was still wearing his seat belt and the tires of the crashed Nissan were still spinning and eventually disintegrated, Pace said.

A witness told police a man stumbled out of the sedan after the crash and fled in an unknown direction, Pace said.

A spent shell casing was found inside the vehicle and a gun was found under the car, Pace said.

Just before 6:50 p.m. in Germantown, a 28-year-old man was on the 200 block of Zeralda Street when he was shot in the head and torso, said Chief Inspector Scott Small.

The man, who had previously lived on the block, was taken by police to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 8:04 p.m., Small said.

The reporter, Robert Moran, really needs to work on his writing; too many short, one or two sentence paragraphs! They need to be combined a bit, to look more polished. As usual, Mr Moran, following what I have inferred to be the Inquirer’s guidelines, deleted all references to race when it came to the victims, but, according to the city’s shooting victims database, all three were black males.

There’s more at the original, descriptions of the other killings, which you can read if you follow the link embedded in the cited article’s title. But Mr Moran’s concluding paragraph was all that I could find about the city’s homicide numbers surpassing 2021’s:

As of late Tuesday night, the city officially reported 322 homicides so far this year — one more than the same period in 2021, which ended with Philadelphia suffering an all-time record 562 homicides.

In other words, piffle! Nothing serious there at all.

The shootings victims database tells us that there have been twenty reported shootings in the city in just the first three days of August, with seven fatalities: five black males, one black female, and one Hispanic white male. Of the total of twenty shooting victims, one was a black female, three Hispanic white males, and sixteen black males. The Enquirer Inquirer, that proudly anti-racist news organization for which #BlackLivesMatter doesn’t believe that that is news which should be reported.

There are times in which I worry that I have reported on this subject too much, and this is the 46th article on this website entitled Killadelphia; “broken recordism” really isn’t a good look. But when we have the city’s newspaper of record trying to hide the records, when the city’s mayor, James Kenney, a Democrat in an unbroken string of Democrats 70 years long and who is tried, worn out, and clueless, when the district attorney is a defense attorney rather than a prosecutor and won’t lock up the bad guys, and the police commissioner a left coast stooge who can’t attract recruits and has left the department seriously undermanned, I can’t help but to harp on this subject, because it is far-left #woke policy put into governing force, on what should be a national stage, and the results should be shouted to everyone: this is the result of liberal policies.

One thing Philly has accomplished is to make painfully clear that, despite their protestations, black lives don’t matter, or at least they don’t matter if telling the truth about how they are being wasted in the city’s streets daily might threaten leftist policies. The idea that conservative policies might make a positive difference is so appalling, is just plain anathema, to the left that they’d rather see blood, red blood mostly from black bodies, running in the city’s streets than to try something different.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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Killadelphia! Philly is now ahead of last year's record pace, but the Inquirer hasn't noticed.

This is no surprise; we all knew it was coming. With three homicides in the City of Brotherly Love yesterday, Philadelphia has now moved slightly ahead of the pace of murders in 2021, the year which set the city’s annual record of 562.

This is something that you would think that The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, would have noticed, but at least as of 12:57 PM EDT, there is nothing on either the newspaper’s website main page or separate crime page. Nighttime reporter Robert Moran noticed two of the killings, but was apparently working solely from Philadelphia Police Department press releases:

2 dead in separate Philly shootings

A 29-year-old woman and a 30-year-old man were gunned down Tuesday night.

by Robert Moran | Tuesday, August 2, 2022

A 29-year-old woman and a 30-year-old man were fatally wounded in separate shootings Tuesday night in Philadelphia, police said.

Just before 8:15 p.m., the woman was outside on the 1800 block of Harrison Street in East Frankford when she was shot once in the left side of her back. Police rushed her to Temple University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 8:33.

Around 7:30 p.m., the man was outside on the 5400 block of Pearl Street in West Philadelphia when he was shot several times in the chest, police said. He was taken by private vehicle to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 7:44.

Police reported no immediate arrests or other details in either case.

So far this year, there were 319 homicides in Philadelphia as of late Monday night. There were 321 for the same time last year, which the city ended with an all-time record 562 homicides.

So, Mr Moran did notice that the city was very possibly approaching tying or exceeding last year’s homicide totals. Possibly he didn’t have access to last year’s totals for August 2nd, and didn’t realize that two homicides would tie it. And possibly he didn’t have the information that not two, but three separate homicides had occurred, all by gunfire, but Fox 29’s Steve Keeley had. Mr Moran did have the police press releases on the two homicides he listed, but, following the Inquirer’s guidelines,[1]I do not have a copy of those guidelines, but have inferred that they exist due to the constant scrubbing of references to race in the Inquirer’s reporting, something which was not the case in … Continue reading he scrubbed the race of the police reports of both the slain woman and man.

