Category Archives: failed city

Dangerous democrat-run cities: College student killed by career criminal

Posted on November 10, 2023 by | 3 comments

For over 60 years, Nashville has been run by a democrat mayor. And we all know how well democrat-run cities are doing these days: increased crime, decreased policing, open-air drug use, and exploding homeless populations. Blue cities are not safe for their citizens.

Here’s a recent example from Nashville:

College student dies after being struck in the head by stray bullet allegedly fired by career criminal

Innocent victim Jillian Ludwig

Jillian Ludwig, 18, was shot by career-criminal Shaquille Taylor, 29, as she walked on a track at a park. Here’s more details from the NY Post:

“A college student from New Jersey died overnight Thursday, two days after being struck in the head by a bullet allegedly fired by a career criminal as she walked near her campus in Nashville — and lay for an hour before a passerby found her.

Jillian Ludwig, 18, a freshman at Belmont University, had been initially listed in critical condition after being shot about 2:30 p.m. Tuesday while walking at Edgehill Community Memorial Gardens Park.

Following Ludwig’s death, authorities are discussing updated charges against suspected shooter Shaquille Taylor, 29, who was already arrested and charged with aggravated assault and evidence tampering.”

Read the whole story here.

Career criminal Shauille Taylor

Here’s some background on the perp, Shaquille Taylor:

Taylor served 11 months and 29 days for a 2016 assault charge and was found guilty for contributing to the delinquency of a minor in 2018, which resulted in him serving a year and two months on probation.

In 2021, he was charged with three counts of assault with a deadly weapon after he and another man were accused of shooting at a female driver while her two kids were in the back seat. He was released from custody earlier this year after being deemed incompetent to stand trial. Federal and state laws prohibit the prosecution of mentally incompetent people.

According to Daily Wire, Taylor was charged with felony auto theft after he was seen driving a car that had been carjacked by two men in ski masks just days earlier, according to police. He was released on $20,000 bond and failed to appear in court.

A court order earlier this year explained that Taylor had developed pneumonia at birth, which led to a brain infection, and that he continues to function at a kindergarten level.

Taylor also did not meet the criteria for involuntary commitment, so the court had “reached the limit of its authority,” Criminal Court Judge Angelita Blackshear Dalton wrote.

Judge Andelita Blackshear Dalton

My question is, why was this perp out of jail in less than two years after being charged with a voilent gun crime?

Answer: Because judges and activists, in their desire for criminal justice reform, have put law-abiding citizens in danger. Mentally-ill career criminals face absolutely no consequences for their violent actions while innocent victims pay with their lives.

Blue-run cities are no longer safe in America today. If you live in one, be vigilant and safe. It may one day save your life.

DCG

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Defund the Police activist meets reality

Posted on November 1, 2023 by | 11 comments

Oakland, California is a democrate-run city that is failing. From The Daily Mail:

“Police data shows the city now has the second worst 911 response time in California, while the number of homicides has jumped by 79 per cent from 2018 to 2022. In the year to date, violent crime is 22 per cent higher than last year, motor vehicle theft is 51 per cent higher and robbery is 36 per cent higher.”

Seneca Scott ran for mayor of Oakland last year and lost. He had called for ‘shifting budgets away from the police’ and a ‘complete overhaul of how we want our communities to interact with law enforcement.’

2022 Oakland Mayorial candidate Seneca Scott

After a recent incident, he’s had a change of heart. From The Daily Mail:

Black activist ditches his progressive beliefs after being arrested for defending himself against homeless knifeman in his Oakland garden

Details of the incident:

“At around 10pm on October 30 2021, Scott discovered two men were trying to steal the water heater from his garden. He went down to confront them, taking his gun for protection, and found they had set up a tent and laid out drugs on his picnic table. 

He told them to put down the water heater and one of them pulled a knife. Scott showed them his pistol and again told them to put down the water heater. 

At this point one of the men fled, but the other flagged down a police car and told them Scott had pulled a gun on him. Police arrested Scott on charges of brandishing a weapon and carrying a concealed firearm.

The charges have all since been dropped.“

Seneca says now he is vehemently anti what he terms the ‘woke left’ and ‘phony “progressives”‘ who he says are ‘dismissive towards black and brown people’. (I would argue that they are dismissive towards law and order.)

Scott told The Free Press that he changed his views when he realized ‘how deep the damage was’ and how ‘the people we had put in place were just complete frauds’.

Read the whole article here.

Better late than never to realize what disasterous democrat policies are doing to his city.  Now we just need about another 250,000 Oakland residents to wake up and change their voting habits.

