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US Attorney General William Barr said Operation Legend has resulted in hundreds of arrests in Chicago as he gave an update on the federal crime-fighting initiative Wednesday morning. Since the program launched in July, Attorney General Barr said more than 500 people have been arrested and 124 people have been charged with federal crimes. video - 10 min Operation Legend has deployed 1,000 federal agents to nine cities, including 400 to Chicago. In the first five weeks of Operation Legend in Chicago, Barr said murders dropped by 50 percent over the previous five weeks. "The bottom line is Operation Legend...

On Wednesday, Attorney General Bill Barr revealed that the murder rate in Chicago had plummeted "roughly in half" since the start of Operation Legend, a program that deploys federal agents to violent cities to quell violence. During a press conference in Chicago, Barr said that Operation Legend has resulted in 500 arrests as well as 124 individual federal crime charges. “Throughout the country, more than 2500 people have been arrested and more than 600 are facing federal charges as part of the operation, an ongoing government effort to combat surging crime in parts of the country,” Fox News reports. Daily...

Twenty-eight individuals were shot, five fatally, over the weekend in Democrat-controlled Chicago. NBC Chicago reports the first of the weekend’s fatalities was a double murder that occurred in a shooting around 4 pm Friday. The fatality occurred Sunday evening, when a 41-year-old man was shot twice and killed on South Crilly. Earlier Sunday a 46-year-old woman was shot and killed while “driving southbound in the 5100 block of South Prairie.” The other shooting fatality occurred around 4 am Saturday, when a 45-year-old man driving a car was shot by a man who was standing on the sidewalk.

CHICAGO (WLS) -- A West Side hospital was forced to stop accepting patients on the tail end of a violent weekend that has left 47 people been shot, four fatally, across the city. Saturday night, resources were stretched to the breaking point as officers responded to multiple shootings in Chicago's 10th Police District, which includes West Side neighborhoods such as Lawndale, Douglas Park and Homan Square. The shootings all occurred within a three hour period, resulting in 17 people injured and at least one dead. "Throughout the night, we had multiple incidents where there were large gatherings and it was...

There were 664 homicides in Chicago in 2017 and, for comparison, 37 casualties in the U.S. military in its myriad operations around the globe. That’s according to data from the Chicago Tribune and from the Department of Defense’s press office. The Chicago deaths are for the period Jan. 1, 2017 through Dec. 31, 2017; the military deaths are from Jan. 1, 2017 through Dec. 22, 2017, which is the latest update on casualties by the DoD posted so far. (There may have been a few more military casualties in December.) From the data available, it shows that Chicago suffered 17.9...

Despite Chicago’s alarming, if select, murder statistics and routine singling out by President Donald Trump for gun violence, this lakeside metropolis was just ranked one of the safest cities in the world.The Economist Intelligence Unit, a London-based research firm affiliated with the Economist magazine, named Chicago to its 2017 Safe Cities Index, issued Thursday — one of only three US cities to crack the top 20 — largely based on advances in digital security.The annual ranking assesses 60 global cities using four factors: personal safety, health security, digital security and the safety of infrastructure.Chicago, at 19th-safest, narrowly trailed the other...

Two men shot to death in separate West Side incidents early Monday were part of a deadly weekend in Chicago that saw eight people killed and 49 others wounded in gun violence between Friday evening and Monday morning. More than 240 people have been shot so far this month. And more than 1,600 have been shot this year, according to Chicago Sun-Times data. Of those victims, 279 have died. Last year, more than 700 people were shot to death in the city. With 57 people shot, this weekend’s carnage outpaced the same weekend last year. From June 17, 2016, to...

even people were killed and at least 31 others were wounded in shootings across Chicago between Friday evening and Monday morning. The violence brought the city’s toll to at least 980 people shot, 170 fatally, since the start of the year, according to Chicago Sun-Times data.

Rahm's Chicago.During a memorial service for a victim of criminal gun violence on the South Side of Chicago, six people were shot including a 12-year-old girl. Community activist Jedidiah Brown told reporters that "the opposition" to those attending the memorial came through an alley before opening fire on the group of mourners. He added that the mother of the person being memorialized was also among the victims, though police have not confirmed that information. A 12-year-old girl suffered a graze wound to the head from a bullet, police said, and was taken to Comer Children’s Hospital, where her condition had...

