As the far-left “Defund The Police” movement gains momentum across the country sparked by the death of George Floyd, a new report details a grim record set in Chicago six days after Floyd’s racially charged death. On Sunday May 31, the Windy City suffered its most violent day in nearly six decades in what was, as one crime lab researcher put it, “beyond anything that we’ve ever seen before.”
In a report published Monday, the Chicago Sun-Times provides a heart-wrenching look “inside the most violent day in 60 years in Chicago,” in which 18 people were killed in the city within 24 hours. That devastating number is nearly 50% higher than the previous high: 13 people killed on August 4, 1991.
“While Chicago was roiled by another day of protests and looting in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, 18 people were killed Sunday, May 31, making it the single most violent day in Chicago in six decades, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab,” the paper reports, noting that the crime lab’s data “doesn’t go back further than 1961.”
Over that weekend, as protests and riots drained police resources, a total of 25 people were killed in the city and another 85 wounded by gunfire, the Sun-Times reports. “In a city with an international reputation for crime — where 900 murders per year were common in the early 1990s — it was the most violent weekend in Chicago’s modern history, stretching police resources that were already thin because of protests and looting.”
Among those killed on Sunday were a “hardworking father,” a “West Side high school student,” a “man killed amid South Side looting at a cellphone store,” and a “college freshman who hoped to become a correctional officer,” the Sun-Times reveals.
“I don’t even know how to put it into context,” said University of Chicago Crime Lab Senior Research Director Max Kapustin. “It’s beyond anything that we’ve ever seen before.”
The Sun-Times cites prominent Chicago gun violence activist Rev. Michael Pfleger, who made a point of noting the role the lack of police presence played over that deadly weekend.
“On Saturday and particularly Sunday, I heard people saying all over, ‘Hey, there’s no police anywhere, police ain’t doing nothing,’” he said. “I sat and watched a store looted for over an hour. No police came. I got in my car and drove around to some other places getting looted [and] didn’t see police anywhere.” (Read the full report here.)
The report comes as the radical “Defund The Police” movement gains momentum among activists and progressive officials. In a move that has made national headlines, the Minneapolis City Council voted last week in a “veto-proof” majority to “dismantle” the police department and replace it with a “transformative new model of public safety.”
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