Such is the journolism[2]The 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 … Continue reading of what I have occasionally called The Philadelphia Enquirer.[3]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. I have twice noted begging letters from the Lenfest Institute, which owns the Inky, asking for donations from subscribers above and beyond their subscriptions. Perhaps if the Inquirer’s reporting matched their history, I’d send something.

References

References
↑1 I do not have a copy of those guidelines, but have inferred that they exist due to the constant scrubbing of references to race in the Inquirer’s reporting, something which was not the case in previous years. And race is not the only thing that the Inky censors.
↑2 The 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. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑3 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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The journolism of The Philadelphia Inquirer And people wonder why the Philadelphia Police Department cannot get recruits to fill the undermanned force?

No, I didn’t misspell the word in the title: the 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. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

I have noted, many times, that black lives don’t matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer, as evidenced by the fact that the newspaper, to meet publisher Elizabeth Hughes’ decree that it be an “anti-racist news organization,” but has become racist in itself.

I also noted that when Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw decided to fire the officer who (allegedly) killed 12-year-old Thomas Siderio, Jr, who had shot first at police, injuring one, and then was pursued and shot as he fled by another officer, the Commissioner declined to name the officer, expressing concern for his safety, but the inquirer managed to ferret out his name and print it. What are we supposed to think other than the Inky is trying to get the officer killed?

Well, they’re at it again!

Philly police fire lieutenant who allegedly used the N-word on a radio call last month

Sgt. Eric Gripp, a department spokesperson, declined to identify the officer but said he was given 30 days notice of his termination on July 5 — a standard practice in police firings.

by Max Marin | Wednesday, July 20, 2022

The Philadelphia Police Department has moved to fire a veteran lieutenant who allegedly used the N-word while on a recorded line with a police radio-room worker last month, officials said Wednesday.

Lt Anthony McFadden, from his LinkedIn page.

Sgt. Eric Gripp, a department spokesperson, declined to identify the officer but said he was given 30 days’ notice of his termination — a standard practice in police firings — on July 5. Police sources identified the officer as Lt. Anthony McFadden, a 32-year veteran of the force who was previously assigned to the Special Victims Unit.

So, the Police Department spokesman declined to identify the officer, but the Inky turned to its internal sources, got his name, and published it anyway.

I have to ask: what’s the point? Only one thing comes to mind: The Inquirer is trying to keep Lt McFadden from being able to get another job on another police force.

This is the same newspaper which doesn’t report on most actual murders in the city, and scrubs out the race of the victims on the few occasions that it does, and of the (alleged) perpetrators when known. In all but the most sensational cases, the Inquirer does not tell readers the names of the perpetrators.

Miss Hughes’ newspaper won’t tell us about actual murders in the City of Brotherly Love, but a police lieutenant says a bad word? Grounds for the firing of a 32-year veteran — will they deny him his pension? — and for the Inky to try to sabotage any future job prospects he may have.

And people wonder why the Philadelphia Police Department cannot get recruits to fill the undermanned force? The Department doesn’t have their backs, and the local media try to crucify them!

oo0oo

Updated! Thursday, July 21, 2022 | 8:43 AM EDT

In the story Person of interest in Monday’s gunpoint rape on subway platform is in custody, reporter Mensah H Dean tells Inquirer readers that:

A person of interest in the rape of a woman on the platform of a South Philadelphia subway station was taken into custody Wednesday morning, the Philadelphia Police Department said.

The person, whose name has not been released, was taken to the Special Victims Unit for questioning, the department said in a statement Wednesday morning.

Perhaps the “person of interest’s” name has not been released, but I note that the Inky did not put enough effort into finding it out, as they did with Lt McFadden.

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73-year-old man murdered by teens in Philly The Inquirer wants to keep teen offenders out of the adult court system

Surprisingly enough, The Philadelphia Inquirer actually reported, albeit briefly, on two murders in the city yesterday.

Two people were killed and eight others wounded in separate shootings around Philadelphia on Monday, police said.

Just after 3 p.m., an unidentified man believed to be in his late 30s was outside on the 2700 block of North Broad Street when he was shot 13 times, police said.

The man was taken by medics to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Police said a person was in custody but released no further information on the case.

Around 1:30 a.m., a 36-year-old man was fatally shot in the head outside on the 3800 block of North 9th Street in Hunting Park. The man, who was not identified, was pronounced dead at the scene by medics. Police reported no arrests.

Note that the Philadelphia Police press releases identified the races of the victims, but the Inky scrubbed that part.

