Archive for the ‘crime’ Category

The #Unexpectedly Chronicles: You Never Hear This Discussed When Sportwriters Decry the Oakland A’s Pending Move

Posted: July 29, 2023 by datechguy in baseball, crime, Sports
Tags: , , , , , ,

The subject of the Oakland A’s pending move to Las Vegas has been the subject of an awful lot of chest thumping by sportwriters all over the place who loudly denounce the very thought of the 29-76 A’s abandoning the City of Oakland, as they abandoned the city of Kansas City in 1968 and the City of Philadelphia in 1955.

The is all kind of talk about “loyalty” and the legacy of the great A’s teams of the 70’s and the Bash Brothers of the 80’s but there is a subject concerning the preference of Las Vegas over Oakland that has not come up in the context of the move by any sportswriter I’ve read nor any sportscaster I’ve seen or heard.

However it’s a subject that any resident of Oakland knows is one of the top concerns of the city, in fact it’s such a concern that the NAACP of Oakland has decided to state it publicly:

Some key quotes:

Oddly enough what the local chapter of the NAACP decry and the residents of the city know the national media which decries the inability of the A’s to draw fans doesn’t have a word to say, blaming the owner instead.

The subject of crime in the city, crime so bad that it’s expedient to pull a major league team, albeit one of the worst teams you will ever see, and move to a city so renowned for it’s criminal past that it hosts the mob museum is an odd omission, until you remember that there is a national election coming up and the issue of crime, particularly in cities run by the left (The last Republican mayor of Oakland was elected in 1961) and when it comes to media, no media is more consistently left than sports media, particularly on the national level.

So while the discussion of the move of the A’s continues over the next couple of years, you can bet your bottom dollar that the subject of crime in the city will continue to be ignored by those in media, at least until after the election.

Unexpectedly of course.

In Philly DaTechGuy’s 3rd Law of Media Outrage is About to Kick In

Posted: July 5, 2023 by datechguy in crime
Tags: , ,

DaTechGuy’s 3rd law of media outrage states:

The MSM’s elevation and continued classification of any story as Nationally Newsworthy rather than only of local interest is in direct correlation to said story’s current ability to affirm any current Democrat/Liberal/Media meme/talking point, particularly on the subject of race or sexuality.

So as long as we didn’t know who the shooter in Philly was the MSM could play it up as another example of the scourge of guns.

Alas the name of the shooter has been released and it turns out the shooter who killed five and wounded two is not only black Black Lives Matter activist but a Black Transgender Black Lives Matter Activist.

This means of course that DaTechGuy’s 3rd law is now in full effect meaning that ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, MSNBC, the NYT, Washington Post etc etc etc are suddenly going to decide that this story is a local story of interest to only Philly and not sometime worth national attention.

#unexpectedly of course

Is the post office suffering from high crime?

Posted: June 24, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in crime
Tags: , , ,

I work as an instructor for a few companies, none of which reside in my local area. Whenever I finish a teaching gig, the company I taught for pays me, sometimes electronically, sometimes with a check. So naturally I was curious when I saw this headline the other day:

Now, reading a bit further (because I don’t trust any headline, and you shouldn’t either), I realized its NOT the Postal Service saying this, its instead a member of the Better Business Bureau. That person had good reason to say this, because she noted that check fraud jumped from 300,000 incidents to 680,000 incidents in 2021, despite Americans writing less checks every year.

From: https://goodmorningwilton.com/break-in-reported-at-wilton-post-office-outside-mail-box/

The issue doesn’t seem to be with residential mailboxes, but rather with the large, outdoor blue post boxes. Post boxes are being broken into at an alarming rate. In some cases, the criminals rob the postal worker to get the key to open the blue boxes. In other cases, they simple beat the boxes open with some blunt instrument. Once they get the checks, it’s not hard to erase the amount with a chemical solution and re-write the check for significantly more than was originally intended.

Checks are probably one of the few items to still be regularly mailed, and the post office was quick to note that its still safe (in their words) to mail checks:

“The Postal Service delivers about 130 billion pieces of mail over a year to 163 million customers,” said Paul Shade with the U.S.P.S. “It still remains the most secure way to transmit anything from any type of mailing.”

