Violence persists despite Chicago’s progress
49 people are shot over holiday weekend
The grim tally of 49 shot over Memorial Day weekend, historically one of the most violent times of the year here, is oddly the latest sign the city may be turning a corner in the fight against gun violence.
Five people were killed and 44 wounded in shootings between Friday evening and Monday night. Last year, seven were killed and 61 were injured.
The decrease highlights the slow progress police say they’ve made in the first five months of the year to reduce Chicago’s stubbornly high murder rate through technology that helps commanders better deploy street cops.
As of Tuesday morning, Chicago had recorded 235 murders this year, compared with 244 for the same time period in 2016. Shootings have dropped more significantly to 1,047 compared with 1,222 last year, according to police department data.
Perhaps most notably, the largest drops in the number of shootings have occurred in two of the city’s historically most violent districts, where the department opened its first data-driven nerve centers in January. The centers use video, sensors and other technology to help officers more quickly respond to shootings and help predict where the next incident might occur.
A West side district where the pilot program was deployed tallied 23 murders compared with 33 at the same point last year, and 112 shootings compared with 182. In a South Side district that also uses the technology, the number of murders dropped to 21 from 27, and shootings decreased to 83 from 116 compared with the same point last year, police say.
“While that’s not a declaration of victory, it’s certainly progress in the right direction,” First Dep- uty Superintendent Kevin Navarro said Tuesday as he announced the opening of a third center.
The vast majority of the 762 murders and more than 4,000 shootings in Chicago last year occurred in a few predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods on the city’s West and South Sides and were driven by gang-related feuds and drug wars.
The technological surge includes an expansion of ShotSpotter technology — sensors that several big-city police departments use to help detect gunfire — and increases the number of remote-controlled police cameras in the pilot areas by 25%. The data from sensors and remote videos are immediately accessible to officers on the streets using smartphones. The department found ShotSpotter sensors, on average, detect shootings five minutes ahead of when dispatchers first receive citizen reports.
Officers staff the newly created nerve centers around the clock and use HunchLab — a Webbased system that crunches information on arrests, calls for service, gang activity, weather and other data — to create prediction models of where the next violent incident might occur.
The police department plans to launch three more nerve centers, officially called Strategic Decision Support Centers, in the months ahead. The tech surge comes as the department is hiring nearly 1,000 additional officers in two years, which would bring the force to 13,500 officers.