Over a 48-hour period last weekend, three shootings erupted within a mile of one another in Chicago’s downtown area, leaving two people dead. During that same time, some 17 other people were shot around the city, most of them in neighborhoods where a higher level of violence is more commonly experienced.
Yet it was the shootings downtown, one outside a major theater that canceled its evening performance, that captured most of the attention from the media and city leaders, including Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who had to address the violence Monday at an unrelated news conference and who surely will face more scrutiny as the mayoral race heats up.
Police leaders also had to answer for the spate of violence, quickly announcing they’d be deploying more resources downtown.
Experts said the outsize attention to downtown happens for a variety of reasons.
It’s the economic engine of the city, generating millions in tax revenue and tourism dollars. And the additional violence downtown strains resources in a police department that is struggling to address decades of consistently higher rates of violence in Chicago’s neighborhoods.
Downtown is also the civic heartbeat of the city, a place where Chicagoans from Rogers Park to Roseland come together for concerts, to hit the beach, spread out on a lawn for a picnic, gaze into the mirrored “Bean” or splash in the fountain at Millennium Park.
“Chicagoans feel like they own the Loop,” said Bill Savage, who has taught Chicago literature and culture for 30 years at Northwestern University. “If the center of our city experiences this kind of violence, it hits everybody in a way. If it’s happening in the Loop, it is about you.”
So far this year, gun violence — both homicides and nonfatal shootings — is declining, welcome news in a city battered by a 60% increase in shootings over a two-year period in 2020 and 2021.
But the recent headlines about downtown trouble have served as yet another reminder of how entrenched the gun violence problem is here, and how it is touching all parts of the city including Chicago’s glittering center.
The number of shootings around the downtown area has in fact increased in recent years, and as of last week, 19 people had been shot combined in the Near North and Loop communities, compared with eight last year.
The citywide violence has already led to pledges from mayoral candidates to remove Chicago police Superintendent David Brown if they are elected, with those Lightfoot opponents citing a lack of strategy to address the violence.
Brown was hired amid a historic pandemic that shut down programming and services citywide. It was also a time when trust in policing plummeted across America in the wake of the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. Criminologists will be studying the lasting impacts of those events, but some said there is a sense that the stress of a pandemic combined with the increased scrutiny on police could have played a role in the spiking gun violence.
Still, Brown and the Chicago Police Department have faced repeated criticism from aldermen, a level of concern that is only amplified when gunfire rings out downtown.
And it is not shootings alone that worry some leaders and the business community. There have long been concerns about clashes and disturbances among the large groups of young people who gather downtown on weekends.
Chicago police did not provide specific details about the response downtown. The mayor’s office referred the Tribune to Lightfoot’s Monday news conference, in which she said downtown would be getting more resources and deflected questions about her potential reelection campaign.
Lightfoot spoke about the difficult task…
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