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August deadliest month for Chicago in two decades

The city recorded 90 murders in the month of August, making it the most violent month Chicago has seen in more than two decades, according to police department data released Thursday.

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Tio Hardiman, executive director of the Violence Interrupters initiative, spoke out Tuesday morning with other anti-violence experts from Chicago and NY, including former NYPD Chief of Department Philip Banks. Propagating this myth most recently is this same Chicago Tribune, which on Friday published a story about the 435 police shootings that occurred in Chicago between 2010 and 2015.

Overall this year, there have been more homicides in Chicago than New York City and Los Angeles combined, CBS Chicago reported.

Police said the siblings are gang members and convicted felons, who were out on parole when they accidentally shot Wade’s relative.

The city is under an on-going investigation to the Chicago Police Department, and pressure is being made upon Governor Bruce Rauner and his willingness to declare the city under a state of emergency.

Hardiman said his Violence Interrupters network consists of about 2,000 to 3,000 people. “We’re at an in-between stage right now”.

The victims of the shootings were overwhelmingly – about 80 percent – African-American males. We’re too divided as a people.

Chicago has recovered an illegal handgun for every hour of the year of 2016, he added. “My job is to get them the training they need, keep them encouraged and keep them in the fight”.

Over the last six years, police in Chicago, Illinois have fired 2,623 bullets at citizens, killing 92 people and injuring 170 others, according to a new database by the Chicago Tribune.

Across the United States, more than two-thirds of defendants released from state prisons were rearrested within five years, with the majority arrested within a year of release, according to a 2014 survey released by the U.S. Department of Justice. “You’re not gonna stop a killing nowhere in Chicago unless you have a relationship with the killer, where that person will listen to you”.

Erica Ford, head of the South Jamaica Cure Violence program and founder of Life Camp in Queens, New York, said funding for programs like CeaseFire have helped in her community.

“My advice to any law enforcement officer is this: You have to look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, ‘Are you trying to win this battle alone?'” Banks said. Meanwhile, you’ve got a revolving door down at the county courthouse where they are letting repeat offenders off easy, and a US attorney’s office in Chicago (technically the Northern District of Illinois) that continuously lags behind the national average in prosecuting federal weapons cases. Aldridge was not the intended target or involved in the dispute, he said, which is also what police have stated. Meanwhile, the rest of Chicago doesn’t seem to experience that much violence.

Later this afternoon, Chicagoans will lead a symbolic funeral procession on the West Side from a closed public school, Nathaniel Pope Elementary, to Mt. Sinai Hospital.

However there does not seem to be a clear cause of the rise, although police and mayor Rahm Emanuel frequently point to gang violence and the easy availability of guns. Rates of gun violence in the city have triggered an alarming situation for the city’s police authorities and demanded the governor’s immediate actions on the matter.

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“She was just another mother who wanted her children to get an education just like any good parent would”, Johnson said of Aldridge.

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