In the comfortable bubble of a mostly white and well-off political media, 2016 is lamented as one of the worst years ever. But whereas the dolor of pundits is largely self-indulgent, their lament could be aptly applied to other, less comfortable parts of America, such as Chicago’s South and West sides. There, it actually was a very bad year.
One of the most disturbing domestic trends of 2016 was an astounding spike in the number of murders in big cities. Chicago was ground zero. The Windy City saw about 800 murders, a 60 percent increase over the year before, and far beyond anything seen in at least the past eight years. This murder epidemic is having an astoundingly disparate racial impact. Only 32 percent of Chicagoans are black, but African Americans account for 80 percent of the city’s murder victims.
