LONG HOT SUMMER IN THE CITY

I love how the powers that be in our Democratic run urban areas are blaming the warm Spring for the 50% increase in murders in their cities. Classic liberal response. It couldn’t be the policies they’ve inflicted on their residents for the last 40 years. How’s that War on Poverty working out in Chicago, Detroit and Philly? If you were thinking about moving to Chicago, think again.

If they are blaming the surge in murders on temperatures rising to 60 degrees in March, imagine what will happen when temperatures hit 100 degrees in August. It’s going to be a long hot summer in the cities.

Fractured gangs blamed for Chicago homicide surge

CHICAGO — There are many theories about what has caused a recent spike in Chicago’s homicide rate, including a splintering of established drug gangs, the warm winter and high unemployment in some neighborhoods that seem a world away from the city’s beaches, lush parks and skyscrapers.

The numbers clearly show there is a problem, with eight killed and at least 35 wounded in a spasm of gunfire last weekend.

The violence is nowhere near its historical peak of the early 1990s, when Chicago recorded roughly 900 homicides per year. But from Jan. 1 through late May there were 203 homicides, an increase of more than 50 percent over the 134 during the same period in 2011.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made combatting gangs a priority and has stood with Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy to unveil a plan of attack. Among the new police tactics is the deployment of dozens of specialized undercover officers to units on Chicago’s West and South sides and then saturating those neighborhood streets with uniformed officers.

In addition, Gov. Pat Quinn on Monday signed into law the Illinois Street Gang RICO Act, which aims to dismantle gangs by boosting penalties for crimes performed as part of a criminal enterprise.

In Englewood, a roughly 20-by-20-block South Side neighborhood, homicides jumped from 40 in 2010 to 60 last year, which is more than half of the total 2011 homicides for cities such as Cleveland, Milwaukee, Washington, D.C., Oakland, Calif., and Kansas City, Mo.

Though police are loath to attribute this winter’s unusually warm weather as a possible factor, because it smacks of excuse-making, there were far more people on the streets in January, February and March — including gang members — than during those months in 2011.

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Just as important have been dramatic changes within the gangs themselves.

“In the past the gangs were very organized from the top down,” said Sgt. Matthew Little of the Chicago Police Department’s gang enforcement unit. As more gang leaders are arrested, convicted and sent to prison, the gangs they left behind have become “very splintered,” he said.

Young men on the city’s streets agree.

“There is no one to control this, so it has become haywire,” said Devon Tims, who identified himself as one of the Chicago Vice Lords, making him one of the city’s estimated 70,000 gang members.

In interviews, McCarthy said the “fracturing” of larger gangs into smaller ones has doubled the number of factions and conflicts. “These kids have guns and they end up using them,” he said.

McCarthy said the gangs are far more territorial and rigid than those that operated when he was a ranking commander in the New York City Police Department and the chief in Newark, N.J. And that means trouble when a gang member simply crosses the street into rival territory.

“If we see a car with three of (one gang’s) guys three blocks over there (on another gang’s turf), they are probably going to shoot someone,” said Leo Schmitz, a gang enforcement commander who was redeployed in January to command Englewood’s police district.

The demolition of the city’s infamous public housing complexes in recent years also played a role. While the high rises long were considered a massive failure that warehoused the city’s poorest families and became magnets for gangs, tearing them down caused a new set of problems by scattering gang members to other parts of the city.

Some of them eventually settled in the thousands of houses that were abandoned during the nation’s recent financial crisis. There the battle for supremacy started anew.

Residents and activists from the most violent neighborhoods have seen similar campaigns to combat gang violence over the years and were both hopeful and skeptical about the latest one.

Jean Carter-Hill, an activist from Englewood, said she thinks the increase in officers patrolling the streets is helping clean up the area but that the city needs to do more, such as helping youths with conflict resolution.

“Every time there is a conflict, these young people get a gun,” she said. “And everyone seems to know where a gun is.”