This was a bigger crime story in Philly:

Brothers, ages 10 and 14, surrender to Philly police in traffic cone beating death of 73-year-old man

James Lambert Jr. was crossing Cecil B. Moore Avenue near 21st Street when a group of juveniles attacked him. Another North Philly woman said she was attacked a month earlier at the same intersection.

by Robert Moran and Oona Goodin-Smith | Monday, July 11, 2022

Two brothers — ages 10 and 14 — have surrendered to police for questioning by homicide detectives as “persons of interest” in a fatal attack on a 73-year-old man last month in North Philadelphia, police said.

No charges have been filed as police continue to investigate the June 24 assault of James Lambert Jr., who was crossing Cecil B. Moore Avenue near 21st Street just before 2:40 a.m. when a group of juveniles assailed him. In a surveillance video, one of the participants can be seen knocking him to the sidewalk with a traffic cone.

Police say seven juveniles were involved.

While Lambert remained on the sidewalk, a girl can be seen in the video picking up the traffic cone and throwing it at Lambert, who then appears to stagger down Cecil B. Moore, followed by the girl, who retrieves the traffic cone and throws it at him again. She is wearing a bright pink long-sleeved sweater, with matching pool slide sandals. White-framed sunglasses are propped on top of her head.

As many as seven youths had gathered by that point. Video shows them talking before leaving the area.

Lambert suffered head injuries and died the next day, police said.

The photo of Mr Lambert is from a tweet embedded in the Inquirer story.

You know what wasn’t mentioned in the Inky? The Philadelphia Police released a video of the attack on Mr Lambert, including the descriptions shown on the right. But when the Inky reported on the story — which, to be fair, did include a link to the video — “four Black male and three Black female teen offenders” became “four males and three females”.

I might not have written about this story, save for one OpEd that was also in the Inquirer, still on the website main page, while the story about the two brats surrendering has been pushed back to the crime page:

Pennsylvania needs to stop prosecuting children as adults

This legislation will reduce recidivism, control costs, make our communities safer, and allow all young people the opportunity to grow.

by Camera Bartolotta and Anthony H. Williams | Monday, July 11, 2022

Imagine only seeing the sun for one hour a day while crammed into a 6-by-8-foot cell. Now imagine that you are only 16 years old, yet to be found guilty, and you are spending your days in an adult jail when you should be in school or spending time with your family. This is the reality of many children charged as adults through “direct file.”

Really? Imagine that you are 73-year-old James Lambert, walking alone, with the help of a cane,[1]The released video obscures the cane, but if you look at the published photo of Mr Lambert, you’ll see the handle of a walking cane. at 2:38 in the morning, and you’ll never see the sun again.

And am I really supposed to believe that, following the high-profile murder of Mr Lambert by teenagers, the Inquirer’s editors didn’t deliberately decide to print this OpEd with keeping these cretins out of the adult system in mind?

Direct file, or “statutory exclusion,” is a provision where kids under 18 are automatically prosecuted as adults for certain offenses, without the chance of a review by a juvenile court judge. This practice often forces the youth to be held in adult jails before trial and, if found guilty, adult prisons. And it doesn’t affect all children equally — according to the Pennsylvania Juvenile Justice Task Force’s findings, 56% of kids convicted as adults are Black boys, even though they make up just 7% of Pennsylvania’s youth population. This disparity is even starker than the disproportionate treatment that Black youth face in other parts of the justice system.

Whenever I see numbers like those, I always finish the article, and you know what I never see? There is never, ever, even the slightest hint that perhaps, just perhaps, if “56% of kids convicted as adults are Black boys, even though they make up just 7% of Pennsylvania’s youth population,” somewhere around 56% of crimes committed by minors which wind up in adult courts are committed by black boys.

There is always the implied, but usually unspoken, argument that if there is a ‘racial disparity’ in arrests, prosecutions, convictions, or incarcerations, it simply must be the result of racism; there is never the consideration that such ‘racial disparities’ are a reflection of a ‘racial disparity’ in who actually commits crimes.

Me? I’m 69-years-old and retired, so I can’t be ‘cancelled’, which means I can actually write the very politically incorrect truth. If I were an Inquirer reporter, and I had the temerity to write something like that, I’d have the security guard, ready to escort me out the door, watching me as I emptied out my desk, while Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Gabriel Escobar stood nearby, tapping his foot, smugly happy for having fired me, while murmurs, and possible jeers, sounded across the newsroom. In journolism,[2]The 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 … Continue reading the truth shall set you free . . . from your job.

Stan Wischnowski was unavailable for comment.

Was the attack on Mr Lambert perhaps an isolated incident?