Paul Shade, USPS

The Post Office also noted it was installing high security boxes that are more difficult to break into.

There is a trend in the statistics. Going city by city, each “bubble” lists the incidents and arrests. Take a look at California:

Los Angeles: 54 incidents, 1 arrest
Oakland: 51 incidents, 4 arrests
San Francisco: 20 incidents, 2 arrests

And at Texas:

Houston: 97 incidents, 12 arrests
Dallas: 25 incidents, 2 arrests

Vs. Florida:

Miami: 15 incidents, 7 arrests
Tampa: 3 incidents, 3 arrests

Although I didn’t have full access to the data to calculate an arrest to incident ratio, I suspect that California would come out on the losing end of that calculation. Florida’s numbers are significantly lower than expected, and I’d reason its the fact that they make arrests and actually prosecute crimes. If you knew you could simply steal a bag of mail, cash a bunch of washed checks and face little to no chance of repercussion, well, why wouldn’t you?

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson makes $10 million “growing pains” error with e-signature blunder

Posted: June 18, 2023 by John Ruberry in crime, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Johnson in photo.

By John Ruberry

If I screw up at work, to the tune of $1,000 or so, I’ll get hollered at by my boss. 

And an error of mine that costs my employer $10,000 will see me filing for unemployment benefits the next morning. 

Chicago’s newly sworn-in mayor, Brandon Johnson, just made a $10 million whopper of a mistake. 

ShotSpotter, which this year changed its name to SoundThnking, is a firm that sells gunfire-detection software, has few friends in Chicago. It is blamed, wrongly in my opinion, for setting up the chain events that led to the death of 13-year-old reputed gang member Adam Toledo in a police shooting. A Northwestern University study found that 86 percent of Chicago police deployments initiated by ShotSpotter alerts led to “dead-end deployments.”

During this year’s mayoral campaign, Johnson vowed to cancel Chicago’s contract with SoundThinking. But earlier this month, a contract with his e-signature approved a $10,184,900 payment to SoundThinking, covering a contract extension approved by his predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, last autumn.

The mayor’s senior advisor, Jason Lee, says Johnson’s e-signature was mistakenly attached to the document authorizing the hefty payment. Of the contract carelessness, Lee said, “That’s not the procedure that we will have moving forward, but that’s what was done.” 

The SoundThinking snafu was a two-day story last week in Chicago. Kudos to the Chicago Sun-Times for breaking the story but had Johnson’s moderate opponent in April’s runoff election, Paul Vallas, made a similar mistake, we’d still be hearing about the $10 million e-signature debacle. And of course, the national media, which is a phalanx of the far-left, is completely ignoring this story. 

Hunter Clauss, who writes the Rundown, a popular political newsletter on behalf of Chicago’s NPR affiliate, dismissed the $10 million blunder as nothing but “growing pains” for the Johnson administration.

Chicago, because of its massive unfunded public worker pension debt, is essentially bankrupt. Its former cash cow, the North Michigan Avenue retail strip, suffered another departure last week when AT&T announced it was closing its local flagship shop there. Macy’s, Disney, Banana Republic, Verizon, and the Gap have shut down their North Michigan Avenue locations since 2020. The retail strip, also known as the Magnificent Mile, was hit by two rounds of rampant looting and rioting three years ago.

Chicago cannot afford $10 million “growing pains” errors. Don’t forget, ShotSpotter has not served Chicago well as a crime fighting tool.

Prior to his election, Johnson was a Cook County commissioner while also serving as a paid organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union. He was a Chicago Public Schools teacher before being hired by his union. 

Vallas was the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools. He was in charge of three other school systems. 

Prior to becoming mayor, Johnson was in charge of nothing of importance. Well, he does own a large home on Chicago’s West Side. But Johnson owed over $3,000 in unpaid water bills and fines until he paid up shortly before he was elected this spring. He also recently owed over $1,000 in traffic tickets.

As Barack Obama famously said many years ago, “Elections have consequences.”

John Ruberry regularly blogs five miles north of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.

Older Entries
Newer Entries