Chicago concealed carry holder shoots man in head during fight
BLACKS MAKE UP ONLY 8% OF THE POPULATION OF S.F. BUT PERPETRATE MORE THAN 40% OF THE CRIMES.
VIDEO: Chicago Family Become Victims of Smash-and-Grab in San Francisco with Toddlers in Car
It was a scary moment for a Chicago family targeted during a smash-and-grab while they visited San Francisco recently.
Several family members and two toddlers were sitting inside the vehicle when the incident occurred near Lombard Street and a witness was able to take pictures of the suspects, KRON reported Wednesday.
What shocked them more than anything else was it took place while children were sitting in the vehicle’s back seat.
Another aspect that made the incident different from others was one of the victims had a device in the stolen bag that has since tracked the moves of the alleged thieves.
“I was in the car when it happened. All I could hear was a smash and then I said no, I jumped out of the car but it was quick. It was five seconds,” Kimberly Balde explained.
She and her sister Katherine had parked their rental car near Lombard Street Monday when the incident took place
“You could see that people were in the car so each seat was taken and my two daughters were in the back, one’s two and one’s four and it was behind the 4-year-old and like I said she seen him, he had a ski mask on, and he was wearing all black. And she said, ‘that ninja took that bag,'” Katherine added.
A resident saw the incident, took photos of the suspects, and claimed three vehicles circling the area were involved.
According to Kimberly, her bag was stolen with her computer, headphones, Katherine’s passport, the childrens’ birth certificates, and other items.
“It’s an organized crime for sure, like, they have it very well thought out. It was a five-second deal and if they can get away with it in five seconds why wouldn’t they keep doing it,” she said.
Meanwhile, San Francisco’s Union Square, the high-end shopping area at the city’s center, boarded up for the Christmas shopping season following numerous “mass looting” incidents that started the weekend before Thanksgiving.
“Some retailers have called on Mayor London Breed to resign after championing proposals to reduce funding to the police. District Attorney Chesa Boudin faces a recall election, driven by residents who are frustrated by his refusal to prosecute petty and “quality of life” crimes in the city,” Breitbart News reported December 1.
In addition, statistics showed the epidemic of car break-ins was growing worse in San Francisco, KPIX reported Wednesday:
The sisters told KRON they knew about all the break-ins prior to their visit but did not expect one to happen so quickly and while they were inside the vehicle.
They filed a police report and also gave officials information regarding the tracking device on the laptop.
Crime does cause poverty
Crime causes poverty, argued James Q. Wilson, probably America’s most celebrated criminologist. Like many observations that are counterintuitive or at variance with current wisdom, Wilson’s findings did not resonate with the mass public.
How does crime cause poverty? Think about the current spathe of smash and grab large-scale retail thefts. Two of those happened at the mall in my town. In the most recent orchestrated assault, some eighty young people, mostly males, pulled up in about a dozen vehicles and ran into Nordstrom swinging crowbars, breaking display cases and stealing 200 thousand dollars’ worth of goods. They injured five employees. The scene was repeated not only throughout California but in several major cities.
Some of my neighbors used to go to the mall during Christmastime to shop, to dine, and to look at the Christmas displays. But not this year. Fear permeates the community, especially among the elderly.
A friend in Chicago used to go to the Magnificent Mile, also the recent scene of violent theft, with his family every Christmas season, but not this year and maybe never again.
Violent thefts create fear, and where there is fear there is avoidance. Fewer shoppers means less spending on goods and services. The violent assault on a retail establishment also causes fear among the salespersons, some of whom do not return to work, just as bank employees who experience a robbery often do not return.
Less spending means fewer jobs and less circulation of money through the local economy. In our case, the local sales tax also goes to our schools, and this means less money for education.
The thugs, who received between $500 and $1000 each to participate in the smash and grab, put themselves at severe and disproportionate economic risk. Going to prison is an economic loss not only for those who are convicted but also for those who depend upon them for support. The breadwinner goes to jail, and the family goes on welfare.
Experiencing high levels of theft in San Francisco, as a result of the city making retail theft under $950 a misdemeanor, Walgreens is closing stores, and Safeway is cutting hours as well as beefing up exit control. The loss of drugstores is resulting in communities talking of prescription deserts and asking the city to compel Walgreens to remain open, something it cannot do.
Neighborhoods that become retail deserts lose value and become less desirable places to live. Retail establishments that remain in high-theft areas are forced to raise prices to compensate for both theft and higher insurance costs. When residents complain of retail deserts, they fail to ask the most relevant question: How did the retail desert emerge?
