Tag: urban crime

It’s Not Our Fault They Say

photog 3 Comments Current Events ,

The Atlantic had an article called “Big Cities Are Ungovernable.”  The writer’s thesis is basically that crime cannot be controlled by the mayors running these cities.

“But more than anything else, crime is weighing mayors down.”

Well at least he admits that.  Some lefty journalists are still claiming there is no crime problem.  The fact that Lori Lightfoot is being kicked to the curb after one term is almost solely because there is an epidemic of violent crime surging through Chicago.

“Crime is not, despite what some politicians might want you to believe, a uniquely urban problem. When violent crime surged around the nation starting in summer 2020, it surged in rural areas, too.

Notice the claim that it’s not just the cities being afflicted.  The dishonesty of this is typical.  The same criminals who have taken over the cities are now expanding into the suburbs and exurbs to compensate for the flight by businesses from these same cities.  But it’s not the cities’ policies that are at fault.  It must be someone else who is responsible.  It must be Trump’s fault!

“Like presidents who are punished or rewarded for the performance of an economy over which they have little control, mayors don’t have that many levers to control public safety, yet voters will punish whoever is in charge as they search for improvement. The rise in violence was a nationwide trend, underscoring the minimal effect of municipal policies on keeping residents safe. COVID, which seems connected to some of the crime increase, was nationwide too.”

More lying.  Mayors have no control over crime!  We’re suppose to forget when and why all this began.  The Democrat mayors and governors forced their police departments to stand down while the George Floyd rioters sacked and burned the downtown areas of almost all the major cities under their jurisdiction.  This dimwit even manages to blame COVID for the surge in crime.

“A mayor can try to hire more police officers or reform the department, but that’s slow. She can seek new leaders, but Chicago, for example, has churned through police superintendents recently to little effect.  …  A mayor can try to address root causes through economic development, but that, too, is slow and subject to larger trends.”

And here is the final dishonesty, There’s no quick solution to the problem.  Adding police or hiring new police leaders is slow and won’t result in a rapid decrease in crime.   Blah, blah, blah.  These lies are absurd.  Reestablishing law and order is as simple as telling the police officers that they are allowed to do their jobs again.  Firing Soros elected prosecutors, reestablishing police qualified immunity from prosecution and announcing all this to the general public would result in an enormous change in the amount of crime going on in the cities.

Now, granted, the prisons would be filled to capacity very quickly.  Many criminals are morons and before they have a chance of adjusting to the new reality, they will be swept up in the new police activity.  So new prisons will be needed.  But that’s a good thing.  Taking homicidal maniacs off the streets should be job one for any law enforcement department.

But this article wasn’t written for you or me.  It was written for Democrat residents of these cities currently plagued by rampaging criminals.  They’re being told that the criminals looting and assaulting them indiscriminately on the streets of these benighted metropolises really aren’t the fault of the mayors.  No, it’s just unavoidable bad luck.  Some mysterious force, possibly Trumpian in origin, is responsible for their cities being overrun by criminals of mostly one ethnic identity and that the mayors are completely blameless and helpless in its onslaught.

Based on Lori Lightfoot’s recent electoral ouster even Democrats don’t believe this jazz.  High profile Democrats have to make the correct noises in public, like the writer of this fantasy piece.  But all but the most totally brain-washed remember the Summer of George Floyd and the Democrats’ total surrender of their urban constituents to the fury of the rampaging but mostly peaceful arsonists, looters and thugs.

We’re three years into this new normal.  The cities are changed in a way that cannot be ignored or explained by arguments like those provided by the writer of this present piece.  To fix things the Democrat voters will have to admit defeat and give control over the levers of government power to people who will make law and order a priority.  Republicans.

Frankly we’re not there yet.  It still must get significantly worse.  Possibly when the Lord Humongous first takes to the air waves and declares himself the supreme overlord of New York City and orders the first human sacrifices at City Hall then maybe even the Democrats will admit they’re in over their heads.

Personally, I’d like it to go on for another two or three years.  I’ve always thought of cannibalism as the correct metric by which to judge where we are in terms of civilizational collapse.  Until you can openly get human meat at the local butcher shop, we aren’t even close to hitting bottom.  So, I try to exhibit patience.  We’re not there yet.  But we’re getting there.

