Amid Rioting, Inky Mythologizes Walter Wallace Jr. As 'Family Man'

By Ralph Cipriano

for BigTrial.net

Before he was shot to death Monday by police, a knife-wielding Walter Wallace Jr. had at least three standing protection from abuse orders filed against him, by his mother and the mother of his children.

According to court records detailed in a new report by Mitch Blacher of NBC 10, the cops arrested Wallace in March after he told the mother of  his children, "I'll shoot you and that house up." 

Wallace was charged with making terroristic threats. And he was turned loose after he plunked down a $1,000 deposit on $10,000 bail, while awaiting a trial that was continuously postponed during the pandemic. 

Wallace's lengthy rap sheet includes a 2019 arrest for kicking the windows and door panels of a police vehicle. In 2016, during a robbery, Wallace allegedly grabbed a woman by the neck, and according to the victim, held a gun to her head. In 2013, he violated a protection order filed by his mother by throwing water in her face, punching her in the face, and threatening to shoot her, according to court records shown on air by Blacher and NBC 10.

This is the same guy The Philadelphia Inquirer mythologized today as a "family man" who had "many mental health crises and encounters with police." And it worked. Wallace was a mentally ill career criminal with 17 arrests; an amateur rapper seen on video cavorting with guns that, as a convicted felon, he was barred from possessing, while rapping about "niggers" and "bitches."

And now, thanks to the Inquirer and the rest of the media, in death, Wallace has been elevated to becoming an issue in the final days of the presidential campaign. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, announced yesterday that they reacted "with shock and grief" at the "emotional weight of learning about another Black life in America lost."

It took a P.C. posse of Inquirer social justice warriors to promote a false narrative about a career criminal being a family man. [We're talking about a single guy with nine kids who just got married this month.] Meanwhile, the Inky's columnists of color were busy stoking racial tensions during two days of rioting by elevating Wallace to the ranks of black martyrdom. 

"Walter Wallace Jr. would not have been subjected to a barrage of bullets, endangering bystanders and his family, if he were a white man in a white community," wrote Solomon Jones.

"Had Wallace's skin color been different, would the police response have been the same," asked Jenice Armstrong. "It's hard to say but I know this: Walter Wallace Jr.'s Black life mattered."

"Cops demonstrate every day," wrote Inky columnist Helen Ubinas, "that they are "incapable of seeing white men and women as a threat and incapable of treating Black men and women as anything but."

None of these journalists, neither the columnists nor the news reporters, bothered to ask D.A. Krasner the big question: what the hell was Walter Wallace Jr. doing out on the street? Isn't that your fault, Larry Krasner? Nope, the journalists whose job it is to hold officials accountable were too busy inciting a race riot. 

Over on the Inky editorial page, the editorial board called on Mayor Kenney and Police Commissioner Outlaw to speed up a "swift and transparent" investigation by releasing the body cam video footage from the two officers involved in the shooting.

While the Inky was fanning the flames of racial unrest, Michael Coard, a civil rights attorney and longtime supporter of Krasner's who served on the D.A.'s transition team, was sending his own divisive message. 

On Twitter, Coard posted a note to "Dear Walter and Breonna and George and literally thousands of others," alluding to prior victims of fatal police shootings, and then Coard proposed "one solution" to the problem: an image of a pig with angel wings.

Critics on Twitter angrily responded that Coard was advocating the killing of cops. Coard, who bills himself as the "Angriest black man in America," did not respond on Twitter to his critics, nor could he be reached for comment.

The latest chapter of civil unrest in Philadelphia began Monday, when cops were summoned on police radio to the 6100 block of Locust Street by a dispatcher who shared a "report of an 27 year old male assaulting an elderly female." It was the third police radio call of the day involving Wallace.

"Use caution," the cops were advised as they pulled up to Wallace's parents' house. "This is an ongoing domestic issue going on up there."

The shooting of Wallace set off two days of riots. Cops reported on Twitter that some 1,000 people were busy looting businesses on Castor and Aramingo Avenues in Port Richmond. Steve Keeley of Fox 29 reported that an ATM was broken into at TD Bank on Aramingo, and a Walmart was repeatedly ransacked by looters and subsequently flooded when a water pipe burst.

Elsewhere across the city, there were a dozen shootings, the city's 405th murder this year, and several ATM explosions. A frightened Mayor Kenney had to call in the Pennsylvania chapter of the National Guard. 

This was after many suburban police departments, as well as the state police, refused to assist the Philadelphia Police Department during the rioting, because of the anti-cop policies of Kenney, Police Commissioner Outlaw and District Attorney Krasner. 

Amidst civil unrest, police sources said they were instructed by First Deputy Police Commissioner Melvin Singleton -- known to his in-house critics as Simpleton -- to stand down during the looting, and to only act to disperse looters rather than arrest them.

On social media, Brian King, who identified himself as a career investigator, posted a picture of a cop splattered with some kind of red liquid, while decrying that "officers are ordered to NOT make arrests for looting."

"Officers were instructed by the Commissioner to just chase looters out of stores," King wrote. "Looters didn't mind as they were going store to store anyway. The official liberal agenda in Philadelphia is to give them space to loot . . ."

"We are all disgusted," said one cop. He was talking about Singleton's orders to not arrest looters, orders, the cop said, he didn't plan to obey.

"I was sworn to lock up bad guys and prevent crime," said the cop who added that's exactly what he'll continue to do.

"He cannot order us to not do our jobs," the cop said about Singleton. "It is illegal to give an unlawful order. Fuck him."