Philadelphia – Page 6 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Blaming Guns

Three teens are dead in Philadelphia (17 homicides in the first 12 days of 2012), and Mayor Michael Nutter is making headlines for strong words against the parents. He ranted that late on a Tuesday night, kids should have been in bed, getting ready for bed, or doing homework. They shouldn’t be driving around looking for fights and other trouble. A little shocked by his rant? Well, you won’t be shocked to know that the next thing he blamed was the lack of gun laws. But, that’s not actually the problem with why the shooter was on the streets:

Meanwhile, Eyewitness News has learned the suspect in the shooting, Axel Barreto, has a lengthy criminal record, including at least seven arrests since 2000, mostly for drugs. But on Saint Patrickâ€™s Day 2004, court records show Barreto was arrested for illegally possessing a gun, but those weapons charges didnâ€™t stick. …

They found him in possession of marijuana but also with a gun, which was illegal because he was already a convicted felon according to Tasha Jamerson, a spokeswoman for District Attorney Seth Williams.

Barreto was charged with five gun-related crimes, including trying to scrape off the serial number on the gun, but the charges were dropped six months later. His defense attorney at the time, Anthony Stefanski, says the judge ruled that police illegally searched Barreto that day without cause, so prosecutors were left with no evidence and little choice but to drop the charges. (emphasis added)

This guy committed at least five gun-related crimes in one incident. That’s not an indication of too few laws on the books. The reason this guy is on the street isn’t because the charges were too light, it’s because the police didn’t follow the law. There’s no gun law that will help Philadelphia if they conduct illegal searches so that all of the evidence of the search has to be thrown out in court. Hell, even an outright ban on possession by any civilian under any circumstance wouldn’t have put this guy behind bars since they found the gun in an illegal search.

Spin No One is Buying in a City Where No One is Accountable

As the Philadelphia Daily News was headed to print with the headline “Kill-adelphia: Yet again, city tops list of homicide rates,” they missed another homicide for their report. As I told Wyatt in response to that tweet, the city’s leaders think he’s using fuzzy math for considering year-over-year numbers. They only count from the very highest number and consider all numbers below it to be an improvement. Even as murder is on the rise, they use a “method” of counting that considers it down by double digits. The problem is that no one believes them, but the city voters aren’t willing to hold anyone accountable.

But John Coleman, shopping at the Uceta market yesterday, wasn’t buying the spin.

“They lyin’,” said Coleman, 25.

They use every excuse under the sun. You can’t track trends with year-over-year data. (Really? Yet, using the absolute worst year is a method for tracking long-term trends?) The city’s leadership says that the numbers aren’t accurate because they actually include every homicide, and they don’t think all of them count. Which ones don’t count?

“We’ve been pretty much flat for about two years, if you take the Gosnell numbers out,” said Everett Gillison, deputy mayor for public safety, who spoke for the Nutter administration.

What are “the Gosnell numbers” that shouldn’t count? That would be the doctor who murdered seven babies & one woman.

Of course, even though shootings are down, the lack of extreme gun control in the rest of the state is to blame, according to the head of the Philadelphia Police Department. The mayor’s spokesman says that the economy is to blame, as does a social worker interviewed in the article. It’s easier to blame everyone else for a city that chooses to do nothing to stop the culture of violence.

Promises are made by the city’s current leaders, but no one cares enough to hold them accountable.

Mayor Nutter, at a debate during his 2007 campaign, pledged that he wouldn’t seek re-election if the 2010 homicide tally was more than the 288 killed in 2002. Then at his inauguration in January 2008, he set what turned out to be an overly ambitious goal of slashing the city’s murder rate by 30 to 50 percent in three to five years. He won re-election this year.

He didn’t meet a single one of those promises, but there was never any doubt as to his chances to hold office this year. I think it speaks volumes that in the picture for the article that only two people in the crowd look upset at the body covered just a few feet from them. I think far too many residents in that city have simply decided to accept this level of crime as a way of life.

The Irony, It Burns

I could fisk this editorial from the Philly Inquirer about the evils of concealed carry reciprocity. But most of you have heard those arguments before. Instead, I’ll just highlight a relevant point compared with some other news from today.

The NRA and its acolytes in Congress argue that this measure simply brings a degree of uniformity to concealed-carry permits in much the same way as one state honors another’s drivers’ licenses.

But the stakes are much higher, since making the right determination about who should – and should not – carry a gun is a potential matter of life and death to a degree unmatched by rules about who gets to slide behind the wheel of a vehicle.

Follow that with a report from the front lines in Philly about their crime problems:

With last night’s vehicular homicide, the kill tally in #Philly is now 302.

I look forward to tomorrow’s editorial calling for the end to the “49 state loophole” that allows drivers from other states to come into Pennsylvania with their tools of death (aka cars) that are too dangerous for Philadelphia’s streets.

Occupy Philadelphia

A blogger colleague who works in the Comcast Center, the tallest building in Philadelphia, has some pics of the Occupy Philly protest trying to occupy the Comcast Center. What I really want to know is who the dude is walking that beam? And what is he accomplishing by being there? How did he get up there? It’s odd that in a picture of occupiers, I’m really floored by the guy with the high wire act.

The best part that Dave notes, “Oh, by the way, I asked my coworker and he said they smelled pretty bad.” Looks like mostly they will be occupying City Hall, which I’m pretty sure probably smells bad enough from the rats that infest that building on any given day. I doubt anyone will notice. But the Comcast Center is private property, and security appears to have acted quickly.