About a month before Lambert was killed, a 53-year-old woman from North Philadelphia said she, too, was ambushed at 21st and Cecil B. Moore.

Watching the video of the attack on 73-year-old Lambert on the news, the woman said she thought it “could have been me.”

The woman, who spoke to The Inquirer on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said she was walking on 21st Street toward the subway on her way to an overnight nursing shift in late May when she spotted a group of young teenage girls on the street.

One of the teens — whom the woman said she recognized from the video of the attack on Lambert — asked her for a dollar. When she did not give them money, the woman said the teens began to swear at her. One threw a brick at her chest, and slammed a metal dolly on her back, leaving deep bruises. Startled, the woman said she threw her cup of hot coffee at the group and ran, phoning her family. . . . .

She said she didn’t contact the police initially about the attack, but called on Friday after hearing about Lambert’s death.

We have previously noted the difference between crimes of evidence and crimes of reporting. If a man rapes a woman on the streets of Philadelphia, as far as the police are concerned, if it wasn’t reported, it didn’t happen. It is commonly assumed that most rapes go unreported, with some guesstimates being as high as 90% not reported. Crimes like robbery might go unreported if the victims do not trust the police or think it will do any good, or are fearful of revenge by the criminals. When your city is stuck with a District Attorney like Mr Krasner, who doesn’t believe in prosecuting criminals, or sentencing them harshly when they are prosecuted and convicted, what reason is there to report that you were robbed?

To the Philly police, the assault on the 53-year-old woman, by at least one of the murderers, murderers!, of Mr Lambert, never happened in late May, because she got away and didn’t report it, or didn’t report it until she saw the video of Mr Lambert’s murder.

Why? Well, she feared retaliation, she said. Whether her assault was caught on camera we do not know, but there was nothing the police could do about a crime that, to them, never happened.

And so we get back to state Senators Bartolotta’s and Williams'[3]Camera Bartolotta is a Republican state senator. She represents Beaver, Greene, and Washington Counties. Anthony H. Williams is a Democratic state senator. He represents parts of Philadelphia and … Continue reading OpEd. They don’t want minors charged with serious crimes to be tried in adult courts. But if the 14-year-old who turned himself in for Mr Lambert’s murder is tried as a juvenile, he will be out of whatever juvenile institution they put him in when he turns 18, and his record, for murder!, will be sealed. It will be as though it never happened.

But James Lambert will still be stone-cold graveyard dead.

States do not put juveniles into the adult system for littering or out-of-control horseplay, or racing unregistered dirt bikes down city streets; they go into the adult system for really serious crimes. The senators tell us that they only want to change the system, and that juvenile offenders can still be sent into the adult system if their crimes are really heinous, but they want a juvenile court judge to take that decision. Thanks, but no thanks: we need to treat crime harshly, not so much for deterrence — which doesn’t seem to work anyway — but to get these miscreants off the streets!

References

References
↑1 The released video obscures the cane, but if you look at the published photo of Mr Lambert, you’ll see the handle of a walking cane.
↑2 The 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. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑3 Camera Bartolotta is a Republican state senator. She represents Beaver, Greene, and Washington Counties. Anthony H. Williams is a Democratic state senator. He represents parts of Philadelphia and Delaware County.
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Killadelphia: City looking at between 540 and 550 murders this year Twelve people reported murdered over the last two days, and The Philadelphia Inquirer has exactly zero stories on them.

There are times I worry that I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but the City of Brotherly Love has become just appalling. It was just yesterday that I noted that Philadelphia had seen six homicides on Wednesday, July 6th, and all six were the murders of black males.

Well, the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page now reports another six killings, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, July 7th. The city’s Shooting Victims Database reports ‘only’ two homicides by firearms, with both victims being black males, in eight total shootings, with seven black victims, and one victim reported as being a white Hispanic male and, in the first time I have ever seen this in that database, one of the black males also reported as being Hispanic.

Mr Keeley’s math is wrong. As of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, June 30th, The Philly Police reported 257 homicides: 280 – 257 = 23. Nevertheless, this is mind boggling. Remember: twelve homicides were reported on two weekdays, not the weekend.

There may be some catch-up in the report, of people reported as seriously wounded several days ago, but if you thought that surely, surely! that even The Philadelphia Inquirer would have to have noticed, you’d have been wrong, or at least you would have been wrong at 12:03 PM EDT.

Now the math: 280 homicides ÷ 188 days = 1.4894 per day, or a projected 543.62 murders for the year. Done a different way, dividing the number of murders this year by the same number on the same day as last year, and then multiplying by 562, last year’s homicide total, I come up with a projected 548.29 killings. Either way, the city is looking at a homicide total in the 540-550 range.