We have previously noted the apparent discrepancies in the sentences that Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn has sought for felons, discrepancies obvious when you look at the race of the offenders. Nathaniel Harper, who is white, was sentenced to 36 years in prison for killing a man he hit as he wrecked the car in which he was fleeing police, even though his attorneys had been trying to plead down to a manslaughter or another lesser offense. Miss Red Corn and her office allowed George Boulder IV, who was part of a deliberate, broad-daylight shooting which killed members of another gang, or Xavier Hardin, who deliberately shot an enemy in Fayette Mall, or Jemel Barber, who was allowed to plead down for one of two fatal shootings, or Malachi Jackson, who killed a 15-year-old rival, or James Ragland, who killed a woman outside a Lexington strip club, every single one of them, along with others, to plead down to manslaughter, for deliberately killing other people.
by Taylor Six | Thursday, September 8, 2022 | 2:19 PM EDT
Morgan Johnson, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.
A Lexington man has been sentenced to 35 years in prison after pleading guilty to murder for a teenager’s death in 2018.Morgan Johnson, 25, was sentenced on Thursday afternoon by Judge Lucy VanMeter for amended charges he pleaded guilty to as part of a deal in July. Johnson pleaded guilty to murder, second-degree burglary and first-degree unlawful imprisonment.
Johnson’s conviction comes after he was accused of killing 19-year-old Christopher Spencer at an apartment off Richmond Road Feb. 7, 2018. Spencer was found on the porch of the residence with multiple gunshot wounds.
Johnson, who was 21 at the time, is also accused of kidnapping a woman he knew and taking her to the Squires Woods Way home, where he sexually assaulted her, according to court records. Johnson, Spencer and the woman knew one another, former Lexington Police Sgt. Jervis Middleton said, according to court documents.
He was sentenced to 25 years for murder, five years for burglary and five years for unlawful imprisonment. Each sentence will run consecutively. He was also ordered to have a 10 year protection order against one of the victims in the case, and a restitution of $6,080.
Mr Johnson’s attorney noted that there had been questions as to whether he was mentally fit to stand trial, and he had been examined at Eastern State Hospital, though Taylor Six’s article notes that the mental hospital does not release any information on individual patients. None of that, of course, excuses Mr Johnson’s crimes. But my question is: why was Mr Johnson, who did plead guilty, not given treatment as lenient as Miss Red Corn has been “mediating” out to black murderers?
Oh, wait, I’m sorry, black manslaughterers, the charges to which they were allowed to plead down.
I have no problem at all with Mr Johnson’s sentence, other than it is too short; he should get out of jail on the same day that Mr Spencer comes back to life. My point is that the thankfully outgoing Commonwealth’s Attorney has been allowing very lenient plea bargain arrangements to killers who aren’t white. If you deliberately kill someone, there should be no plea bargains: you should go to jail for the rest of your life.
But that’s not what happens in Lexington, not if you’re black:
On January 19, 2022, Malachi Jackson, now 20 but 16 at the time of his crime, charged with the murder of 15-year-old Kevin Olmeda, was allowed by Miss Red Corn to plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter, second-degree assault, and first-degree criminal attempt to commit robbery. With a recommended sentence of 15 years by the prosecution, time already served taken into account, and the state minimum of 85% of sentence required, Mr Jackson could be out of jail by the age of 31.
On March 11, 2022, Xavier Hardin, 21, was allowed by Miss Red Corn to plead guilty to manslaughter, assault and wanton endangerment charges in the killing of Kenneth Bottoms Jr., 17, and charges of murder were dropped. The shooting was caught on security tape in Fayette Mall, so it isn’t as though the prosecution would have a difficult time proving their case. Mr Hardin was eventually sentenced to 22 years in prison, but even if he serves the maximum sentence, he’ll be out when he’s just 41-years-old.
This is not justice, and this is not law enforcement. Thankfully, Miss Red Corn is leaving office in a few weeks, but we need to do what we can to push her successor to enforce the law, to the maximum extent of the law. Not doing so is why Lexington has already seen 34 homicides this year, one every 7.38 days, and is on pace for 49 or 50 murders for the year; the exact number works out to 49.44. The city’s record is ‘only’ 37 murders, set last year.
I seem to remember a time, not so long ago, when the left were telling us that it was not just right, but mandatory, that people alter their desired behavior because a horrible virus was loose. Now some are demanding, demanding! that the government enable their ability to do exactly as they please, without any health consequences. From NBC News:
Queer men across the U.S. talked to NBC News about the dates they never went on, the sex they never had and the gatherings they avoided due to the viral outbreak.
by Benjamin Ryan | Friday, September 2, 2022 | 9:04 AM EDT
For many gay and bisexual men, the sprawling and chaotic monkeypox outbreak has upended a summer that was supposed to be a well-earned opportunity — following the peak of the Covid crisis — to finally have some fun and revel with their gay brothers without the threat of viral infection hanging over them.