HOW TO GET RICH IN PHILADELPHIA

Michael Nutter, the mayor of Philadelphia, signed a tough new anti-gun law in 2008. He severely restricted a citizen’s ability to buy a gun. It seems he now has a bit of a problem. Philadelphia is averaging a murder per day so far in 2012. People are getting gunned down like it’s a PS3 game. So he’s got a brilliant solution. Philadelphia is offering $20,000 to anyone who turns in a murderer. What an opportunity. Driving through West Philly every day gives me ample opportunity to generate some extra cash. At the current rate of murders, I’m bound to witness two or three in the next year. Sounds like easy money.

These are the solutions that come from Democratic politicians that have ruined every urban area in the country. Let’s assess the brilliance of the Democratic rule of Philadelphia since 1950. You start to dish out entitlements to the poor voters, like welfare and low income housing. You raise taxes on the workers and the businesses to pay for the entitlements. The workers and businesses leave the city for the suburbs, leaving only the poor people. You double the entitlements so you can continue to get their votes. You raise taxes even more on the productive people. More productive people flea the city. All that remain are the poor, ignorant and criminal. As the pie continues to shrink, the scum start killing each other. What’s left of the good people scramble to get out of the city before it’s too late. You ban the sale of hand guns to law abiding citizens so that only the criminals are armed. You now have chaos and wholesale slaughter on a daily basis. Nutter’s solution will be to hire more police and throw more money at the “problem”. The next Phila budget will require more taxes to pay for his new solution. Do you think it’ll work?

Here is a chart showing gun sales in the U.S. since 2002. Do you see a trend?

This chart is from the FBI. Do you see a trend?

Criminals tend to think twice if they believe the person they are about to commit a crime against happens to be holding a gun. When will do-gooder liberal Democratic douchebags ever get it? An armed citizenry is the best deterrent to crime. Nutter is a Nut. His $20,000 bounty will result in more murders. Anyone turning in someone for murder will likely become the next victim in Killadelphia.

Nutter plans $20,000 bounty for tips leading to slaying arrests

BY DAVID GAMBACORTA
Philadelphia Daily News

THE NUMBERS tell you that the city is back to where it was four and five years ago, back to a murder or two a day and an incomprehensible number of shootings.

Faced with that grim reality, Mayor Nutter yesterday announced at a news conference at Strawberry Mansion High School that the city is, in so many words, now throwing the kitchen sink at its crime problems.

There was no clever, catchall nickname for the assortment of initiatives, just a clear sense that city leaders are ready to try anything to escape being forever known as “Killadelphia.”

One initiative that Nutter said he hopes will be a “major game-changer” simply involves cash: $20,000 for tips that lead to the arrest and conviction of a murder suspect, and $500 for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of thugs who carry or sell illegal guns.

“To every criminal out there, I just put a $20,000 bounty on your head,” Nutter said. “We are coming for you. We will find you. People will give up that information.”

The mayor said he had set aside $500,000 in the city’s budget to fund the reward program.

He discussed other plans:

* Doubling the city’s contribution to the district attorney’s witness-assistance program to $400,000 – an announcement that called to mind the cold-blooded murder earlier this week of North Philly store clerk Rosemary Fernandez Rivera, who had given police information about another slaying.

* Boosting the Police Department’s overtime budget – perhaps by a few million dollars, according to Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey – so that cops can work extra hours in the city’s most violent neighborhoods.

* Hiring 100 police recruits for a class that would start training at the Police Academy in June, coming on the heels of the 120 recruits scheduled to graduate from the academy in March.

* Establishing a program that would enable residents to text anonymous tips and crime photos to police.

* Expanding a Commerce Department corridor-improvement program to put surveillance cameras in residential neighborhoods and other public spaces.

And that wasn’t all.

Nutter noted that although the Pennsylvania Crime Code calls for people caught carrying illegal weapons to get up to seven years in jail, many offenders in the city often get off with a slap on the wrist – a couple of months in the slammer and a little probation.

He and D.A. Seth Williams said they want to make sure the stiffest penalties are being enforced by the courts, but were vague on how that might happen.

Nutter said the city also would establish a Gun Stat program that would bring together cops, prosecutors, prisons, and probation and parole officials to focus on closely tracking those who commit gun crimes.

