Chiraq celebrated the Fourth with 101 people shot. The youngest was a 13-year-old boy. And everyone is looking for answers.
The Chicago Police Department says it is conducting "a very comprehensive review" after the city experienced one of its most violent Fourth of July weekends in recent years, with at least 101 people shot between late Friday afternoon and early Wednesday.
The review will include an analysis of how "amateur fireworks" might have affected the ShotSpotter system, which captures audio of gunfire and attempts to pinpoint its location for quicker deployment of officers. The system is deployed in the Englewood and Harrison districts, traditionally among the city's most violent.
"It's perplexing," Guglielmi said. "We deployed some very successful tactics over the Memorial Day weekend." Yet those same tactics did not seem to work as well over the Fourth holiday.
People, including criminals, adapt. And it's unclear how much good a reactive system can do anyway. Once shots have been fired, there's only so much that can be done.
You can stop crimes in progress. But once two or three people are shooting at each other, the damage is usually done fairly quickly. Broken windows policing was built to stop crimes before they happened. And it worked really well. That made it into a major target of the pro-crime left. Broken windows policing was demonized. If you tried to actually rebuild neighborhoods by focusing on the small stuff to stop the big stuff, you were just persecuting "poor people". The same poor people being shot by the drug dealers and the repeat offenders whom the pro-crime left, from Obama on down, puts on the streets.
So here we are.
The Chicago police are not going to be able to arrive in time every time to stop two thugs from shooting at each other, and anyone in the way. To stop that from happening, you need approaches like Stop an Frisk.
And those are off limits. So the killing goes on.