Over the past weekend, the city of Chicago reached yet another grim milestone, despite its strict gun-banning laws, by surpassing its 3,000th shooting victim. Proving nothing is sacred, late Sunday night, an 18-year-old woman was shot while attending a prayer vigil for a previous victim of Chicago’s gang violence.
The teenaged girl was shot as she attended a vigil for 23-year-old Nahmar T. Holmes, killed earlier in a gang-related incident outside his home in the city’s Brainerd neighborhood. Two others were also wounded during the vigil shooting.
Monday ended with the shocking total of 3,033 shooting victims in the Windy City, a total that puts the number of victims for 2016 already higher than the whole of victims for 2015.
The shootings come so often in the city that one person is shot every two hours and one killed every 13 hours.
By Tuesday, September 13, the toll of bloodshed reached 527 total homicides and 3,055 shot, surpassing the toll in 2015 of 2,988 shootings and 491 murders.
Meanwhile, a grand jury is now looking into the Chicago Police Department to determine if a cover-up of the details of the Laquan McDonald shooting was perpetrated by street officers and their bosses.
Patricia Brown Holmes, a former Cook County judge, was appointed as a special prosecutor in July and recently told the media she feels she has enough evidence to impanel a grand jury on the cover-up allegation.
Laquan McDonald was the teenaged suspect shot 16 times by Chicago police during an altercation in 2014. The release of the police dashcam video of the shooting sparked intense protests in Chicago late in 2015.
Even as the protesters focus on claims that the CPD is the root of the problem, the facts present a different story. As protesters insist that Chicago police are shooting black youths down in the streets, the truth is that there have been only six police-involved shootings resulting in a death in all of 2016. That is but a tiny percentage of the over 500 murders, mostly of African-Americans, to date in the city.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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