"18 Murders in 24 Hours: Inside the Most Violent Day in 60 Years in Chicago"

From the Chicago Sun Times (Tom Schuba, Sam Charles & Matthew Hendrickson):

The Rev. Michael Pfleger, a longtime crusader against gun violence who leads St. Sabina Church in Auburn Gresham, said it was "open season" last weekend in his neighborhood and others on the South and West sides.

"On Saturday and particularly Sunday, I heard people saying all over, 'Hey, there's no police anywhere, police ain't doing nothing,'" Pfleger said….

Most homicide victims in Chicago are young, black men, and the suspects are, too. But murders have fallen significantly in recent years, along with police-involved shootings. There were 764 murders and 12 fatal police-involved shootings in 2016, compared with 492 murders and three fatal police-involved shootings last year.

"The level of activity experienced over the last week has been unprecedented and the Department is actively investigating multiple incidents across the city and working to determine the motives in these cases," Chicago Police spokesman Thomas Ahern said in a statement….

The article doesn't break down the 18 victims by race, but the 8 victims whose photos were shown (and a 9th who was shot but survived) all appear to be black. Thanks to Gail Heriot's post at InstaPundit for the pointer.

Comments

[KevinP]

Just another day in a Progressive Paradise.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Also, just another day at a disaffected, stale, authoritarian, right-wing blog.

[Liberty Lover]

Yes, Chicago that Liberal left-wing paradise.

[MK Ultra]

Gotta make up for the lockdown months.

[Armchair Lawyer]

Sad, but true. And it will only get worse.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w27324

[PoxOnBothYourHouses]

An example: a story on Steven Pinker by Carl Zimmer (NYT, 2011):

-------
Steven Pinker was a 15-year-old anarchist. He didn’t think people needed a police force to keep the peace. Governments caused the very problems they were supposed to solve.

Besides, it was 1969, said Dr. Pinker, who is now a 57-year-old psychologist at Harvard. “If you weren’t an anarchist,” he said, “you couldn’t get a date.”

At the dinner table, he argued with his parents about human nature. “They said, ‘What would happen if there were no police?’ ” he recalled. “I said: ‘What would we do? Would we rob banks? Of course not. Police make no difference.’ ”

This was in Montreal, “a city that prided itself on civility and low rates of crime,” he said. Then, on Oct. 17, 1969, police officers and firefighters went on strike, and he had a chance to test his first hypothesis about human nature.

“All hell broke loose,” Dr. Pinker recalled. “Within a few hours there was looting. There were riots. There was arson. There were two murders. And this was in the morning that they called the strike.”

[AmosArch]

According to activist sources police kill 250 blacks per year. Most of the violent deaths are shootings and in almost all the shootings they have a weapon. There were about 9 unarmed black people shot in 2019

There are ~2500 black on black homicides according to FBI sources

Altogether assuming the worst case where every single one of the police deaths were completely unjustified thats 0.001% of black deaths per year. Priorities.

I guess all Black Lives Matter but some Black Lives Matter more than others.

[ThePublius]

Black lives only matter to BLM and progressives when they are killed by white people, for whatever reason. Like poor, innocent Michael "Hands up, don't shoot" Brown.

[Queen Amalthea]

Thousands of guns are stolen every year, but I imagine lots of people would be incensed if a dozen were taken wrongly from citizens by the police.

Likewise, lots of people stop or mock people praying, but I imagine a government official doing the same even if only in a dozen instances would spark quite the controversy.

[Doug Huffman]

See Hollywierdo activist Tom Arnold’s incitement to theft and violence

https://twitter.com/TomArnold/status/1269455538120568832

It is 0500, do you know where is your shotgun, where is your snowflake activist scion?

[rsteinmetz]

At one of the local protests a mother whose son was killed by police made an impassioned spheech about her son who didn't deserve to die because he had a good heart.

Trouble is he was killed in a shhotout with police.