Chicago Can Elect a Tough on Crime Mayor or They Can Have Chaos

photog 9 Comments Current Events , , ,

John Kass’s news site is where I go if I want to know what’s left of Chicago.  He has other folks writing on his site now and someone named Steve Huntley gave an update on the mayoral election going on.  So the cretinous incumbent Lori Lightfoot is currently ranked fourth in a field of eight.  And because of various nefarious associations, the usual mobbed up candidates are not the leading candidate.  It so happens that an actual law and order type,  Paul Vallas is in the lead and believed to be headed into the runoff.  Bestill my beating heart!  So, if Vallas becomes mayor and hires a bunch of cops and allows the cops to arrest people for crimes what happens when odious state’s attorney Kim Foxx just refuses to prosecute them?  Well, they’re right back on the street killing, assaulting and robbing the general public I guess.

I’m not very hopeful that the cities have learned their lesson  it probably will take quite a bit longer for folks in the blue states to take the plunge and demand a return to civilization.  We’ll probably have to wait until cannibalism breaks out in a big way.

To be continued.

The Gloves Are Off In The Chicago Mayor’s Race

Baltimore and Philadelphia – Real Life Clockwork Orange

photog Current Events , , ,

Two recent headlines demonstrate unmistakably that some of our cities are solidly ensconced in third world lawlessness.  In Philadelphia a pack of seven feral children beat a 73-Year-Old Man to death with a traffic cone.  And in Baltimore a “squeegee-man” shot and killed one of his “customers.”

Reading either of these stories brings home what the reality is for residents of these two cities.  Philadelphia has a district attorney that will not prosecute even violent felons.  The chance that he will prosecute these minors for murder is slight even if they are ever found.  As for the squeegee killer, no one saw him and it doesn’t sound like law enforcement is even looking for him.  The tone of the article is more about finding good paying jobs for “squeegee workers” which leads me to wonder if there are now squeegee women.  You go girls!

These two stories coming on the heels of the Harlem bodega worker who was charged with second degree murder for stabbing a man who assaulted him in his store bring home the fact that Barack Obama was successful in using a race-based color revolution to destroy America’s cities.  He unleashed the Justice Department to strip away the police shield that protected law-abiding residents of these cities from the feral under-class that Democratic city governments breed with their dysfunctional schools and welfare programs.

And these three examples are just this week’s sample.  Any week you can find cases just as brutal and hopeless.  Murder has skyrocketed and the percentage of crimes solved has plummeted.  It’s obvious that the police don’t even bother to look for the criminals because the Soros-funded prosecutors won’t even indict them.

Eventually there may be such a backlash among minority residents that actual law and order city government may be elected.  Or maybe it won’t.  There is such a thing as a tipping point.  If a large enough percentage of normal people leave the city it can disintegrate to where there aren’t any capable people left to run it.  If the city becomes economically unviable then the rich will flee altogether.  At that point city services will deteriorate to the point where the working and middle class also flee.

What’s left then, is Detroit.  The city will be run by whatever local grifter can corral enough votes in the election by promising to hire his supporters into city government.  Of course, the city will sink into bankruptcy and the state will control the purse strings in the background.  Eventually trees will start growing in streets and whole blocks will disappear into small forests that sane people would never come near.

Up till recently Detroit was the cautionary tale.  Places like New York and Chicago had avoided the fate of Motown back in the nineties.  But now it seems like there will be further examples.  Philadelphia and Baltimore look like the standouts.  Each of them has sunken pretty deep into lawlessness and there don’t seem to be any mechanisms to lift themselves out by their bootstraps.  The police force, the voters and the district attorney in each city are already solidly locked into their part in this drama.  The voters haven’t shown any willingness to vote out lawless prosecutors and the police aren’t going to risk prison by arresting criminals especially if they’ll only be released anyway.

The only interesting aspect of this destruction of cities is for any relics of old America still trapped in these places.  Will Independence Hall with its Liberty Bell have to be disassembled brick by brick and moved to Harrisburg?  Will the Orioles have to be airlifted out after a double header by a special forces battalion using attack helicopters and miniguns?

There is a fight on for the future of America.  2022 and 2024 will tell us whether we can vote our way out of this mess.  Pessimism says no.  Fraud and the stupidity of suburban women threaten to allow the Democrats to stay in power.  Optimism says yes.  Empty store shelves and 9% inflation say Congress flips in 2022 and the White House in 2024.  I’m going to stick around and see.  Won’t take long.

