A journalist and advocate who rose from homelessness and addiction to serve as a spokesperson for Philadelphia’s most vulnerable was shot and killed at his home early Monday, police said.
Josh Kruger, 39, was shot seven times at about 1:30 a.m. and collapsed in the street after seeking help, police said. He was pronounced dead at a hospital a short time later. Police believe the door to his Point Breeze home was unlocked or the shooter knew how to get in, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. No arrests have been made and no weapons have been recovered, they said.
Authorities haven’t spoken publicly about the circumstances surrounding the killing.
Crime is pretty bad in Philadelphia, certainly not a place I would want to live. Though it does beat out St. Louis and Baltimore 3x over in murder rates.
He was shot 7 times. I’d bet this was personal, or that he was specifically targeted.
To be clear, I know nothing other than what I just read in the article, but someone had to really want him dead to shoot him seven times, and no one else i.e. not a mass shooting.
When investigating a crime, and there is overkill like this, it usually points to a personal motive.
I bet when they find the guy he will claim skydaddy told him to do it.
Yep, this doesn’t look like a robbery.
It takes a weekend to learn how to use lock picks to open a door in seconds. I know the police carefully frame it as “or knew how to gain entry”, but it’s not as high a bar as they make it sound.
Ahh, I see I’m not the only fan of the lockpicking lawyer.
Rural crime is pretty bad too. I’ve met literally like one person who was randomly attacked on the streets in Philly. The vast majority of crime is people killing people they know.
Philadelphia has over 3x the homicide rate as the country as a whole. Crime is quite bad in Philly.
TIL homicide is the only crime that exists
Even if we’re talking about violent crime (which, itself is a minority of crime), homicide doesn’t even make up a majority or plurality
It’s a pretty solid metric to start with as it is the hardest to fudge. Homicides will be discovered. Other crimes can easily fly under the radar if nobody reports them.
Can agree. Me and 4 of my friends all had our cars broken into in Houston.
None of us reported it because we felt like there would be no point.
We wouldn’t want ya.
So, what causes crime to rise? What solutions do you offer?
Reduce wealth and income inequality somehow. There’s been no research on UBI reducing crime afaik and honestly I don’t know that it would work for that. People need to feel like they are doing valuable work.
Cops on foot patrol in neighborhoods NOT to punish anyone but literally just to get to know the community and make eye contact.
Access to training and education to promote moving into higher income and responsibility jobs.
Mental health support (although people won’t want help as long as they are Fighting against the system)
There need to be healthy, organic, non-crime non-drug non-gang groups for people to be part of. I don’t know what is are into these days. Basketball? Dancing on Tiktok? Anything social.
That’s not the whole story. Singapore is one of the safest countries in the world, and it has one of the highest gini coefficients (i.e. largest income inequality) in the world.
IIRC Singapore has a very specific and controlling demographic control system? Like regions have to have demographic breakdowns that approximate the national numbers or something?
There are a bunch of social engineering things you can do to reduce crime. But good luck trying to tell Americans where they can and can’t move. Probably easier to just tax the super rich.
Yeah, I grew up in South Jersey, about an hour SE and there’s at least one news story about a murder that happened somewhere in Philly each night. Sometimes multiple separate shootings. Most of Philly is a shit hole.
Asshats like you certainly don’t help the Lou be better, you’re welcome to stay away forever while we enjoy our T-ravs
How dare one not want to live somewhere because of… checks statement… high crime rates.
The crime rates are only the downtown city of St. Louis which due to STL’s unique political city/county split makes it an inaccurate comparison to every other city in the nation. Combine our county of city of St. Louis and St. Louis county together, and we’re not as bad as everyone makes us out to be. Every other city gets to use their full city metro area, both they love using St. Louis as a boogeyman because we’re split differently and they can count only the city downtown area for crime
Atlanta doesn’t. The city limits only include about 1/10 the population of the metro area.
I don’t mean to diminish your point, but rather just to mention that we’ve got some of the same sorts of statistical anomalies, too.
Says who? I checked the FBI crime statistics. and they have rows for the STL MSA for 2016, 2017, and 2018, though not in the latest one from 2019, probably because they didn’t report the numbers to the FBI.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s