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The number of people shot during all of last year was 2,988. Between Friday evening and early Monday morning, at least 52 were shot and nine of them were killed, according to police. The weekend before, 49 people were shot, nine of them fatally. And the weekend before that, 52 people were shot, seven of them fatally. The month of July saw 65 fatal shootings, the most for a July in the city since 2006. Last Monday nine people were shot to death, the deadliest day in Chicago since 2003. The deadliest period over this past weekend was between Saturday afternoon and early Sunday when five people were killed and at least 19 others were wounded.
Among the deaths was the son of a Chicago police officer. Arshell Dennis III, 19. He was with a 20-year-old man who was wounded outside a house in the 2900 block of West 82nd Street when someone approached and fired shots around 12:05 a.m. Sunday, police said. Dennis, who was to return to college in New York later Sunday, was shot in the chest. He was pronounced dead at 12:45 a.m. at Little Company of Mary Hospital, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office. Three people were shot to death and at least seven others were wounded on the first night of the weekend, between Friday afternoon and early Saturday. At least 16 people were shot Sunday into early Monday. One of the victims was a 6-year-old girl who was shot in the arm around 9:10 p.m. outside her home in the 12300 block of South Perry Avenue. She was taken to Roseland Community Hospital in good condition, police said.
Members of the Chicago Police Department work the scene where two men were shot, one fatally, on the 6500 block of South Ashland Avenue on Aug. 12.
Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson told reporters Monday morning that he spent a "good portion" of his weekend grieving with the elder Dennis, who is his friend. In his nearly 30 years with the Police Department, Johnson said he's seen far too many parents like Dennis whose children won't be coming home. "Quite frankly, I'm just sick of it," Johnson said at a news conference at police headquarters. "There's no other way to describe it. I'm just sick of it." Johnson told reporters he and Officer Dennis were patrolmen together in the 1990s in the Gresham District on the South Side, and that the officer is "a good man who was raising a good kid." "Any shooting victim in Chicago is unacceptable," said Johnson. "But this one hits home."
As he has many times, Johnson called for stricter prison sentences for repeat illegal gun offenders. Efforts over the years in Springfield to impose mandatory minimum sentences for people caught with an illegal gun have been stalled by lawmakers who felt such guidelines would disproportionately affect African-Americans and other minorities. Without revealing specifics, Johnson said a new bill in the works in Springfield would enable judges to impose more sentences on the higher end of the range for felons convicted more than once of carrying a gun illegally. It's unclear, however, if plea agreements would be covered. "Any leader of the city of Chicago that thinks what we're seeing out on the streets is OK, shouldn't be a leader," Johnson said, flanked by other command staff. "Go in those neighborhoods and live there and tell me how you feel after a week.
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The operation was about six weeks in the making, police said. Officers from the Police Department's Bureau of Organized Crime made arrests from about 5 a.m. Thursday through Friday morning, targeting 15 gang factions selling narcotics and having illegal guns. The 101 arrests took place in 15 of the city's 22 police districts, mostly covering crime-ridden portions of the South and West sides. "What we try to do is target the worst areas and some of the busiest districts and take down some of the gang members who were operating in those districts and driving the violence," Anthony Riccio, the organized crime chief, said Friday at a news conference at police headquarters. Riccio would not say what gangs were targeted. But 61 of the 101 people arrested are documented gang members.
Riccio said officers plan on arresting about 100 more people in connection with this operation in the next seven to 10 days. "The route we took is attacking them through the sale of narcotics," he said. "Narcotics is what funds these gangs. It funds the operation. It provides them with money to buy the guns that are used to shoot at rival gang members and, in some cases . . . to shoot at police officers." This sweep is the latest effort by the department in recent months to fight some of the worst violence the city has seen since the 1990s. Through Sunday, 425 people were slain in Chicago, up 50 percent from 283 in a year-earlier period, according to official police statistics. During the same period, shooting incidents rose by 48 percent to 2,136, up from 1,443, the data show.
Other violent crimes such as sexual assaults, robberies and aggravated batteries also have spiked by double digits. In May, 140 people were arrested on mostly drug and weapons charges during a sweep on the West Side. Then ahead of the Fourth of July weekend, 88 more people were arrested during similar raids. Most of those arrested in this week's raid and the two previous ones scored high on the department's Strategic Subject List, a computerized algorithm that is designed to zero in on those most likely to shoot someone or become a victim of violence.
The department has been focusing on more than 1,400 people who have the highest scores on the list, between about 400 and 500-plus -- meaning they are believed to be 400 to more than 500 times more likely than average to be prone to violence as a victim or offender. "These offenders and street gangs, they're often associated with don't care about innocent children playing on the street," Superintendent Eddie Johnson said at the news conference. "They don't care about the neighborhoods that are trying to avoid these conflicts. They don't care about the families who are left behind in the wake of their actions to grieve the loss of a child or a brother or sister." The Rand Corp., a nonprofit public policy think tank that does statistical analysis, released a study last week criticizing the department's first version of the Strategic Subject List from 2013.
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In two Chicago office buildings about eight blocks apart, a pair of University of Chicago research teams are analyzing big data to answer a thorny question that has become especially charged in recent months: Will a police officer have an adverse interaction with a citizen? The team from the university’s Crime Lab is in the first stages of working with the Chicago Police Department to build a predictive data program to improve the department’s Early Intervention System, which is designed to determine if an officer is likely to engage in aggressive, improper conduct with a civilian. The other team, part of U. of C.’s Center for Data Science & Public Policy, is expected to launch a data-driven pilot of an Early Intervention System with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina by the end of the summer. The center is working on similar efforts with the Los Angeles County sheriff’s office and the Nashville and Knoxville police departments in Tennessee.
Data crunching has been used in policing since the late 1970s. But applying this level of big-data processing — similar to techniques that help determine email spam, a person’s movie preferences or advertisements on a social media page — to predict police misconduct is new, experts say. In this foray, data scientists are encountering deep suspicion from officers concerned about the system’s fairness and effectiveness. The new approach also raises the complex issue of what to do once the system predicts an officer is likely to misbehave. The efforts come at a volatile time in Chicago and around the country. The Chicago Police Department is under a federal probe after last year’s release of video showing an officer fatally shooting Laquan McDonald 16 times in October 2014. The release of another video earlier this month, from the scene of a July stolen car crash in which police fatally shot 18-year-old Paul O’Neal in the back, further roiled relations between the community and its police force.
Rayid Ghani, director of the Center for Data Science and Public Policy, said police departments can benefit from programs that use big data to, among other things, predict an officer's adverse reaction to a citizen.
Damn that's how many have died in the Louisiana flood! Will you be demanding in outrage that Obama go visit?No wonder Obama will never move back there. Unfortunate, because Windy City is crying out for a community organizer.
13 Killed, 41 Injured in Weekend Shootings Across Chicago Video
