Over 1,000 victims, 126 dead, just 2 convictions: 6 years of mass shootings in Chicagohttps://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2021/8/2/22559312/mass-shooting-victims-gun-violence-crime-cpd-police-department-clearance-murder-arrestIn both cases, there was a large number of witnesses and surviving victims, yet no arrests have been made. That is all too common in Chicago, where police say they do not prioritize the cases despite the especially harsh toll such shootings have on a community.
Only one person has been charged in any of the at least 39 mass shootings so far this year, according to a Sun-Times analysis of city data and court records.
That amounts to charges in just 2% of this year’s mass shootings — far below the police department’s dismal 13% clearance rate for shootings overall, which is the lowest of any big city in the nation.
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In an interview, Chief of Detectives Brendan Deenihan said many of the mass shootings in Chicago appear to stem from disputes or arguments, though he acknowledged some are clearly gang-related. Despite the increasing number of mass-victim events, Deenihan said they aren’t prioritized over other shootings.
“The detectives who are assigned to a mass shooting, and then if they’re assigned a shooting later on that week, they’re doing the same thing in order to solve that incident,” he said. “There aren’t any other different tools.”
He acknowledged, however, that investigating a mass shooting requires an “extraordinary” amount of time and more resources than other shootings. Detectives have to interview far more people, both victims and witnesses, and forensic technicians are needed to process sprawling crime scenes, often littered with dozens of bullets.
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The Chicago Police Department’s efforts to crack cases have long been hampered by its strained relationship with the communities ravaged by gun violence, areas that have been over-policed and are predominantly Black and Hispanic. In those areas, fear of gangs and distrust of police has created an atmosphere that discourages cooperation, or snitching, striking fear in residents who may otherwise help investigators.
The article is close to being Numbers-Porn, which kind of clouds a couple of things. First, CPD is treating murders as murders, whether a random one-on-one or a "mass shooting". Second is that where "mass shooting" murders require considerably more work, many witnesses are declining to cooperate. IMO, that latter point should have been the big focus, that resolving "mass shooting" murders is being frustrated by lack of witness cooperation.
