In Chicago, violent crime is up overall even as shootings drop

There were at least 29 people shot over the weekend, eight of them fatally. The youngest victim was only 15-years-old.

The 15-year-old boy was shot around 4:10 p.m. Sunday in the 2200 block of South California Avenue when some in a white car fired shots at him, according to police. He was struck in the chest and taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Another teenage victim was the son of an executive at an anti-violence group.

The name of the 19-year-old man has not been released, but Project H.O.O.D. said he was the son of its executive assistant and brother of its youth manager.

“He tragically fell victim to a senseless act of gun violence, a harsh reality we’ve pledged to combat,” said Pastor Corey Brooks, founder of the nonprofit group. “We will honor the memory of our colleague’s son by intensifying our efforts to prevent such tragedies in the future.”

The victim was in the back of a rideshare vehicle when someone approached the car on foot and shot him. The driver rushed him to the hospital but he didn’t survive.

As bad as this weekend was, the previous holiday weekend was worse, granted that weekend included and extra day of mayhem.

More than 70 people were shot, 13 fatally, in Chicago over the holiday weekend, including a father of four who was gunned down at a large family Father’s Day park gathering, according to police.

The violence over the Father’s Day and Juneteenth holidays also left a number of teenagers injured, including a 14-year-old boy who died after being shot multiple times on a street in the Garfield Park neighborhood on the city’s West Side, according to a review by ABC News of weekend incident reports from the Chicago Police Department.

Police officials said at least 75 people were shot across the city in 51 separate incidents that occurred between 6 p.m. on Friday and 11:59 p.m. on Monday.

Believe it or not, shootings (both fatal and non-fatal) are down this year, at least compared to the two previous years when violence was up sharply. The red line is 2023 year-to-date while the two darker lines are 2021 and 2022.

That is good news but the news isn’t all good. Robbery, aggravated assault and aggravated battery are all up compared to last year. Because these crimes are far more numerous, the overall rate of violent crime is up 10% compared to last year at this time.

New mayor Brandon Johnson is a believer in dealing with the “root causes” of crime. He’s only been in office for about five weeks so it’s too early to judge how that’s going.

Mayor Johnson favors a multi-tiered long-term crime fighting strategy, as he works to promote 200 more detectives, but he’s not promised to fill vacancies.

“Everybody knows that police strategy, alone, is insufficient, it’s a failure. And I don’t know how you scramble to hire people – a process that takes 18 months. Do you really want to scramble to find police officers? I don’t think we want to scramble to find anyone that requires the professional training that is needed to ensure that we are delivering adequate services for the people of Chicago.”

Mayor Johnson said recently “If you don’t live in Chicago, you don’t have a right to talk about the city of Chicago.” That’s not going to fly obviously. If 2,000 people are being shot every year, including many teenagers, people inside and outside Chicago have a right to say something about it.

Mayor Johnson should get a few months to implement his plan. He can’t be judged on what’s happening five weeks in to his term. But that also means he can’t take credit for the marginal improvements so far this year which mostly happened before he took office. Maybe we’re just seeing a reversion to the pre-pandemic mean which has nothing to do with him or his plans.

So far the overall numbers don’t look so good. Another six months of this without improvement and I suspect a lot of people in the city will be tired of hearing about his long term plans to work on root causes.