From The Chicago Tribune: As the first quarter of 2016 nears an end, violence in Chicago has reached levels unseen in years, putting the city on course to top 500 homicides for only the second time since 2008.
As of 6 a.m. Wednesday, homicides totaled 135, a 71 percent jump over the 79 killings in the same year-earlier period, official Police Department statistics show. That represented the worst first quarter of a year since 136 homicides in 1999, according to the data.
Shootings have jumped by comparable numbers as well. As of Wednesday, at least 727 people had been shot in Chicago so far this year, a 73 percent rise from 422 a year earlier, according to a Tribune analysis of department data.
Worse yet, that jump follows two consecutive years in which shootings rose by double digits, the analysis found. Homicides also rose by about 12.5 percent last year over 2014.
If there was any hopeful sign in the numbers, it would be that for most of March, homicides rose citywide by a more modest 25 percent from the same year-earlier period, the department said.
Crime experts caution about making year-to-year comparisons, but Arthur Lurigio, a professor of criminal justice and psychology at Loyola University Chicago, called the escalating violence at the start of the year “alarming.”
“We have to go back decades to find jumps of this magnitude in year-to-year comparisons,” he said. “We’re on our way to 500 homicides again. We’re going backward.”
On Tuesday night, about 20 residents joined several police officers at 71st Street and Jeffery Boulevard in the South Side’s South Shore community in a show of solidarity in the fight against crime. The area isn’t as prone to gun violence as it once was, but it still has its flare-ups. The event drew mostly residents who appeared to be in their 40s, 50s or 60s, not the at-risk youths most affected by the violence.
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