Category: Philadelphia

Joe Vento, owner of Geno’s Steaks in Philadelphia, has been cleared of any wrongdoing when he posted as sign asking patrons to speak english when ordering.

I’m very glad that Joey’s betters have given him the green light, but I’m afraid James Madison already did that.  I hope others will join me in saying that the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission can still go to hell for even putting on the charade that they had any authority under any law to make an issue out of this.  As Wyatt Earp says, it was a waste of city taxpayer money.  Thankfully, the city didn’t make an issue of this to the point where their betters have to remind the City Commission that they are not, in fact, part of Communist Cuba, but are still part of the United States.

It’s not just a Philly thing anymore.

… you might not want to believe some of the things you hear from tour guides.  The tours at Independence Hall that are guided by the park rangers have tended to be pretty good.  Some rangers are far better at doing the tour than others.  It’s about half scripted, and half whatever the ranger feels like talking about that day.

No carrying in the building that The Constitution was signed in, and the Second Amendment was ratified.  Even if we fix the National Park carry ban, it’s still a federal facility, so 930(a) applies.  I’ll have to be happy to have carried in the room the second amendment was likely first drafted in.

Darling of the international left, Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted in 1981 and sentenced to death in the shooting death of Officer Daniel Faulkner, has been denied his appeal by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in a unanimous decision.

The Allentown Morning Call talks about how an Allentown woman got labeled a scofflaw in the City of Philadelphia.  It seems that parking enforcement officers (a.k.a. meter maids) have problems with dyslexia:

”What is probably happening is that the ticket writer is transposing the H and the M characters because they are next to each other and they are shaped the same,” Martinko, a 19-year veteran, wrote in an e-mail. ”I have done this when running license plates on my in-car computer.”

Going on that hunch, Martinko ran a slight variation of Hersch’s license plate: GMH-7177. Sure enough, that plate traced to an Oldsmobile registered to an owner who lives in the neighborhood where the tickets were issued.

A transposition error sounds like a reasonable explanation, said Linda Miller, the parking authority’s deputy executive director. It’s one of the first explanations the parking authority looks at when someone contests a ticket.

”Unfortunately, when you have someone keying in or writing a plate, they sometimes make mistakes,” Miller said.

Mistakes are understandable, but it shouldn’t take six months to fix the problem.  I had a friend who got nabbed by the PPA for having an unregistered vehicle on city streets even though the car had valid and current Iowa tags and registration on it.  When she contested it, PPA claimed the plate was stolen.  There are reasons why the city’s tax base has been eroding steadily for decades; it’s not a nice place to live.  The government is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent, the taxes are horrible, and the only people who live there tend to do so out of neccessity rather than choice.

I think we can do better.

… to hang around the trash dumpster.

State Rep Stan Saylor, my new hero, is calling on the Philadelphia Parking Authority to be investigated for issuing bogus parking tickets:

Several Pennsylvania state legislators are tired of hearing complaints from constituents about bogus parking tickets. State Representative Stan Saylor (R-York) is calling for an investigation of the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA) after the agency’s meter maids insisted a wheelchair-bound man, Frank Pinola, failed to feed a parking meter on June 21 and July 30. Before the issue drew public attention, the PPA had demanded $92 from Pinola, who was not driving on those occasions.

He’s introducing a bill that would require photographic evidence to accompany all parking violations.  I would very much support this bill.   A friend of mine who lives in the city, but who had use of her father’s car while she was in college, got a 300 dollar ticket for an unregistered automobile, even though the automobile was lawfully registered to her father in Iowa, and insured.  Because it had previously been titled in Pennsylvania (it used to be my car), the PPD issued her a ticket, sent to her previous (read my) address.  They accused her of lying when she contested the ticket when the matter of the car being legally registered was brought up, and said the tag was stolen.  She didn’t have money to fight it any further, and just paid the fine.  The Philadelphia Parking Authority are thieves, pure and simple, and I’m happy to see someone finally doing something about it.

Looking at his overall plan, there would seem to be some good:

Philadelphia’s new commissioner said he plans to disband the elite Strategic Intervention Tactical Enforcement team – the SITE unit, which was created in 2006 by former Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson to flood violent areas at night. Ramsey said that the SITE unit had drained resources from regular patrols to the detriment of the local districts.

My armchair quarterbacking here might be in error, but it would seem to me that anything that steps up regular patrols will help.  I don’t know much about SITE, or whether to accept Ramsey’s assessment of it, but if it was one of Johnson’s ideas, that makes me skeptical of it off the bat.

Ramsey instead plans to create a “mobile force” of officers who offer to work extra shifts during the high-crime summer weekends, when violent crime tends to spike.

A mobile force?  You mean one that drives around in patrol cars? :)  What does this mean?  Is all the overtime sustainable?  Are there enough officers who want the overtime?  Would it be cheaper to just hire more cops?

Ramsey said he would concentrate resources into nine of the city’s 23 police districts that were responsible for 65 percent of the city’s homicides: the 12th, 18th and 19th Districts in Southwest Division; the 14th, 35th and 39th Districts in the city’s Northwest Division; the 15th District in the lower Northeast; the 22d District in North Philadelphia and the 25th District in the Eastern Division.

That means little to me, so I can’t assess whether that’s the smart thing to do or not.   Wyatt Earp says it’s a whole lot of nothin’.  Since he’s in the department, and I’m not, I’ll defer to his judgment on this matter.