For the month of August, the city of Chicago recorded 86 homicides, the most for a single month in almost 20 years.
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By Wednesday morning, 425 people had been fatally shot so far this year in Chicago-accounting for 91% of the total murders in the city. Despite this, the city saw more homicides in 2016 than in the cities of New York and Los Angeles combined, according to the New York Times. The police department says the city’s per capita rate was higher than Chicago’s in August.
The number of shooting deaths here has surpassed the total for previous year with four months still to go, in a bloody 2016 in which Chicago has outpaced most major USA cities in homicides. It was the deadliest month in the city since October of 1997.
The department on Thursday released data for last month.
“The truth is in the streets of Chicago and the streets of America, it doesn’t matter if I have never been to jail, if I am a professor or a journalist, when I am stopped by a cop in the street, I have fear coursing through my veins and my one goal is to survive the encounter”, added Fountain, who is black. Johnson said there is a proliferation of guns on the streets of Chicago and stricter gun legislation is necessary to keep gun offenders from repeating their crimes.
CHICAGO, IL – DECEMBER 23: Pictures of Chicago residents who have died by gunfire are posted next to a Christmas tree outside Saint Sabina Church in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood on the city’s Southside on December 23, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois.
Police say 90 people were killed in Chicago last month, more homicides than NY and Los Angeles combined. “Another act of senseless gun violence”.
“An increasing numbers of major cities across the country are experiencing increases in violent crime – in particular gun-related crime”, and much of this crime is occurring within minority communities, said John Cohen, an ABC News contributor who is a former USA counterterrorism official. If you would like to discuss another topic, look for a relevant article.
In an interview with NBC Chicago, Johnson dismissed the idea of bringing in the National Guard, as some lawmakers have urged.
“All those proactive actions – verbal insults, disrespect, other violations of people’s rights – they undermine” any decrease in crime achieved by their use, says Samuel Walker, emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. We can blithely assume that slapping another law on the books will solve the problem, and even if it doesn’t, well, we’ve done something. “I want to have a discussion where the police are part of the solution in making changes”, he said. No thoughtful leader thinks that’s a good idea or would really provide a solution.
August is going down as the most violent month in Chicago in 20 years, as weekend shootings raised the number of homicides this year to just a few shy of all of last year.
New York, with more than three times the population of Chicago, has recorded 222 homicides and 760 shooting victims, according to NYPD crime statistics through August 21.
In this July 7, 2014 file photo, Chicago police display some of the thousands of illegal firearms they confiscated during the year in their battle against gun violence in Chicago.
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Instead, Johnson repeated his call for imposing higher sentences on repeat gun offenders. You have got to watch the police, you have got to watch the brothers in the community.
