CHICAGO, IL — A South Side shooting early Saturday that left two men dead pushed Chicago's 2017 murder total past 100 victims, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
The 100th and 101st murder victims of the year happened during a shooting just before 1 a.m. Saturday, Feb. 25, at a party in the Woodlawn neighborhood, the report stated. Two shooters wearing hoodies fired into a crowd in the 6500 block of South Drexel Avenue, the report added.
A 38-year-old man — identified by the Chicago Tribune as Samuel Head — was fatally shot in the chest, and a 20-year-old man was fatally hit in the face and chest. Head's 29-year-old girlfriend was grazed in the thigh and taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in good condition.
With Saturday's shooting, this year's murder numbers closely match the homicide total for the first two months of 2016, a year that saw more than 750 slayings in Chicago, according to the Tribune. (The Chicago Police Department and the Tribune don't agree on last year's murder total; CPD puts it at 762, but the newspaper reports at least 781 murders, which include expressway killings, police-involved shootings, homicides when a victim was killed in self-defense and death investigations, all areas that CPD does not tally in its total.)
In fact, 2016 was Chicago's bloodiest year in nearly two decades, and it well surpassed the 2015 homicide total of 480. Last year also saw 3,550 shooting incidents and 4,331 shooting victims, according to police.
With only two months in the books, here's how the violence in Chicago is adding up in 2017, according to statistics from the Sun-Times:
96: Murder victims in 2017 killed by gunfire. That includes two shootings involving Chicago police officers.
4: Victims stabbed to death this year.
400: Minimum number of people wounded in Chicago shootings this year.
7: People killed in shootings Wednesday, Feb. 22, the most in Chicago in a single day this year. Those killings sparked another in a litany of tweets from President Donald Trump that have bemoaned the city's crime and gun violence:
Seven people shot and killed yesterday in Chicago. What is going on there - totally out of control. Chicago needs help!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 24, 2017
3: Fatal gunshot victims younger than 13 killed in as many days earlier this month. Kanari Gentry-Bowers, 12, and Takiya Holmes, 11, were shot and killed within a half hour of one another Feb. 11. On Valentine's Day, Lavontay White Jr., 2, and his 26-year-old uncle were killed while they sat in a car. The shooting was streamed on Facebook Live by the uncle's pregnant girlfriend, who was shot and wounded. The woman, who was four months pregnant, lost her unborn child days later.
9: Murder victims this year younger than 18.
2 months: Age of Chicago's youngest 2017 murder victim. Aliya Acosta was stabbed to death Feb. 9 in Humboldt park as a result of child abuse.
82: Murders in 2017 on the South, West and Southwest sides. The Chicago neighborhood with the most homicide victims is Austin with 12.
84: Murder victims this year who were people of color. Of those, 77 were men.
Even before taking office in January, Trump had targeted Chicago and the inability of city leaders to curb the continuing epidemic of crime and gun violence. While campaigning for president last year, he suggested Chicago police implement a stop-and-frisk policy, a controversial law enforcement tactic that allows officers to stop individuals without probable cause — just reasonable suspicion — and question and pat them down.
The criticism that received the most notoriety came days after his inauguration when Trump tweeted that he would "send in the Feds" if civic leaders didn't turn things around. Although the president didn't specify what his message meant — increased cooperation from federal law enforcement agencies, calling up the National Guard — Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson welcomed Trump's offer if it meant more federal money, especially if it was directed to non-law enforcement areas that would help fund mentoring programs or additional inner city jobs.
So far, the president hasn't followed through with his ultimatum, and Trump's impotency in that matter has been a source of frustration for Johnson. That irritation boiled over Friday during a press conference discussing overnight police raids that led to 81 arrests on weapon and drug charges. Chicago's top cop gave an empassioned defense of the Chicago Police Department and leveled his own criticism about the lack of federal help:
"Listen, we haven't been sitting around for months and years just waiting on someone to help us. We work every day as hard as we can to reduce the gun violence in this city. … [E]veryone is not just sitting on their hands waiting for somebody to come help us.
"Now what I want to say is this: We have said what we need from the federal government, and we embrace that. We will take more federal agents, more funding for mentorship programs, educational opportunities, housing programs. … We need all of those things. This violence problem isn't a one-point fix. It's a multi-layered onion that we have to just keep peeling back until we get to the root of it.
"But at some point you have to stop talking, and you have to to do action. And that's what we're doing. So we're not waiting. We will embrace the help when we get it. The crime in Chicago won't wait for anhyone else to come and help us, so we're doing what we can now to try and resolve this issue."
Johnson cited the amount of gun arrests in 2017 so far as an example of the work his department is doing to reduce gun violence in Chicago.
"We are almost double in gun arrests than we were the same time last year. That's a ridiculous number," he said. "That kills the notion that the police department is sitting on its heels not being proactive, not doing anything about it. We actually are doing something about it."
While admitting that CPD can do better, Johnson also lashed out at state lawmakers for a lack of gun legislation that would create harsher penalties to keep repeat offenders behind bars and off the streets.
"Right now, when I go into homes on the South and West sides of Chicago, those mothers aren't asking me about long-term solutions. They want to know, 'How come that guy killed my son and is still out there? And you all know who it is'," he said.
"That's why we call these guys repeat gun offenders. They're not new to us. … But the simple fact is we need the judicial system and our legislators to help us with this."