[BillyG]

2500? You're low, ~6300.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3.xls

Also, I don't consider someone having a weapon to mean they should be shot. A pocket knife in a pocket is not a capitol offense, nor is a gun in a holster.

[librarian]

They need to put up cameras.

[Joe_dallas]

"The article doesn't break down the 18 victims by race, but the 8 victims whose photos were shown (and a 9th who was shot but survived) all appear to be black. "

most of the perps were also black.

Racial profiling based on the demographics of the perps remains valid policing policy.

[NToJ]

"most of the perps were also black.

Racial profiling based on the demographics of the perps remains valid policing policy."

What do you mean exactly? It's always proper to use the observable physical traits of the alleged perpetrators to sharpen the focus on potential suspects. For a murder investigation, if you think the cops should engage in "Racial profiling" how do you see that working, precisely? If the alleged perp (from eye witness accounts) is black, between the age of 20-35, male, and average height, it would be a pointless waste of resources for the cops to randomly stop black males between the age of 20-35 of average height, especially in areas with lots of black people (like Chicago).

Race itself cannot be probable cause in the absence of a description. See US v. Brignoni-Ponce. So what are you suggesting, exactly?

[rsteinmetz]

The embeded map has more pictures and the names of some unpictured suggest they were black plus a number were were hispanic and also possibly black. I'll leave it to others to dig for more detail.

[Commenter_XY]

You think maybe the Chicago PD is hanging back, just a little? I mean, in between the risk of the job, a nutjob Mayor, the riots, and people now screaming to defund the police....how exactly do you think the Chicago PD would react? Not surprising in the slightest.

I am sorry to see it and I don't like it, but I understand it. I cannot imagine what their professional lives are like right now.

[Sid Storch]

There’s a simple fix. If Rev. Arthur would just speak to these young men, assure them that they’re just as good as us ofay who tend not to kill each other, the resulting wave of self-esteem will lead to a reverence for books over guns.

[Kristian H.]

That’s different because shut up you racist!

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

This site has operated for

___0___

days without using a racial slur.

[ThePublius]

Prof. Volokh, some very basic fact checking on that article shows that it is seriously flawed. First, not all killings are murders, as lawyers well know. The numbers quoted are killings. Second, cherry picking the years 2016 and 2019 tells a false narrative; 2016 was an outlier year, with a much larger number of firearms related homicides than years on either side. Why pick 2016? To lie, that's why. 463/519, 496/591, 626/685, 722/808, 449/512, 391/464, 375/455, 441/514 are the numbers of shot and killed/total homicides for the years 2019 through 2012. My source is heyjackass.com, the leading popular "Illustrator of Chicago Values."

[Don Nico]

Obviously you don't like this year's data, so call the article flawed. Did you read it? The Sun-Times never was a right wing newspaper.
And have a look at https://graphics.suntimes.com/homicides/

[Rossami]

I don't know what you are complaining about. The thesis of the article is that a) this weekend's rate of killings was very high despite b) the recent downward trend (with recent defined as since 2016). The data you quote exactly confirm the article's claim that 2016 was the high and that killings have been declining since. And since 2017 was also high and 2018 was still above average, there's a strong argument that it was a trend and not a statistical artifact of a single outlier datapoint. (Unexplained, of course, is why the trend jumped up so sharply in 2016. But that's also not relevant to the current article.)

re: the difference between killings and homicides - While we should always be precise in our definitions, your own data shows that the distinction in this case is not especially relevant.

[Jerry B.]

I thought everyone knew by now that black lives only matter if they are blacks killed by police.

[Michael W. Towns]

mad_kalak: From your mouth to God's ears.

[librarian]

...yea, that will help.

https://voxeu.org/article/police-monitored-cameras-and-crime

[librarian]

..yea, that will help.

https://www.urban.org/research/publication/evaluating-use-public-surveillance-cameras-crime-control-and-prevention