When community organizers compare food prices in inner city neighborhoods and suburbia, they often cry racism, but the reality is more complicated. Theft is higher in inner city neighborhoods, and retail establishments need to compensate for the losses. The higher prices of course impact the people who can least afford them.
Crime does cause poverty and puts a strain on the economic and social quality of life of millions of people. The sooner we understand that the sooner we will be willing to stop talk about both absurd nostrums such as defunding the police and making retail theft a misdemeanor. Instead, we will start talking about preventing crime and making people feel secure in public spaces, something that currently does not exist. In the end, that will move us toward enhancing everyone’s economic wellbeing and quality of life.
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati, and a distinguished fellow with the Haym Salomon Center.
The media’s willingness to play along with progressives in their effort to mask black-on-black crime reveals artful deception. To date in 2021, in Chicago, over seven hundred people have been murdered by gun-toting assailants, an increase of more than fifty percent over the previous year. The victims are disproportionately black at a rate of 8 to 1 against all other races and ethnicities combined, with most of the shootings occurring in majority-black neighborhoods and attributed to known street gangs and their affiliates. In their 2020 annual crime report, the Chicago Police Department released information on the race and ethnicity of almost five hundred homicide victims but excluded that information for the more than two hundred known assailants, also a media practice more woke than informative in their day-to-day reporting of each individual shooting
The Whitewashing of Black Crime
Selectively reporting or downright ignoring crime based upon race is a dangerous gambit in the hands of a partisan media with a political ax to grind. The Associated Press Stylebook cautions journalists against identifying race in crime reporting once a suspect is found or apprehended; however, there is an escape clause that suggests that race can be injected into a story if a reporter believes it plays a part in a particular demonstration or criminal act. That opens the door to gaslighting and editorializing upon the factual circumstances of an event for political purposes.
On January 6th, no sooner had the pepper spray fog lifted from Capitol Hill, leaving all to lick their wounds, than NPR had already leveled blame for the melee on majority-white Trump voters, Trump supporters, and an assortment of right-wing fringe groups. Subsequent testimonial evidence of the involvement of Antifa decked out in full black bloc, along with credible reports of federal provocateurs acting as crowd agitators, none of whom have been arrested or handed House commission subpoenas, has drawn little interest from liberal commentators still exulting over the prolonged and isolated imprisonment of protesters charged with low-level crimes.
Similarly, media reporting in the immediate aftermath of the Kyle Rittenhouse shootings, to include Democrat celebrities and Joe Biden, immediately opened a false front by christening him a white supremacist. Creating an inference that his shooting victims were black, neither Rosenbaum, Huber, nor Grosskreutz, were identified as white males with villainous histories.
Media tongues suddenly stopped wagging after a young black man drove his car into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six and injuring dozens. Darrell Edward Brooks, a career criminal with a forty-four page vitae of lawbreaking, deliberately plowed his car through a marching group and onlookers in what many considered a blatant and premeditated act of domestic terror. Brooks effectively made that case in his own social media postings, characterizing himself as a child abusing, Hitler-coddling anti-Semite and BLM acolyte with a predilection to run down elderly whites.
Suddenly faced with an incident at odds with the progressive race narrative and no white scapegoats in sight, CNN, MSNBC, and liberal newspaper outlets cashiered all arrest photographs of Brooks save one released by the police a day after the initial mugshot. In the updated close-up, Brooks appears bug-eyed and washed-out, the melanin drained from his face as if the strong lighting of an arrest processing room were all that was needed to flesh out the white supremacist from the black xenophobe.
MSNBC fabulists Joe Scarborough, Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, and Chris Hayes gave Waukesha an outright cold shoulder. No link to the attack could be found on a scroll of their webpages still chock full of Machiavellian commentary on January 6 and the Rittenhouse verdict. Maddow eventually aired a segment on Waukesha without so much as a reference to Brooks, choosing instead to cast blame upon a red SUV that “inexplicably sped into the parade route.” Although Brooks several times veered his car into the path of paradegoers, NBC News made a de minimis issue of his intent by labeling the attack an accident, while ABC came close to blaming cops by alleging Brooks was fleeing a pursuit.
