Homicides in Chicago increased by 38 percent

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Mr. Emanuel listed safer streets among his top three priorities when he became mayor a year ago, but Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, is now testing that promise.

Chicago homicide rates

Is it time to call in the National Guard? According to The New York Times, homicides in Chicago have increased by 38 percent as New York & Los Angeles and other major cities have dropped. There is definitely a crisis going on, and it needs to be addressed.

As of June 17, 240 people had been killed there this year, mostly in shootings. 66 more deaths than occurred in the same period in 2011. The violence is affecting Chicago’s most impoverished neighborhoods in the South and West side. The majority of the killings have been tied to Chicago’s rapidly increasing gang warfare.

There is no evidence of a broader crime wave. In fact, measures of crime apart from homicides, including rapes, robberies, burglaries and auto thefts, have actually improved by about 10 percent since a year ago.

“We’ve got a gang issue, specific to parts of the city. We have a responsibility to bring a quality of life to those residents. And we are going to do it,” Mayor Emanuel, visibly vexed, said in an interview on Friday.

“My bigger issue is not only the homicides and shootings,” he added. “It’s what it does to all the legitimate citizens in that community and the kids.”

City gangs

Gangs in this city have changed over the decades. Splintering from a small set of well-established bands into hundreds of tinier groups with alliances so disparate and shifting that even a former Gangster Disciple member from the West Side, who refused to be named but revealed bullet scars during an interview as proof of his rougher days, said he could not begin to keep them all straight. In just the last two years, the police say, 500 monitored gang factions have fractured into more than 600, many of them with stunningly ready access to guns.