DCG

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Posted in Crime, Democrats, drugs, failed city, failed state, safety, woke culture

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Washington, D.C, failed city (part 2)

Posted on October 29, 2023 by | 4 comments

Take a bow: Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.

Our Nation’s capitol is a democrat-run city and a dangerous place to live. Violent crime is up 38% in Washington compared to the same time last year.

Now, thanks to democrat policies, it’s more difficult to shopt at CVS. As reported by The Daily Mail:

CVS in Washington DC replaces stock with PHOTOGRAPHS of items as it battles with out-of-control crime and moves to shut 900 stores

How you get to shop in democrat-run cities.

From their story:

“A CVS pharmacy in Washington DC has been forced to replace almost all its stock with photographs in an attempt to combat rampant shoplifting. 

Framed images of items such as toilet paper and kitchen towels stand in place of the real thing, according to pictures shared to X, while customers have to press a button to request staff fetch the products from storage. 

‘This is how we live in America now?’ questioned conservative commentator Joey Mannarino, who shared the images. ‘This is the third world!’ 

The pharmacy’s dystopian move comes just weeks after a CVS store in DC was ransacked by up to fifty teenage looters, who routinely attack the store and pillage its shelves.  

Amid the shoplifting crisis, CVS has joined rival drugstore chains Rite Aid and Walgreens in closing over 1,500 stores combined in the coming months. “

Read the whole article here.

Voters in blue cities continue to elect soft-on-crime officials who refuse to adequately protect law-abiding citizens. Y’all need to wake up before it’s too late!

DCG

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Behavior has consequences: Soros-funded DA and Dem Congressman get carjacked

Posted on October 25, 2023 by | 5 comments

Democrats are discovering there are consequences to their calls to defund the police.

New Orleans DA Jason Willliams (D)

On October 16, 2023, at around 10 p.m., Soros-funded New Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams (D) and his 78-year-old mother were carjacked at gunpoint in New Orleans.

Williams said two masked suspects brandishing high-powered automatic weapons demanded his black Lincoln Navigator and made off with some of his mother’s belongings. The SUV was later recovered at an undisclosed Uptown location. (Fox8) Two teen suspects were arrested on Oct. 24, for the carjacking. (Fox8)

On Monday evening, Oct. 2, 2023, at around 9:32 p.m., Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), 68, was carjacked at gunpoint outside his Washington, DC, apartment building in DC’s trendy Navy Yard neighborhood. As Cuellar was parking his car, three armed assailants held guns to Cuellar’s head as they took his phone and vehicle, the New York Post reports. Cuellar was unarmed and was not injured.

Rep. Henry Cueller (D-TX)

The incident was the latest in a series of violent crimes that have affected members of Congress or their staffs in D.C. this year:

  • In February, Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.) was assaulted in the elevator of her northeast DC apartment building by a homeless man with a long rap sheet. She suffered bruises as a result of the attack and got away by tossing her hot morning coffee at the assailant.
  • In March, a staffer for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)  was brutally attacked in broad daylight by a knife-wielding assailant in DC, on the same street where Craig was assaulted. The staffer, 26-year-old Phillip Todd, suffered serious injuries in the attack, including multiple stab wounds to the head and chest.
  • In June, a staffer for Rep. Brad Finstad (R-Minn.) was attacked at gunpoint near Nationals Park in Washington, DC. Finstad suffered minor injuries in the attack, which occurred in the same neighborhood where Rep. Cuellar was carjacked.

To date, 750 carjackings have been reported in DC this year alone, with 75% involving a firearm. That is a 115% increase in the number of carjackings from this time last year, according to DC police crime statistics.

See also my post of May 23: “Washington, D.C., failed city“.

~E

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Seattle, failed city (part 4)

Posted on October 24, 2023 by | 4 comments

Democrat policies are killing once-great American cities. Seattle is a prime example.

The lawlessness allowed in Seattle has led to an increase in cime, open-air drug use, repeat offenders and decreased public safety. This can be directly attributed to democrat policies that include their Defund the Police Movement as a capitulation to BLM and the Saint George riots.

Remeber CHOP (Capital Hill Occupied Protest)? In June 2020, then mayor Jenny Durkan allowed Antifa/BLM/various thugs to take over six blocks of the city for 23 days and had the Seattle Police abdicate their responsiblities and vacate a precinct building. Shootings occured there and a teenage boy was killed.

Seattle democrat leaders haven’t learned much about policing crime and adequately punishing criminals since that event as they have now set a record for homicides, the highest level of homicides the city has seen in nearly three decades.

