Chicago:
Gun violence in Chicago left 10 people dead over the weekend and 43 others injured. The gunfire came amid a surge in violence this year in the nation’s third-largest city. Statistics released by the Chicago Police Department bring the number of shooting victims for the year thus far to 2,887 and the number of homicides to 542. Last year at this time, according to police statistics, there were 1,862 shooting victims and 364 homicides.
The violence follows the longer Labor Day weekend that ended with the same number of homicides and roughly the same number of shooting victims. Before that weekend, the Police Department had been encouraged by recent statistics that showed a drop in the number of homicides and shootings in July and August compared with the same two-month period last year. Police Superintendent David Brown on Monday was back to lamenting, as he has in the past, that at least some of the shootings involved people he contends should not have been on the streets.
He pointed to a suspect in the shooting of six people, two of whom died. He said the person had seven felony arrests and at the time of the shooting and had been released from jail and placed on electronic monitoring after being charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm. “It’s beyond frustrating,” he said.