Soon after Memorial Day, however, these men, as well as transgender individuals and other queer people — GBTQ for short, because lesbians’ monkeypox risk is remote — were met head-on with harrowing reports about monkeypox’s often devastating and disfiguring effects on the body. Next came anger and frustration over what queer activists characterize as the Biden administration’s fumbling initial response to the outbreak.
I guess that it’s OK now to call queers queer. After all, they seem to have embraced the term for themselves. It’s not how I choose to express myself, but whatever.
Lost amid the frantic media and public health reports about monkeypox epidemiology, the delayed vaccine deliveries and the squabbling over how best to communicate about the virus are the millions of GBTQ people whose happiness, well-being and connection to one another have in many cases been considerably compromised by the mere threat of monkeypox infection.
“Life has sort of halted,” said Guillermo Rojas, 29, a Mexican citizen and public administration graduate student in New York City. “This was supposed to be the great summer that everything went back and opened.”
Dr. Alex Keuroghlian, a psychiatrist at the LGBTQ-health-focused Fenway Institute in Boston, said the outbreak has “been extremely distressing for community members and is also triggering in that it harkens back to the early days of the AIDS epidemic. It has a chilling effect on people’s sense of community, cohesion and belonging.”
Let’s be truthful here: in the NBC article, “people’s sense of community, cohesion and belonging” means their ability to go out and seek anonymous, promiscuous sex.
The article continues to note that monkeypox, while quite painful, has been fatal in only one instance in the United States, in an already “severely immunocompromised person”, which would be extremely politically incorrect to read as a homosexual male who had AIDS. The vaccine is becoming much more readily available.
One very politically correct notion, that monkeypox is spread by skin-to-skin contact, is disabused, as the article cites a study which points out that Sex between men, not skin contact, is fueling monkeypox, new research suggests: The claim that skin-to-skin contact during sex between men, not intercourse itself, drives most monkeypox transmission is likely backward, a growing group of experts say.
Now, however, an expanding cadre of experts has come to believe that sex between men itself — both anal as well as oral intercourse — is likely the main driver of global monkeypox transmission. The skin contact that comes with sex, these experts say, is probably much less of a risk factor.
Over 100 gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people responded to an NBC News online survey seeking to learn about how monkeypox has affected their lives. What this diverse cross-section of the community most had in common were missed opportunities. They wrote about sex they never had, dates they never went on and gatherings with friends they avoided.
This was really the most important part of the 2,684-word long article, because it set the stage for the rest of it, and the rest of it was basically whining that so many homosexual males felt it unsafe to go to bathhouses and bars cruising for mostly anonymous sex. COVID-19 put a real crimp in that starting in 2020, and once the panicdemic — not a typo, but a word reflecting the fact that the worst symptom of the disease was panic — was over, and the license for promiscuous, anonymous sex was restored, it all got shut down again.
“Post-Covid,” said (Guillermo Rojas, 29, a Mexican citizen and public administration graduate student in New York City), recalling how he experienced the free-spirited bacchanalia into which monkeypox arrived in New York City this spring, “everybody went crazy, and there were sex parties all over town.”
Monkeypox swiftly pushed the contemporary safer-sex playbook out the window. Queer people have been left scrambling for answers about how to protect themselves and have expressed bewilderment as they’ve struggled to process mixed messaging from public health leaders and journalists about what poses a substantial risk of infection.
Rojas was one of the first U.S. residents to receive the prized monkeypox vaccine, in late June. But even with the benefit of his first jab of the two-dose vaccine, he has still sharply curtailed what he had hoped would be a long-awaited libertine summer.
“I’ve stopped going to sex parties,” he said, given that public health authorities identified such gatherings of men as major monkeypox risk factors. “I also stopped having sex with people who live off their OnlyFans. I additionally stopped cruising at the gym, I did not continue to go to Fire Island, and I stopped attending orgies.”
To misquote Dirty Harry, I’m just all broken up about Mr Rojas’ ability to go out to orgies.
Not everyone in the queer community has been on the same page regarding monkeypox precautions. Just as battles over mask mandates and school closures have turned neighbor against neighbor during the Covid pandemic, fierce internecine conflicts have arisen among GBTQ people this summer about the best ways to respond to and communicate about monkeypox.
