Chicago recorded its deadliest month in two decades in August, thanks in part to a sharp rise in gun violence in the nation’s third-largest city this year. The number of homicides ties the total recorded in August 1996.
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With 90 murders and 472 shooting victims in August alone, investigators face a daunting challenge as they try catch those responsible for the city’s spiking violence.
News of the August crime statistics came Wednesday as hundreds of people gathered to honor and remember yet another young victim, Elijah Sims, who was shot and killed shortly before his 17th birthday.
Chicago is on pace to have more than 700 homicides by the end of the year, the newspaper reported.
According to the Associated Press, there have been more than 470 homicides in the Windy City since the start of the year.
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson also told CNN affiliate WBBM, “I am sick about reporting on murders every weekend”.
“These men and women are working their tails off out here”, Johnson said of officers. Are there any politicians in Chicago who don’t think the answer to stopping the city’s surge in violence is more gun-control laws aimed at restricting legal gun ownership?
In Los Angeles, with a population of about four million (compared to Chicago’s 2.7 million), there have been 176 homicides and 729 people shot, according to that city’s data through August 20.
This year’s victims included innocent bystanders, including a father paying bills at his kitchen table and the cousin of National Basketball Association star Dwyane Wade, who was shot last month while pushing her baby near a school.
32 years old, Nykea Aldridge was a victim of stray bullets in a shootout between two men as she walked with a stroller in the neighborhood Parkway Gardens, a complex of low-priced housing in South Chicago for go registering three of her children in elementary school.
26, and Derren Sorrells, 22, brothers, have been charged with first-degree murder. An increased level of confrontational gang interactions; 2. more guns being carried; 3. and local police pulling back in proactive stops. Meanwhile, you’ve got a revolving door down at the county courthouse where they are letting repeat offenders off easy, and a USA attorney’s office in Chicago (technically the Northern District of Illinois) that continuously lags behind the national average in prosecuting federal weapons cases. This isn’t due to the fact that “guns are easy for people to get”. Two 14-year-old boys were shot in the 1000-block of North Menard Avenue in the city’s Austin neighborhood around 7:45 p.m. Police said the gunman opened fire from inside a passing vehicle.
“This reprehensible act of violence is an example of why we need to change the way we treat habitual offenders in the city of Chicago”, Johnson said on Sunday.
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The McDonald shooting was a turning point for the Chicago PD, as it forced the city to become more transparent about officer-involved shootings and complaints of police brutality. Similarly, there were just under 3,000 gunshot victims recorded for all of 2015, according to data collected by the Chicago Tribune. In 2015, following the release of a video depicting a white Chicago police officer shooting a black suspect more than a dozen times, Emanuel fired McCarthy.