California, Drowning in its Own Stupidity, Starts Flailing

photog Current Events , ,

What happens when a ship of fools hits an ideological iceberg?  Well, if the ship is California and the iceberg is reality, various things.  The true believers assemble on the deck and ask the band to play Grateful Dead jams.  If you are one of the captive normies you head for the life boats.  And if you’re in-between you start to panic and rethink the unsinkable nature of the ideology you’ve been fed.

For the last few years, the normies (and some not so normal) have been fleeing California by the millions.  Mostly this has been a combination of toxic policies that makes life there difficult and ultra-expensive.  Things like endless wild fires, clogged and crumbling roads, rampant crime, limited job opportunities, shortages of water and electricity have gone from frightening to unavoidable.  The impossibility of living a middle-class existence on an upper middle-class income has driven out the young.  And the old are cashing out their over priced homes to live on that value in more moderate cost areas like Nashville and Salt Lake City.

But last night we got to see the in-betweens reacting to the utter madness that has been unleashed in the last two years by the combination of BLM policies and Soros funded district attorneys.  Last night ultra-progressive San Francisco voted to recall Chesa Boudin by a 60% to 40% margin.  This continues the trend where all the school board members up for re-election were booted out because of their fanatical anti-white and radical anti-meritocratic agenda outraged parents especially Asian-Americans.

In addition to this election, we saw Los Angeles, the epicenter of everything fake, advance a fake Democrat to the brink of being their new mayor.  Rick Caruso, a billionaire and Republican, switched party flags to run as a Democrat and is the top vote getter in the primary that will see him compete in November for mayor.  Both Los Angeles and San Francisco are reeling from the effects of the crime epidemic that followed the BLM riots in 2020.  Homelessness has become endemic and neighborhood stores are shutting down under the weight of endless smash and grab robberies.  The regular people are frightened and confused as to how to return to normal life.

But the elites and other true believers are still telling anyone who will listen that all is for the best in this best of all possible Californias.  And to confirm that fact Governor Gavin Newsom took more than 56% of the vote in last night’s primary.  Well, after all what does a governor have to do with tackling crime and homelessness?  And he did do such a great job with the pandemic.  And he does have really great hair.  But it’s going to be long hot summer and if the rolling brown outs and the wildfires really start to take their toll, who knows, maybe the in-betweeners may decide they can’t afford to keep Governor Nuisance for another four years.

As an outsider, I prefer to see California continue to stew in its self-appointed insanity.  And even the change of a few mayors and DA’s and even a governor won’t fix California anytime soon.  What might do the trick is when the last of the legacy nuclear power plants are soon decommissioned.  Once the cost and the reliability of their electricity falls off the cliff and their mandate for battery cars goes into effect then the clownish aspect of their policy decisions may finally break the back of the true believers.  But that’s a ways away.  So, in the short term enjoy the music on the deck, California.

Brooklyn Subway Attack – Get Out of the Cities

photog Current Events , , ,

Some kind of a mass casualty event went on this morning in a Brooklyn subway train that spilled over onto the 36th St subway stop in Sunset Park.  Looking at the footage maybe it was a smoke bomb followed by a handgun volley.  There are supposed to be fifteen people injured.  At least a couple look like gunshot injuries.

When all is said and done maybe no one will know who, what, or why this happened.  The NYPD’s capabilities have been seriously degraded.  And whatever the FBI says will be suspect.  The takeaway for me is New York City will soon be comparable to Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro.  A large city with some remaining cultural icons that is infested with crime and horrible poverty.

Thanks Democrats.

Gangsters in Chicago Let Illinois Governor Know Who’s in Charge

photog Current Events ,

You can’t make this stuff up.  Even Al Capone couldn’t run amok like this.

“A crime spree unfolded recently in Chicago that evoked a scene from “The Godfather.” In one of the more memorable moments in movie history, the Corleone family leaves a severed horse’s head in the bed of the fictitious movie mogul Jack Woltz as a sign of their power. Earlier this month in the Windy City, thieves broke into two northside stores and stole cash registers. They emptied the contents and then dumped the empty registers on the front lawn of Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s private home in Chicago’s swankiest neighborhood.”