Michael Weinstein, the president of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, dusted off his outspoken antipathy toward PrEP and published a scathing rebuke of the sexual liberties the HIV-prevention pill has facilitated in an op-ed titled “Monkeypox Reckoning” in the Los Angeles Blade on Monday. Notorious for an unapologetically strident, moralizing and fear-based approach to HIV-prevention communication, one that is far out of step with that of the vast majority of the public health community, Weinstein decried “a wholesale abandonment of safer sex promotion in favor of PrEP.”
“There has always been a sex radical group that has defined gay liberation as absolute sexual freedom,” Weinstein wrote, blaming monkeypox on (the loss of) those freedoms.
Let’s see, a disease spread primarily by sex, and some people see a highly promiscuous sex life as more probable to spread the disease? That’s pretty much logic, you know?
John Pachankis, a psychologist at the Yale School of Public Health, noted how for the past two decades, queer advocacy organizations have pushed “a narrative that gay people are just like everyone else” in a successful effort to secure many civil rights protections. He spoke to the conflict that members of this community now face when the particulars of gay sex lie at the heart of the monkeypox outbreak and, as during the AIDS crisis, have become fodder for intense public debate.
“In the context of the real threat of those rights’ being taken away,” Pachankis said, referring to the recent rising tide of anti-LGBTQ sentiment and policies in the U.S., “the last thing that you want to do is disconfirm that narrative — even if the picture is a little more nuanced, even if gay people do live distinct lives from straight people, even if they express their sexuality more creatively, some might say more authentically.”
Brian Minalga, 36, who is gender nonbinary and works in the HIV field in Seattle, said: “There’s this idea that there are good people with good behaviors having the good type of sex. It’s moralistic and puritanical.”
It’s also practical.
Every human society of which we know has developed the concept of marriage, of restricting sexual activity to husbands and wives, and gradually eliminated legal polygamy, because that was what worked best for society. But let’s tell the truth here: the sexual drive for men is heavily skewed toward f(ornicating) anyone in a skirt, and it has always been the reluctance of women, who bear the far greater burden in reproduction, which has held men back.
But when the prospective copulation is between two men males? That restraining force just isn’t there, and that’s why homosexual males have such a promiscuous culture. If homosexual males were really like the propaganda put forward to normalize homosexuality, just people seeking only loving, coupled relationships, who deserve the benefits and stability of marriage, the tremendous spread of monkeypox wouldn’t have occurred.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and various state andlocal health departmentshavereported that monkeypox is indeed already disproportionately affecting Blacks and Latinos. And yet outsize shares of the vaccines have tended to go to whites — thanks, health advocates say, to structural factors that favor access to more privileged members of society.
Watching such patterns play out “is painful,” said Carlos E. Rodríguez-Díaz, an associate professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, “because it’s a reminder of the presence of systemic racism.”
(Jazmyn Henderson, an activist with ACT UP, an HIV and AIDS advocacy group), a trans Black woman, said Black men who have sex with men may still identify as heterosexual. “Identifying as gay, identifying as trans, all of that is very stigmatized,” she said. “I didn’t realize how stigmatized trans women are until I became one.”
Just as with COVID-19, the black community have been more resistant to taking the vaccine. The left have given us all sorts of reasons for this, most involving distrust of government, but whatever the reasons, the reluctance to take the COVID vaccines existed, and they were part of the community, whether the left wanted to blame that on racism or not. With monkeypox, that reluctance is a baseline, and the added stigma over homosexuality in the black community layers on top of that.
Simply put, the vaccine against monkeypox exists, and has existed for a long time; it’s not experimental the way the COVID vaccines were. There were some initial shortages, but those are being rapidly resolved, and if black homosexual males have been more reluctant to take the vaccine, that’s on them. The wryly amusing part is the view of the view of the left that black males and white males have exactly the same social concerns and should think exactly the same way.
There’s a lot more at the original, with much of the rest telling us how specific individuals have curtailed their promiscuity over fears of monkeypox. But, alas! sexual promiscuity has been curtailed in society because it has real, identifiable, and sometimes serious consequences.
A former friend of mine was fond of saying that the sexual revolution is over, and the men won. Well, in a lot of ways, that’s true. But it’s also true that the men lost, and when you get two, or more, males together interested in sex with each other, sometimes that will result in negative consequences for them. The homosexual activists want the government to subsidize and protect their right to screw indiscriminately, but once everyone is vaccinated against monkeypox, something else will come along.