Temple University criminologist Jerry Ratcliffe, who has helped the Police Department develop crime-fighting strategies, said “the more-specific, focused strategies have the best chance of succeeding. . . . It’s a good chance to try something new.”

WHAT KIND OF COUNTRY HAVE WE BECOME?

I live about 5 miles from Souderton. It is a small middle class town surrounded by farms. I’m sure it has a very low crime rate. People who live in Souderton and my town feel safe. It is 30 long miles from the squalor and crime of West Philly. Then in an instant, a beautiful 9 year old girl is playing outside her apartment in the middle of the afternoon and is abducted, raped, bludgeoned, and strangled to death by her 24 year old demented neighbor. My faith in humanity just took another body blow. How can this happen? What is it in our society that makes men do such a thing? This act is so incompehensible to me that I’m just left depressed and wondering whether our society is so far gone that there is no hope.

This fiend had never had any trouble with the law. He had a fiancee. How many more of these ghouls are sitting in their apartments fantasizing about murdering little girls? Is it TV? Is it his parents? Is it a genetic defect? Is it the devil? I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I don’t know about a lot of things anymore. The older I get, the more I don’t understand.

But, even with my complete disillusionment with our society, I still had a few questions after reading this horrifying tale. His fiancee told police she heard a little girl screaming in pain and terror. Why the fuck didn’t she do something? Why didn’t she run toward the screams and save this little girl. She didn’t even call the police. She called the killer.

Secondly, the police in this country will taser you during a traffic stop and treat you like a Muslim terrorist at our airports, but three weeks ago this demented killer had this girl and her friend in his apartment with the door locked and asked them if they wanted to see his dick. The girls reported it to police and they DID NOTHING!!!!

In what kind of society does a 24 year old man ask two 9 year old girls if they want to see his dick and the police don’t think that is a problem?

We live in a sick sick world that is spiraling downward. I’m completely disgusted with everything.

Souderton girl murdered

When 9-year-old Skyler Kauffman didn’t come in for dinner after playing with friends Monday evening outside her Souderton Garden Apartments home, her family went looking, then notified police who continued the search and put out an Amber alert.

“It’s one of those situations where everyone did what they were supposed to do,” Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman said, but, unfortunately, it wasn’t enough this time.

James Lee Troutman, 24, who lived in another apartment in the same complex at Second and Chestnut streets, was arraigned Tuesday evening on charges including murder, kidnapping and rape of a child.

Minutes before midnight, Detective George Moyer had found Kauffman’s body wrapped in a comforter under bags of trash in a trash container behind the apartments.

Troutman had no significant police record, Ferman said.

“This is one of those terribly disturbing situations where they happen seemingly out of nowhere,” she said.

During the arraignment, Troutman sat for much of the time with his head cupped by one or both of his hands.

He answered “yes” to Magisterial District Judge Kenneth Deatelhauser’s question of whether he understood the charges, then was returned to prison. Because of the charges, Troutman is not eligible to be freed on bail, Deatelhauser said. A preliminary hearing was scheduled for 1 p.m. May 19. Troutman did not have an attorney at the arraignment.

“Dirtbag” was the first of the epithets shouted at Troutman as he was taken, wearing a bullet-proof vest, from a police car into the arraignment.

After the arraignment, the shouts became such a din that individual ones could not be made out.

“You’re gonna burn,” one said.

“Die, Troutman, die,” another said.

Police were called by Kauffman’s mother and grandmother about 7:11 p.m. Monday, May 9, according to the affidavit of probable cause. Kauffman had last been seen by the family about 5 p.m.

Another resident told the responding officer he had seen blood in a basement area of one of the apartment buildings. When the officer went to the basement, he found both blood and a clog that was similar to the one Kauffman had been described as wearing, the court papers say.

Montgomery County Detective Edward Schikel, of the Forensic Services Unit, who met and talked to Troutman while investigating at the scene, saw what appeared to be blood on one of Troutman’s sneakers, police said.

That attention to detail helped speed up the investigation and lead to the arrest, Ferman said.

“Without that observation, I don’t know if we’d be here today,” she said.

After going to Troutman’s apartment and being given permission by Troutman’s fiancé to search for the missing girl, Schikel found bloody clothes, police said.

