Chicago PD’s new Superintendent David Brown had a bad weekend. But not as bad as the 24 people who were killed over that span. While Chicago’s finest toiled at dealing with looters near Michigan Avenue, the criminals ignored all social distancing requirements and left a gruesome toll: two dozen dead and 66 wounded.
HeyJackass.com has the bloody toll including an extra-bloody Sunday that saw upwards of 45 people maimed in a single day.
Yes, the Windy City has a new police chief in David Brown. And yes, the new Chief said early on that he would move heaven and earth to keep homicides under 300 not only in 2020, but in subsequent years. But that was before the riots started.
WTTW covered the Chief’s optimism:
Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown has been on the job for about six weeks. He takes over at a time when homicides are up slightly over 2019 and a global pandemic has shuttered businesses and caused a spike in unemployment.
Still, Brown is optimistic. He’s aiming for the city’s homicide rate to fall below 300 a year — he calls it the moon shot. Over the years, many of his predecessors have vowed to bring that rate down, but it has persisted at about 400 to 500, spiking in 2016 to 756 as the city reeled from the release of the Laquan McDonald police shooting video.
As of this writing, the tally for the first five monts stands at 241, meaning Mr. Brown has room for just 59 more corpses at the morgue before the city blows right past that magical 300 number. And given that 14 homicides happened on Sunday alone(!), the Magic 8-ball says he will be lucky make it past the Independence Day weekend before reaching his arbitrary limit.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot hopes that Brown can deliver. Time will tell if her hopes lead to change, or if more failed city leadership will only lead to more deaths on Murder City, USA’s mean streets.