Will there be any protests?
The day surpasses August 4th, 1991, when 13 people were killed. The University of Chicago Crime Lab can’t locate a day in the city’s history with more murders dating back to 1961.
Several of the murder victims were promising young people who appear to have been killed in little more than senseless arguments. Reporting from the Chicago Sun Times describes some of the deceased as high school students, a working-class father, and a college freshman who was gunned down after a petty argument at a bus stop.
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Longtime gun control activist Rev. Michael Pfleger, a Catholic priest in Chicago, admitted that the city’s police department appeared to have largely given up on containing and deterring crime as widespread looting and violence spread throughout the city.
“On Saturday and particularly Sunday, I heard people saying all over, ‘Hey, there’s no police anywhere, police ain’t doing nothing,” said the liberal priest. “I sat and watched a store looted for over an hour. No police came. I got in my car and drove around to some other places getting looted [and] didn’t see police anywhere.”
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot also revealed that the Chicago had received more than 65,000 911 calls over the weekend, a figure higher by an order of magnitude over the normal weekend 911 calls, which are usually around 15,000. However, the Mayor seems more concerned with condemning community members who peacefully band together to stop crime than with the ineptitude of the police.
The weekend broadly was the most violent this year in Chicago, with a grand total of 27 shooting deaths and 92 shootings.
Although Chicago sustained some of the most severe looting and violence in the country that weekend, it appears unlikely that they’ll be any serious protests for the 18 residents of the city murdered on Sunday.