Soros, Kass, Liberal Prosecutors, and the Battle for Transparency

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Real Clear Politics

In the first six months of this year, 329 people were killed in Chicago, most of them by firearms, only three at the hands of police. This death toll was a 34% increase over the first half of 2019. In one 24-hour span -- May 31, 2020 -- 18 Chicagoans lost their lives. According to the University of Chicago Crime Lab, it was the city’s single most violent day since it began collecting crime data in 1961.

“We’ve never seen anything like it at all,” Max Kapustin, senior research director at the lab, told the Chicago Sun-Times. But gunfire in the city is unabating: 16 Chicagoans were shot Thursday, July 24, three of them fatally, in a cycle of violence and suffering that  has continued all summer. As I write these words, there have been 440 homicides in Chicago so far in 2020. By the time this column is finished, edited, and published, that grim total will almost certainly be higher. More Windy City residents will be wounded as well: Non-fatal shootings in this first six months of the year increased by about 42% -- from 978 in 2019 to 1,384 in 2020.

Many of the injuries suffered in those shootings are grievous, and the victims exceedingly young: Among those wounded recently was an 8-year-old boy shot in the back. A 10-month girl was shotat 11:30 a.m. on July 27 while strapped in her car seat in a vehicle on the freeway. She was the fourth Chicago child under 10 fatally shot in a five-week span. “Here we are again, praying that this baby makes it through the night,” said Christopher Scott, who is active in of one Chicago’s anti-violence groups. “I’m in shock,” added the baby’s mother.

She’s hardly alone. The city’s cops feel under siege. Three were shot last week by a carjacking suspect being transported in a police vehicle to a police station. Privately, the police are also reeling. Ten Chicago officers have taken their own lives in the last two years. The most recent was Dion Boyd, who turned his gun on himself last week after 30 years on the force. Boyd had recently been promoted to deputy chief. Chicago’s top police official, David Brown, has been on the job for only three months. He has said he knew the Chicago job would be hard, but not this hard. He is, quite obviously, desperate for answers to the city’s murder wave.