Chicago residents, officials: Violence is not unique to city

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CHICAGO—After claiming victory by falling crime numbers in a city that has been heralded the “murder capital,” Chicago officials and residents were confronted with another rash of shootings, yet again highlighting violence that plagues the nation’s third most populous city.

The national spotlight shone back on Chicago after 13 people were wounded in a late-night attack at a South Side park Thursday. Between Friday and Sunday, at least 24 people had been shot; five of them died as a result.

City officials and agencies close to the matter have become adamant about finding the causes and tracking the true solutions to Chicago’s crime epidemic, and agree that it’s a critical time to get the problem under control. While it’s impossible to point the finger at every possible cause, Roseanna Ander, founding executive director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, suggests that along with a host of social issues, the rash of guns and the justice system play a large part in Chicago’s crime issue.

“The other pieces of the system also need to be similarly aligned so that when people are arrested for guns, it is considered a serious crime, and it’s not clear that there is this sense across the rest of the system that carrying a gun illegally in Chicago is a ‘real crime’ and really needs to be a priority in terms of sentencing and the way the justice system works,” she told theGrio.

Chicago police have already seized more than 5,100 illegal guns thus far in 2013, and according to Ander, they seize more than any two other police departments combined annually.

Data collected on people arrested for carrying an illegal firearm, and those arrested multiple times for the same offence, indicate that it’s very common to get probation, Ander noted. “It seems like it’s sending a message perhaps that it’s not a big deal to carry a gun illegally, and yet, when you look at in Chicago, 85 percent of the homicides are with guns, over 80 percent of the homicides occur outdoors in a public place, its that decision to leave out their house and carry a gun illegally in the first place that’s putting the rest of the community at huge risk.”

Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy has consistently pushed for additional gun control measures and says the lack of “common-sense” gun laws has made Chicago’s violence issue spiral out of control.

“What is needed in Chicago is real action on reasonable gun laws on the state and federal level. We need to keep illegal guns and military-type weapons out of our communities. Illegal guns, Illegal guns, Illegal guns drive violence,” he said at a press conference Friday, updating on Thursday’s shooting at Cornell Square Park. “Military-type weapons, like the ones we believe [were] used in this shooting, belong in the battlefield, not in parks, playgrounds. etc. It’s common sense. It’s a miracle there have been no fatalities.”

McCarthy, who was the police chief of the New York Police Department before Chicago added, “We should require background checks for all gun sales. At the state level, we need law that requires reporting of transfer of a weapon. Those illegal weapons end up on streets of our communities.”

Another large known contributor to Chicago’s violence epidemic comes from socioeconomic conditions and behavior, and exists in the streets, institutions and homes of residents.

“We need to be focused more on what’s putting young people at risk to becoming engaged in serious violence, and so really putting resources into prevention or programs that seem promising,” Ander described.

Over the last year, McCarthy and Mayor Rahm Emanuel have implemented a “comprehensive crime reduction strategy,” that commenced with a gang audit, identifying every gang member, their turf and who they’re in conflict with. Since the majority of shootings happening in Chicago tend to be gang-related, police are equipped with that information whenever an incident happens.

Most recently, McCarthy and Emanuel added extra police reinforcement in 20 high-crime areas in the city.

Since Emanuel became Mayor in 2011, he’s vowed to bring the city’s violence issue down. “For a city to have its sense of civility, its sense of community, it must live by a moral code, not a code of silence,” he said at a prayer vigil for the 13 victims of the Cornell Square Park shooting. “We cannot allow children in the city of Chicago and we will not allow children in the city of Chicago to have their youthfulness, their optimism, their hope taken from them. That’s what gun violence does.”

Although the thousands of gang factions make Chicago’s crime epidemic unique, experts and city officials agree that crime is not a unique issue to Chicago.