UPDATE: Apparently the high wire act is a statue. I guess that’s why it’s not moving.

Live Blogging the Philly OC Trial

From What Starts with W. For those of you who might not remember, this is the case of the guy made to eat pavement for OCing a pistol down the streets of Philadelphia while in possession of a valid License to Carry. You can see the YouTube video that started it all here.

Apparently the verdict is not guilty. He was charged with reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct. I sincerely hope this helps his Civil Rights lawsuit.

Lawlessness & Segregation?

Things you should know about Philly are best summed up in this tweet by Wyatt:

And it continues. The murder count in #Philly is now at 273. #armyourselves

That was from Monday. One more day on the books means four more murders on the tally, according to the PD’s website. The number is now 277.

Anytime Philadelphia needs to make budget cuts, they look to public safety first. I mean who cares if a few more people die in fires each year? And that murder count doesn’t really matter since the Police Department’s leadership is cooking the books in terms of how they compare crime statistics anyway. Slashing these departments has been the favored policy of Democrats ever since I moved to the area. But now an independent candidate for Mayor wants to take it to a new extreme, as well as divide up the city’s services based on race.

Philadelphia voters who go to the polls next month will find an independent candidate on the ballot for mayor – Wali “Diop” Rahman, a 34-year-old activist pushing for a major shift in city spending priorities, taking dollars away from law enforcement to spend more on education and community development.

“Right now the city’s fundamental policy is that of police containment,” said Rahman, an organizer for the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, which promotes efforts by the African American community to control its own institutions, including schools, police, health care, and housing.

His platform doesn’t explain how much he will cut from police and court budgets, but it does include a few other gems like mandatory hiring for convicts. It’s not clear what force he will use for businesses to make the hires, but it will be mandatory. In theory, he could make it a stipulation of the taxpayer-funded handouts he’ll give to businesses based on the race of their owners, but he doesn’t actually tie the two policies together. He will also free “political prisoners” which just happen to be those who have killed police officers.

It will be interesting to see how many votes this guy gets on Election Day. Given that the city is headed towards one of the highest murder counts in years, will some voters really support someone who wants to cut back on police and release more murderers from prison?

“Florida Loophole” in the Press

This time in St. Louis, but still using Philly as an example. We’ve documented previously that these articles have been popping up all over. The purpose of this article is to help defeat HR822, it would seem. It’s worth noting that HR822 does not extend to residents in their home states, so both before and after HR822, this Florida issue is still completely a matter of state prerogatives.

The city argues that it needs latitude in determining who is a threat, because of long-standing problems in the court system. A Philadelphia Inquirer report last year noted that while prosecutors in other big cities win felony convictions in half of violent-crime cases, in Philadelphia, prosecutors had been winning only 20 percent.

It seems to me that this is the real problem to fix. You can’t have a revolving door justice system and expect to turn your city as a whole into a kind of low-level prison, where we all have to deal with more restrictive laws because the City can’t serve basic functions such as controlling crime. It is also absolutely inappropriate to consider arrests, rather than convictions, in determining who is permitted to exercise a constitutional right.

Fudging the Numbers

Looks like Ramsey and Nutter are fudging the murder numbers in Philadelphia to make this year not look like quite the disaster it’s actually been. It’s worth noting that Philadelphia’s response to the same financial crisis everyone else is facing was to cut police and firefighters first and foremost.

Meet Some Real Gun Violence Prevention Activists

This is what groups like CSGV and Brady Campaign would look like if they were really about gun violence prevention, rather than being about collecting money from suburbanites who think guns are icky. I don’t think this group, “CeaseFire Philadelphia”, is affiliated with CeaseFire PA. CeaseFire Philadelphia seems to be about actuallyÂ interveningÂ with troubled young men, to get them to give up a life of violence, using older men from the same neighborhoods, who have since given that life up. According to the article, it seems to work. I think programs like this are a great thing if they work.

CeaseFire PA, on the other hand, have a number of members that live in rough and tumble neighborhoods like Rador and Ardmore, and I think perhaps have seen some of the individuals from CeaseFire Philadelphia, when they drive quickly through those neighborhoods with the doors locked after getting lost on the way back from dinner and a show.

Castle Doctrine Hysteria

From the Philly Inquirer:

When Gov. Corbett signed a law June 28 expanding the right to use deadly force outside the home, gun-control proponents predicted every thug would have a new defense to pulling the trigger.

It didn’t take long.

Just eight days after the new “castle doctrine” law took effect, it has been raised in the defense of a North Philadelphia man charged with killing a neighbor over $100 owed in the purchase of a pit bull puppy.

Of course, they are going to raise self-defense, since that’s one of the main defenses used against the charge of murder. That was true before castle doctrine, and it’ll be true after. The way they continue to describe the case, it looks like a pretty run of the mill self defense claim.Â In this case, Johnson was threatened by several men:

Cruz testified that Jetson Cruz asked Johnson why he threatened Samantha, then shoved him, and that “Lydell pulled a gun from his waist and started shooting.”

That’s likely going to hinge on whether he had a reasonable fear of imminent death or grave injury, rather than a duty to retreat. Multiple attackers against one can be reasonable under certain circumstances. The Inquirer is making mountains out of molehills here. This is a fairly ordinary self-defense claim, and I don’t think Castle Doctrine is likely to pay a big role in it, or a role at all.