Chicago's gun violence murder rate eclipses New York's, despite the Big Apple having three times as many people as the Windy City,443 people were shot dead in 2012, with 65 of them being 18 or younger. 'That’s the equivalent of a Newtown every four months,' President Obama said during a recent visit to the city. The frustrated populace is at the mercy of uneasy truces between gangs and an easily accessible flow of guns found in neighboring cities, and is struggling to survive.Originally Posted by PLOL
Bet me $10,000 Chicago doesn't even have a top 10 murder rate
BY RICH SCHAPIRO NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Published: Sunday, February 24, 2013, 2:00 AM,CHICAGO — It was seen as a moment of hope for this blood-soaked city.
Nine days ago, President Obama swept into town and delivered a nationally televised speech decrying the gun violence stealing the lives of Chicago’s children.
Some 443 people had been shot dead in 2012. Sixty-five of those were 18 or younger.
“That’s the equivalent of a Newtown every four months,” Obama said, referencing the Connecticut school shooting that left 20 children dead.
Frances Colon, a high school senior who dreamed of becoming a lawyer, watched the speech at home seated on a mustard-yellow couch beside her father, Jose.
Two of Colon’s classmates had been killed in the past two months. The 18-year-old listened to the President with rapt attention — and left the couch feeling upbeat.
“Papi, it’s a good thing they’re doing something about this gun thing,” she said to her dad.
Six hours later, Colon was dead.
The ambitious teen was shot in the back in the hardscrabble Humboldt Park neighborhood, an innocent bystander caught in a drug dispute, police said.
Before the night had ended, a second Chicago schoolgirl was shot and killed.
Frances Colon
AARON SHOWALTER/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Frances Colon was an innocent bystander who was shot and killed by gunfire that came from a drug dispute.
“It’s always the ones that want to do something with their lives,” Colon’s mother, Dorothy Payton, told the Daily News. “She wanted to be a lawyer. She was going to be a lawyer. There was no doubt about it.”
“When’s all this shooting gonna stop?” fumed Payton, a 46-year-old nurse. “She should be in school right now. She shouldn’t be sitting in no damn freezer.”
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That two Chicagoans were gunned down hours after the President’s speech is hardly surprising. This windswept city along the banks of Lake Michigan is grappling with an epidemic of gun violence.
A shocking 506 people were murdered in Chicago last year. That’s 87 more slayings than in New York City, which has three times as many residents.
As the number of murders in Chicago skyrocketed last year, New York City recorded the lowest murder rate of any big city in the country.
Law enforcement experts credit a wide range of strategies that include deploying more officers in crime-ridden areas and the controversial stop-and-frisk tactic. Improbably, the steep drop in crime came despite the NYPD having 6,000 fewer officers than a decade ago.
And 2013 has gotten off to an equally bloody start in Chicago. As of Thursday, the city had recorded 54 murders, compared to 36 in New York.
A seeming endless flow of guns flood into the city’s gang-ruled neighborhoods. And due to light sentencing guidelines, it’s not uncommon for someone arrested for a serious gun crime to serve as little as a few months behind bars.
Dorothy Payton, mother of Frances Colon, who was shot and killed Friday, Feb. 15, 2013 in Chicago, talks with the Daily News about her daughter's death and the lack of action towards local gun violence by local officials.
AARON SHOWALTER/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Dorothy Payton, mother of Frances Colon, said there was a lack of action toward local gun violence by local officials.
The murders happen with such startling frequency that young people living in tough neighborhoods find themselves attending as many as five funerals a month.
“I know about 10 people who have been killed already this year — two months, 10 people,” said Calvin White, 17, a student at Roberto Clemente High, the school that Colon attended.
“Chicago is a battlefield.”
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The neighborhood where Colon took her final steps is located along Chicago’s West Side, one of the city’s deadliest places. Boarded-up houses line the blocks. Iron bars reaching 10 feet into the air ring the scattered bodegas and liquor stores.
A half-block from Colon’s murder scene, an ominous greeting is scrawled on a gate outside the Pulaski Mini Mart.