Censoring criminal misdeeds in matters where a particular skin color is unsuitable to one’s needs or political purposes is emblematic of today’s legacy media. MSNBC and CNN have chosen to shun awkward incidents of organized looting, an appellation promptly discarded in the belief that wordsmithing a crime might lessen a connotation to race. Flash mobs of larcenous young adults, many concealed in ski masks, hoodies, and packing handguns, arrive en masse to empty boutique shops of their wares, pepper-spraying and assaulting employees, and at times engaging in gun battles with police while escaping in convoys weighted down with booty. What began as a California phenomenon spurred on by the pro-thievery provisions of Proposition 47 has become hoodlum chic across the country.
The New York City Police compile data on crime and its characteristics as good as any major city department. Their data shows that 63 percent of all homicides were committed by blacks against 65 percent of all murder victims in 2020. In distant second at 26 percent were near identical rates of Hispanic-on-Hispanic victims and assailants. Citywide shootings and murder statistics for 2021 are tacking in the same direction, only worse. These results are transposable to many Democrat-run major cities, all with a calamitous impact upon black residents and inner-city neighborhoods.
NYPD has sought the public’s help in identifying mob looters caught on security cameras. Videos and photos unmistakably reveal inconvenient truths to those who ply their trade in racial obfuscations. From San Francisco to Minneapolis and Chicago to New York City the choreography is the same, rampaging troupes of mostly young black males plundering in blue cities with do-nothing policies towards crime and mayoral diktats that prevent cops from interfering with or investigating retail theft.
The media’s willingness to play along with progressives in their effort to mask black-on-black crime reveals artful deception. To date in 2021, in Chicago, over seven hundred people have been murdered by gun-toting assailants, an increase of more than fifty percent over the previous year. The victims are disproportionately black at a rate of 8 to 1 against all other races and ethnicities combined, with most of the shootings occurring in majority-black neighborhoods and attributed to known street gangs and their affiliates. In their 2020 annual crime report, the Chicago Police Department released information on the race and ethnicity of almost five hundred homicide victims but excluded that information for the more than two hundred known assailants, also a media practice more woke than informative in their day-to-day reporting of each individual shooting.
Black-on-black violence may be an irrefutable feature of city murder rates but should not be propagandized as an innate characteristic of race. Motives behind urban bloodshed are socioeconomic and involve a culture of gun violence by criminal street gangs running a wholesale and retail drug trade supplied by foreign drug cartels. The free flow of drugs across open borders feeds lucrative American drug markets. Laissez faire approaches to enforcement in the face of political largesse towards violent felons has led to a dramatic uptick in gang recruitment and gunplay aimed at eliminating competition at the local level. Internecine gang rivalries have given rise to a disturbing trend towards wild public shooting sprees rather than headshot street assassinations. Multiple innocents are now caught between indiscriminate gang fusillades and their intended targets, causing murder rates to skyrocket.
Overlooking race in reporting crime data chills the development of solutions that would strengthen the safety and welfare of inner-city neighborhoods, allow police to focus their efforts upon serial shooters and other violent offenders, and recommend high bail or pre-trial detention for recidivist felons who pose a legitimate danger to the community. Unfortunately, these remedies are of little interest within a liberal evangelism that has broad-brushed the word racist from a social pathology into a birth defect, putting a branding iron to more than three hundred million Americans born of a certain pallor and hammering home the message in grade schools, college campuses, the military, and corporate boardrooms.
Expect no mea culpa over the biased reporting of the Waukesha parade massacre, the Rittenhouse shootings, serial mob robberies, and racially-scrubbed city murder statistics, all necessary to advance the liberal canard on white fragility, supremacy, and systemic racism. Unfortunately for the well-being of the black community, keeping a focus upon intrinsic white racism brings about an ignorance of the elemental constructs of black-on-black crime.
Smash-and-grab robbery hits Chicago business in broad daylight
Poll shows 61% of Americans disapprove of Biden's handling of crime
THE BIGGEST CRIME TIDAL WAVE IN THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IS THE BLACK CRIME TIDAL WAVE IN AMERICA
BLACK LUNATIC IMPERSONATES A COP!
Tucker Carlson Tonight 12/12/21 FULL | BREAKING FOX NEWS December 12, 2021
Watters: It’s payback time
20 People Shot Friday into Sunday Morning in Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago
Twenty people were shot, two of them fatally, Friday into Sunday morning in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s (D) Chicago.
ABC 7 and the Chicago Sun-Times report the first fatal shooting occurred shortly before 3:30 a.m. Saturday “in the 2100 block of North Albany Avenue,” when a 26-year-old man was shot while on a friend’s porch.
