Chicago: Police Have Made No Arrests for Weekend’s 70-Plus Shooting Victims

Chicago police have made no arrests for the weekend’s 70-plus shooting victims as witnesses to the incidents refuse to come forward.

On August 6, Breitbart News reported on the violent weekend, noting that 11 of the 70-plus shooting victims died.

USA Today reports that witnesses are refusing to come forward to name suspects in the shootings. In fact, wounded shooting victims are refusing to speak as well.

This silence was modeled by 23-year-old Romell Young, a young man who was shot after a fist fight in Chicago earlier in the year. When police approached Young in the hospital and asked him about the gunman he refused to give details. And when asked by news outlets he remained mum, saying only, “I believe karma is (vengeful), you feel me?”

Following last weekend’s violence with no arrests, Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) and Chicago Police Superintendent responded to the dearth of witnesses by pleading with people to tell police what they know. Johnson said, “You all know who these individuals are, they come into your homes every day, sleep with you every night. Grandparents, parents, siblings, significant others — you know who they are.”

The silence from witnesses contributes to the fact that the Chicago Police Department “has solved far fewer murders over the last several years compared to most other major departments around the country.” In 2016 they were only able to make arrests or at least identify the suspect in 26 percent of the cases they investigated. And 2016 was a bloody year, with nearly 800 homicides in the Windy City.

In 2017 there were 650 murders, yet the Chicago Sun-Times reports that police only made an arrest or at least identified a suspect in 17.5 percent of the cases.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.