US
Chicago Is Officially Twice As Deadly For Black People Than America’s Police
No featured image available
With more than 500 homicides to date, Chicago is already living its bloodiest year in two decades — and it’s only the tail end of summer.
While the numbers are shocking, the violence visited upon predominately black neighborhoods reveals something less talked about: Chicagoans kill more black people than all of law enforcement does in the entire country. Just reference The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize winning project on police shootings.
WaPo records officer-involved shooting deaths using an online tracker called “Fatal Force.” The database notes that of 667 people killed by police in 2016, 162 were black, or 24 percent.
By comparison, 375 of Chicago’s homicide victims this year are black, a whopping 75 percent. That means African-Americans are more than twice as likely to be gunned down walking the streets of Chicago than while interacting with police nationwide.
In a city that’s seen more fatalities since 2001 than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined, these numbers are not hard to believe.
Chicago is home to neighborhoods where selling drugs is the only way to make a living and illegally carrying a gun is a pragmatic life insurance policy, as highlighted in a BBC documentary Wednesday.
“I’ve never seen so many guns like now,” a local told journalists. “It’s like somebody dropped off crates of guns in everybody’s hood,” he added.
Chicago reached 500 homicides over Labor Day Weekend when 13 people were killed and 52 wounded.
While state-sanctioned violence of any kind is worthy of public scrutiny, Chicago’s homicide numbers are still striking. Gang bangers in the city have certainly made their mark, and social movements to challenge the violence are seemingly silent. A Facebook post by Black Lives Matter (BLM) Chicago expresses outrage at a lack of hospitals rather than at the perpetrators.
“The common theme after the violence occurred is that almost everyone died because there wasn’t a trauma center close to the neighborhoods where they were shot,” the post declares. It continued, giving people information on how to take first aid classes.
The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to BLM Chicago to see if any demonstrations were planned in response to the weekend and the year’s violence, but requests for comment were not returned at press time.
In city where someone is killed every 11 hours and 43 minutes, some say the clock is ticking for a solution looking inward.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].