No, that isn’t a typo in the headline: the spelling ‘journolism’ or sometimes ‘journolist’, comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

We have previously noted the killing of 12-year-old Thomas J Siderio, Jr, after he took a shot at the police, and The Philadelphia Inquirer’s attempts to drum up sympathy for a wannabe gang-banger with parents who are criminals. We have pointed out that while the Philadelphia Police Department wanted to keep the name of the officer who shot young Mr Siderio confidential, for the officer’s safety, the Inquirer dug in, found out the officer’s name, and published it, in what I can only believe is an attempt to get the officer killed. The Inquirer’s Editorial Board had already opined that the killing of a young, gun-toting punk who opened fire on police young Mr Siderio should “should make every Philadelphian outraged.” I guess that outrage means that the Inquirer ought to put a target on the officer, to try to get him killed, because that’s exactly what they have done. What apparently didn’t outrage the Editorial Board was the fact that a wannabe gang banger was carrying a weapon and took a shot at the police.

In their never-ending police hatred and #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 attitude, are now attacking the police unit involved in Mr Siderio’s death. To increase the propaganda value, the Inquirer included a photo of Mr Siderio, not as the 12-year-old wannabe thug packing a stolen 9mm Taurus semiautomatic handgun, but as an 8-year-old, innocently looking at a dog.

Before killing a 12-year-old, a South Philly plainclothes police unit caused frequent chaos, residents say

The South Philadelphia police task force that fatally shot TJ Siderio were known as “cowboys.” Some they arrested thought they were being carjacked, robbed or stalked — with dangerous consequences.

by Samantha Melamed, Chris Palmer, and Ryan W. Briggs | Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Jakir Waters was driving to his mother’s house to babysit his 3-year-old brother one morning in early October 2020. First, though, the 19-year-old stopped on a side street in South Philadelphia to see a friend.

Waters, 21, said he was double parked and chatting out the window, when he noticed a car behind him, dark tinted windows concealing who was inside. Unsettled, Waters pulled off. The black sedan followed, staying with him as he serpentined through narrow streets.

“I didn’t know who it was. … I thought it was someone out to kill me,” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff going on: People are dying every day.”

Waters looped around about eight blocks, then headed west on Moore Street. As he approached 22nd Street, he said, “I looked up to see where they were in my rearview mirror. And, when I looked, I ran a red light and someone hit me.”

After the crash, three men emerged from the black sedan, demanding to know where the guns and drugs were stashed. It was only then, said Waters — who had never been convicted of a crime but was out on bail on two gun cases — that he finally understood that they were police.

Police did not find any drugs or guns.

There’s a lot more at the original, but note how the Inquirer is setting it up to look as though the police caused the wreck. And the reader has to go down fifty, fifty! more paragraphs to get to this:

Waters, after 18 months in jail, agreed to plead guilty in all three cases. He has 1-year-old twin daughters he’s never met. He said he believed a plea deal offered the fastest way home.

Mr Waters is a convicted criminal, but even with that, the Inquirer tried to make it sound as though he was really an innocent victim, who pleaded guilty just to get out of jail.

As for the plainclothes cops who tailed Waters — seemingly in violation of a departmental directive to avoid most car chases — they continued as officers assigned to the South Task Force, a roving tactical unit that uses social media and on-the-ground surveillance to seize illegal guns and arrest suspected felons across South Philadelphia.

Unless the Inquirer article is poorly written — which is always a possibility — this was not a car chase, but tailing a vehicle.

Its mission is central to a prime goal of Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw: getting illegal guns off the street to combat an unprecedented surge in shootings and homicides.

As often as the editors of the Inquirer wail that Pennsylvania’s gun control laws are not strict enough, and that state law prohibits the city from enacting more onerous ones, one would think that the inquirer would strongly support policing that seeks to get illegally-possessed firearms off the streets. Young Mr Siderio, for one, was both well underaged and carrying a stolen weapon.

