One week ago, the grisly violence we’ve grown to know Chicago for seemed to be down. Killings dipped to their lowest point the city has known since the 1960s. But those numbers and high hopes took a sharp change for the worse over this past weekend as 46 people were wounded, including eight who were fatally wounded.
Between Friday afternoon and Saturday, 13 people were shot, including one person who died. Then, between Saturday afternoon and Father’s Day (Sunday), reports show that at least 33 people were shot, six of them fatally, including one 16-year-old victim. One of the victims also included a victim, age 15, who was fatally wounded by police on Sunday night.
Last year at about the same time, there were 53 people shot, nine fatally in one weekend, per the Chicago Tribune. Officials also point to statistics which show the city’s violence as a whole is down compared to last year. Per an article published in the NY Times on June 11:
“So far in 2013, Chicago homicides, which outnumbered slayings in the larger cities of New York and Los Angeles last year, are down 34 percent from the same period in 2012. As of Sunday night, 146 people had been killed in Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city — 76 fewer than in the same stretch in 2012 and 16 fewer than in 2011, a year that was among the lowest for homicides during the same period in 50 years.”
Let’s hope it’s not another long summer for the Windy City.