The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Another Bloody Year in ‘Killadelphia’

Posted on | December 31, 2022 | Comments Off on Another Bloody Year in ‘Killadelphia’

Murders declined slightly this year in Philadelphia. Through Monday, Dec. 26, the city had recorded 512 homicides this year — down from a record 562 in 2021 — according to the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Most of the victims were young Black men, with the violence intensely concentrated in neighborhoods where poverty, blight, and other systemic disadvantages collide.
The number of people who were shot and survived — nearly 1,800 through Monday — also rivaled last year’s record-setting pace.
And while other crime categories, particularly those not involving guns, had been declining over the last few years to decades-long lows, police statistics show several offenses had marked increases in 2022: Commercial burglaries were up by 41% compared to last year, retail thefts by 51%, and auto thefts by 30%.
More than 2,800 robberies involved guns this year, police said — about 55 per week — a 22% increase over last year, and the highest annual tally since 2015. . . .
Interviews in recent weeks with violence survivors, community advocates, and law enforcement officials, as well as data on the issue, show some clear trends: Guns continue to proliferate, carjackings have hit record levels, and the effects are being felt widely across impacted communities.
As shootings and homicides have hit sustained new highs, so has the proliferation of the weapons used to commit them.
For the third straight year, according to police statistics, around 90% of all homicides were committed by gun, about 15% higher than both the state and national average.
Police also recovered more than 6,000 so-called crime guns — firearms typically recovered at crime scenes, in drug busts, or from people accused of possessing them illegally. That’s nearly double the tally from just four years ago.

Notice how the Inquirer, after acknowledging that this problem is disproportionately concentrated in the black community, immediately offers the excuse of “systemic disadvantage,” as if poverty (and “blight,” whatever that means) could somehow explain the recent increase in criminal violence. But has there been an increase in “disadvantage” since 2017, when Philadelphia recorded only 259 homicides? No, of course there has been no such thing, and therefore you can’t blame “blight” for the fact that Philadelphia’s deadly violence roughly doubled in a span of four years, 2017-2021, and has just slightly declined this year after setting an all-time record last year. What does explain it, then?

The George Floyd riots of 2020, and the subsequent implementation of “criminal justice reforms,” are the obvious explanatory factors. As for the impact of these national trends in Philadelphia, the drift toward “social Justice” (i.e., irresponsible leniency) in the city was aggravated by the 2017 election of Soros-backed Larry Krasner as the city’s district attorney.

“There is a new culture of disrespect for law enforcement in this City that is promoted and championed by District Attorney Larry Krasner . . . We’ve now endured over a year and a half of the worst kinds of slander against law enforcement — the DA routinely calls police and prosecutors corrupt and racist, even ‘war criminals’ that he compares to Nazis.”
— U.S. Attorney William McSwain, 2019

Here’s a question: Did Larry Krasner create the “culture of disrespect for law enforcement” in Philadelphia or, as I rather suspect, was Krasner’s election an expression of a pre-existing anti-police sentiment in the city?

Joe Biden got 81% of the vote in Phiadelphia in 2020. Hillary Clinton got 83% of the vote in Philadelphia in 2016. No matter who the Democrats nominate for any national or statewide office in Pennsylvania — even the brain-damaged John Fetterman — that candidate will get 80% of the vote in Philadelphia. Are people who vote for Democrats expressing respect for law enforcement? Or are they instead expressing sympathy for the kind of criminals who are terrorizing Philadelphia?

Democrats are the anti-cop, pro-criminal party, and electing Democrats is an invitation to crime. No one should be surprised that deadly violence prevails in Philadelphia — or Chicago, Baltimore, etc. This is what the residents of those cities voted for when they elected Democrats.

Because the media are controlled by “Democratic Party operatives with bylines,” crime is reported in a deliberately misleading way, as reporters strive to conceal the real causes of crime — i.e., the “culture of disrespect for law enforcement” that produces a political alliance between criminals and Democrats. More from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Carjackings, another gun-related crime, have continued to rise at a startling pace. Police said more than 1,300 carjackings were reported this year, a 53% increase over last year and nearly six times the annual total reported just three years ago.
Eleven people were shot during carjackings this year, police said, and officers made 274 carjacking arrests, sometimes for charges connected to violence, other times for theft or unauthorized use of a vehicle.
Police and community members say the rise in the crime is fueled in part by young people using the cars for joyrides around the city, or to commit additional crimes. Criminal justice experts have also pointed to the increased value of used cars, plus electronic key fobs and heightened vehicle security that require robbers to confront drivers for their keys.

The word for this is deflection — blame guns, rather than criminals, for the increased number of carjackings and, while you’re at it, bring in “experts” to cite irrelevant facts, as if “electronic key fobs” and other anti-theft technology didn’t exist prior to the past three years. The real reason that carjackings have skyrocketed is that Krasner won’t prosecute criminals, and the criminals know this, so they’ve run rampant.

Probably the main reason homicide declined in the past year is because not all victims are innocent victims — bad guys killing each other reduced the number of would-be killers. Dozens of Biden voters criminals getting killed? Who says there’s no good news from Philadelphia?



 

Category: Crime, Pennsylvania

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