2 dead, multiple people hurt in shooting at party at Pittsburgh Airbnb rental
"Murders are spiking. Police should be part of the solution. "The Real Reason Obama Didn’t Pass Gun Control [...] America’s gun control majority hasn’t decided that the murder of children is a “bearable” cost for preserving our constitutional freedoms. It simply hasn’t figured out how to overcome the intense opposition from the gun rights minority, in a system of government designed to give disproportionate power to lightly populated rural areas, where love of gun rights runs deep, and intense minority opposition, a category that includes gun owners. Figuring it out is crucial for gun control advocates, and it requires a better understanding of why the gun control push failed after Sandy Hook." P - Related: rooster, With Slow Progress On Federal Level, Police Reform Remains Patchwork Across U.S. "Too late the damage is done" Nope, No evidence of that. And reform will continue. All for the better, in spite of naysayers like you. P - rooster, Another ridiculous lie by you. 7 myths about “defunding the police” debunked https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=167253290 https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=167307104"
Sadly this shooting was just on ABC News
At least 50 shots were fired inside the home, where 200 people were partying.
By Bill Hutchinson 18 April 2022, 06:14
VIDEO - At least 2 killed in Pittsburgh house party shooting The "vast majority" of people at the party were juveniles, according to police. Pittsburgh Public Safety
Two juveniles were killed and at least eight people were wounded when a barrage of 50 gunshots broke out .. https://abcnews.go.com/US/gunviolence/ .. early Sunday inside a Pittsburgh Airbnb rental house, where police said roughly 200 people were having a party. Some escaped the gunfire by jumping out of windows.
The Pittsburgh shooting unfolded around 12:30 a.m., when police were notified of multiple ShotSpotter gunfire-detection alerts in the East Allegheny neighborhood on the city's North Side, the Pittsburgh Police Department said in a statement.
Pittsburgh Public Safety Investigators mark the scene of shooting in Pittsburgh, in the early hours of April 17, 2022.
Cellphone video taken from inside the packed house and obtained by ABC News captured the screams and panic of party-goers rushing to get out of the residence, some tripping and falling down a staircase.
In the footage, someone is heard shouting, "He's got a gun!" and "We got to go!" As apparent gunfire sounded, someone yelled, "They're shooting!" followed by people screaming.
Victims suffering from bullet wounds were found near the home and taken to hospitals by ambulance, police said. Other gunshot victims were taken to area hospitals in private cars, including two juveniles who were pronounced dead upon arriving at emergency rooms, authorities said.
[Image inside ]- Gun Violence Tracker [It moves through the three just below.] Week: Apr. 8 - 14, 2022 Year 2022 Years 2017 - 2022 368 deaths and 783 injuries over the past week https://abcnews.go.com/us/gunviolence[nice work]
A total of 10 people were shot, including the two slain juveniles, police said. Several other victims suffered broken bones and cuts fleeing the chaotic scene, according to authorities.
A preliminary investigation found that the shooting occurred during a large party being held at the short-term rental property, "with as many as 200 people in attendance, many of them underage," according to the police statement.
"As many as 50 rounds were fired inside, prompting some party-goers to jump out the windows, sustaining injuries such as broken bones and lacerations," according to the police statement. "Several more shots were fired outside the home."
No arrests have been made, and detectives are combing over evidence found at eight different crime scenes in a radius of several blocks around the Airbnb house. Detectives are also reviewing security video in an effort to identify suspects.
Pittsburgh Police Chief Scott Schubert said at a news conference Sunday that the gunfire started after an "altercation" and confirmed that multiple shooters engaged in a gunfight. He said that in addition to the gunshot victims, five other people were injured from either jumping out of windows or falling down stairs while taking cover.
"It is our top priority to find out who did this and get them off the street," Schubert said.
He said the "vast majority" of people at the party were juveniles.
"This is something that shouldn’t have happened. This goes back to having too many guns -- too many illegal guns -- on the streets. Too many people who have access to these illegal weapons," Schubert said. "Innocent people were struck… We’re sick about it, and we’re gonna do everything we can to get those responsible for it."
