Chicago close to recording 600th homicide of year

CHICAGO — Chicago is close to recording its 600th homicide for the year, only the second time the city will have reached the grim milestone since 2003, according to data kept by the Chicago Tribune.

After a weekend when 30 were people shot, five of them fatally, the number of homicides stands at 593 this year, according to the Tribune’s database.

That’s below the 681 homicides this time last year but substantially above other recent years.

Last year saw gun violence at levels not recorded since the late 1990s. This year has not been as bad, but the last time the city hit 600 homicides was 2003, and that was for the entire year, according to statistics kept by the Chicago Police Department.

The Chicago Police Department’s count of homicides this year is 581 because, unlike the Tribune, it does not count homicides on expressways as well as fatal shootings by police officers and homicides considered justified.

Shootings have shown the same trend: This year trails last year but not other recent years. Nearly 3,200 people have been shot so far in 2017, down from the roughly 3,800 shot this time last year. That”s compared with 2,609 at this time in 2015, 2,208 in 2014, 1,923 in 2013 and 2,162 in 2012, according to Tribune data.

Among those shot over this past weekend was a 14-year-old boy, who was grazed in the right foot and leg on Saturday afternoon. He and a 22-year-old man were fired at from a black sedan in the West Side”s Heart of Italy neighborhood.