Chicago Homicide Rate: Still Rising!

The City of Chicago is experiencing an increase in homicides and shootings that have not been seen in over 5 years. According to the Chicago Police Department Compstat report that since Jan 1 through May 6 ther have been 169 homicides, which is a 54% increase from the previous year and up 34% in the last two years. Shootings are up to 706 from the previous year of 590 at the through the same dates. That is up 20%. This is inspite that acrosss the board in all the Index crimes are down across the board.

Some have attributed the weather to the increase in gang violence, still others point to the economy, but regardless of the cause it is of greater importance to solve the problem. The goal reduce the violence. As shown in this news story Mayor Rahm Emanuel hopes to reduce the crime in those plagued violence neighborhoods by conducting a new strategy involving those neighborhoods.

The new strategy called a "wraparound" crime-fighting strategy on the eve of his one-year anniversary as the city's mayor. The strategy, Emanuel explained alongside Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy in a church in Chicago's West Pullman neighborhood, aims to follow crackdowns on gang-infested areas of the city with city services, such as street light repairs, graffiti removal, street and vacant lot cleanups and job training.

"It is a coordinated strategy. Rather than spreading the peanut butter too thin across the city, concentrating it when you clear an area of a gang so it’s not just cleared temporarily and ... two days later, the gangs are back," the mayor saidas reported by the Chicago Sun-Times.

"Once we make arrests, and we eliminate a narcotics organization, we are committed to holding onto that turf, to that territory, to squeeze out the drug market and the violence," McCarthy said of the strategy, which he said has already led to the arrest of "more than 50" alleged gang members, according to CBS.




How the impact of this new strategy will effect the homicide or shooting rates is not yet known, only time will tell. What we do know is that the deaths of young people all across the City of Chicago has to come to an end. Whether it is related to narcotics, gang violence or some other type of criminal activity society has to come together as a whole to stop the violence.