Pittsburgh Public Safety Police at the scene of shooting in Pittsburgh, in the early hours of April 17, 2022.
Shell casings collected at the scene indicate multiple weapons were fired, including rifles, a police commander told ABC affiliate station WTAE in Pittsburgh.
"We share the Pittsburgh community’s outrage regarding this tragic gun violence. Our hearts go out to all who were impacted -- including loved ones of those who lost their lives, injured victims and neighbors," Airbnb said Sunday in a statement to ABC News. "Airbnb strictly bans parties, and we condemn the behavior that is alleged to have prompted this criminal gun violence."
Airbnb said the person who booked the house has been issued a lifetime ban from Airbnb. The company confirmed that an "unauthorized party" was thrown without the knowledge or consent of the house host, who specifically stated in the listing page that no parties were allowed and that any evidence of a party would result in a $500 fee.
"We will be considering all legal options to hold this person accountable," Airbnb's statement said, adding that the company is cooperating with the Pittsburgh Police Department's investigation.
Addressing allegations that many of those attending the party were minors, the company said, "we can confirm that users must be 18 or above to create an Airbnb account."
The company also noted that its CEO, Brian Chesky, has joined a coalition of CEOs nationwide calling for stricter gun control measures to get illegal firearms off the streets.
Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey said in a statement on Sunday that police were using all available resources to find those responsible for the shooting and added that members of the community had contacted the investigators with information on the episode.
Gainey said the shooting came as Pittsburgh police and city leaders have been been working on a plan in the past several weeks to address gun violence in the city. He said a special meeting of public safety and key community members is being scheduled to discuss a citywide effort to combat gun violence.
"The time is now for us to move with a sense of urgency to bring justice to the victims and peace to our city," Gainey said in his statement. "It is critical that we come together now to help reduce the violence currently happening while we begin to do the long-term work of ending the culture of violence that is enabling the senseless loss of life we are experiencing today. We must say no more and never again."
Anyone with information about the shooting can call the Pittsburgh Police Department's Major Crimes unit at (412) 323-7161.
‘Some version’ of theory linking protests over police killings to increase in crime may be best explanation for increase in murders in 2015, St Louis criminologist says after deeper analysis of crime trends
Chicago has seen more than 1,000 shooting incidents so far this year, compared with about 600 incidents during the same period last year. Photograph: Paul Beaty/AP
Lois Beckett @loisbeckett Sat 14 May 2016 06.23 AEST Last modified on Sat 15 Jul 2017 05.25 AEST
For nearly a year, Richard Rosenfeld’s research on crime trends has been used to debunk the existence of a “Ferguson effect”, a suggested link between protests over police killings of black Americans and an increase in crime and murder. Now, the St Louis criminologist says, a deeper analysis of the increase in homicides in 2015 has convinced him that “some version” of the Ferguson effect may be real.
Looking at data from 56 large cities across the country, Rosenfeld found a 17% increase in homicide in 2015. Much of that increase came from only 10 cities, which saw an average 33% increase in homicide.
“These aren’t flukes or blips, this is a real increase,” he said. “It was worrisome. We need to figure out why it happened.”
All 10 cities that saw sudden increases in homicide had large African American populations, he said. While it’s not clear what drove the increases, he said, he believes there is some connection between high-profile protests over police killings of unarmed black men, a further breakdown in black citizens’ trust of the police, and an increase in community violence.
“The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” Rosenfeld said. Now, he said, that’s his “leading hypothesis”.
Other experts have argued that it’s still hard to know whether 2015’s increase in murders was significant, much less what might have caused the trend. The liberal Brennan Center found that increases in homicide last year were localized in only a few cities, and that “community conditions” were likely to blame, rather than “a national pandemic”.
Even if the increase in homicide is significant, there are many competing theories for what may be responsible. The Brennan Center pointed to economic deterioration of struggling neighborhoods. Columnist Shaun King argued last month .. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-incompetent-police-costing-lives-chicago-baltimore-article-1.2597721 .. that the increase in violence in two cities seemed to be caused by police officers “refusing to fully do their jobs”. Local police officials have blamed court system failures, gang dynamics and the proliferation of illegal guns.
