Chicago police are grappling with a surge in gun violence after more than 100 people were shot over the July long weekend, according to local media.
According to the Chicago Tribune, 15 people were killed and 86 others were wounded between late Friday afternoon and early Wednesday. Nearly half the shootings occurred in the last 12 hours of the long holiday weekend.
The youngest person shot was a 13-year-old boy who was seriously wounded, the Tribune said.
“The mood here is frustration,” Chicago Police Department chief spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi told the Tribune. “It’s perplexing. We deployed some very successful tactics over the Memorial Day weekend,” he added.
Gangs were a major source of the violence, Chicago Police First Deputy Superintendent Kevin Navarro said at a news conference Wednesday.
Chicago police deployed 1,300 additional officers to patrol during the 4th of July weekend and had arrested 58 people on drug and gun charges ahead of the holiday in hopes of tamping down violence.
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The number of shootings, which police said surged during a six-hour period on Monday night, was higher than in 2013, the last time the 4th of July weekend spanned four days, when 74 people were shot, according to the Tribune.
The weekend brought the total number of people shot in Chicago this year above 1,800, which is lower than the 2,035 recorded at this time last year when violence spiked sharply, the Tribune reported.
The violence came less than a week after President Donald Trump tweeted that gun crime in Chicago had reached “epidemic proportions” and that he would be “sending in Federal help.”
Much of the violence was gang-related, Navarro said according to Reuters. Other shootings appeared to be over “petty disputes that escalated into somebody pulling out a gun,” Guglielmi said.
Chicago police seized a total of 159 guns since Friday.
— With files from Reuters
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