As we have noted many times, Philadelphia has been seeing a huge surge in homicides, and Mayor Jim Kenney wants no part, no part at all, of accepting responsibility. District Attorney Larry Krasner is also famed for passing the buck, while Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, the Mayor’s hand-picked stooge, is far more concerned about inclusion and diversity than enforcing the law. To be fair, with Let ’em Loose Larry not seriously prosecuting most crimes, Commissioner Outlaw is really kind of helpless.
First, the math. With at least five homicides reported on Saturday and Sunday, Philly is sitting at at least 369 homicides as of the 247th day of the year, for a killing rate of 1.4939 per day, which works out to a projected 545.28 killings for the year. However, an alternate way of projecting the numbers, using 2021’s record-setting pace, gives us 574.52 projected murders.
Let’s tell the truth here: the vast majority of homicides in the City of Brotherly Love are perpetrated on black victims by black killers. As bad as Philadelphia’s homicide problem is, it is very much a black problem, while white Philadelphians see themselves as much safer.
We have noted that the homicide rate in Philly came down under previous Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, and that, as of August 9th, Philly had seen more homicides this year than any full year under Mayor Nutter and his staff.
Mr Nutter, like Mayor Kenney, is a liberal Democrat. Mr Krasner is a hard-left Democrat, sponsored, to the tune of $1.45 million by George Soros, while the previously elected District Attorney, Seth Williams, was also a liberal Democrat, though maybe not quite as far left as Mr Krasner. Mr Williams had his own legal problems, and was forced to resign after a federal conviction, for which he spent 2½ years in federal prison.
Every elected official in the chart to the left is a Democrat; Democrats outnumber Republicans about 6 to 1 in registration in Philly, and the last Republican mayor left office while Harry Truman was still President.
But if they’re all Democrats, and mostly liberal ones in a chart which begins in 2007, there has been a clear and dramatic difference in how the city’s leadership has performed when it comes to homicides. Mr Nutter inherited 391 murders from his predecessor, John Street, and while the glide path was certainly uneven, the number of killings was reduced to under 300 in his last three years in office. There was a dip of three murders in Mr Kenney’s first year, but then the killings increased rapidly, over 300 in Mr Kenney’s second year, and by the third year were higher than in any of his predecessor’s eight years.
While Mr Krasner specifically campaigned on reducing sentences, not pursuing convictions for certain minor’ offenses, and investigating the Police Department, there had been some sentence reductions in Mr Williams’ last few years as well.
While pondering all of this, an uncomfortable thought popped into my head, and I will admit to not knowing the least offensive way to put it, but here it is: when dealing with a murder problem that is very heavily skewed toward Philadelphia’s black population, is it possible that Messrs Nutter, Williams and Ramsey, who are all black men, were simply paid more attention to by the city’s black community than Messrs Kenney and Krasner, who are both white, while Commissioner Outlaw is black, but is also a woman? Is it possible that the previous city leadership were simply more respected by the black community than the people currently in office?
I do not know the answer to the questions I just posed, nor do I know how one would go about researching them, but they are really questions which should be asked.
We have previously noted how Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn has a history of “mediating” plea deals to let murderers plead down to manslaughter and get far more lenient sentences. These were crimes in which the murderers “manslaughterers” deliberately tried to kill someone, so you’d think that someone who killed another man in an accident after fleeing police would catch something of a break, right?
Nathaniel Harper, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.
A jury delivered a guilty verdict in the murder trial of 42-year-old Nathaniel Harper, who was charged after he led police on a five-county car chase that resulted in the death of 57-year-old Anthony Moore of Lexington.Harper was convicted of wanton murder, fleeing or evading police and receiving stolen property following an incident on August 29, 2017. The defense team had hoped that Harper would receive a lesser homicide charge such as reckless homicide or second degree manslaughter.
The jury made a determination for his sentence on Wednesday afternoon for a total of 36 years with 30 years for the murder charge, one year for receiving stolen property, and five years for fleeing and evading police.
Was Mr Harper determined to go to trial, rather than take a plea bargain? Apparently not:
While the defense team – including Shannon Brooks and Chris Tracy – said there was no question of the truck being stolen and that Harper fled, they questioned whether he should be charged with murder.
“He is guilty of fleeing and receiving stolen property,” Brooks said in closing statements. “You can check those boxes as we stand here now. We concede those.”
They asked their client be charged with reckless homicide, as opposed to wanton murder, defined as the operation of a motor vehicle under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to human life.
In other words, his attorneys were trying to get Mr Harper a lesser conviction, but knew that conviction on something serious was a given.
Now, I have absolutely no problem with Mr Harper being convicted of murder in this case, and would have had no problem with him being sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. It is my position that deliberate murderers should get out of jail on the day that their victims come back to life.
