Chicago reeling after bloody weekend
An evidence marker sits on the ground next to where a 17-year-old boy was fatally shot in the abdomen Sunday while riding his bike.
— President Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff — and decades of “one-party Democratic rule” in a series of tweets Sunday and Monday.
The former New York mayor also tweeted his support for Chicago mayoral candidate and former Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, referring to him as “Jerry” and calling him a “policing genius.”
McCarthy plans to run in February against Emanuel, who fired McCarthy in 2015 after the release of dash-cam video that showed a white police officer kill a black teenager by shooting him 16 times.
Misspelling Emanuel’s last name, Giuliani tweeted: “He can do a lot better than Mayor Emmanuel who is fiddling while Chicago burns.” Giuliani also falsely claimed that Chicago had “63 murders this weekend.”
The mayor had no immediate comment on Giuliani’s attacks.
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, right, with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, speak at a news conference Monday.
In a statement, McCarthy called himself a “proud Democrat” and distanced himself from Giuliani’s views and “the misguided, divisive tone and policies of Donald Trump.”
But McCarthy said the blame for the bloodshed “lies squarely with Rahm Emanuel’s weak leadership and failed policies.”
Most of the shootings happened in poor neighborhoods on the West and South sides where gangs are entrenched, said Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, standing next to the mayor.
Johnson noted that homicides in the city are down about 20 percent from last year. But he said gang members and others arrested on gun charges aren’t dealt with harshly enough.
“It is the same people who are pulling the triggers,” he said. “This is a small subset of individuals who think they can play by their own rules because they continue to get a slap on the wrist when we arrest them.”
Johnson said at the morning news conference that there had not been any arrests in the weekend shootings.
Days before the attacks, some 200 protesters marched through a well-to-do North Side neighborhood and briefly closed Lake Shore Drive, calling for more resources to stem violence in poor areas.
Tio Hardiman, one of the organizers of last week’s rally, said members of the black community need to take the initiative by mediating truces between gangs.
Chicago ended 2017 with 650 homicides, down from 771 the year before. Still, last year’s total exceeded the combined number of killings in New York and Los Angeles, the two U.S. cities bigger than Chicago.