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My friend Shaun enjoying one of the most diverse dolostone blocks in adams county, nicknamed “the fern rock” . The only lithophytic ferns missing from the ohio check list were appalachian climbing fern, filmy fern, red shoestring gametophyte fern, and Asplenium pinatifidum. Which occur on acidic substrates. also Asplenium resiliens, which only occurs in one nook in adams county and no where else.
Tuesday afternoon shootings leave one man dead, two wounded across Philadelphia
Tuesday afternoon shootings leave one man dead, two wounded across Philadelphia
Medics pronounced a shooting victim dead on location shortly after 3 p.m. Tuesday afternoon on I Street near East Luzerne Street in the Juanita Park section of Philadelphia.
Police look for gunman, possibly armed with an AK-47, after deadly shooting, crash: http://t.co/muMSMM52Mr pic.twitter.com/v3vS1ooasf
— NBC10 Philadelphia (@NBCPhiladelphia) November 4, 2014
Police told NBC10they were…
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Maybe It's Time to Lay Off the Heartstrings When Reporting on Crime
Something strikes me as off about this well-intentioned but none too informative column by Daily News writer Helen Ubiñas. In an attempt to provide readers with a glimpse into the tense, stressful lives of people who live in Philadelphia’s high-crime neighborhoods, Ubiñas and her editors fall into the same trap that ensnares many reporters who cover violence, poverty and other unsavory aspects of city life.
She confronts a problem, finds someone to humanize it — in this case, a grandmother and block captain in Fern Rock, where two died in a shooting last week — and makes references to vague, far-off solutions. Yet like many before her, Ubiñas stops short of actually exploring those solutions, or delving at all into the complex systems of marginalization that foster so much violence in the first place. Even as she does a good job of unpacking cliches like “senseless violence,” she doesn’t offer much in the way of seeing beyond those simplistic views of Philly’s deadliest crisis, either.
What we’re left with, when it comes to last Thursday’s issue of the Daily News, is a bleak but quietly hopeful story about a grandmother who makes the best of a horrifying situation. I wouldn’t exactly call it condescending or even sentimental, but the story doesn’t rise too far above the The Black Eyed Peas in terms of revealing anything about urban crime.
Ubiñas takes issue with the defeatism implied in phrases like “senseless violence,” but the column fails to move the conversation in any way that would suggest an alternative view. “Here is another prisoner of her own home,” Ubiñas writes of the grandmother, all but daring readers who “live in one of Philadelphia’s bubbles of prosperity” to take pity on her and her circumstances. “There are reasons, and solutions,” another source tells us, “they just don’t necessarily make us feel better.” Right here would have been a good moment to start exploring those reasons and solutions -- shouldn't a reporter taking on challenging topics be expected to challenge her readers with uncomfortable realities? -- but instead the story then returns to the resilient grandmother. Five short paragraphs later, it ends on a dark but somewhat inspiring note.
Just once, I’d like to see a major newspaper step back and take a broad view of what leads people, and especially city people, to crime. I’d like to see an acknowledgement of the intergenerational poverty and bleak job prospects that make people desperate. I’d like to see nods to research that has found how urban renewal erodes social cohesion, and how disparities in policing have allowed the drug trade to fester in certain areas. Without finger-wagging, I’d like to see journalists call out middle-class flight as the cause of an eroding tax base and, therefore, conditions that facilitate joblessness and crime.
Similarly, I'd like to see reporters turn a critical eye toward various ongoing efforts at gang interventions, student retention in public schools, job creation for unskilled workers, and investment programs for low-income, high-crime areas. I want to know what kind of successes these programs have had, what kind of obstacles they've run into, and where they have gone totally wrong.
This is all very Urban Studies 101 stuff, but it’s surprisingly absent from even the most compassionate stories about crime and criminal behavior in papers like the Daily News.
One last point: I want the gods of journalism to put a moratorium on any and all uses of the word “sketchy.” It’s a terrible descriptor that serves only to classify the urban poor and their circumstances as “other.” It’s befit for high schoolers who talk about the kids smoking weed out in the parking lot, but it doesn’t belong in news stories.
Neighbors and passers-by look on a police investigate the scene where four men were shot overnight. Photographs for the Gun Crisis Reporting Project by Joseph Kaczmarek.
Two men were killed and two more were wounded in a shooting early Sunday on North Park Avenue near West Chew Avenue in the Fern Rock section of Philadelphia.
According to police, officers responded to reports of gunfire shortly after midnight and found three shooting victims. Two men — ages 26 and 39 — were rushed to Albert Einstein Medical Center but were pronounced dead a short time later.
Another 39-year-old man was listed in stable condition at Einstein with arm wounds. Police said a fourth victim arrived at Temple University Hospital in a private automobile. The 41-year-old man had been shot in the thigh and was listed in stable condition.
Crime scene investigators marked at least 31 pieces of ballistic evidence at the scene. Police said they recovered two handguns, according to 6ABC, adding that tests will be done to see if they were the weapons involved.
The incident took place outside an unlicensed bar located inside a former day care center, according to CBS3. Police said the shooting started as an argument between motorcycle club members, according to an NBC10 report.
Posted by Jim MacMillan.
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Four shot, two fatally, in Fern Rock overnight Neighbors and passers-by look on a police investigate the scene where four men were shot overnight. Photographs for the