And:

“Consider, for example, that Chicago saw six children shot this past Tuesday in just a matter of hours. The violence commenced with the afternoon murder of a 15-year-old high school freshman, Caleb Westbrook, who was killed in broad daylight as he walked home from school on Chicago’s west side. The ages of the victims shocked even a city very accustomed to war-like street violence. Chicago “won” the dubious title of America’s deadliest city in 2021, with almost 800 total murders, the most in over 25 years. The death toll could have been higher but for expert emergency room skills in Chicago hospitals, because over 3,500 people were shot in Chicago in 2021. Local health care workers have become so proficient at treating gunshot wounds that the U.S. military sent  medical staffers to Second City hospitals to train before deployment to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

I’m glad to hear that Chicago is reaching Mogadishu level so quickly.  As I’ve often said it will take rampant cannibalism to finally force the inhabitants to admit they’re wrong about police and crime.  Bring it on, bring it on, bring it on.

Mike Simonelli Appears on Fox News to Condemn Manhattan DA

photog Current Events , , ,

If you remember last month I linked to my friend Mike Simonelli’s book, Justified Deadly Force.

Last week he was invited onto Fox News to comment on the new Manhattan DA’s policy of refusing to prosecute anything short of murder.  My favorite bit is his answer to the DA’s question on how do we define a criminal.

Nancy Pelosi and Mayor London Breed Are Shocked to Discover Crime is Going on In San Francisco

photog Current Events , , , ,

If two of the biggest phonies in America have been forced to admit that they’ve turned San Francisco and by extension all of America’s cities into Mogadishu maybe the reckoning has already begun.  Nancy Pelosi and San Francisco Mayor London Breed almost simultaneously came out with statements decrying the madness of smash and grab robberies at the major upscale shops in San Francisco and vowed that it must be stopped even if it hurts the feelings of the thugs committing the crimes.

I’m aware that these statements are performance art intended to redirect blame away from Pelosi and Breed.  After all everything that these two creatures have done during their careers has aided and abetted the chaos that has now overtaken America’s cities.  And even if they are not the actual architects (after all these aren’t masterminds we’re talking about, more like stooges of the real brains behind all this), then at least they are fully culpable in this rolling disaster.  Any statement they make now seems laughably late and hopelessly inadequate.  What exactly is Breed going to do to get the police to arrest black criminals.  After all black lives matter.  And “black lives matter” means never interrupting black criminals when they’re in the middle of crime.  This is what Pelosi and Breed and all the rest of the mayors and governors in blue jurisdictions created in 2020.  They legitimized black mobs along with their Antifa and BLM handlers to riot, burn, beat and loot their cities and citizens.  They forced the police to stand down under threat of imprisonment.  How exactly do you switch that back to 2019?  You can’t.  The cops don’t believe their bosses anymore.  You can’t undo what the mayor of Minneapolis did when he gave a police station to the mob to burn down.  Portland, Seattle, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia followed suit and now the gangs run those cities.  Soon all the people who can, will flee.  Those left behind will have to fend for themselves.  Maybe at some point if the country hands control over to the Republicans and there are any brave men left running things, they’ll send the army in to shoot it out with the thugs.

But hearing those two moon bats in San Francisco act shocked and outraged about crime in San Francisco reminded me of Louis, the police chief in Casablanca declaring that he is shocked, shocked to learn that there is gambling going on at Rick’s Cafe, just as the croupier hands him his winnings.  Maybe they are scared.  I never thought I’d live to see the day when the residents of San Francisco got too much social justice.  But maybe they finally have reached their limit.  I’m not sure and I wouldn’t bet the house but it does seem that the stooges are feeling a little exposed right now.  But I hope no Republican white knights show up to clean up the mess.  Let the moon bats soak up all the loathing that the residents of these places are going to excrete.  There’s nothing like having the side windows of your BMW broken for the tenth time to make you reconsider electing an intersectional, anti-cop mayor and city council to run your city.

A lot of people say that three years is a long time and could provide enough time for things to turn around and get Dementia Joe re-elected.  I think three years is a long time.  But I think it may be just long enough to get Democrats ridden out of the cities on a rail.  It may be just enough time for them to lose control of even some of their strongholds.  I think they let the genie out of the bottle.  And now I don’t think they know how in the world they’ll ever get it back in.  Let’s watch what happens.  But be smart, watch from a good distance.

Justified Deadly Force and the Myth of Systemic Racism, by Mike Simonelli – A Book Review

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, photog's Corner, Reviews , , , , , , ,

I have known Mike Simonelli, the author of this book, for over forty years and he has always been an honest, talented and patriotic American.  After separating from the Air Force, he transferred into the US Army Reserves to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, retiring with the rank of lieutenant colonel.  Currently as a law enforcement officer he has been dealing with the reality of trying to keep the peace in an America where everything is upside down.  The media paints the police as racist monsters intent on harming and even killing innocent black citizens.  And at the same time the media works to paint black criminals as innocent bystanders who just happen to be “in the wrong place at the wrong time” in an attempt to mask the fact that criminality is the cause of a great majority of their frequent encounters with the police.