As it is, born on October 1, 1978, and taken into custody on August 29, 2017, if the judge follows the jury’s recommendation, his sentence would not expire until August 29, 2053, when he would be 75 years old. Of course, under Kentucky law, Mr Harper would be eligible for parole after serving 85% of his sentence, or 20 years, whichever is less.
Yup, I’ve got the mugshots of all of those fine gentlemen embedded in the links under their names, and it will take only a glance to see what the obvious difference is.
Fortunately, Miss Red Corn is retiring at the end of this month. Less fortunately, it will be Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) who appoints her replacement, and Miss Red Corn suggested Kimberly Henderson Baird, her first assistant, to Mr Beshear, saying:
It goes without saying that appointing (Baird) would be historical — she would be the first African American woman to serve as Commonwealth’s Attorney in Kentucky. It is time!
Clearly, race is important to Miss Red Corn, who is an Osage Indian.
It is amusing that, in the Lexington Herald-Leader article on Miss Red Corn’s retirement, the newspaper said:
One of her more recent murder convictions was Robert Markham Taylor, (photo here) who was sentenced to 49 years in the brutal attack on University of Kentucky chef Alex Johnson, whose murder generated national headlines. Johnson, 32, was beaten to death, and his body was stuffed into a barrel and dropped into the Kentucky River, where it was found in January 2014.
She also successfully prosecuted Paris Charles, a handyman, (photo here) who killed and dismembered Goldia Massey, his girlfriend, in 2014. Charles was sentenced to 35 years in that case.
Yup, you guessed it: both men are white.
Miss Red Corn should not be feted; justice demands that she be gone, and, in reality, she should be prosecuted herself for her obviously discriminatory prosecutorial behavior.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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!
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.
One great thing about moving back to our home state of Kentucky from Pennsylvania: property taxes are much lower in the Bluegrass State! Property taxes on what was our home in Jim Thorpe are currently listed as $3,228 according to Zillow, while we paid slightly under $400 in property taxes on our current abode last October.
The Kenney administration cannot claim to center either racial or housing equity if they are making it more difficult for working class and Black and brown homeowners to afford to their homes.
by Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier (D – 3rd District) | Wednesday, May 11, 2022
Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier (D-Philadelphia). Photo from her city biography page and is a public record. Click to enlarge.
Philadelphia prides itself on its high homeownership rates, especially among working class residents. But the massive property assessment increases that were announced earlier this week present an immediate threat to this fact of life in our city — especially in Black and brown neighborhoods experiencing rapid gentrification. A disproportionate number of these neighborhoods are in the 3rd Councilmanic District, where residential assessments have increased by 50% on average.
I will admit to some amusement that The Philadelphia Inquirer’s use of the Associated Press Stylebook has led to the “Black and brown” formulation when it comes to race. The AP decided that black was to be capitalized when referring to race, but white was not. Continue reading →
But in Philadelphia, the epidemic of gun violence has been intensely concentrated in just a handful of neighborhoods and several dozen blocks — like the one where Johnson was killed, according to an Inquirer analysis. These shootings have left behind a breathtaking level of fear and trauma among a fraction of the city’s residents, nearly all of whom are Black and brown.
I admit to being wryly amused by the Inquirer’s stylebook, seemingly copied from the Associated Press, which decided that, in reference to race, “black” should be capitalized, but “white” should not. The stylebook led to “black” being capitalized and “brown” being left in lower case. Social justice, racial justice, and just generally being #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 leads to some real stupidity.
As unchecked gun violence has reached unprecedented heights this year, it has continued to disproportionately batter these same communities, where residents also endure higher poverty levels, lower life expectancy, and more blighted housing, the analysis shows.
Naturally, the “anti-racist” Inquirer wants to blame everything but race, unless it’s the racism of white people!
After several paragraphs noting violent areas, including the blocks around the intersection of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, about which we have written previously, and around which the Philadelphia Police Department has mostly ignored the open-air drug markets, I came to these two paragraphs, two I found very important:
The vast majority of the city’s developed[2]By “developed,” article authors Chris Palmer, Dylan Purcell, Anna Orso, John Duchneskie, and Jessica Griffin meant blocks not devastated by crime and neglect, blocks in which the … Continue reading blocks with housing — more than three-quarters of them — haven’t experienced a single shooting since 2015. Entire swaths of Center City, Northeast Philadelphia, Chestnut Hill and Roxborough, far whiter and wealthier than the rest of the city, have not seen a shooting for years.
Neighborhoods like Graduate Hospital, Fishtown, and University City — where years of reinvestment have ushered in more wealth and opportunity — are just a few minutes’ drive from shooting hot spots. But they rarely experience gun violence.
