Gun violence continued to upend daily life in parts of Chicago Friday, when a shooting halted traffic on one of the city’s busiest freeways the day after 12 people were shot, five of them fatally, as part of a 52% rise in shooting incidents in the Windy City this year compared with last year.
$42 million. That’s how much President Trump, during this week’s visit to Kenosha, promised for public safety in Wisconsin, described as the “tipping point” state in the 2016 election, which Trump won by a narrow margin. He also promised $4 million for small businesses in Kenosha and $1 million for Kenosha law enforcement.
TOPLINE
Gun violence continued to upend daily life in parts of Chicago Friday, when a shooting halted traffic on one of the city’s busiest freeways the day after 12 people were shot, five of them fatally, as part of a 52% rise in shooting incidents in the Windy City this year compared with last year.
KEY FACTS
President Trump has repeatedly derided the nation’s third-largest city as a “disaster,” based in part on the rash of shootings that continued minutes into Friday when occupants of a car on the Dan Ryan Expressway on the city’s South Side were hit by shots fired from another car, according to the Chicago Tribune, which was quoting state police; one person was taken to the hospital in critical condition.
One of Thursday’s shooting victims was a male shot as he was riding a bicycle on the sidewalk on the North Side, not far from Lake Michigan, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, which quoted Chicago police; he was pronounced dead at Illinois Masonic Medical Center.
As of August 30, shooting incidents in Chicago were up 52% — to 2,152 — compared with the same period a year ago, according to the Chicago Police Department; the shootings are part of a wave of violence to hit major cities this year; according to the website Gun Violence Archive, there had been 12,239 gun deaths this year as of Thursday (not counting suicides); for all of 2019 the figure was 15,404.
The spike in shootings comes as protesters across the country march to decry police violence directed at people of color, and many push cities to reallocate some funding for law enforcement to support community services, which some activists say could lessen the need for police, particularly in cases involving mental health calls.
President Trump has made “law and order” a key pillar of his reelection campaign, offering vocal support of law enforcement, including on his visit this week to Kenosha, Wisconsin, just north of Chicago. That city of 100,000 was rocked by days of protests over the police shooting of a Black man, which was followed up by the shooting of three protesters, two of whom were killed, by an Illinois teen with pro-law enforcement social media profiles. Trump took the opportunity to heap praise — and funding — on local law enforcement and did not pass up an opportunity to blame the Democrats for problems in Chicago, adding: “We went to Chicago very recently. Obviously, that’s been a disaster, Chicago, total disaster.” Some political observers say the move is designed to win support among suburban women, where Trump’s support has been slipping. Amid reports of increased violence and as images of burning cities flash across the nightly news, support for the Black Lives Matter movement — a key proponent of redirecting police funding — is slipping. Voters’ favorable views of the Black Lives Matter movement dropped by 9 percentage points since June, including a 13-point dip among Republicans, according to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday. Veteran Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher told Politico slipping support for the Black Lives Matter movement is the “direct effect of the strategy of Donald Trump and Fox News.”
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