Troutman’s fiancé, Heather Clemens, said that Troutman left the apartment about 5 p.m. Monday and said he was going outside to play games on his cell phone, investigators said.

Clemens later heard a female voice screaming loudly, “wailing” and saying no in a way that was “long and drawn out when she said no, like nooooooo! while she was still crying,” investigators said.

When Clemens called Troutman, investigators said, she did not get an answer, but he called back about five minutes later and said he was exercising at Indian Crest Middle School. After she told him about the screams, Clemens told investigators, Troutman said he hoped “everything’s OK.”

He later came home, changed, took a shower and they ate dinner, police said.

Troutman initially admitted to talking to Kauffman around 5 p.m. Monday night, but denied killing her, police said.

He later admitted choking her, police said.

Troutman described the killing as having happened when he “snapped” and “It was like a white out,” police said.

Asked by officers why he killed Kauffman, he said he had to because once he took her down the basement he knew she could get him in trouble,” police said.

An autopsy showed Kauffman died of asphyxia and blunt force trauma, police said.

There was no previous connection between Kauffman and Troutman, other than being neighbors, Ferman said. He was not a relative or friend of the family.

There was, however, a previous incident, police said, in which on April 18, Kauffman and another girl were near Troutman’s apartment when they needed to use the bathroom and he invited them to use his.

Taking them to the bathroom, he told the girls to ignore the photos of naked women on the walls, police said.

The girls became nervous and tried to leave, but found the apartment door was locked, then unlocked it and escaped, police said. In that incident, Troutman also allegedly asked the two girls if they wanted to see his “bird,” police said.

No charges were filed in that case.

DON’T PULL THAT STRING

OK. This one is hard to believe. But true stories are better than fiction. Three weeks ago I posted a story about my dumbass cat and the string hanging out of her ass. http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=12124

I thought it was crime that I had to pay $220 to Harleysville Veterinary Hospital so they could keep her for two days until she shit the string out. The nice mild mannered veterinarian stayed all weekend with our cat and kept Avalon up to date on the string’s progress. The nice veterinarian’s name was David Rapoport. He evidently loves dogs and cats, but isn’t a big fan of babies. I opened my local newspaper this morning to the headline below.

Upper Gwynedd veterinarian David Rapoport charged in murder of woman and unborn child

A married veterinarian furious over his mistress’ pregnancy shot the woman three times before dumping her body in a nature preserve, authorities said Tuesday.

Dr. David A. Rapoport of the 1200 block of Brownstown Court, Upper Gwynedd, is being held without bail on charges of criminal homicide and criminal homicide of an unborn child.

Rapoport, a married veterinarian who worked at the Harleysville Veterinary Hospital, is accused of fatally shooting Jennifer L. Snyder, a 27-year-old Lower Macungie Township woman, who was 10 to 12 weeks pregnant with his child, according to the Lehigh County District Attorney’s office.

State police arrested Rapoport, 30, in last week’s shooting death of Snyder, whose body was discovered Friday in a wooded ravine in the Trexler Nature Preserve in North Whitehall Township, near Allentown.

Bullet casings from the scene matched a gun that officers recovered from Rapoport’s vehicle, Lehigh County District Attorney James Martin said.

Authorities suspect that Rapoport, 30, killed Snyder because he was angry about the pregnancy. Snyder had been a technician at a Lower Macungie veterinary hospital.

Police say Snyder was last seen Wednesday and failed to show up for a doctor’s appointment Thursday morning.

State police took Rapoport into custody before 10 a.m. Tuesday “outside his father’s home in Montgomery County,” according to Lehigh County officials, and was arraigned by District Judge Jacob Hammond of Allentown.

He did not have an attorney, court officials said.

Snyder’s body was found a short distance from where her vehicle was discovered on Thursday while police were responding to a call of a suspicious vehicle in a parking lot on Independence Drive in North Whitehall.

Police said that the vehicle, which was registered to Snyder, had a shattered passenger side window and that there was blood and two spent shell casings inside the vehicle.

Lehigh County Coroner Scott Grimm determined that Snyder had been shot once in the back and twice in the head.

