Fifty people were shot, five fatally, over another violent weekend shaming Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot who needs to resign if she cannot offer a workable solution to the problem.
“At the end of the day, our endgame strategy is to arrest violent felons, but if violent felons are getting right out of jail, we need cooperation and collaboration with other partners within the criminal justice system,” Chicago Police Department superintendent David Brown said.
Chicago has seen an explosion of violence as in a record-breaking pace for murders in the city, one not seen since 1998. Chicago has also seen a 53% increase in shootings and murders this year compared to the same period last year.
NBC Chicago reported last week that the city was on pace to top 700 homicides this year, a number that’s only been surpassed once before since 1998, while gun violence was up 50% compared to 2019. The city hit the 700 homicide mark this weekend.
The city has already experienced more homicides this year than it did in 2016, a notoriously deadly year for the nation’s third-largest city.
Killings had been on a steady decline in the city since 2017, according to FBI crime statistics. Before this year, Chicago’s success had accounted for more than half of the national decline in homicides.
Chicago Police Department superintendent David Brown blamed the rise in violence on letting violent offenders out of jail too soon.
From ABC7:
The 700th homicide was a man killed in a quadruple shooting early Sunday on the Far South Side, according to records kept by the Chicago Sun-Times.
He was standing with a group on a sidewalk in the 700-block of East 101st Street when shots rang out, according to Chicago police.
The man, 28, was shot multiple times at 12:40 a.m. and died three hours later at a hospital, according to police and the Cook County medical examiner’s office. Two women, both 30 years old, and a 25-year-old man were also shot, police said. They were listed in fair or good condition.
Chicago has seen a 53% increase in shootings and murders this year compared to the same period in 2019, according to police statistics. Violence has risen so much, Chicago has more murders this year than during the same period in 2016 – the city’s most violent year in recent memory.
The jump in violence reverses a years-long trend of homicides violence citywide. The Sun-Times counted 503 homicides in all of 2019; 550 in 2018; and 664 in 2017. Chicago logged 781 homicides in all of 2016.
In the 1990s, yearly homicide totals over 900 were common, with Chicago reporting more than 930 murders in 1994.
About 93% of homicides in 2020 have been shootings, according to the Sun-Times’ numbers.
Homicide victims are disproportionately Black males, according to medical examiner’s public records. More than 88% of victims in 2020 are men, and 78% of total victims are Black.
