There wasn’t much to celebrate in Chicago after the city recorded 102 people shot—15 fatally—over the Fourth of July weekend. Most of the shootings occurred on Monday, Independence Day eve, and took place on the south and west sides of the city.
“It’s perplexing,” Chicago Police Department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told the Chicago Tribune. "We deployed some very successful tactics over the Memorial Day weekend. Yet those same tactics did not seem to work as well over the Fourth holiday.”
The staggering numbers come despite more than 1,300 extra officers deployed during the four-day weekend. Alcohol likely played a role in some of the shootings, and police also attributed some of the violence to Chicagoland gangs. As Gugliemi noted, “We have to change the underlying culture.”