Rosenfeld’s new analysis of homicide trends, which was was funded by the Department of Justice, is currently being reviewed by department officials and has not yet been released to the public. A justice department spokeswoman said the paper is expected to be released in July.
A political flashpoint
The question of whether there is any link between protests over police mistreatment of black Americans and an increase in violence in some black neighborhoods has been a political flashpoint for the past year. Conservative writer Heather Mac Donald warned in May 2015 that protests over police behavior would only backfire on black citizens.
[Insert: rooster, Just more right-wing misinformation from you. [...] She is known for her pro-police views[9] and her opposition to criminal justice reform,[10] as expressed in her book The War on Cops and columns such as "The Myth of the Racist Cop"[11] and "The Myth of Systemic Police Racism."[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Mac_Donald ]
“Unless the demonization of law enforcement ends, the liberating gains in urban safety over the past 20 years will be lost,” she wrote. Her op-ed, titled The New Nationwide Crime Wave .. http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-nationwide-crime-wave-1432938425 , sparked a months-long debate.
The Obama administration repeatedly denied that there is any evidence of a “Ferguson effect”, while FBI director James Comey reiterated his suggestion that violent crime was increasing because of “a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement over the last year.” Protesters said the conservative focus on the Ferguson effect is an attempt to undermine the movement to reform American policing.
"It’s a complicated, hard issue, but the stakes couldn’t be higher FBI director James Comey
Rosenfeld said that the version of the Ferguson effect he now found plausible was very different from the one Mac Donald had described.
“She thinks the solution is to stop criticizing the police; I think the criticism is understandable, rooted in a history of grievance, and serves as a reminder that the police must serve and protect our most vulnerable communities.”
If a breakdown of trust between police and community is leading a spike in murders, he wrote in an email, the solution required two things: better community policing in communities of color, and “more effective response to serious violent crime,” focused on redoubled efforts to solve homicides and other acts of violence.
FBI director James Comey said he could not be certain of the ‘Ferguson effect’ but said it was ‘common sense’. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Comey reignited the debate on Wednesday, telling reporters that the continued increase in violence was a serious problem that national media outlets were choosing to ignore. He said that private conversations with police officials across the country convinced him that “marginal pullbacks by lots and lots of police officers” afraid of being the subject of the next viral video of police misconduct might be contributing to the increase.
[Note that rooster. All these concerned people looking for solutions and you are only interested in stating certainties which fit you political view. Note also the "might be" whereas all you do is speak in certainties. Certainties which are not certain. ]
“The people dying are almost entirely black and Latino men,” he said. “It’s a complicated, hard issue, but the stakes couldn’t be higher. A whole lot of people are dying. I don’t want to drive around it.”
Some protesters and law enforcement leaders criticized Comey for advancing a theory without national data to back it up.
“Director Comey’s recent comments about a ‘viral video effect’ are unfounded, and frankly, damaging to the efforts of law enforcement,” Ronal Serpas, the chairman of Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, said in a statement Thursday.
'In the case of homicide, a lot did change, in a very short period of time Richard Rosenfield
Serpas cited a series of influential reports .. https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/crime-2015-final-analysis .. from the liberal Brennan Center that found no change in overall crime in 2015 in the nation’s 30 largest cities, and only a slight increase in violent crime.
The Brennan Center analysis did find that the murder rate had increased 13.2% .. https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/crime-2015-final-analysis .. in the nation’s 30 largest cities, but it downplayed this finding. “While this suggests cause for concern in some cities, murder rates vary widely from year to year, and there is little evidence of a national coming wave in violent crime,” the report noted.
The three cities that had seen the biggest increases in murder “all seem to have falling populations, higher poverty rates, and higher unemployment than the national average,” the Brennan Center report concluded. “Economic deterioration of these cities could be a contributor to murder increases.”
Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri St Louis and the chair of a National Academy of Sciences roundtable on crime trends .. http://sites.nationalacademies.org/DBASSE/CLAJ/CurrentProjects/DBASSE_081065 , said the Brennan Center’s focus on the economic roots of violence was not enough to explain “why homicide increased as much as it did in these cities in a one-year period”.
