Last year, the per-capita homicide rate in Philadelphia was worse than Chicago. It takes a lot of effort to be worse than Chicago, but Philadelphia — a/k/a “Killadelphia” — is up to the challenge, and is now on pace to break the city’s all-time annual murder total of 500, a record set in 1990 at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic. Basically, you could put police crime-scene tape around the entire city; every sidewalk in Philadelphia is covered in chalk outlines of slain victims.
OK, maybe I got a little carried away there, but it’s difficult to exaggerate how deadly conditions are in Philadelphia now:
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said on Monday that whoever was responsible for killing a pregnant woman and her unborn child as she was unloading gifts from her baby shower will face two counts of murder.
The victim, identified as Jessica Covington, 32, was shot 11 times in the head and belly on Saturday night in what police believe was a targeted shooting.
Deputy Police Commissioner Christine Coulter demanded that progressive DA Krasner take action amid a massive surge of gun violence.
‘Children are getting shot, unborn children getting shot, what is the city doing about this?’ she asked.
Police were said to be questioning a suspect in connection with Covington’s killing on Monday, but no arrests or charges have been announced as of late afternoon.
Speaking at a press conference on Monday, Krasner said Covington’s killing made him ‘sick.’ He said the person or persons who took the pregnant woman’s life and that of her unborn baby will ‘very likely’ face two counts of murder.
He praised police for ‘working nonstop and doing an amazing job with this case.’
Krasner has cut the number of prosecutions for gun crime and cops are blaming him for a huge spike in shootings a homicides.
Police in Philadelphia have made a record number of arrests for illegal gun possession this year – but the suspects’ chances of getting convicted dropped to 49 per cent from 63 per cent in 2017, analysis by the found.
There have been 491 homicide victims in 2021 – a 14 per cent increase from last year’s number of 436, and 283 in 2019.
Krasner boasts on his website that he has cut incarceration rates by 24,800 years, cut supervision by 102,400 years, never used the death penalty and helped exonerate 23 people.
Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw has said that Philadelphia’s criminal justice system has become a ‘revolving door’ for repeat gun offenders since Krasner was sworn into office in January 2018.
This is the problem with Democrats talking tough on gun control. You hear them talk about “getting guns off our streets,” but they don’t want to prosecute the people who are actually committing crimes with those guns — because all the criminals are Democrats.
Dana Pico at First Street Journal has been following the grisly “Killadelphia” death toll, and Ed Driscoll at Instapundit calls attention to the role of “progressive reforms” in the nationwide crime wave:
[Milwaukee County DA John] Chisholm, who was elected in 2007, supports deferrals for some misdemeanors and “low-level” felonies in order to cut down on incarcerations. And he’s taken credit for inspiring a new wave of prosecutors in cities like San Francisco, St. Louis, and Philadelphia who have enacted similar reforms. Chisholm congratulated San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin following his election in 2019, and the pair spoke at a forum earlier this year on the status of the progressive prosecutor movement.
Chisholm and other progressives support reforms to the cash-bail system, which they say criminalizes poverty. He has acknowledged that his reform-minded approach could put murderers back on the streets of Milwaukee.
“Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into [a] treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody?” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2007. “You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach.”
The Milwaukee DA said his office recommended $1,000 bail for [Waukesha massacre suspect Darrell] Brooks following his arrest on Nov. 5 on charges that he punched his girlfriend in the face and hit her with his vehicle in a gas station parking lot. The woman is identified only by her initials in court papers, which indicate they have a child together. Brooks was also charged with eluding police officers when they arrived to take him into custody.
What Democrats don’t want to admit is that crime is a people problem. It is easy to focus on guns, but the inanimate object does not kill people. Democrats have trained their media allies to mindlessly repeat the phrase “gun violence,” but my guns are not involved in violence. My podcast partner John Hoge has a rather substantial arsenal of firearms, none of which has ever been involved in “gun violence.”
Rhetoric that demonizes law-abiding gun owners is necessary to the Democratic Party agenda of absolving themselves and their constituents of responsibility. Nothing that goes wrong in Philadelphia — or Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, etc. — is the fault of the people directly involved, because those people vote Democrat. The voters who elect Democrats must be held blameless for their problems, and the blame must be transferred to scapegoats — which is why phrases like “white privilege” and “systemic racism” have entered the political lexicon.
The kind of “reforms” implemented by Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner are aimed at ending the “racial injustice” of putting criminals in prison, as if there were something deliberately unfair about the demographic profile of the prison population, as if law enforcement and the court system were letting white criminals go unpunished. Well, where are all these white murderers in Philadelphia? What has Larry Krasner done to end the “white privilege” that lets these perpetrators get off scot-free?
These are rhetorical questions, obviously. The population of Philadelphia County is 44% black and 34% non-Hispanic white. Fifteen percent of the county population is Hispanic and 8% are Asian. But these other demographic groups are not implicated in the “gun violence” epidemic that has Philadelphia on pace to set a new homicide record.
In 2020, Joe Biden officially won Pennsylvania by a margin of 80,555 votes. He got 603,790 votes in Philadelphia County.
So the dishonest blame game will continue, and the bodies of homicide victims will keep piling up in “Killadelphia,” because Democrats like Larry Krasner don’t want to arrest the criminals whose votes elect them.