“Welcome 2 Glocktown,” it reads.
Owner Mike Khasawneh doles out chips and cigarettes from behind a wall of bulletproof Plexiglas that cost him $4,000.
A Jordanian immigrant, Khasawneh bought the store seven months ago, unaware it was located in a war zone. He’s already put it up for sale, but has found no buyers.
Police investigate a fatal shooting at S. Champlain Ave. and E. 74th St. in Chicago in January. There were 54 murders in the city as of this past Thursday.Photo by Chicago Sun-Times
ANDREW A. NELLES/SUN-TIMES MEDIA
Police investigate a fatal shooting at S. Champlain Ave. and E. 74th St. in Chicago in January. There were 54 murders in the city as of this past Thurs., Feb. 21, 2013.
“I want to save my life,” Khasawneh, 65, said. “Somebody shoots someone every couple of days around here.”
The violence is just as fierce on Chicago’s South Side, where rival gangs lord over the Englewood and Auburn-Crenshaw neighborhoods.
Curtis Toler, a 35-year-old ex-gang member turned peacemaker, walks along E. 79th St. with other members of CeaseFire Illinois looking to diffuse tensions before they turn violent.
During a tour of the neighborhood, he casually points out the places where murders have recently taken place. Walking west, Toler takes a Daily News reporter and photographer to the shuttered bodega where Miami Heat star Dwyane Wade’s 20-year-old nephew, Darin Johnson, and five others were shot, one fatally.
Toler said he works with the gang members to set up “safety zones,” places where shootings are off-limits.
“If someone’s near a church, or walking with his mom, he gets a pass,” said Toler, who was shot six times during his youth. “We try to set up certain rules of engagement.”
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The bloodshed isn’t new. Violence has scarred this city since the 1920s, when Al Capone ruled the streets.
But while murders have tailed off in other big cities like New York, Chicago’s murder rate hit its highest mark last year since 2008.
Rev. Michael Pfleger, of Saint Sabina's Catholic Church in Chicago, has played a key role in the effort to bring peace between the city's rival gangs and decrease the gun violence that has become so common in the city.
AARON SHOWALTER/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Rev. Michael Pfleger, of Saint Sabina's Catholic Church in Chicago, has played a key role in the effort to bring peace between the city's rival gangs and decrease the gun violence that has become so common in the city.
Experts attribute the uptick to a trifecta of trouble: a recession-battered economy, gangs and easy access to guns.
A cluster of gangs — the Latin Kings, the Gangster Disciples and the Blackstone Rangers, among others — has long dominated Chicago’s streets.
But over the past decade, the police have been successful in dismantling the top layers of these drug-selling organizations, which has led to unintended consequences.
“The good thing is you don’t have a massive structure of organized crime,” said Harold Pollack, co-director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. “The bad thing is you now have a massive structure of disorganized and fragmented crime.”
“They’re fighting over small pieces of territory, and you don’t have a hierarchical structure that in some cases can constrain the random violence,” Pollack added.
The rise of social media has fueled the bloodshed as well, experts say. Rival gang members regularly taunt each other on YouTube and Facebook, with the online beefs often escalating into street gun battles.
The Chicago police seized more than 7,400 guns in 2012 — roughly three times more than cops in New York.
Many of the firearms are coming from an unlikely spot — a hole-in-the-wall gun shop within a few miles of the Chicago city limits.
Between 2008 and March 2012, nearly 20% of the 1,375 guns recovered in crimes were bought at Chuck’s Gun Shop in nearby Riverdale.
18-year-old Janay McFarlane (pictured here in a photo from 2011) was found shot to death Friday, Feb. 15 in a North Chicago alley. President Obama ironically spoke at her younger sister Destiny's school earlier in the day about gun violence.
AARON SHOWALTER/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
18-year-old Janay McFarlane (pictured here in a photo from 2011) was found shot to death Fri., Feb. 15, in a North Chicago alley.