“The conclusion one draws from the Brennan Center’s report is, ‘Not much changed,’ and that is simply not true. In the case of homicide, a lot did change, in a very short period of time,” he said.
While “economic disadvantage is an extraordinarily important predictor of the level of homicide in cities,” he said, “there’s no evidence of a one year substantial economic decline in those cities. There have to be other factors involved.”
History of the ‘Ferguson effect’
Demonstrators, marking the one-year anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown, face off with police in Ferguson. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images
The idea of a “Ferguson effect” was coined in 2014 by St Louis police chief Samuel Dotson. The same year that Ferguson saw massive protests over the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, St Louis saw a 32.5% increase .. http://sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Ferguson-Effect.pdf .. in homicides. “The criminal element is feeling empowered by the environment,” St Louis’s police chief argued, blaming the increase in crime on what he called “the Ferguson effect”, and arguing that the police department needed to hire 180 more officers.
Samuel Sinyangwe, a co-founder of Mapping Police Violence and Campaign Zero, called the conservative focus on the Ferguson effect “a reactionary attempt to undermine the movement”.
“It has been the attempt to put across this narrative that any criticism of the police is dangerous to society,” he said.
That kind of political rhetoric has been used against civil rights advocates in the past. Opponents of the 1964 Civil Rights Act argued that “civil rights would engender a crime wave”, Yale political scientist Vesla Weaver wrote in an article .. http://www.ebonterr.com/site_editor/assets/EBONTERR_41.pdf .. on how arguments about crime were used to attack and undermine African Americans’ fight for equal rights.
When Rosenfeld analyzed St Louis’s crime data, he found the increase in homicides there could not have been caused by a “Ferguson effect”, because the greatest increase came early in the year, months before Michael Brown’s death or the protests that followed.
But that paper only looked at the evidence for the effect in one city. With funding from the National Institute of Justice, the justice department’s research arm, Rosenfeld did a new study early this year that looked that more broadly at homicide trends in the nation’s 56 largest cities and found an overall 17% increase in homicide.
As a result of that broader national analysis he said, he has had “second thoughts” about the Ferguson effect. “My views have been altered.”
[See rooster, Some people do adjust their opinions when faced with new evidence. Have you ever? ]
Looking at the additional homicides in large cities, he found that two-thirds of the increase was concentrated in 10 cities: Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Washington, Nashville, Philadelphia, Kansas City and St Louis.
Those 10 cities had somewhat higher levels of poverty than the other cities he examined. But, he said, the “key difference” was that “their African American population was substantially larger than other large cities”: an average of 41% in those 10 cities, compared with 19.9% in the others.
Students in Baltimore march in protest chanting ‘Justice for Freddie Gray’ in April 2015. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images
Violence has many complex causes, and decades of exhaustive research has shed only partial light. Even the dramatic drop in violence and crime since the early 1990s – the most basic fact about crime in America – is not fully understood .. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/11/24/10-not-entirely-crazy-theories-explaining-the-great-crime-decline#.YIO9mfHdB . In trying to understand 2015’s murder trends, Rosenfeld looked for reasons why cities that already struggled with high levels of violence might see “a precipitous and very abrupt increase”.
Rosenfeld considered two potential alternative explanations: the US heroin epidemic, and the number of former inmates returning home from prison. Neither of these explanations quite lined up with the increase in violence, he said. For instance, the country has been in the midst of a heroin epidemic since 2011. Why there would be a four to five year lag before the epidemic caused murders to spike?
“That led me to conclude, preliminarily, that something like a Ferguson effect was responsible for the increase,” he said.
What exactly that effect might be is far from clear, he said. The fierce debate over the “Ferguson effect” or Comey’s “viral video effect” has described the dynamic in several ways, including criminals being “emboldened” by protests agains the police, and “de-policing”, or police drawing back from proactive activities, in the wake of increased public scrutiny. One Chicago officer said that police were drawing back not because of public scrutiny via cell phone videos, but because of their fear that city officials would no longer protect officers .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/25/chicago-guns-child-execution-tyshawn-lee-gang-violence .. who made honest mistakes while doing a difficult job.