The 26-year-old was shot in the head.
The second fatal shooting was discovered Saturday “about 10 a.m. in the 2300 block of North Austin Avenue.” A 21-year-old woman was found with a gunshot wound to her head too. She was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.
HeyJackass.com notes that 762 people have been shot and killed in Chicago thus far in 2021, and another 3,596 people have been shot and wounded.
Part of Chicago’s gun crime is occurring on expressways. WGNTV reported the city hit the figure of 213 expressway shootings in mid-November of this year.
The total number of expressway shootings in 2020 was 101.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. Reach him at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.
What a shock: Crime up, Biden down
A new poll has bad news for President Biden. It sure looks as if Americans are in a bad mood, from filling their gas tanks to buying foodstuffs or feeling safe from criminals. This is from ABC News:
President Joe Biden is facing significant skepticism from the American public, with his job approval rating lagging across a range of major issues, including new lows for his handling of crime, gun violence and the economic recovery, a new ABC/Ipsos poll finds.
As the White House confronts rising and widespread concern about inflation, Americans are especially negative on how the Biden administration is managing this issue.
What do you expect? We understand that crime is a local issue. In other words, we look to mayors and governors to tackle street gangs and criminals. At the same time, we do look for the President for some leadership or at least protecting our streets from incompetent and indifferent local leaders.
The White House likes to talk about sending money to cities. So what does money do if local leadership won't tackle crime directly? This is a sample of the problem:
At least 12 major U.S. cities have broken annual homicide records in 2021 -- and there's still three weeks to go in the year. Of the dozen cities that have already surpassed the grim milestones for killings, five topped records that were set or tied just last year.
From Chicago to Philadelphia, it's a killing field out there. At some point people look to the mayor or the governor or finally the President for help. What do you do when no one seems to care? You scream and give the President bad polling numbers.
P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk).
Image: Abbasi786786
A brutal murder in highlights what leftists are doing to America
Chicago has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country. It also has some of the worst gun crime in the country. However, if you needed a reminder that it’s people, not guns, that kill, on Saturday night two thugs killed a man the old-fashioned way: They beat him to death.
Jose Téllez, a married father of three, lived in Gage Park. This is one of Chicago’s older neighborhoods. It started as an actual park in the 1870s. By the early 20th century, developers started building bungalow-style single-family homes. The neighborhood used to be home to working-class families with roots in Eastern Europe and Ireland. However, it’s now primarily Hispanic. Since at least 2012, it’s been a solidly Democrat neighborhood.
On Saturday, Téllez was engaged in a quintessentially all-American activity: He was putting up Christmas lights on his Gage Park home. That’s when two men set upon him and, using blunt objects, brutally beat him to death. As of now, the police have not arrested anyone for the attack.
Offhand, I can think of a whole bunch of reasons for the attack, many of which are quite far-fetched (e.g., aliens from Mars took him down). The most likely scenarios, though, are what we’ve gotten used to seeing in Democrat cities: Gang members killing people over money, turf wars, failures of respect, or gang initiation rituals. And of course, although Téllez was engaged in a charming domestic task and although his niece described him as a “loving husband, father, brother and son,” that doesn’t mean he didn’t have dark corners of his life that came back with a vengeance.
The only thing we can say with certainty is that, in Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago, no one is safe. There’s a complete breakdown in law and order, thanks to defunding the police, attacking the police, electing a prosecutor who refuses to prosecute, disarming law-abiding citizens, and using racist condescension to give a pass to minorities for the crimes they commit. All of these factors add up to a toxic soup of crime and dysfunction. (And no, I’m not blindly accusing a minority, whether Black or Hispanic, of murder Téllez. However, there’s no doubt that the leftist justice system intentionally gives a pass to minorities.)
The Constitution envisioned a minimally invasive government, one that allowed a free people maximum control over their lives. However, the Founders also understood that self-governance requires certain core values and individual self-control. Indeed, they were quite explicit about that fact. John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Image: Jose Téllez.
Leftists have assiduously cultivated a population of immoral people. They have aggressively destroyed the traditional controllers of vice in America: The Judeo-Christian faith and middle-class values. In their place, they’ve substituted race hatred, class envy, and complete disdain for the criminal justice system.