The record-setting violence in Chicago is even worse than announced as new evidence shows the city suffered 50 more homicides last year than the numbers publicly reported in the past week. The city posted a decades-high homicide count of 812 in 2016, per the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office. That’s 15% greater than the 762 murders reported by the city's police department. The discrepancy is largely due to the fact that the county tallies “homicides” while the police number counts “murders.” Murders are defined as violent acts subject to criminal prosecution. Homicides, according to the medical examiner, include instances “when...

A thousand more people have been shot in Chicago this year compared with the same time last year after a weekend that saw eight people killed and at least 40 wounded, according to police and data compiled by the Tribune. At least 3,475 people had been shot in the city as of shortly after midnight Monday compared with 2,441 people shot this time last year, an increase of 1,034, according to Tribune data. There have been at least 595 homicides this year compared with 409 this time last year, an increase of 186. The gun violence over the weekend was...

BRONZEVILLE — After another brutally violent weekend in Chicago, Police Supt. Eddie Johnson appeared impatient and exasperated Monday as he renewed his plea for judges and legislators to help keep repeat gun offenders off the streets."Any leader in the city of Chicago that thinks what we're seeing out on the streets is OK, shouldn't be a leader," Johnson said, his voice swelling. "Go to those neighborhoods and live there, and tell me how you feel then."Those killed over the weekend included 23-year-old Abner Garcia, an Army veteran with no criminal history, and 19-year-old Arshell Dennis, a college student whose father...

Seven people were killed and at least 47 more people — including an 8-year-old girl — were wounded in shootings across the city between Friday evening and Monday morning, according to Chicago Police. The weekend’s latest homicides happened within 20 minutes of each other Sunday afternoon on the Southwest and West sides. About 4:30 p.m. in Gage Park, someone walked up to a 35-year-old man in the hallway of a home in the 5500 block of South Spaulding and shot him in the left leg. He was taken to Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, where he later died, police...

Eleven people were killed and at least 42 more - including a 3-year-old boy - were wounded in shootings across the city between Friday evening and early Monday, according to Chicago Police. The most recent homicide happened early Monday on the South Side. A 22-year-old man was shot in the back about 1:30 a.m. and taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he later died. About 1:30 p.m., someone used a high-powered assault rifle to kill a 17-year-old boy outside a Catholic church in the Back of the Yards neighborhood during Sunday Mass. The boy was walking outside Holy Cross Church...

Someone was shot in Chicago every 150 minutes during the first five months of 2016. Someone was murdered every 14 hours, and the city saw nearly 1,400 nonfatal shootings and 240 fatalities from gunfire. Over Memorial Day weekend, 69 people were shot, nearly one an hour, topping the previous year’s tally of 53 shootings. The violence is spilling from the Chicago’s gang-infested South and West Sides into the business district downtown. Lake Shore Drive has seen drive-by shootings and robberies. The growing mayhem is the result of Chicago police officers’ withdrawing from proactive enforcement, making the city a dramatic example...

The month's toll was fueled by a Memorial Day weekend in which six people were killed and 63 wounded, and a Mother's Day weekend when more than 50 people were shot, eight fatally. That brought the total number of people shot in Chicago so far this year to more than 1,500. At least 250 of them have died. [Snip] Chicago police say the violence has been stoked by gang conflicts and a proliferation of guns, mixed with weak gun law enforcement.

CHICAGO (CBS) — Five people were killed and at least 13 others have been wounded in shootings across the city since Friday evening, according to police. The latest shooting left two people dead in the outbound lanes of the Kennedy Expressway early Sunday on the Northwest Side. Crews responded about 4 a.m. to Interstate 90/94 near Armitage, where a Chevrolet Tahoe was stopped with the male driver and female passenger dead at the scene with gunshot wounds to the head, according to Illinois State Police. Their ages were unknown.

Three major cities accounted for more than half of the rise in the national murder rate between 2014 and 2015, a new report shows. Though overall crime rates were stagnant in America’s 30 largest cities the murder rate rose 13.3 percent, according to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice. The violent crime rate also rose by 3.1% in those major cities, lead by increases in Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Charlotte.

No excerpt allowed from USA Today, story here.

--(snip)--Despite being the nation's third most populous city, Chicago far outpaces New York City, Los Angeles and every other large city in America in the sheer number of homicide and shooting victims, though it fares better than some smaller cities on a per capita comparison. And despite the attention given to Chicago's police-involved shootings, the city had fewer in 2015, with 22 people shot, than in recent years. In an interview with the Tribune, interim Superintendent John Escalante said he plans to fight violence in 2016 by employing some of McCarthy's past strategies, including a continued focus on arresting people...