The criminals have now set their sights on new targets: middle and high school students at/around schools. Jason Rantz at KTTH reports the following:

“The Seattle crime crisis is now finding middle and high school students. A group of armed and masked thieves are targeting students after school and there aren’t enough officers to proactively police the neighborhoods. They’re committing the crimes in broad daylight.”

Yahoo News reports that Ballard High School and Whitman Middle School parents are on edge after a number of muggings, some of which turned violent. Since September 15, there have been five attacks where teen boys on their way home from school were jumped for their iPhones. Guns were used in some of the robberies.

KTTH also reports that there will be minimal consequences for the minors committing these crimes, as is to be expected in democrat-run cities.

“Following the nationwide trend in Democrat-run cities, the thieves appear to be teens. In Washington state, teen criminals seldom suffer meaningful consequences. Washington Democrats passed legislation preventing officers from talking to teen suspects until they have a lawyer present, even if the suspect’s parents consent. When teens do get caught, they seldom see jail time. Instead, they’re pushed into restorative justice programs run by police and prison abolitionist groups. The county provides little oversight.”

Read the full KTTH story here.

Seattleites should embrace the suck. Y’all voted for this yet never remember this key item:

DCG

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The “revolving door” of crime in Washington State

Posted on October 18, 2023 by | 4 comments

Criminals in democrat-run cities are given a pass under the guise of “criminal justice reform,” “equity” and “systemic racism.”

Throw in activist judges, BLM and the “Defund the Police” movement popular in these cities and you have the perfect recipe for the release of repeat offenders and increased crime.

Seattle has 118 repeat offenders which the city, a couple of years too late, now realizes is a threat to public safety.

The problems associated with democrat policies extends south of Seattle as well.

In Thurston County, Washington (Olympia area) they experienced slightly more crime in 2021 compared to 2020.

Judge Sharonda Amamilo

In 2020 the people of Thurston County elected Judge Sharonda Amamilo to the Thurston County Superior Court. The Court web page describes the good judge:

“Judge Sharonda D. Amamilo was elected to the Thurston County Superior Court Bench in 2020 and began her historic first term in 2021 as the first person of color to serve as a Judge in Thurston County. She is committed to protecting the constitutional rights of all citizens, bringing a diversity of experience and background to objectively deliver compassionate justice to litigants appearing before the court; many with traumatic backgrounds.”

How compassionate is the judge? As reported by Jason Rantz at KTTH, she released a woman who led police on a high-speed chase, has 17 prior convictions, failed to show up for five previous court appearances, and was booked for three counts of assault in the first degree, possession of a stolen vehicle, attempt to elude, and DUI. The good judge released the suspect on her own personal recognizance, on the promise she’d return for a future court date.

You can read all the details about the judge’s compassion for criminals here.

Progressives never learn:

DCG

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San Francisco, failed city part 3

Posted on October 3, 2023 by | 6 comments

We all know that democrat-run San Francisco is a failed city. The homelessness, crime, locked up store shelves, open-air drug use, poop-covered streets, stores closing, and the list goes on and on.

Yet I never did expect this headline:

San Francisco Bay boaters forced to fight off ‘pirates’ as seafaring bandits ravage community

Thieves are getting very creative in California. From the Fox News story:

“Residents living on houseboats and yachts in the San Francisco Bay resorted to physically fighting off seafaring bandits who are ransacking their ships, former harbor master Brock de Lappe said.

Another woman said she rescued a man whose sailboat drifted into the bay without a motor or any way to get back to shore after one of the “pirates,” which is what the resident call the burglars, cut his boat line during an argument. 

“The open shoreline of the (Oakland-Alameda) estuary is littered with sunken wrecks and derelict, end-of-life vessels, and crime has risen to truly intolerable levels,” de Lappe said during a municipal meeting. 

Since the summer, burglars have been using small boat homes to raid yachts and houseboats in the Oakland-Alameda Estuary, which is populated by marinas with over 3,000 slips, to steal anything of value.  Then they either sink the ships or dump whatever is left of the boats miles away in the Oakland Harbor or along its shorelines. 

Mary Spicer, who founded a group of volunteers that has been cleaning the estuary since 2017, canceled their cleanup this year “because of safety concerns” from a particular homeless encampment, where she said there have been violent incidents. “Unfortunately, I don’t feel comfortable bringing children to the site until those are addressed by the city of Oakland,” Spicer said.”

Read the whole story here.

