Last weekend was a veritable bloodbath in Chicago, with 82 shootings and 14 deaths, including two armed teenagers shot by police. Tara Long takes a look at how the Windy City got to be so violent:
Noting that the Chicago PD has come under scrutiny for underreporting violent crime, Josh Voorhees adds that while the murder rate is falling overall, it remains terrifyingly high in the city’s toughest neighborhoods:
Even if a portion of the recent drop in crime numbers is due to a statistical sleight of hand, most observers agree that violent crime is indeed falling in Chicago, as it is in most major cities. But the overall numbers obscure the fact that Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, and much of the violence has been sequestered in poor, predominantly black areas of the city where gang violence goes largely unnoticed unless it comes in bunches, as it did this past weekend. After crunching the homicide numbers for 2000 through 2010, Yale University sociologist Andrew Papachristos found that the murder rate was about 3.1 per 100,000 residents living in the Northwest side’s Jefferson Park. Less than 10 miles away in West Garfield Park, the rate was more than 20 times that, a staggering 64 per 100,000, or roughly in line with the casualty rate for civilians in Iraq at the height of the last war. When people describe parts of Chicago as urban war zones, it is not hyperbole.
The Dish 