Officer Simonelli told me that he wrote this book for two reasons.  The first is to provide a balance against the books that have appeared over the last decade that paint the false picture of the police in America as a fatally flawed product of racist objectives and behaviors.  The second reason was to provide a resource for people who need to address these false portrayals of law enforcement in America.  These may be private citizens arguing with friends and neighbors about something they heard on the news.  Or it might be an elected official who needs to dig up verifiable facts about the use of deadly force against blacks by the police.  It could even be a town police chief trying to counteract a passionate but misinformed resident at a town council meeting.  But for whatever specific need this book will serve to provide ready facts and references for the rebuttal of the endless accusations of systemic police racism as it applies to the use of deadly force against black Americans.

The majority of the book is divided into three main headings:

Part 1. Deadly Police Shootings: Racial Bias by the Press, Protestors and Politicians

This section is broken down into sub-sections on; Research Study Introduction, Literature Review Methodology and Results.

Part 2. Justified Deadly Force of Unarmed Subjects, 2019 to 2020

This section is broken down into sub-sections on; Incidents in 20219, Incidents in 2020 and Analysis.

Part 3. Felonious Line of Duty Murders of Law Enforcement Officers 2019 to 2020

This section is broken down into sub-sections on; Incidents in 20219, Incidents in 2020 and Analysis.

 

The sub-sections listed as incidents in 2019 and 2020 in both Part 2 and Part 3 are case histories for all the events under those categories that occurred in the United States.  Each death of an unarmed subject and each murdered policeman is given its own case study.  This is an enormous amount of research to back up the assertions and conclusions that Officer Simonelli makes in his book.

Obviously, I find myself in complete agreement with the conclusions of this study.  But it is extremely gratifying to have facts and figures at my disposal when debating the rabid Left or even the misinformed or uninformed among the general public.

One of the amazing facts that is highlighted in the book is that an almost complete analog to the George Floyd death occurred only this time with a white subject, a man named Tony Timpa in Texas who died under almost exactly the same circumstances and yet because he was white there was no outrage, no riots and arson, no vilification of the police and no beatification of the deceased.

Reading the case studies, especially the accounts of the murdered police officers, makes it painfully clear just what an impossible job it is to, at the same time, protect the public, minimize the risk to oneself and still avoid being accused of using unjustified or excessive force against a suspect.  And now in the current environment where immunity from civil lawsuits for police officers has been removed, I’m shocked that even larger numbers of police have not retired or resigned from the blue state and blue city jurisdictions.

As a friend, I hope a million people head over to Amazon and buy Mike Simonelli’s book.  But more importantly I hope everyone sends a link to this post to friends who they think might be interested in or helped by the facts that are documented in this book.  It really is a unique resource.

 

Justified Deadly Force and the Myth of Systemic Racism, by Mike Simonelli

 

Another Brain-Dead Dem Called Out By His Own Party

photog Uncategorized , , , ,

Another crack in the facade of United States of Woke.  Another city slipping into lawlessness, another head prosecutor who refuses to prosecute criminals.  Another Democrat waking up to the consequences of demonizing the police.

Larry Krasner is the District Attorney for Philadelphia.  Philadelphia has experienced 521 murders this year.  You have to go back sixty years to find that total previously.

At a Monday press briefing, Krasner told reporters: “We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence.”

Michael Nutter was Philadelphia mayor from 2008 to 2016.  He is a Democrat and he is black.  Not exactly an anti-progressive kind of guy.  Here’s what he has to say about Krasner’s statement:

“Larry Krasner owes an apology to the 521 families of Philly’s homicide victims.  …

Krasner should also use his words to send a message to the shooters, murderers, and criminals of this city by committing to actually prosecute them, rather than coddle them, make excuses, reduce or drop charges. He should commit to locking them up for carrying illegal weapons or shooting people.

If Krasner does not have the fortitude or the guts to carry out those duties, he should resign and turn things over to someone who is not trying to sell Philadelphians on the false choice of having either public safety or police reform.”

Too little, too late?  Probably.  But it might wake up a few more Democrats.  Maybe they won’t ruin the next city they move to.