Armed with an assault rifle, assailants indiscriminately sprayed a crowded Chicago park with bullets during a neighborhood basketball game. Among 13 people wounded during the apparent gang shooting was a 3-year-old boy, who was struck in the face.
Thursday night’s attack occurred between areas police have flooded with officers, demonstrating the difficulty of trying to contain all of the city’s gang hotspots. It also reignited outrage over the toll of Chicago’s gun violence, the perpetrators’ disregard for those caught in the crossfire and the inability of even stepped-up police action to prevent such setbacks.
On Friday, residents grappling for answers decried the invasion of drugs and a lack of local leaders; prominent rap artist Common said more must be done to understand the city’s youth; and a frustrated police chief again called for tougher gun laws.
“We can do a lot of really good policing. … We can reduce crime, like we’re doing, but we’re not going to have success occur as long as these guns keep flowing into our community,” police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said during a news conference.
“Illegal guns, illegal guns, illegal guns drive violence,” he said as he called on lawmakers to toughen the nation’s gun laws.
The recent shooting happened shortly after 10 p.m. in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, on the city’s southwest side, in Cornell Square Park, which was crowded with people watching a neighborhood basketball game and enjoying a warm late-summer night.
The assailants used a 7.62 mm rifle fed by a high-capacity magazine, a type of weapon that belongs on a “battlefield, not on the street or a corner or a park in the Back of the Yards,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy said officers were “interviewing a number of people,” but there was no one whom he would describe as being in police custody.
Among those hit was 3-year-old Deonta Howard, who was shot in the face, and two teenagers, 15 and 17.
Deonta was alert when he arrived at the hospital and was apparently doing well, his family and friends said early Friday. He was in critical condition, as were two other shooting victims. The others were in serious or fair condition when taken to hospitals, according to the Chicago Fire Department; hospital officials declined to provide updates Friday evening.
In response to a surge in violence last year, the police department stepped up its crime-fighting efforts, including paying overtime to add patrols to some neighborhoods, including the Back of the Yards. Through the first six months of 2013, the department had spent more than $57 million on overtime for officers, more than half of it from a program that saturates dangerous neighborhoods with hundreds of officers every night.
The park where the shooting took place slipped through the cracks. Police said they had “impact zones,” with intensified patrols, three blocks north and three blocks south of the park.
But police were well aware that the area was what McCarthy called “a high-gang conflict zone.” Some of the victims were gang members, McCarthy said, but detectives were not clear on the intended target.
Violent crime is down this year in Chicago compared with 2012, when homicides surged past 500 for the first time since 2008.
The hip hop artist Common, a Chicago native who has spoken eloquently about his hometown’s violence, said the city needs to better understand its young people and be more consistent in its efforts to help them. Speaking at a city-sponsored summit aimed at helping local musicians develop their careers, he noted that while the violence remains a problem, so does increasing poverty and other hardships that families face.
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“It makes me think I got to do more, we got to do more,” said Common, who has a foundation that helps expose disadvantaged young people to the creative arts. “Young people, we have to meet them where they are. Some of them may not be in a place where they can say, ‘OK I’m going to stop.’ It may be a process. You have to deal with that.”
Some residents responded with resilience.
At the park where the shooting took place, two men with a well-worn basketball came onto the courts Friday afternoon to proclaim the site safe.
“We’re not going to let an act of evil discourage us,” T.T. Turner, pastor at Mount Sinai Baptist Church, said as he shot baskets with Cleo Miller, a 26-year-old with Michael Jordan “Jumpman” logo earrings.
“Those that did this will be caught,” Turner said.
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