Chicago:
The United States celebrated Independence Day with parades, barbecues and fireworks, but in violence-plagued Chicago, 88 folks had been shot, 14 of them fatally.
The vacation weekend violence comes soon after improved media and police focus to the difficulty that has plagued Chicago all year, the nation’s third-biggest city which is on pace for more murders than the 774 recorded in 2020 — which was Chicago’s second deadliest year in the last two decades and more than New York and Los Angeles combined.
Holiday weekends generally are specifically deadly in Chicago, and for the reason that of that, members of Chicago’s City Council took the unprecedented step of grilling police superintendent David Brown for six hours on July 2 about police approaches.
Despite the meeting, 10 more folks had been shot than last weekend, when 78 had been shot, 10 fatally, across the city.
Last year 87 folks had been shot in Chicago, 17 fatally, more than a 4-day stretch that integrated July 4. That is a day more than this vacation weekend, so this year’s July 4 gun violence was worse.
Nationwide, there had been more than 400 shootings more than the July 4 weekend and at least 150 folks died, according to information collected by the Gun Violence Archive.
And along with 5 children who had been shot this weekend in Chicago, two police officers – a commander and a sergeant – had been also shot early Monday morning whilst attempting to disperse a crowd on Chicago’s West Side. They are recovering from non-life-threatening gunshot wounds.
Outside the hospital Monday, Brown offered updates on other Fourth of July shootings, like a 5-year-old girl shot Sunday afternoon and 4 other children shot more than the weekend in separate incidents.
“As we’ve seen too many times, tragically, someone else is being targeted and the unintended target, an innocent child, is struck,” Brown stated.
Fed up with gun violence, mothers and grandmothers in Austin, one of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods, went on a hunger strike and slept in a tent in the parking lot of an abandoned bank more than the Independence Day weekend.
The ladies, who ranged in age from 21 to 71, integrated Rosetta Dotson, 67, who lost 3 nephews to gun violence more than the years and Jackie Guider, 57, whose son Chavaris was fatally shot in the head by an armed robber on the streets of Chicago in 2016.
Sitting on chairs in a semi-circle in 90-degree heat on Saturday, the ladies prayed and talked about their neighborhood – Austin – which they like regardless of its reputation. For them, the only way the violence will cease is for the neighborhood to take action.
For mother and grandmother Jacqueline Reed, 71, issues have in no way been so harmful in Austin. The mother of 3 adult sons, Reed stated she did not worry for their security when they had been increasing up, but instances have changed.
“I was never afraid. They rode big wheels up and down the street and we didn’t have that fear that something bad would happen,” she stated.
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