A review of the two years that coincide with the COVID-19 pandemic reveals a dramatic uptick in both homicides and shootings across the city, with a more-than-60% increase in both categories that increased pressure on policymakers to find answers.
Chicago’s gun violence proved unrelenting in 2021, as the fear and unease many neighborhoods have long feltShootings remained high in many city neighborhoods that have for decades struggled with violence, but the downtown area this year was also repeatedly the site of shootings, burglaries at high-end shops and large-scale gatherings of young people who sometimes had to be dispersed by Chicago police. Carjackings continued to increase around the city.
Through Dec. 21, there had been 783 homicides in the city and an additional 3,592 nonfatal shooting victims, according to the Chicago Police Department website and city of Chicago data. The homicide total does not include shootings on the city’s expressways. Experts cautioned that it will take some time to understand the ripple effects the pandemic had on public safety, as it potentially shifted crime patterns and created a higher level of interpersonal conflict at a time when the number of guns in circulation soared.long-term strategies that were always needed: sustained investments to target the adverse and unaddressed conditions that allow violence to take hold, combined with policing that is both effective and fair in all neighborhoods.
In West Town, the number of shooting victims increased to 54 from 33 over the two-year period, including one incident in which aof a speeding car and began shooting — leaving four bystanders wounded, one critically, along a busy stretch of Milwaukee Avenue packed with restaurants and bars on a Wednesday evening.
For example, shootings in the Harrison District on the West Side increased from 303 to 464 between 2019 and 2021, according to Chicago police data. And in Englewood, they jumped from 173 to 325. The disproportionate impact of the violence tracks with a recent study by researchers at the Violence Prevention Research Center at the University of California, Davis who examined violence and ZIP code data in 13 major cities, including Chicago. The findings showed that low-income communities of color experienced 14 times as much firearm violence as those in whiter, affluent neighborhoods during the first five months of the pandemic.
Wicker Park and the nearby West Town neighborhood have experienced a dramatic and troubling increase in carjackings. In the Near West police district, which covers part of the neighborhood, the number of carjacking victims increased from 47 in 2019 to more than 160 in 2021, according to city of Chicago statistics.
Both Lightfoot and Chicago police Superintendent David Brown have seized on these examples this year, repeatedly blaming the release of pretrial detainees for the uptick in violence. A representative from the state’s attorney’s office provided the crowd with detailed stats, saying that in 2021, for incidents that happened in the neighborhood where the meeting was held, the office had approved 82% of the felony cases that Chicago police brought to the prosecutors. For gun cases, the approval rating was 84%
“Ultimately we want to understand objectively what is behind this and how to effectively address it, so we can save lives and not unduly punish people or incarcerate people when we don’t need to,” said Olson, who said his own research has not found any causal links between pretrial release and re-offending.
Royko is already planning his next meeting, where he hopes for a detailed conversation with both Foxx and Evans.Olson has been crunching crime data in Chicago and Illinois for more than 30 years, and knows all too well how troubling the numbers are. But as 2021 comes to a close, the criminologist did not sound entirely defeated.
The city has also launched a COVID-like response to violence, meeting in December with four different communities to start crafting strategies to reduce the violence that would involve multiple agencies, beyond police. “The diagnosis of what happened over the past two years is how we get to the right prescription,” Brown said. “Many people jump right to the conclusion that we to re-implement mass incarceration, which failed.”One by one on a recent Friday residents trickled into the community center on Cottage Grove Avenue with cheery “hellos” for the weekly “Together We Can” meeting, a new initiative in the Grand Crossing police district to amplify police and community partnership.
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