It’s becoming increasingly clear that the leadership in places like Chicago, Portland, Seattle, New York City and Los Angeles don’t care about the people living in their cities. If they did, they wouldn’t be either defunding or contemplating defunding police at a time when violent crime is running rampant. It appears that the people can no longer put their confidence in their local government, which makes one wonder whether it’s time to defund the government instead of police.
Everything was unfortunately back to “normal” in the city of Chicago over the weekend, as at least five people were murdered and another 59 were wounded across the Chicagoland area. This is a sharp increase compared to the weekend before where at least four people were killed and another 36 were wounded in shootings.
In case you’re new to my weekly column about Chicago weekend shootings, we say the names of the dead here because their lives mattered too (Some information about victims have yet to be released by the coroner’s office:
Unidentified Male, Mid 20s
Tamyreon Jordan, 18
Jeremy Curry, 28
Charles L. McFee, 48
The Chicago Sun-Times also reported that among the wounded was a “12-year-old boy and six teenagers.”
As for the year-to-date numbers on weekend shooting victims, Chicago is now up to at least 201 people dead and 1,050 people wounded. For the third week in a row, the Chicago Tribune shooting tracker, which claims to keep a weekly count of all Chicago shooting victims regardless of the day of the week, hasn’t been updated. As a reminder, the Tribune’s numbers reported that 2,249 people had been shot, as of July 29. That is 695 more than the same point in 2019, and the second highest since 2012.
The downturn in weekend shootings, if you can even call it that, didn’t last long and it doesn’t seem that any amount of violence in major cities will prompt leadership to do anything substantial about it. The officers themselves can only do so much while political leadership continue to publicly display their lack of faith in police.
At this point, it appears that the unrest in major cities will only get way worse before it gets any better.