In addition, especially when it comes to Blacks, leftists have used ideology and propaganda to cause Blacks to internalize the same conditions that the slave culture used to keep Blacks on the plantations. Slavers opposed education, marriage, and the nuclear family, and the right to bear arms because all of those things encouraged slaves to rebel. No wonder that, after 1865, Black community leaders encouraged Blacks to get their shot at the American dream by getting educated, marrying and raising families, and arming themselves. (Martin Luther King, Jr. was a strong Second Amendment proponent.)
However, beginning with Johnson’s Not-So-Great-Society, leftists have assured Blacks and other minorities that education is a White thing meant to destroy Black history and character, that marriage and the nuclear family are White attacks on minority freedom and integrity, and that guns are inherently evil rather than tools that protect a free people. And of course, BLM has completely undermined the rule of law in Democrat-run communities, allowing the predators free reign (and I used that word intentionally) over people who just want to live their lives in peace.
That’s how you end up with a culture in which a man hanging Christmas lights for his family is set upon by two men and pummeled to death.
The government will not fix this problem. Leaders in minority communities must push back at a racist leftist ethos that implies that minorities are incapable of achieving an education, having stable families, or demonstrating self-governance and self-control. When minority communities rid themselves of these race hustlers and again commit to excellence, men like Téllez should once again be able to hang Christmas lights in safety.
Hat tip: Peter von Buol
THE REALITY OF THE STAGGERING EPIDEMIC BLACK CRIME TIDAL WAVE IN AMERICA!
BLACKS ARE 15xs to 30xs MORE LIKELY TO PERPETRATE VIOLENCE THAN WHITES.
Dr. Williams comments on another reality: that the rate of black homicide and armed robbery as well as other violent crimes are as is as much as 15–30 times more than whites
Blacks are also overrepresented among perpetrators of hate crimes—by 50 percent—according to the most recent Justice Department data from 2017; whites are underrepresented by 24 percent. This is particularly true for anti-gay and anti-Semitic hate crimes.
Why Can’t We Talk About the Murder Wave?
Two years in, pols and media still deny crisis, dodge role of defund and decarceration
Charles Fain Lehman • December 11, 2021 5:00 amDuring a weekly briefing last Monday, Philadelphia district attorney and prominent "progressive prosecutor" Larry Krasner sought to downplay the surge in violence his city has endured over the last two years.
"We don't have a crisis of lawlessness, we don't have a crisis of crime, we don't have a crisis of violence," Krasner said. "It's important that we don't let this become mushy and bleed into the notion that there is some kind of big spike in crime."
Those claims are at odds with the facts on the ground. Philadelphia has seen over 500 homicides this year, the most in 60 years; shootings, which began surging last year, remain well above pre-2020 norms. As former mayor Michael Nutter (D.) put it in a blistering op-ed, "I'd like to ask Krasner: How many more Black and brown people, and others, would have to be gunned down in our streets daily to meet your definition of a ‘crisis'?"
Krasner's comments, though, typify a rhetorical approach adopted by prominent politicians, think tanks, and the media amid a record surge in homicides across the country. Since murders began rising in the wake of last summer's anti-police protests, progressives have sought to discount or otherwise wave away the spike and conspicuously avoided discussing the role of the diminished criminal justice system. This wariness reflects a progressive fear of "tough on crime" rhetoric but is likely to cost them electorally—if it has not already.
Many have followed Krasner's approach, downplaying the surge as "just" a homicide spike. In June, for example, the Guardian published a "factcheck" of the "‘crime wave’'narrative police are pushing," insisting that the increase was really only in murders and adding that "Americans overall are much less likely to be killed today than they were in the 1990s, and the homicide rate across big cities is still close to half what it was a quarter century ago." A recent report from Democratic think tank Third Way similarly emphasized that "contrary to the media narrative, overall crime decreased in 2020 compared to 2019," only belatedly noting the record increase in homicides and gun violence.
Murders did surge in 2020, FBI data show, by roughly 30 percent, the highest one-year percentage increase on record. But so did aggravated assaults—a proxy for shootings—and carjackings. Early evidence suggests that things worsened over 2021: Among nearly 90 cities tracked by the data firm AH Datalytics, roughly two-thirds have seen homicides continue to rise in 2021. At least 12 major cities have already hit all-time homicide records, including 5 that have tied or topped records set last year. As Manhattan Institute senior fellow (and my colleague) Rafael Mangual has documented, dozens of smaller cities have seen the same record surge in homicides. In many jurisdictions, things are as bad as they were in the 1990s. In fact, if trends continue, the AH Datalytics data suggest, 2021 will see the most big-city murders since 1995.
