Photo credit: Brad Boniwel
By Mike Keleher
Well the good news to be touted by the city will of course be “Shootings down in 2019!”…yes indeed. They are down a whopping 7% since 2018…whee, that must be quite a source of solace for the paltry 2754 people who were shot in Chicago this year.
I am loath to do high school level math and figure out 7%, but looks like 192 fewer people were shot this year. I am sure the city will claim victory, but on the spectator side of things it is just as likely heavy rains kept some potential targets indoors on Saturday nights this year!
Is it just me, or does 2754 seem like a rather inordinate amount of humans shot in one year in one city? It will hit the newspapers for a day and then that story will be gone…again.
Oh, and homicides this year? 513 murdered. That is quite a lot of murders, but what makes that number even worse is well documented by www.heyjackass.com when it shows the police/prosecution clearance rate for those murders stands at only 12.2% this year.
So if you killed someone in Chicago, especially in the high crime neighborhoods during 2019 you have an 87.8% chance of getting away with it? That is outrageous, no matter how you slice it. Where is the incentive to not kill people? There can’t be any fear of apprehension or prosecution in those numbers. The violent criminals are going to continue to do what ever the hell they want to do, despite increased police efforts, new mayors, or even the presence of some of the toughest gun control laws in the nation. They just don’t care and have little reason to fear apprehension. They continue to run amuck year after year.
By the way, www.statista.com reports the nationwide murder clearance rate in the U.S. in 2018 (the latest collected data) is 62.3%.
How in the world do numbers like this become so commonplace? There is a giant media and city combined comment of “Meh.”
According to www.heyjackass.com, of the 513 murders in the city, no charges were filed in 439 of those cases. Suspects were charged in 61 of those crimes, 6 were ruled self defense, police were involved with 6 and a single murder/suicide noted.
One would think with so many murders to practice on year after year, the CPD would be really good at solving them by now!
The inherent problem with Chicago violent crime as most of us suspect, is most of the shooters and most of the “shootees” all have prior gun crime convictions, and no one in that circle or even the general population is willing to cooperate with police investigations. over gang and drug crime even when so many innocent bystanders are killed by accident. Marksmanship remains a low/no skill with Windy City gunmen.
Looks like New York City finished this year with about 300 murders within their 8.6 million residents. LA City has 4 million people. I could not find any fresh stats for just LA city, but there were a whopping 511 homicides in LA County this year. 511! Why that is tied with Chicago city homicides! OMG! How is this possible? Well when you tie in all the communities in LA county there are 10 million people living there compared to Chicago’s 2.7 million.
Even though Chicago economies and sports teams continue to take a beating, and the population continues to decline, it manages to hold on to the #1 spot for big city violent crime and homicides again this year!
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