While Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was busy officiating a Kennedy wedding in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts over the weekend, dozens more in the city she was elected to lead were victims of shootings.
At least six people were murdered and another 45 were wounded in shootings across the Chicagoland area over the weekend. This is down from the previous weekend, which saw at least 11 people killed and another 62 wounded.
It’s a possibility that shootings were slightly down over the previous weekend in light of the annual Lollapalooza music festival happening downtown.
Here are the names and ages of those who lost their lives over the weekend, according to the Chicago Sun-Times:
Jerome Jenkins, 26
Patrick Glasper, 27
Demarcus Reed, 27
In a separate article, the Sun-Times reported that the city only has a charged two percent of shooters that carried out what they consider a “mass shooting,” which is defined as a shooting involving four or more victims.
Only one person has been charged in any of the at least 39 mass shootings so far this year, according to a Sun-Times analysis of city data and court records.
That amounts to charges in just 2% of this year’s mass shootings — far below the police department’s dismal 13% clearance rate for shootings overall, which is the lowest of any big city in the nation.
Going back to 2016, the alleged shooters have been charged in just 21 of at least 212 mass shooting incidents — or less than 10% of the cases, the Sun-Times analysis found.Just two men have been convicted in those attacks, which through Friday night have wounded 1,032 people, 126 of them fatally, records show. Two of the other 21 people who have been charged were ultimately found not guilty, while another suspected shooter had his case dropped, records show.
As for the year-to-date totals for Chicago weekend shootings, 188 people have been murdered and another 1,041 have been wounded in Chicago in 2021. The Chicago Tribune, which keeps a tracker of all shooting victims in Chicago, still hasn’t updated their numbers in nearly a month, but reported that — as of July 7 — 2,021 people have been shot in Chicago this year. That number is 164 more than at the same point in 2020, which saw the second most shooting victims in the last 10 years of tracking data.