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| Chicago Police detectives investigate the scene early Friday, Sept. 20, 2013, where a number of people, including a 3-year-old child, were shot Thursday night in a city park in Chicago. Thursday night's attack was the latest violence in a city that has struggled to stop such shootings by increasing police patrols. |
CHICAGO (AP)
-- A shooting that injured a 3-year-old boy and 12 others in Chicago
occurred just outside a section of the city that police have flooded
with officers, reigniting outrage over the toll of the community's gun
violence and the inability of stepped-up police action to stop it.
Residents
had gathered in a neighborhood park Thursday to watch a late-night
basketball game when assailants armed with an assault rifle
indiscriminately sprayed the crowd with bullets.
On
Friday, residents decried the perpetrators' disregard for those caught
in the crossfire, the invasion of drugs into their communities and a
lack of local leaders to stand up for them. A prominent rap artist,
meanwhile, 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
shooting happened shortly after 10 p.m. in Cornell Square Park - in the
Back of the Yards neighborhood on the city's southwest side.
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, a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old.
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.
"It's devastating," said one
of the boy's relatives, Morris Shadrach Davis, 63. He said one of the
boy's uncles was fatally shot during a violent Labor Day weekend in the
city that claimed a total of eight lives and left 20 others wounded.
"We
are not a bad family," he said, struggling to make sense of his
family's double tragedy and the larger tragedy unfolding in the city.
"The
black community is really messed up now," he said at his home on the
city's West Side. "We had leaders before. ... Drugs have infiltrated our
community. We as a people have been totally forgotten."
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, demonstrating the difficulty of trying to
contain all of the city's gang hot spots. Police said they had "impact
zones," with intensified patrols, three blocks north and three blocks
south of the park.
But police were 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. Police have recorded 305
homicides so far this year, 21 percent fewer than the 389 slayings
recorded over the same period last year.
Rap
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.
"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.
