It is sick out there and getting sicker. Chicagoans are living in a war zone. Over half the population has witnessed a shooting by age 40. The average age of the witnesses is 14. The average age for being shot is 17.
Of those young people who were surveyed, 7% of blacks, 7% of Hispanics, and 3% of whites were themselves shot. This indicates that while so-called “black-on-black” crime may be at a higher level, a pathological percentage of young people are being subjected to the hail of bullets that has become a way of life in the Windy City.
The data is drawn from a long-term study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Open Source. The team was led by a criminologist from Cambridge University along with researchers from Harvard and Oxford. The study began 25 years ago, and the sample size is about 2,000 young people.
The racial and sexual breakdown of violence in this once great “Second City” of the United States matches familiar patterns in law enforcement. Women are less likely than men to have seen the violence, with 43% of women and 58% of men having witnessed shootings. If you break the numbers down by race, 56% of lacks and Hispanics and 25% of whites are likely to have witnessed at least one gunshot incident.
“We expected levels of exposure to gun violence to be high, but not this high. Our findings are frankly startling and disturbing,” said Dr. Charles Lanfear of the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology. “A substantial portion of Chicago’s population could be living with trauma as a result of witnessing shootings and homicides, often at a very young age.”
“The study participants are taken from right across Chicago, and only a tiny fraction will be involved in any kind of crime,” said Lanfear. “Given the levels of women and children witnessing gun violence in the city, the vast majority of this exposure will be as bystanders in public spaces, in streets, or outside schools. The public health consequences of life in violent and traumatized neighborhoods will be playing out not just in Chicago, but in many cities right across the United States,” Lanfear said.
According to the Cambridge University report, “Researchers also compared the locations of gun violence incidents in the year leading up to recent study interviews in 2021. Rates of shootings within a 250-meter radius of the homes of Black participants were more than 12 times higher than those of White participants. Rates of shootings near the homes of Hispanic people were almost four times higher than for White people.”
In comments to the Chicago Sun-Times, Matt Richards, the Department of Health’s deputy commissioner, said, “Gun violence is an essential public health issue because the impacts are felt in a domino effect across a community.”
The bottom line is that in many sections of Chicago, Post Traumatic Stress syndrome has become a way of life. And while all the talk of health, race, and gender may have an academic interest, it is criminal behavior that is driving the problem. Sherlock Holmes didn’t turn his caseload over to Dr. Watson to heal the problem. He turned criminals over to the long arm of the law to bring the miscreants to justice and restore the tranquility of order.
In this case, it means turning them over to Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, whose murder clearance race, in spite of trying to pad her numbers, is abysmal. Chicago Police Supt. David Brown said 400 murders are considered “cleared” in 2021, a 19-year high. That is over 50% of the 797 homicides last year. But when the Chicago Sun-Times dug into the numbers, they found that “199 of those cases were closed ‘exceptionally,’ which means no one was charged. And one in seven cleared cases involved a murder committed more than 10 years ago. In all, CPD [Chicago Police Department] actually made arrests in fewer murder cases than in 2020, when 209 people were charged.”
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So in only about 25% of last year’s murders was someone even charged. This means you have 75% odds of getting away with murder in Chicago. In that kind of lawless world, it is little surprise your odds of seeing someone shot by the age of 40 is 50%, even money, 1-1. What is amazing, given those odds, is how few people Kim Foxx is able to bring to justice. How many witnesses to a shooting does a prosecutor need to make a case?
Until justice is served, there is little incentive for criminals to change. As long as weak punks pretending to be men continue their gunplay without consequences, a new generation of PTS, shooting, and murder victims will be subject to this hell. The trail of tears running into the Chicago River from this heart of the wild, wild Midwest will continue until someone in the justice system develops the backbone and skills to punish the thugs and end the pattern of intergenerational violence.
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