A host of factors are likely behind this spike, but a leading contender is the decrease in policing capacity, manpower, and morale following last summer's anti-police protests and riots in the wake of George Floyd. Many big cities experiencing big homicide spikes have also reported a dramatic drop-off in police staffing, as cops flee for less hostile employers in the suburbs. Court closures and a massive reduction in daily jail populations likely also contribute, further reducing the capacity of the criminal justice system to identify, detain, and prosecute serious offenders.
But political leaders, aided by the media, have downplayed or ignored the role of these changes. In November, the New York Times cited "dozens of interviews" with "criminologists, city and state officials and people close to murder victims," all of whom "could not name a single, direct cause of the spike in homicides" except possibly "the continued destabilizing effects of the coronavirus pandemic." Recent Washington Post coverage of rising homicides in D.C. gives the police unions a hearing but lets city officials get away with attributing the increase to illegal guns and pandemic interruptions. Axios Chicago similarly linked the city's surge to illegal guns, a standard but dubious talking point of Chicago's various Democratic mayors.
Krasner's assertion that "it’s important that we don't let this become mushy and bleed into the notion that there is some kind of big spike in crime" represents a longstanding sense among progressives that tough-on-crime rhetoric, combined with an "if it bleeds it leads" ethos at major publications, contributes to public misconceptions about the crime level, in turn fueling political support for policing and incarceration. But a commitment to the obverse—depolicing and decarceration—seems to have encouraged leaders like Krasner to insist there is no reason to be worried, even when there is.
Such denialism is likely to play poorly in an electorate where more than three in four voters across all parties say violent crime is a "major problem." Republican Glenn Youngkin used rising crime rates against Democratic opponent Terry McAuliffe in his successful bid for the Virginia governorship this past year. Particularly if murder rates continue to rise, Republicans are likely to take the same tact in the coming midterm elections next November—with potentially disastrous consequences for Democrats.
Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal.
Pizzeria owner knocked unconscious while breaking up fight, North Carolina video shows
Mike Scotto di Frego, co-owner of Brother’s Pizzeria, was attacked and knocked unconscious in his restaurant on Dec. 5., surveillance video shows.
As a single dad and a business owner, violent interactions aren’t something he can risk, he said on the restaurant’s Facebook.
“I got (jumped) and stomped out til I was unconscious,” Scotto di Frego said. “I have two boys, I’m a single dad. I don’t need this in my life.”
Scotto di Frego was punched by another individual when he moved to break up a fight between two girls, he said. Police informed WGHP that the incident happened around 2:30 a.m. Dec. 5.
“There were two different patrons with tables in there and somehow an argument started and then, from the argument, a fight began, and then the business owner tried to break things up and he was assaulted,” Winston-Salem Police Sgt. Kevin Bowers told the news station.
According to Scotto di Frego’s account of the incident on the pizzeria Facebook page, he was still reeling from the attack the next day and working to figure out what exactly happened. After receiving dozens of supportive comments online, he posted a photo of his face, bruised and swollen, but healing.
In the restaurant surveillance video submitted to news outlets, viewers can see Scotto di Frego attempt to speak to customers walking by him toward a group of people in the back of the restaurant. The video shows one man come up behind Scotto di Frego and hit him in the side of the head, causing him to fall into a booth. The same man appears to stomp on him once he has fallen down, the video shows.
Following the incident, Scotto di Frego and his business partner decided to permanently close the restaurant early at night in response to violence in the pizzeria.
“I’m sorry to announce this, but due to recent incidents in the store we will no longer be open late nights,” they wrote. Now, their restaurant will begin to close at 10 p.m. except for Saturday, when it will close at midnight. It will cost them money, the pizzeria told News & Record, but it’s not worth the risk.
Merchants told the outlet that officers on downtown patrol are off by midnight, leaving a scarce law enforcement presence by the time late-night venues close.
“It’s no secret that we can use more people,” Bowers, the longtime supervisor for the downtown bike patrol, told the News & Record. “Every department could.”
Kira Boyd, spokesperson for the Winston-Salem Police Department, told McClatchy News that safety concerns for downtown business owners are a priority for the department.
“We encourage citizens to report any crimes they witness in our city,” Boyd said. “We will be meeting with a group of business owners soon to discuss ways we can partner to keep their patrons and our citizens safe.”
If citizens have any information about the incident, they are asked to call the Winston-Salem Police Department at 336-773-7700.
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