Homicides surge 50% in Chicago, 20% in US in 2020
Ramin Mazaheri
Press TV, Chicago
Another weekend in Chicago, the third-largest city in the United States, and another 40 people got shot. It stopped making front page news years, if not decades ago.
New data shows the situation has actually gotten worse this year. The Great Lockdown has created a massive increase in poverty, unemployment, societal disengagement and homicide. In Chicago, murders are up a whopping 52% compared with last year, while shootings are up 47%.
But scientifically citing mathematical growth rates can easily obscure the reality that this year there have been an average nine different acts of gun violence every single day in Chicago alone.
Like many American cities, especially in the north, Chicago is highly segregated racially: 95% of Chicago’s victims this year are non-White. Conservatives try to pin all America’s crime problems entirely on gangs, but many wonder why local police consistently refuse to provide security in poor areas, and also say the problem is endemic structural poverty to begin with.
For decades America’s lower classes, and especially non-Whites, have seen so much human potential go wasted.
Chicago’s homicide rate per 100,000 people is higher than in war-torn Afghanistan and equal to that of Mexico, but ranks just 25th in the nation. If American cities St. Louis, Baltimore and Detroit were separate nations, they would classify as three of the top six deadliest countries in the world.
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