Rosenfeld said he has only seen clear evidence of decreases in proactive police activity in Chicago and Baltimore. He said he believed “de-policing” was not a major factor in other cities – and that even in Chicago, changes in proactive police activity could only be responsible for some of the increase in shootings and violence.
One potential link between public attention to police violence and increased violent crime in the community, he said, might be if intensified community mistrust of the police make offenders think “that they can commit crime with impunity. They don’t think the community is willing to cooperate with the police and investigations or they think the community is less likely to contact the police when victimized.”
“We don’t yet have the data to understand the mechanism for the Ferguson effect,” he said.
‘A largely evidence-free debate’
Advocates for police reform and community violence prevention greeted the hypothesis with some skepticism. Dante Barry, executive director of the Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, said the idea that increased political activism by black Americans could lead to increased violence was “anti-democratic”.
Mistrust between some black neighborhoods and police was not some new phenomenon, he said. “The trust factor has always been a factor, for generations.”
Sinyangwe, of Mapping Police Violence and Campaign Zero, said he could not evaluate Rosenfeld’s research before reading his full report, but noted that New York City, which saw both massive protests over the death of Eric Garner and a brief drop in proactive police activity .. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/nyregion/decrease-in-new-york-police-arrests-continues-for-a-second-week.html .. as a protest against Mayor Bill de Blasio, has not seen dramatic increases in crime or murder.
“The reality is we really don’t know what leads to increase in homicide,” he said. “You have to go into communities and ask them what is going on.”
Phillip Atiba Goff, a leading researcher on racial bias in policing and the president of the Center for Policing Equity, said in an April interview that one way of interpreting the Ferguson effect is “on its face, offensive”, but that there is clear research evidence linking perceptions of police legitimacy to how willing people are to break the law.
“If you believe not having police doing proactive stops in neighborhoods leads to immediate upticks in violent crime, that suggests that the people who live in that neighborhood are just waiting to commit acts of violence until they’re not being watched by the hall monitors that wear badges and guns,” he said. The suggestion that some Americans “can’t control their base instincts” without someone with a badge surveilling them is the kind of logic that led to mass incarceration and the war on drugs, he said.
" People are very opposed to acknowledging the connection between policing and crime Heather Mac Donald
“A far more reasonable hypothesis is that the decay in police legitimacy is harming both police morale and community morale,” he said. “When you don’t believe police are legitimate, you are much more likely to be engage in illegal behaviors and be uncooperative with law enforcement.”
Mac Donald, whose op-ed launched the Ferguson effect debate, said in April that increased homicides in cities with large numbers of black residents “is exactly what you would predict from the Ferguson effect. That’s where the Black Lives Matter message that police are racist is going to have the most effect, and it’s where cops are getting the most pushback from proactive policing – and where policing is most necessary.”
Police stand at protests marking the anniversary of the shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson. Photograph: Xinhua/Landov/Barcroft Media
The Obama administration has rejected Ferguson effect because “it goes against a broader agenda of saying the real solution is social services, fighting racism,” she said.
“People are very opposed to acknowledging the connection between policing and crime,” she said. “You see the Brennan Center trying to tie itself into knots denying its own data.”
In response to criticism of the Brennan Center report, Inimai Chettiar, who oversaw the production of the report, said it “looked specifically at what’s happening to crime and not the cause. We didn’t look into whether or not there’s a Ferguson effect.”
“There have been a lot of people saying there was a crime wave and there was a murder wave nationally, and what the report’s results show is that there was not a national murder wave, there is not a national crime wave. Crime is still the same, however there are pockets that are experiencing higher murders, and those are serious things that we need to address.”
Rosenfeld blamed the FBI’s extremely slow crime data system for fueling a “largely rhetorical – largely evidence-free debate”. The FBI’s full national crime numbers for last year will not be released until September, more than a year after the debate over the year’s crime trends began.
In the absence of official national statistics, his research was based on police department data collected by the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, he said.
“That’s simply unacceptable, that’s unnecessary, and the FBI really needs to get its act together,” he said.
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