Chuck’s is run out of a two-story red-brick building that sits on a shabby block about a mile from an abandoned housing complex.
“We don’t speak to reporters,” said a female staffer when approached by The News.
Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez has been fighting an uphill battle to strengthen the state’s lax gun laws.
Alvarez has joined Mayor Emanuel’s push to increase the mandatory minimum sentence for serious gun crimes from one to three years. It’s 3-1/2 years in New York.
The laws deterring straw buyers are similarly flimsy. To stop people from buying guns for gangbangers, Chicago requires firearms owners to report lost or stolen weapons.
But there are no laws in place requiring gun owners outside the city to do the same, so anyone wishing to ferry weapons to Chicago gang members has little to fear.
“If you think about it, it’s common sense,” said Alvarez. “You report your car stolen, your bike, but you don’t have to report a gun that’s stolen?”
Alvarez described Chicago’s murder count last year as “embarrassing” — and conceded that stemming the violence will take more than stiffer laws.
“I think everybody’s looking for that magic wand, but it doesn’t exist,” said Alvarez.
18-year-old Janay McFarlane was found shot to death Friday, Feb. 15 in a North Chicago alley. President Obama ironically spoke at her younger sister Destiny's (pictured, right) school earlier in the day about gun violence.
AARON SHOWALTER/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
The daughter of Angela Blakely (seated), Janay McFarlane, was shot and killed on Feb. 15. Ironically, President Obama spoke at the school of her younger daughter, Destiny (standing), earlier in the day about gun violence.
The Rev. Michael Pfleger agrees.
Pfleger has spent the past decade crusading for an end to the violence wreaking havoc around his South Side church.
Last summer, Pfleger succeeded in convincing the four major gangs in his area to participate in a basketball tournament.
A roster of NBA stars, including the Chicago Bulls’ Derrick Rose, attended the Peace Tournament, and the Nation of Islam provided security.
“That whole walking-on-water thing that Jesus did was nothing compared to what I saw happen on that day,” Pfleger said.
Since then, a fragile truce between the gangs has taken hold, but Pfleger says he knows there’s still much to be done to end the cycle of violence.
“My job with the brothers in the streets is not just to stop them from shooting,” said the prominent pastor, whose adopted son, Jarvis, was shot dead in 1998. “My job is to dust off their dreams and help them reach their future.”
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Despite the relative peace in Pfleger’s neighborhood, bullets have continued whizzing through the streets elsewhere in Chicago.
The remnants of a memorial for 18-year-old Janay McFarlane, who was found shot to death Friday, Feb. 15 in a North Chicago alley, remained Tuesday night, Feb. 19. President Obama ironically spoke at her younger sister Destiny's school earlier in the day about gun violence.
AARON SHOWALTER/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
The remnants of a memorial for 18-year-old Janay McFarlane.
In late January, one of those bullets struck the head of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old honor student and majorette who performed at Obama’s inauguration a few days earlier.
Pendleton was among a group of teens taking cover from the rain under a park canopy when a gang member jumped a fence and opened fire.
In his Feb. 15 speech at the Hyde Park Academy High School, Obama invoked Pendleton’s death as he called for stricter gun laws.
Destini Warren, 14, was standing two rows behind Obama that day. She had a doctor’s physical scheduled that same day, but persuaded her mom to cancel it so that she could hear the President.
“I liked how his speech related to what was actually going on here,” Destini said.
At 11:30 p.m. that night, Destini was in her room, watching the TV show “Martin,” when her father rushed in.
Her 18-year-old sister, Janay McFarlane, had been shot and killed in a North Chicago alley.
McFarlane, a high school senior who had a 4-month-old son, was not the target of the gunfire, police said.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Destini told The News. “I would never think it would happen to her.”
Fighting back tears, Janay’s mother, Angela Blakely, struggled to keep her composure as she spoke of her daughter’s dream of becoming a chef.
“It’s just so senseless,” said Blakely, 42, glancing at Destini. “Because there’s so much gun violence, what do children nowadays have to look forward to?”
rsschapiro@nydailynews.com
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