Well, there’s good news and bad news for the city of Chicago. The good news is that the Chicago Police Department (CPD) reported that the city has seen a drop in total shootings and murders from last year. The bad news is that this Labor Day weekend saw twice as many people murdered as in 2018.
Three-day holiday weekends are usually a time to have fun, hang out with family and friends, and maybe have a little barbecue. Unfortunately, eight people were murdered and another 35 were wounded in shootings across the Chicagoland area over the extended weekend. This is a stark increase over 2018’s Labor Day weekend, where four people were shot and killed and another 23 were wounded in shootings.
Here’s an example of the violence, according to the Chicago Sun-Times:
On Sunday, a 15-year-old boy was shot and killed in Austin on the West Side.
Officers responded to a ShotSpotter alert about 2:19 a.m. and found Dovantae Jackson in the 5100 block of West Washington Boulevard with gunshot wounds to the leg and back, Chicago police and the Cook County medical examiner’s office said.
He was pronounced dead on the scene, police said. He lived in the same block where he was shot.
While a rise in shootings during a holiday weekend is unacceptable, the CPD are touting new numbers that they’ve released that indicate not only that the numbers for this August were down compared to 2018, but that compared to last year at this time, shootings numbers for 2019 have seen a double-digit percentage drop.
The Sun-Times noted that the CPD reported the number of murders in 2019 have seen a 14 percent decline as compared to the same time in 2018, while “showing a 12 percent decrease” in the total number of shootings.
As for the recently ended month of August, the CPD reported a 23 percent reliance in murders and 19 percent decrease in the total number of shootings.
On another positive note, CPD reported that they’ve seized “7,500 illegal guns” in 2019.
MRCTV’s running tally since Memorial Day weekend is now up to at least 643 shooting victims, with 83 of those victims dying as a result of their wounds. Judging by those numbers alone, nearly 13 percent of all weekend shooting victims since Memorial Day weekend have been murdered.
Not all is negative in the city of Chicago, but extended holiday weekends still have their drawbacks in certain areas of the Windy City.
For a brief recap of this past weekend's violence, watch below: