https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20160331/br...ence-skyrockets

 

CHICAGO — Police stops in Chicago are down nearly 90 percent as the Chicago Police Department continues to struggle with bad morale and incessant violence.

 

From the start of the year to last week, police made only 20,908 recorded investigative stops, said Anthony Guglielmi, a Chicago Police Department spokesman. Over the same period last year, there were 157,346 recorded stops.

And yet...

 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-chic...0330-story.html

 

As the first quarter of 2016 nears an end, violence in Chicago has reached levels unseen in years, putting the city on course to top 500 homicides for only the second time since 2008.

 

As of 6 a.m. Wednesday, homicides totaled 135, a 71 percent jump over the 79 killings in the same year-earlier period, official Police Department statistics show. That represented the worst first quarter of a year since 136 homicides in 1999, according to the data.

 

Shootings have jumped by comparable numbers as well. As of Wednesday, at least 727 people had been shot in Chicago so far this year, a 73 percent rise from 422 a year earlier, according to a Tribune analysis of department data.

 

Worse yet, that jump follows two consecutive years in which shootings rose by double digits, the analysis found. Homicides also rose by about 12.5 percent last year over 2014.

And yet...

 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-chic...0330-story.html

 

I blame the milder winter.

Today there was a murder right outside my favorite late night Mexican spot growing up. A bouncer got killed at a bar near my old condo over the weekend. The shooting numbers this year are getting as bad they were in the 90s. Just wait until it warms up.