It is misleading because the majority of aggravated assaults battery and murders
in Chicago occur in neighborhoods that comprise a population of about 600,000 people. So the actual battlefront casualty percentage in Chicago is much greater if you target certain areas.
The numbers of violent crimes has increased from 40 per 100,000 1959 to 400
per 100,000 in 2011.
The numbers of reported “shots fired” over any weekend is so great that
the CPD can’t keep count of those calls.
Last but not least chicago is a sanctuary city so all of the illegal criminals from latin America have free reign.
I doubt that Rahm or Quinn will propose anything meaningful to combat gang crime. Nothing has been done in the past except to hold “gang Summits” pleading with and appeasing gang leaders to be nice. we have an understaffed overworked police department which will be losing some of their benefits if Rahm has his way.
That is a very good point - such numbers are not very meaningful due to the differences in the effected population size. For example, the number of US soldiers who died in combat in Afghanistan (per 100,000) was 478 as of 2008 (those were the latest numbers I could find).
There were 440 Chicago citizens murdered last year, out of a population of 2,695,598. The article says that the murder rate so far this year was up 54%, bringing an estimate of this year’s total to 677. That works out to 23.7 deaths per 100,000 people.
Now, even if we reduce the population of Chicago to just 600,000 as you suggest, the rate still only bumps up to 112 per 100,000. There is likely some distortion - after all, soldiers posted in Bagram are likely far safer then troops on patrol Helmand, and I suspect that a significant number of those Chicago murders did take place in the rest of the city.
Still, while this death rate for Chicago is indeed shockingly high, it is less then a quarter of that of Afghanistan.