“(Y)ears of reinvestment have ushered in more wealth and opportunity”, huh? Let’s not beat around the bush here: the writers managed to avoid the word itself in their long article, but the word is gentrification.
Gentrification is the process of changing the character of a neighborhood through the influx of more affluent residents and businesses.[3]“Gentrification”. Dictionary.com.Lees, Slater & Wyly 2010[page needed] define gentrification as “the transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city to a … Continue reading It is a common and controversial topic in urban politics and planning. Gentrification often increases the economic value of a neighborhood, but the resulting demographic displacement may itself become a major social issue. Gentrification often shifts a neighborhood’s racial or ethnic composition and average household income by developing new, more expensive housing and businesses in a gentrified architectural style and extending and improving resources that had not been previously accessible.[4]West, Allyn (5 March 2020). “Baffled City: Exploring the architecture of gentrification”. Texas Observer. Archived from the original on 22 June 2020. Retrieved 21 June 2020., [3][5]Harrison, Sally; Jacobs, Andrew (2016). “Gentrification and the Heterogeneous City: Finding a Role for Design”. The Plan. 1 (2). doi:10.15274/tpj.2016.01.02.03.
The gentrification process is typically the result of increasing attraction to an area by people with higher incomes spilling over from neighboring cities, towns, or neighborhoods. Further steps are increased investments in a community and the related infrastructure by real estate development businesses, local government, or community activists and resulting economic development, increased attraction of business, and lower crime rates. In addition to these potential benefits, gentrification can lead to population migration and displacement. However, some view the fear of displacement, which dominates the debate about gentrification, as hindering discussion about genuine progressive approaches to distribute the benefits of urban redevelopment strategies.
But it appears that the residents of these poorer neighborhoods don’t want wealthier, and let’s be honest here, whiter people moving in:
Angst is roiling minority neighborhoods as they struggle to balance the opportunities and the threats created by gentrification. “West Philly is the new Africa,” one resident warned at a community meeting. “Everyone wants the property that’s in West Philadelphia.”
The topic of the community meeting — a plan to beautify 52nd Street, to make it safe, welcoming, and prosperous once again — was, on its face, nothing but good news for West Philadelphia’s long-declining business corridor.
Yet the audience of about 50 residents and retailers, mostly African American, grew increasingly agitated as urban designer Jonas Maciunas flipped through a PowerPoint presentation of proposed improvements. Many weren’t seeing a vision of a neighborhood revitalized from Market to Pine Streets. Instead, in the talk of redesigned intersections, leafy thoroughfares, and better bus shelters, they heard the ominous whisper of gentrification.
“It just seems that when white people decide to come back to a certain neighborhood, they want it a certain way,” said Carol Morris, 68, a retired elementary school teacher.
Morris’ declaration opened the floodgates of fear and anger that recent night at the Lucien E. Blackwell West Philadelphia Regional Library. Maciunas and Jesse Blitzstein, director of community and economic development for the nonprofit Enterprise Center, which is spearheading the project, were peppered with skeptical questions ranging from the validity of surveys showing community support for the improvements to the maintenance of trees that would be planted.
While Philadelphia and the Inquirer haven’t been so blatant as to say so directly, the liberal city of Lexington[6]Fayette County was one of only two counties, out of 120 total in the Bluegrass State, to be carried by Joe Biden in the 2020 election. has. As we have previously noted, Lexington said, directly, that it was concerned about gentrification, and, “Most new owners being more affluent and differing from the traditional residents in terms of race or ethnicity.” The city was concerned about white people moving into heavily black neighborhoods.[7]Lexington’s Hispanic population are not large enough to really dominate larger neighborhoods.
Philadelphia is not concerned about black residents moving in and integrating nearly all-white neighborhoods, and that is what the Inquirer’s Editorial Board said ought to happen. But somehow, liberal cities don’t seem to want that to happen in reverse, don’t seem to want white people moving into majority black neighborhoods. Yet, as the Inquirer noted:
Neighborhoods like Graduate Hospital, Fishtown, and University City — where years of reinvestment have ushered in more wealth and opportunity — are just a few minutes’ drive from shooting hot spots. But they rarely experience gun violence.
Gentrification seems to reduce violence!
Gentrification ought to be something every city wants. Not only do revitalized properties raise property values around them, but when white ‘gentrifiers’ move into a majority black neighborhood, they are clearly white people who have no racist attitudes toward blacks, people perfectly willing to have black neighbors. Is that not a good thing?
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.