Police said that an investigation interview with Rapoport Thursday revealed that he and Snyder had been dating.

The investigation turned up a 9mm Glock semiautomatic pistol belonging to Rapoport, according to authorities. Police ballistics tests determined that the discharged casings found in Snyder’s vehicle and at the scene where her body was found matched the gun.

According to court documents, police believe Rapoport killed Snyder on Wednesday, then dumped her blood-soaked car behind a professional building about two miles from where the woman’s body was found doused in bleach and wrapped in a blanket and trash bags bound with duct tape.

Surveillance video from the building appears to show Rapoport getting out of Snyder’s vehicle on Wednesday afternoon and tossing a bottle of bleach into the trash nearby, police said.

Blood-spattered duct tape and a handgun were recovered from Rapoport’s vehicle, according to police.

When questioned by police, Rapoport initially denied any recent contact with Snyder, but later acknowledged having a relationship with her and not wanting his wife to know about it.

Snyder’s roommate said the victim left her apartment in Lower Macungie on Wednesday and was planning to meet Rapoport.

She wasn’t seen after that and was reported missing after she failed to show up for an obstetrician appointment Thursday morning. An autopsy determined she was pregnant with a boy.

According to court documents, Rapoport is scheduled for a preliminary hearing at 10:30 a.m. March 29 at the Lehigh County Courthouse in Allentown.

Martin said it was too early to say if he would seek the death penalty in the case.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This photo was taken from Harleysville Veterinary Hospital’s website.

I THINK THE KITTY DID IT.

X-Files on Dead Pentagon Illuminati Apparatchiks

OK, here is a really interesting story to speculate on. Who offed this Pentagon Military Intelligence official and why?

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Front Page

AFP/Getty Images

John P. Wheeler 3d died from blunt-force trauma.

Del. report: Wheeler died from blunt-force trauma

By Kathleen Brady Shea and John P. Martin

Inquirer Staff Writers

The former Pentagon adviser whose body turned up last month in a Wilmington landfill was fatally assaulted, authorities said Friday.

John P. Wheeler 3d died from “blunt-force trauma after being assaulted,” Delaware’s chief medical examiner said. The ruling answered one question about Wheeler’s Dec. 31 death, but left many others unanswered.

The one-paragraph statement offered no new details about Wheeler’s unexplained behavior in his last days – when he was seen wandering around Wilmington disoriented – or clues to who killed him and dumped his body in a Newark, Del., trash bin.

Carl Kanefsky, a spokesman for the medical examiner, said the office released the ruling after getting toxicology results, the last piece of evidence it needed for a determination.

Kanefsky refused to elaborate on or release those results, but acknowledged they were a factor in determining the cause of death – effectively ruling out any suggestions Wheeler might have been poisoned or overmedicated, or might have passed out on his own.

Lt. Mark Farrall, a Newark police spokesman, said the investigation was continuing.

“The only thing I can say is to reiterate what I’ve said before: We’re looking for information on how Mr. Wheeler got to Newark,” Farrall said.

A 66-year-old New Castle, Del., resident, Wheeler had been scheduled to take a train Dec. 28 to Wilmington from his consulting job at Mitre Corp., a defense contractor outside Washington.

The next night, an employee at a Wilmington parking garage reported seeing him coatless, confused, and holding one shoe. The next day, he was captured by a surveillance camera in a downtown building, again looking disoriented.

That was the last time he was seen alive.

His body tumbled out of a truck as it delivered trash to the Cherry Island landfill in Wilmington just before 10 a.m. Dec. 31. Farrall said investigators have determined that the truck made 10 pickups that morning in Newark before going to the landfill.

Wheeler’s tragic end contrasted with a lifetime of achievement: a West Point graduate and veteran who worked as secretary at the Securities and Exchange Commission, aide to Pentagon leaders, and executive director of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

One unresolved mystery concerns the four-year dispute Wheeler had with a neighbor who was building a house across from his. Wheeler felt the project was out of scale for the historic neighborhood.

A law enforcement source has said police linked Wheeler to an arson attempt at that house days before he disappeared. But there has been no evidence disclosed that it played a role in his death.