As we noted on Friday, with “(N)early thirty” spent shell casings — and an Inquirer photo shows a #29 evidence marker at the shell casings — and three shooters, and everyone is going to know that this was a targeted hit intended for one or more of the victims, and this is Philly same old, same old. Of course we were right!

The Strawberry Mansion shooting that wounded 7 was a targeted attack that hit bystanders — including a 2-year-old and her mother

Surveillance footage shows the three black-clad masked shooters firing at the teenagers, as bystanders flee stray bullets.

by Rodrigo Torrejón, Oona Goodin-Smith, and Chris Palmer | Friday, February 24, 2023 | 11:02 PM EST

The shooting that wounded seven people Thursday evening in Philadelphia’s Strawberry Mansion neighborhood appeared to be a targeted attack between three shooters and a group of teenagers — with stray bullets injuring a 2-year-old girl and her mother — police said Friday. The gunmen remain at large.

It occurred shortly before 6 p.m. as the group of four teens rounded the corner of 31st and Norris Streets, in front of a beer distributor and half a block from James G. Blaine School.

Surveillance footage shows that as the group turned the corner, three black-clad masked shooters hopped out of a silver Hyundai parked in front of the beer shop and began to shoot at the teenagers using at least one gun with an extended clip — peppering the street with gunfire. . . . .

Police said Friday they are still searching for three shooters and a gray, four-door Hyundai Elantra, possibly a model from 2011 to 2016, with an unknown Pennsylvania license plate. Police said it wasn’t immediately clear why the group of teens was targeted.

“It wasn’t immediately clear why the group of teens was targeted”? Bovine feces! It is crystal clear: one group had a beef with another, and in Philadelphia’s normal culture under Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, beefs among the gang-bangers “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families” are settled with bullets. It wouldn’t be quite so bad if the bad guys underprivileged young men from neighborhoods depressed by years of housing ‘redlining’ and economic disinvestment were better shots and only struck their intended victims.

Of course, this wasn’t the underprivileged young men’s first crime:

Stolen vehicle used in Strawberry Mansion shooting is recovered

The vehicle had been reported stolen in West Philadelphia earlier this year amid a rash of car thefts.

by Ryan W. Briggs | Updated: Saturday, February 25, 2023 | 10:43 PM EST

Philadelphia Police have recovered a stolen vehicle they believe was used by a trio of suspects in a Strawberry Mansion shooting that wounded seven near a public school earlier this week.

An internal document, obtained by The Inquirer, indicates police have located a silver Hyundai Elantra visible in video footage that captured the Thursday evening incident.

In the same video, three individuals can be seen emerging from the vehicle and opening fire on a group of people standing in front of a beer distributor near 31st and Norris Streets.

So, if this group of underprivileges young men didn’t steal the car themselves, they at least knowingly received a stolen car. And the odds are that the weapons they used were not legally obtained or that any of them had permits to carry them. The law does not seem to have been something which they felt the need to follow.

Further down:

The recovered getaway vehicle had been reported stolen in West Philadelphia’s 19th Police District earlier this year, amid a rash of car thefts specifically targeting easy-to-steal Hyundais.

Police did not immediately confirm where the vehicle was recovered, nor did they indicate if any persons of interest had been identified in connection with the shooting.

Twenty-six children under the age of 18 have been shot in Philadelphia since the start of the year.

So, who is the article writer, Ryan W Briggs? His Inquirer biography states that he is a researcher doing “deep dives” into public and other records. Perhaps he should do better, because, according to the city’s shooting victims database, accessed at 11:56 AM EST on Sunday, February 26, 2023, there were 263 total shootings recorded through Thursday, February 23^rd, including 28 victims listed as age 17 or younger, of whom one was a white male, one a white female, three black females, and 23 black males.

Of course, publisher Elizabeth Hughes’ dictate that the newspaper would be an “anti-racist news organization” meant that Mr Briggs wasn’t allowed to tell readers that racial breakdown. None of the articles on the shootings mentions race at all, even though we know that all of the victims, the intended and unintended alike, were black, as were the three shooters.

Helen Gym Flaherty is running for the Democratic nomination for Mayor of Philadelphia, and she retweeted this gem!

“Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother’s son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest . . .” — Ella Baker

Well, it’s true that Mrs Flaherty’s hometown newspaper does not believe that the killing of black men is important enough to cover the stories. Trayvon Martin was, in fact, not murdered: a jury of his peers determined that George Zimmerman, who shot young Mr Martin after Mr Martin assaulted him and was beating Mr Zimmerman’s head into the ground, committed no crime, but simply defended himself. Mrs Flaherty, who supports District Attorney Larry Krasner and his decarceration policies, now says she’ll have the city’s public libraries open on evenings and weekends, something that would already be the case if the city had the money and staff to do so, perhaps thinking that the “cliques of young men” would spend their time in the library reading Shakespeare instead of shooting up Kensington and Strawberry Mansion.

Naturally, neither Mrs Flaherty nor any of the other Democratic candidates for Mayor will admit the truth: the problems of shootings in the City of Brotherly Love are very much problems in the city’s heavily black neighborhoods, and not nearly as bad among Philly’s white residents. The Editorial Board of the Inquirer admitted the problem, sort of, claiming that the internal segregation of the city led black and Hispanic residents to feel far less safe than white Philadelphians, but always blaming something other than internal neighborhood cultures.

Yes, Philadelphia is one of our poorest major cities, but that’s been the case for many years now. Yet while Michael Nutter was Mayor, Seth Williams District Attorney, and Charles Ramsey Police Commissioner, 2008 through 2015, the number of people murdered in the city was roughly half that under the current regime. There was not one single year under the Nutter Administration in which more people were murdered than in any of the previous five years under Mr Kenney, or who will be murdered this year unless something changes drastically.

It’s not as though conditions in the city have changed that much during Mr Kenney’s seven years on office; it can only be the policies of the city government and the attitudes in the dangerous neighborhoods.