As always, I checked the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page on Monday morning, and it tells me that, as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, January 23, 2022, 37 souls had been sent untimely to their eternal rewards. IT also tells me that ‘only’ 36 people were murdered in the city’s streets on the same date in record-breaking 2021, and ‘just’ 34 in 2020, which saw 499 killings.

That ugly 37 number was three higher than the last time the Police Department updated the homicide numbers, for Thursday, January 20^th, yet The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page and crime page show no stories on homicides over the weekend, and the crime page has several stories that are days old.

And so I found this, a Washington Post story, but reprinted in the Inquirer:

Homicide rates have soared nationwide, but mayors see a chance for a turnaround in 2022

For a decade, Atif Mahr mentored young people, preaching the virtues of anti-violence even as the streets of his north St. Louis neighborhood echoed ever more often with the crack of gunfire.

by Griff Witte | The Washington Post | Sunday, January 23, 2022

For a decade, Atif Mahr mentored young people, preaching the virtues of anti-violence even as the streets of his north St. Louis neighborhood echoed ever more often with the crack of gunfire.

Then one day last October, those bullets tore a jagged hole in Mahr’s own family. His daughter Isis was dropping off a friend when a gunman unloaded on her car. The soccer standout, who had been saving money to pay her way through nursing school, was 19.

“I always feared it,” Mahr said. “I never imagined it.”

Isis’s death filled him with hurt. The reaction from the community, however, gave him hope.

The past two years have been dreadful for public safety in U.S. cities as homicide numbers soared – in some cases to record levels. Experts say a constellation of factors is to blame, including the coronavirus pandemic’s scars and a breakdown in trust between police and the communities they serve during the social unrest of 2020. But as 2022 kicks off, city leaders from coast to coast say the stars may be aligning in a very different way.

Flush with federal pandemic-relief funds, mayors are pumping money into crime prevention programs that have demonstrated early promise. Police chiefs are using advanced data to target places and people for intervention, even as they attempt to mend badly strained neighborhood ties. And communities such as Mahr’s, tired of burying their own, are rising up against those most responsible for the deaths. The result, some officials and experts say, may be a golden opportunity to break the trend of spiraling violent crime.

“People have said ‘Enough is enough,'” Mahr said. “They’re ready to fight back.”

There’s more at the original. Here’s the link to the Post original.

The main thrust of the story refers to St Louis, Missouri. As we noted a few days before the New Year, KSDK proudly noted that homicides in 2021 had fallen back to “pre-pandemic” levels, with ‘just’ 192 souls sent untimely to their eternal rewards, compared to 263 in 2020, and 194 in 2019. The 2021 year-end total wound up being 196.

Being the numbers geek that I am, I actually did the math — and we know that math is racist, so that’s obviously a problem — and the numbers worked out to a homicide rate of 8.54 per 100,000 for white males, and 205.48 per 100,000 for black males in the Gateway City. Like Josef Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.”

Both the Philadelphia and St Louis numbers represent too small a sample size to make any meaningful statements about trends in homicides, though with 37 murders in 23 days, Philly is on pace to another record number, 587 homicides. Even if the city’s killings slowed down to 2020’s pace, it would represent a bloodbath in the City of Brotherly Love.

And the Inquirer? The city’s newspaper, third oldest continuously published daily in America, is doing its job in steadfastly ignoring the deaths. We can find stories, from five days ago, about the cute white woman killed when some miscreant bludgeoned her to death with a pipe, and, also five days ago, about the man being charged with a firearms violation for fatally shooting the criminal trying to steal tha catalytic converter from his car. The story, from ten days ago, about the retired postal worker who defended himself with his legally-owned firearm, still shows, but there’s nothing there about the vast majority of the killings, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the victims were people about whom there was nothing exceptional about their killings.

I have mentioned, many times, Inquirer publisher Elizabeth Hughes’ statement that she was making the newspaper into an “anti racist news organization,” but I failed to delve into just what “anti racist” meant. From National Public Radio:

‘Not Racist’ Is Not Enough: Putting In The Work To Be Anti-Racist

by Eric Deggans | August 25, 2020 | 12:03 AM EDT

When the topic of racism comes up, I often think of a billboard in the small town of Harrison, Arkansas.

It was a sign promoting a white supremacist radio station called White Pride Radio. The sign’s message, emblazoned next to the picture of a cute-looking white girl with a cute-looking dog, read “It’s not racist to [heart] your people.”

My takeaway: Even white supremacists don’t want to be called racist.

Which might explain why, for people dedicated to fighting racism, simply saying you’re “not racist” doesn’t feel like quite enough. To effectively defeat systemic racism — racism embedded as normal practice in institutions like education and law enforcement — you’ve got to be continually working towards equality for all races, striving to undo racism in your mind, your personal environment and the wider world.

In other words, you’ve got to be anti-racist.

I have to ask: does “undo(ing) racism” in my “personal environment” mean that I must move from the 99.07% white county, even though it’s a poverty-stricken county in eastern Kentucky? We didn’t choose the place where we bought our retirement home due to the county’s demographics, but because it was what we wanted, for a very low price. I guess that doesn’t make me ‘anti racist’ enough!

What anti racism has come to mean, in the hallowed halls of American journalism, is to not tell the truth. The Sacramento Bee, the lead McClatchy newspaper, led the way in that company’s decision to stop publishing mugshots of criminals, by stating:

Publishing these photographs and videos disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.

Miss Hughes’ article pointed out that she was:

• Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime.
• Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.
• Commissioning an independent audit of our journalism that resulted in a critical assessment. Many of the recommendations are being addressed, and a process for tracking progress is being developed.
• Training our staff and managers on how to recognize and avoid cultural bias.
• Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

In simpler terms, under Miss Hughes’ leadership, the Inquirer will take decisions in its news coverage and editorial decisions based not only on whether the information being considered for publication is factual and well-sourced, but on whether it might reinforce negative stereotypes against a particular racial group. It makes itself obvious in the fact that the Inquirer simply does not report, save in the briefest terms, about the individual homicides in the city.

It also makes itself known in what the Inquirer says about the bloodbath in the city’s streets. It’s never about bad people shooting others, but “gun violence,” as though guns magically levitate themselves and fire away at innocent people, without any human agency at all. The editorial policy, as well as the political policies of the city’s Democratic leadership — and Philadelphia’s last Republican mayor left office while Harry Truman was still President! — has been to ignore the fact that the vast majority of both victims and perpetrators in city homicides, and in crime in general, have been black.

What has anti racism really become? At least in Philadelphia, it has become the acceptance of an urban black culture in which the killing of young black men by other young black men is just plain expected. The problem cannot be seriously addressed because it cannot even be admitted, because to admit it would be racist!

I am not the only one who has made fun of the notion that math is racist, but the Inquirer, along with many of our major, and not-so-major, daily newspapers, have adopted a policy which says, at bottom, that truth is racist, that facts are racist.

Elizabeth Hughes knows this, Inquirer editor Gabriel Escobar knows this, Lexington Herald-Leader editor Peter Baniak knows this, they all know this, but they knuckle under to political correctness anyway, because they just can’t handle the truth.