By “developed,” article authors Chris Palmer, Dylan Purcell, Anna Orso, John Duchneskie, and Jessica Griffin meant blocks not devastated by crime and neglect, blocks in which the housing was not dilapidated, but they couldn’t quite bring themselves to say that.
“Gentrification”. Dictionary.com.Lees, Slater & Wyly 2010[page needed] define gentrification as “the transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city to a middle class residential and/or commercial use”.
Harrison, Sally; Jacobs, Andrew (2016). “Gentrification and the Heterogeneous City: Finding a Role for Design”. The Plan. 1 (2). doi:10.15274/tpj.2016.01.02.03.
We already knew it was a bloody few days in the City of Brotherly Love, but the city didn’t update its figures on Friday, due, I suppose, to the Good Friday holiday. Now they have, and it’s ugly.
The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page states that there have been 140 homicides in the city as of 11:59 PM EDT on Easter Sunday, April 17th. That’s 11 more dead bodies since the previous Sunday, and 8 of them occurred since the end of Wednesday, April 13th, 8 murders in 4 days.
So, about what has Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw been worried?
Please join me in welcoming @Phillypolice‘s first Chief Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion Officer, Ms. Leslie Marant! Ms. Marant’s position and office have been established to oversee diversity and inclusion efforts at every level of our organization. A lifelong Philadelphian, she …is uniquely qualified to succeed in this position. Having demonstrated tireless dedication and passion to the field of DEI work, she is the former Chief of Staff for the Universal Education Company, as well as the former Chief Council to the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission. She has earned a B.S. in Finance & HR Admin, and a Juris Doctor & Master of Laws, Trial Advocacy from @TempleUniv. We will benefit enormously from her experience as we continue to build and rebuild trust with the communities we serve. Welcome!
The Commissioner’s statement quoted is from three separate tweets. The image of the tweet on the right is a screenshot taken by me at 9:15 PM EDT on Monday; click on the image to take you to the original tweet.
“(D)iversity and inclusion”? It would seem that “diversity and inclusion” efforts have not been exactly successful in the city’s shootings and killings! Perhaps Commissioner Outlaw should worry about her primary job, bringing criminals to justice, first?
According to the city’s Shooting Victims database, there had been 49 people shot from Thursday through Sunday, 33 of them black, 12 listed as Hispanic white, and 4 as non-Hispanic white. That brings April’s total to 133 shooting victims, 104 of them non-Hispanic black, 12 Hispanic white, and 6 non-Hispanic white. No other racial/ethnic groups are listed as shooting victims.
Philadelphia’s population, according to the 2020 census, was only 38.3% non-Hispanic black, yet, thus far in April, they’ve been 78.20% of the shooting victims. Yet the main page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website had exactly one story on the shootings and killings this morning, and it was dated on Saturday, April 16th. The publisher, Lisa Hughes, the Executive Editor, Gabriel Escobar, and their minions don’t want to report at all on shootings and killings in minority communities, because that would be raaaaacist!
By this afternoon, the Inquirer’s Editorial Board weighed in:
As summer approaches, and with the city once again on pace to record more than 500 homicides this year, officials must act now to stem the possibility of bloodshed later.
When it comes to gun violence in Philadelphia, it’s long been clear that warm weather can have serious consequences.
A 2018 New York Times analysis found that days when the temperature exceeds 50 degrees have nearly 70% more shooting victims in our city than days when the weather is 49 or below. A similar trend, the Times found, plays out in other cities that also experience seasonal weather changes.
It should hardly have come as a surprise, then, that an unexpected stretch of sunny April weather during the holiday weekend also saw the number of incidents of gun violence tick up dramatically in the city. During a 24-hour stretch from Thursday to Friday, the city averaged a shooting an hour, and of the two dozen people who were shot, five were killed. All told, from Thursday to Sunday, the city saw a total of 50 shootings. During that four-day stretch, the high temperature in the city did not dip below 52 degrees.
The weather has been cool in the northeast on Monday, so maybe there won’t be as many shootings and killings, but the forecast is for a warming trend, to finally get back to spring normal temperatures.
The Editorial Board, a self-described “group of journalists who work separately from the newsroom to debate matters of public interest,” but who seem to have a strong commonality of #woke leftist views, continue with typical liberal pablum ideas: opening more swimming pools this summer, the School District offering in-person educational programming for all students over the summer, and a roster of summer programs.
While restoring programs and reopening pools are important steps for cooling tensions, the stakes and the scale of this crisis demand the same kind of bold intervention that we’ve seen from Mayor Jim Kenney on COVID-19. That means finding more ways to fight gun violence, not telling residents and colleagues that you’ve done all you can.
