A recent study of the violence in Barack Obama’s adopted home town of Chicago shows that the most at-risk group in the Windy City are its African American residents.
The new study by the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab released last week shows that African American residents represent fully 80 percent of all murder victims but only make up one third of the population, CLTV.com reported.
The study further found that repeated involvement in the justice system is also a high indicator that a resident could become a murder victim, as 40 percent of those killed had more than 10 prior arrests.
The town headed up by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff, also surges far ahead of the nation’s other big cities in gun violence despite the decades of strict anti-Second Amendment laws. Ninety percent of the city’s homicides are committed using guns compared to only 72 percent in Los Angeles and 58 percent in New York.
Another sad finding is that the politically motivated reining in of Chicago’s police has likely contributed to the out of control murder rate.
Street stops have fallen by an incredible 80 percent as police have become reticent to stop residents, and the rate of solved murders has also plunged to only 26 percent. With fewer stops and fewer criminals brought to justice, the streets full of criminals may be “fueling a cycle of retaliatory violence,” the study said.
Meanwhile, even though 2017 isn’t yet a month old, already 35 Chicagoans have been shot and killed and 198 total have been shot. During the first three weeks of January, a person is shot every two and one half hours, while someone has been killed every 14 hours.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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