Chicago Has Brutally Violent Weekend

More than 60 are shot, and 10 are dead
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 6, 2018 6:21 AM CDT
Chicago Has Brutally Violent Weekend
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.   (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Chicago might have been making headlines this weekend for the thousands of people who packed downtown for Lollapalooza. Instead, most of the attention is focused on the shooting violence that occurred elsewhere in the city, leaving more than 60 injured and 10 dead between Friday evening and Monday morning, reports WLS-TV. The worst of it took place in a three-hour span starting around midnight Saturday when 30 people were shot, reports the Sun-Times. Of those victims, 25 were injured in five mass shootings. Police say gang violence is mostly to blame, with shooters taking advantage of large gatherings in the summer weather to inflict the most casualties. "If they shoot you, they don’t even run,” one man tells the Chicago Tribune. "They just walk away, they ain’t trying to run."

A police spokesman says the extra police presence at the music festival did not play a role in the violence because officers working it were generally on their regular days off and on OT. The violence prompted Rudy Giuliani to enter the fray with a series of tweets backing Garry McCarthy, a former Chicago police chief who hopes to unseat Mayor Rahm Emanuel. "MAKE CHICAGO SAFE AGAIN!" tweeted Giuliani, who worked with McCarthy in New York when Giuliani was mayor. Giuliani called McCarthy a "policing genius" thanks to his work with the data-centric CompStat system, adding, "Chicago murders are direct result of one party Democratic rule for decades." The Washington Post can't resist pointing out that Giuliani misspelled McCarthy's first name as "Jerry" and the current mayor's last name as "Emmanuel," and that McCarthy is a Democrat himself. (More Chicago stories.)

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