The weather may be cooling down in Chicago, but the violence shows no signs of letting up. After one of the bloodiest summers in the city’s history, 42 people were shot — and 5 killed — over the weekend.
The Chicago Tribune reports that 26 people were shot in neighborhoods on the south and west sides of the city — where much of the violence occurred over the summer — in a span of just 18 hours, a level of violence, the Tribune notes, that was surpassed only once, back in August, when 41 people were shot over the course of just 7 hours.
Fortunately for residents of the city’s south and west sides, the violence is down from that record-breaking weekend, when 75 people were shot and more than a dozen killed.
The violence began early, on Friday night, as Halloween revelers attended parties and events, which broke out into squabbles. At 10:30 pm Friday night, “a 20-year-old man and a 17-year-old boy were walking on a sidewalk when the assailant walked up and fired. The 20-year-old was pronounced dead at Stroger Hospital, and the teen was in serious condition with a gunshot wound to the back, also at Stroger.”
The violent weekend ended early Monday morning, around 4:15am, when “a passenger was shot in the leg” while riding in a car “on the inbound lanes of the Dan Ryan,” one of Chicago’s main highways, the Tribune reports. The gunman apparently took aim at passing cars — the second such random attack in two weeks.
Last week, the city suffered an almost completely ignored mass shooting: 6 people, who had attended a funeral for a local rap artist, were shot as they exited the funeral service held on Chicago’s south side.
“People were gathered at the Bethlehem Star Church for the funeral of Vantrease Criss, a rapper also known as ‘Dooskie The Man,’ who had been killed about a week ago, police said. The six were shot as people exited the church and got into their cars,” the Tribune reported last week.
The victims were mostly young men and women in their 20s. All were last reported to have survived their wounds. A few were transported to local hospitals in serious condition.
These incidents of violence are serious, but Chicago fell out of the headlines after Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago’s police chief pledged to redouble their efforts to combat the summer’s rash of shootings. In August, the mayor and police chief pledged to hire more police, reconsider beats and reassign community liaison officers, and engage communities on the south and west side in helping to police their own neighborhoods.
Those efforts appear to have fallen by the wayside, as have offers from the White House to aid Chicago’s law enforcement community.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel is not running for a third term.