Apparently Commissioner outlaw believes that hiring a Chief Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion Officer is the way to go! Yeah, that’ll sure calm down the gang-bangers!
Call me a cynic if you will, but somehow I’m not confident that the city’s wannabe gangsters are going to be all that interested in summer school.
If the city is once again unable to open all of its pools, then avoid hitting poorer neighborhoods with most of the closures. If library hours and programs cannot be fully staffed, find ways to support branches in our most vulnerable communities. If trash collection once again falls behind, prioritize neighborhoods where residents have smaller homes and fewer cars, leaving them without options to store and transport their waste. Hold the Police Department accountable, track and transparently evaluate anti-violence programs, and ensure the implementation of recommendations from the “100 Shooting Review.” Integrate violence prevention into everything the city does, as this board called for at the outset of the year.
Apparently to The Editorial Board, “poorer neighborhoods” is a synonym for black and Hispanic neighborhoods. As we have previously noted, the Board are very, very concerned about the racial disparity in the danger faced by Philadelphians, and blamed it on Philly being one of the most internally segregated cities in the country. Curiously enough, if you read their editorial carefully, you might come to the conclusion that the Board want white residents to feel as endangered as black residents do, sort of a socialist leveling down rather than raising up.
The fact is that there are a lot of poorer white Philadelphians as well, and they aren’t shooting each other at the same rate black city residents have done. However, neither the Editorial Board, nor the Mayor, nor the District Attorney, nor the Police Commissioner can admit that the homicide rate in Philadelphia is a racial problem more than an economic one. There is something in the culture of urban black communities that is leading the young men males of those communities to carry guns and blast away, but it is apparently wholly raaaaacist to point out that statistically obvious fact.
But you cannot address a problem if you are unwilling to acknowledge the problem, and the while liberals of Philadelphia are unwilling to face the problem because it is so very politically incorrect.
We noted, on April 5th, a rowhome for sale at 4931 Hoopes Street, in West Philadelphia. The purpose was simple: to demonstrate how bad the neighborhood in which a 13-year-old was shot happened to be. We included four pictures of this disaster listing, for documentation, because photos disappear from zillow.com once a home is sold.
The house is completely unlivable, save as a squatter could make his home there. More importantly, while a house flipper might be interested in the property, he’d quickly forget the notion, because he could never recoup the money that he’d have to spend on the place to get it up to snuff because the property values in the rest of that dilapidated neighborhood are so low. Even if a flipper could buy the place for $1.00, there’s a possibility that he couldn’t make money fixing it up and selling it.
According to the zillow listing, property taxes on this place are $875 a year. If someone fixed it up and resold it, it would be reassessed, and the taxes increase.
2222 Wallace Street; the unit for sale is on the left. Photo from listing on zillow.com. Click to enlarge.
Now, why did I bring this up? There was a story in The Philadelphia Inquirer highlighting another row home for sale, in Fairmont, at 2222 Wallace Street . . . . for $875,000.
There is already a pending offer on this home.
The photos make it look well done, and it’s a beautiful home, though I will confess that were I to have redone this home, I would not have selected the styles that the remodeler chose. Nothing personal; it’s simply not my style.
Taxes? According to the zillow.com listing,[1]I tend to use zillow.com for my real estate searches, and photos of properties for sale normally disappear from the zillow listing. However, realtor.com listings tend to hold on to the photos longer, … Continue reading property taxes on this unit were $10,881 in 2021. That works out to $906.75 a month, which is higher than any mortgage payment I’ve ever had to make on any of the houses I’ve owned. Yet, as we previously noted, the Editorial Board of the Inquirerare aghast that how safe people are in the city depends upon their skin color. While I have no idea what race the family who put in the pending offer on the Wallace Street house are, generally speaking most black and Hispanic Philadelphians can only dream of owning a home in that neighborhood.
I was wryly amused that the Inquirer ran this story, given how the Editorial Board were lamenting that the city is very racially segregated, and that an $875,000 listing is not exactly one which will draw many black or Hispanic prospective buyers. Still, article author Paul Jablow has such stories about once a week.
I tend to use zillow.com for my real estate searches, and photos of properties for sale normally disappear from the zillow listing. However, realtor.com listings tend to hold on to the photos longer, and here is the listing on that site.
Mr Johnson’s attorney noted that there had been questions as to whether he was mentally fit to stand trial, and he had been examined at Eastern State Hospital, though Taylor Six’s article notes that the mental hospital does not release any information on individual patients. None of that, of course, excuses Mr Johnson’s crimes. But my question is: why was Mr Johnson, who did plead guilty, not given treatment as lenient as Miss Red Corn has been “mediating” out to black murderers?
