According to the website HeyJackass!, Chicago’s homicide total for 2016 is 470 with only 20.9% of those cases cleared. Detectives are overwhelmed by new cases every day in addition to the open cases they’re working from last year. Chicago is Exhibit “A” in the failure of strict gun control laws.
Via Reuters:
Every two weeks, Cynthia Lewis contacts the detectives investigating the homicide of her brother on Chicago’s south side almost a year ago.
They have had no success finding who shot Tyjuan Lewis, a 43-year-old father of 15, near his home in the quiet Roseland neighborhood of single-family houses.
The death of Lewis, who delivered the U.S. mail for 20 years, is one of hundreds of slayings in 2015 that have gone unsolved as the number of homicides soared in Chicago, piling pressure on a shrinking detective force. In a city with as many as 90 shootings a week, homicides this year are on track to hit their highest level since 1997.
Chicago’s murder clearance rate, a measurement of solved and closed cases, is one of the country’s lowest, another sign of problems besetting police in the third biggest city in the United States. Over the past 10 years Chicago has consistently had one of the lowest clearance rates of any of the country’s 10 biggest cities, according to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Chicago Police Department.
Last year, Chicago police had 480 murder cases and solved 223 murders that had been committed in 2015 or before, for a clearance rate of 46 percent, according to Chicago police figures. That is well below the average national rate of 63 percent, and the average rate of 68 percent for cities with populations of more than 1 million in the past decade, according to FBI figures.
Chicago, with a population of 2.7 million, has more shootings and homicides than any other U.S. city, according to FBI and Chicago police data, and more shootings by law enforcement than other major cities, according to police department figures on officer-involved shootings compiled by Reuters. Its police department is under federal investigation for the use of lethal force by its officers.
Detectives and policing experts interviewed this week said Chicago struggles to solve murders because of declining numbers of detectives, the high number of cases per detective and because witnesses mistrust the police and fear retaliation from gangs.