Two shootings in Maplewood in 24 hours.

David Andreatta recently wrote an article in the D&C that Rochester averages one shooting every 32 hours.
The historic Maplewood neighborhood beat that average this week.
We had two shootings here, less than half a mile apart, in 24 hours.
The first was Thursday night on Ramona Park, which is a residential section of the neighborhood.
The second was last night on Dewey Avenue and Flower City Park.
That shooting took place near the neighborhood nuisance business called Phat Boy.
Phat Boy has long allowed drug dealers to ply their products in front of the store, and permitted their customers to use them in the parking lot behind their store.
The well tended neighborhood garden on the corner merely adds to the ambience of the experience, if the buyers aren't too high to notice.
The location has all the ingredients for a disaster to occur. It is surprising that worse hasn't happened there.
Yet.
The mayor's office and the police department are unable or unwilling to clear out the thugs loitering in front of the store. Phat Boy refuses to do anything about their presence. The neighborhood is helpless to do anything about it.
It is even more ironic that "Clergy on Patrol" roamed through that area less than a month ago.
Nobody really knows what "Clergy on Patrol" is supposed to do, other than provide the mayor's politicized preachers the opportunity to mug with her in front of the news cameras. That is their reward for preaching politics from the pulpit during her campaign. It certainly hasn't helped lessen violence and crime anywhere they have roamed.
Nor is the media willing to give these incidents anything more than perfunctory coverage. They are only too common in Rochester, as Andreatta's article pointed out.
Nobody was killed, either. No corpses littered the sidewalk. That might have produced a few tepid responses from the police, the mayor's office, elected officials and the neighborhood.
"Might have."
The police are fond of saying that these shootings are merely rival gangs shooting at each other.
That is to reassure us, since most residents aren't gang members and therefore we are safe.
Unless a stray bullet catches an innocent passerby, like on Parsells Avenue a few months ago.
The point of this rant?
The police like to say crime is down, but shootings are up. Clergy on Patrol is supposed to somehow deter violence, but it hasn't. We all say we abhor the violence that occurs in our city, but we have become accustomed to it. Unless we are one of the victims.
Our politicians are too unconcerned to care enough to enact legislation that will imprison these bastards for a good long time. They are afraid of either being branded racist or of selling out to whitey.
And the thugs merrily roam our streets, protected by political correctness.

The family that preys together, stays together. In prison.

The sixteen year old Mojena twins, Juan and Darvis, killed sixteen year old Trenton Nelson this week.
They tracked him down, chased him, beat him and stabbed him.
Nelson died four hours later.
The Mojena twins were arraigned on Thursday.
They will be convicted of something or other.  Plea bargains are as common as pig tracks in our court system and nobody knows exactly what they will be convicted of or tried for.
All that's certain is that two sixteen year old punks are responsible for the death of another sixteen year old boy.
Perhaps the court system will be kind to them, and allow them to share the same prison cell, preserving their family unit and their uniqueness as twins.
The murder occurred on Rochester's northeast side, which is one of the areas of town that is no stranger to crime, violence and death.
The fact that the two murderers are twins is the only reason it has achieved a modicum of interest in the media.
There has been no official word from Mike Patterson, the city councilman for that quadrant, about this crime in his constituency. That fat slob rarely has anything to say about his district.
There has been no official word from City Hall. They're still reeling from the Taser death of a black man at the hands of the police to be concerned about such a trivial matter.
The black ministers who dominate Mayor Warren's administration haven't said anything, either.
Why would they?
They are only concerned about incidents occurring between the black community and the police force.
Then they shoot off their big mouths and scream racism. And pose for the cameras.
They are unconcerned about crime, violence and death in general.
They are all hypocrites.
So much for "Clergy on Patrol" and "Operation Transformation," which the city's public relations office has been touting as a success.
Success?

To end poverty, we must first destroy the sub-culture that tolerates violence and death.

There is much talk about eliminating poverty in Rochester.
This is a sham.
Creating new committees to talk about the problem will do nothing, because they are tactfully ignoring the root causes of poverty, at least in Rochester.
The war on poverty has been going on for fifty years, since the Johnson Administration.
It produced affirmative action, political correctness and a lowering of standards to encourage social engineering.
It failed, at a cost of untold billions of dollars to taxpayers.
Bleeding heart liberal politicians still want the taxpayers to shell out even more.
The people most intimately affected are worse off now than they were when the war on poverty began.
Poverty is heavily concentrated in certain sections of Rochester. This is primarily where the black community lives: the ghetto.
There is no nice way of referring to it, although nobody likes to call it that.
It is also in the ghetto where most of the violence in Rochester takes place.
And where most of our murders occur.
Because that's where a sub-culture exists that has no respect for authority or personal responsibility and tolerates crime, violence and murder.
It starts with the family.
The families there consist largely of unwed teen mothers, absentee male authority figures, individuals with histories of crime as long as your arm and a heavy dependence on the Department of Social Services to provide basic subsistence.
That comes courtesy of you and me.
The same is true of the basic education offered by our public schools. Most of them don't want it or need it, since they believe it won't help them get anywhere. They see their fate as predestined or part of the natural order of things. School won't teach them to become better criminals or street savvy drug dealers.
So they don't go to school.
Most of those who do graduate are unprepared for anything approaching higher education because the standards have been lowered so that they would graduate. They can't read or write at a twelfth grade level, but have a diploma.
The diploma has become a sham, in the name of social engineering.
In return, society is told that they do not have to follow its rules, that they are entitled to succor after three hundred years of slavery in this country, and that they will resort to violence when the mood strikes if they are thwarted.
Racism has become their crutch. And more people are getting sick and tired of hearing those rants.
Their only loyalty is to their dysfunctional families. Crime and violence are okay, as long as it is conducted against non-family members. And being loyal to criminal family members is considered honorable. Don't snitch.
This is why Mayor Warren's "Operation Transformation" will fail, as will Assemblyman Joe Morelle's poverty initiative. It overlooks the need for personal responsibility for one's actions. Which is not the primary feature of the sub-culture in the ghettoes. It's everyone else's fault.
Mayor Warren's administration is minister-ridden. She depended heavily upon them to preach politics from the pulpit during her election campaign. In repayment, they wish to bask in the glow of celebrity. These same ministers have had no effect on stemming the birth of illegitimate children born to teen agers, which helps perpetuate poverty. Their sermons haven't stopped open air drug markets, or people from settling private scores by shooting or stabbing. Young criminals scoff at the ministers until they are incarcerated, then they demand their support to get out, usually citing racism as the reason they were jailed.
The crimes they committed had nothing to do with their being prosecuted and convicted, in their twisted minds.
The ministers, of course, are responding to the call to action, seeking publicity.
And they will fail.
Clergy on patrol is concentrating its efforts on members of a sub-culture that have already rejected anything approaching Christian morality.
The ghetto hepcats see such morality as "boogee," their way of pronouncing "bourgeois," and not something to imitate.
Their condition is not in god's hands, anyway, but in their own.
And society owes them nothing.
Mayor Warren: you really want to transform Rochester? Tell the girls to keep their legs together, stop making babies that will be supported by the taxpayer, go to school, graduate and stop hanging around bums. Tell the boys to stop making babies, go to school, graduate and stop letting your homeboys drag you into selling drugs. Become contributing members of society, not burdens who feel entitled to the fruits of others' hard work. To all the fine, young criminals: tell them when they break the law, they will go to jail and society will wash its hands of them.
And nobody but their nearest and dearest will mourn them when they fail.
That's the truth of the matter.
And nobody, not even those fine, Bible-thumping ministers, has the guts to tell the truth about it.