Then, on March 1, four Task Force members drove to Barry Playground in South Philadelphia, looking for a 17-year-old and a 20-year-old who’d been seen on social media with guns. When officers arrived, police say, a bullet pierced the windshield of their unmarked black Chevrolet Cruze. Two officers got out to chase the suspected shooter, TJ, and Mendoza fired four shots, killing him. The Inquirer has previously reported that video and audio show that TJ had dropped his gun by the time he was shot in the back.

This was extremely poor, at best, writing, if not deliberately deceptive. The embedded link is to a story which stated only that “investigators are examining whether he had tossed a gun moments before a fatal bullet struck him in the back.” At least two Inquirer stories noted:

The gun that Philadelphia police say 12-year-old Thomas “TJ” Siderio tossed after shooting into an unmarked police car was found five doors down — or roughly 60 feet — from where he was fatally shot by an officer last week, video and audio recordings obtained by The Inquirer show.

Sixty feet, or 20 yards, is the distance that a physically-fit 12-year-old boy fleeing at top speed could cover in two seconds. If young Mr Siderio had thrown the weapon behind him, rather than just dropping or tossing it sideways, the distance could have been less. But Inquirer staff writers Samantha Melamed, Chris Palmer, and Ryan W. Briggs chose a link which didn’t give the readers that information.

But even biased reporting couldn’t prevent the reporters from noting somethi9ng good:

By the time TJ was shot, the South Task Force already had a reputation in law enforcement circles as a brash and freewheeling group whose members displayed an intense devotion to their jobs and were often found in chaotic situations.

The unit appears to have formed around 2019, bringing some of the most active officers from across South Philadelphia’s three police districts into one team.

Since January 2020, task force members on average made about seven times more arrests resulting in criminal charges than the median for all Philadelphia police officers, an Inquirer analysis of court records found.

In other words, they were doing their jobs, and doing pretty well.

The Inquirer really doesn’t like the idea that the city needs police. Somehow, some way, the eaten-up-with-social-justice reporters — Miss Melamed describes herself as covering “issues of identity, race, social justice, as well as prisons and the legal system” while Mr Palmer’s bio states that he covers “criminal justice and law enforcement in Philly, focusing on how it’s evolving and impacting communities during a moment of reform” — couldn’t help but notice that the cops were actually doing their jobs.

How consumed by #woke ideas are the newspaper’s staff? Inquirer columnist Elizabeth Wellington fretted that Elon Musk’s accepted offer to purchase Twitter, and his ideas of unregulated free speech might mean an end of democracy and efforts for “social justice”. The newspaper included another OpEd piece, by Gwen Snyder, “a Philadelphia-based researcher, organizer, and writer working to counter fascism and the far right,” telling us how terrible unregulated speech is.

In the same ‘social justice’ vein, the very long article concludes:

To (Hans Menos, a vice president at the Center for Policing Equity and former head of Philadelphia’s Police Advisory Commission), officials in cities across the country are too quick to defend and rely on units like the task force — even when their tactics lead to scandals that erode public trust.

In his view, they should be rethinking their approach.

“We have so many systems of punishment and not enough systems of care,” Menos said. “We focus on [crime] and say, let’s create a specialized unit to address crime … but not systems of care for our communities to say: ‘We can prevent these crimes a different way.’”

The newspaper’s very consistent editorial approach has been that individual possession of firearms is a bad thing, yet the Inquirer is now publishing stories, some of which are thinly-veiled opinion pieces, trying to undermine law enforcement’s attempts to find and confiscate illegally-possessed firearms in Philadelphia. Even the cited article noted that the task force has been proactive rather than the reactive nature of uniformed police officers. Yes, proactive policing can sometime get rough; criminals are rough, often times hardened bad guys, and the police have to be strong and resolute as well, but in a violence-filled city like Philly, with a homicide rate far higher than even Chicago’s, despite Philly being run by liberal Democrats and having a District Attorney who likes to turn the bad guys loose.

Philadelphia needs more officers like the South Task Force members, needs more police who will be able to go out and enforce the law. The Inquirer staff are appalled by such a notion.