I sound like a broken record:

DCG

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America in decline: CVS to close 900 stores due to rampant increase in shoplifting

Posted on September 26, 2023 by | 4 comments

America is in decline, particularly in democrat-run cities. As a result, our nation is facing the folowing:

  • Increased inflation and interest rates
  • Increased debt (both for the nation and many individual households)
  • Disasterous “Defund the Police” policies
  • Increased crime with soft-on-punishment policies
  • Open borders with thousands of illegal aliens arriving daily as well as drugs (particularly fentanyl) pouring into our cities

The disasterous policies of this administration and democrats (I’d also include The Swamp in the blame game) have led to this:

CVS says it will close NINE HUNDRED stores by the end of 2024 – 10% of all its shops – as it moves to online strategy amid rampant increase in shoplifting

From the Daily Mail:

“CVS is set to close hundreds of stores across the country as it undergoes a complete retail overhaul – as more outlets move towards online sellers amid rampant increases in crime.

The major drugstore chain is coming to the end of a policy launched in 2021 which will see 300 stores closed each year – meaning 900 will have shuttered by 2024. 

In the announcement, which has hit headlines again recently amid rampant shoplifting at the chain, bosses they said that they were undergoing a new ‘retail footprint strategy.’

CVS and other retailers across the US continue to adjust to post-pandemic footfall, with COVID helping turbocharge the popularity of online shopping. More shoppers are turning to buying online in the wake of the pandemic, as well as rocketing levels of shoplifting affecting sales in stores.

CVS claims that ‘local market dynamics, population shifts, and a community’s store density’ are some of the aspects it has looked into when deciding which stores to shutter.”

Read the whole story here.

Locked up goods: What many Americans now see when shopping at their local stores.

Things are so bad in democrat-run Oakland, California that over 200 businesses are staging a strike today to protest over crime that has “gotten out of hand” and are demanding better public safety.

San Francisco’s retail area is turning into a ghost town due to crime and homelessness. Stores are closing in Seattle due to crime. Philadelphia convenience stores are closing due to brazen thefts. This is pattern in many other democrat-run cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, Washington DC, New York, and Los Angeles.

Local and national elections matter. The health and prosperity of our American cities matter. Remember folks:

DCG

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Posted in Crime, Democrats, drugs, failed city, failed state, illegal immigration, Joe Biden, The Left

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Our nation needs some hope and healing…

Posted on September 18, 2023 by | 2 comments

Democrat-run cities are dangerous for their citizens and law enforcement. Between their “Defund the Police” movement which has resulted in increased crime, cashless bail policies and soft-on-punishment district attorneys, no one is safe. Just take a look at some recent headlines from our nation:

These stories break my heart. It’s so disheartening to see what is happening to some of our once-so-beautiful American cities.

Americans better wake up to the fact that elections have real life-and-death consequences. Politicians are failing their citizens while implementing their horrendous policies. We need strong leadership restored to our cities (and country) before they completely perish and rot before our very eyes.

DCG

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Austin, Texas, failed city

Posted on September 7, 2023 by | 3 comments

Another democrat-run American city heading for chaos.

Austin, Texas hasn’t had a republican mayor for over two decades.

During 2020, during the height of the “St. George” BLM-led protests and the Defund the Police movement, the Austin City Council “cut or reallocated a higher percentage of money from the police budget than any of nearly two dozen other cities nationally that significantly altered law enforcement funding at the time.”

Austin cut $150 million from their police budget. How’d that work out for the citizens of Austin? From the NY Post: “Compared to 2020, Austin has had a 77% increase in auto thefts, an 18% increase in aggravated assaults, and a 30% increase in murders.”

The Austin Police Department has also lost 800+ officers since 2017.  Although the police budget has since been refunded, mass retirements and the slashing of cadet classes caused a police shortage where the department is hundreds of officers short.

Here’s the result of the elected bureaucrats actions (from the NY Post):

Short-staffed Austin police urge robbery victims not to call 911 as crime ravages city

From the story:

“The Austin Police Department posted a graphic in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, to urge residents to call 311 or make an online report if they’re robbed – 311 is a number usually used for non-emergency requests, as opposed to 911.

“Even if you are cautious & follow all the safety advice, you may still become the unfortunate victim of a robbery,” the Austin Police Department wrote on X.”

Read the whole story here.

Austin became a blue city that many attribute to the presence of a university and the influx of left-leaning high-tech workers from the two coasts. Their votes destroyed the likes of Seattle, San Francisco and New York. They didn’t learn an obvious lesson:

DCG

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