Internet Comments, Summarized

Damn: Two highway police officers shot in North Philadelphia near Broad and Diamond. One is in critical condition; the gunman is dead.

Yeah. So that’s not fun. But there’s a lesson here as well: Let’s take a look at the first three comments on the Action News story:

This is pretty much the only three kinds of comments on news stories nowadays: Not-so-subtly racist ones (comment 1), oddly naive responses to previous racist ones (comment 2) and absolute nonsensical ones complaining that soap operas — in this case, One Life to Live and/or All My Children — were pre-empted for a few minutes (comment 3).

Reader Joe writes: “The article says it happened at 1:45, so the story probably went up around 2. The first comment is at 2:06. I think commenter 3 was watching TV and his program was interrupted — so he went online with the specific intention of complaining about the show being bumped.” He also notes that commenter 3 refers to a double-police shooting as a “slow news day.” Man, who needs to be shot to impress that person? “How dare they interrupt Days of Our Lives to tell me the Pope was shot!”

Update: One of the officers has died.

2 officers shot in North Philadelphia [6 ABC]

Cops Fire Guns To Stop Gunfire

Every year, around New Year’s, the district attorney or something trots out a kid who was injured by a stray bullet shot into the air to celebrate the New Year. And, every year, the DA tells everyone not to fire guns into the air. The citizens of Philadelphia promptly don’t listen to the teevee telling them not to shoot into the air in celebration, of course. The Inquirer reports today there were 257 incidents of gunfire at midnight reported on 911 calls.

The only way for the police to stop all the shooting, of course, was to apparently fire into a house and arrest the wrong guy. The Inky reports:

“As soon as everyone said ‘Happy New Year!,’ bullets were flying through the house,” said Clinton Rogers, 30, who lives in the 5600 block of Boyer Street, where the party turned to chaos. He said he was near the front door holding his 3-year-old daughter, Camirah, when the gunfire erupted and door fragments struck him in the face.

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