Chicago: Seven fatal shootings in one day, Trump threatens federal intervention
By
Alexander Fangmann
25 February 2017
Seven people were shot and killed on Wednesday, in what has so far been the deadliest day of 2017. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the city has recorded this many murders 21 times in the past 16 years, a rare but—appallingly—not unheard of occurrence. The last time it happened was Christmas Day of the past year.
According to counts by the Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune, there have been just under 100 murders in the first eight weeks of the year, an increase over the first eight weeks of 2016. The past year saw more murders than the city has seen in nearly two decades, with the number of murders increasing over 50 percent from 2015, to 762 from 496.
As with most of the city’s shooting deaths, the murders were concentrated in just a few of the most impoverished neighborhoods, in which gang violence is rampant. Six of seven were killed on the South Side, one of whom was a 20-year-old pregnant woman, while one, a 60-year-old man, was killed in the Little Village neighborhood on the West Side.
Reports of the violence led President Donald Trump to tweet: “Seven people shot and killed yesterday in Chicago. What is going on there – totally out of control. Chicago needs help!”
Since his campaign for president, Trump has made it a point to regularly comment on the violence in Chicago as part of a campaign to remove all constraints on police violence against the working class. During an interview last August on the O’Reilly Factor, Trump claimed to have met with a “top police officer in Chicago” and claimed that the violence could be solved by the police “being very much tougher than they are right now.”
At a campaign rally in September, he…