Chicago had its 1,000 shooting of the year on Wednesday, and hit the dubious milestone at the fastest pace seen since the 1990s.
According to data from the Chicago Police Department compiled by the Chicago Tribune, the city saw its 1,000th shooting six to nine weeks earlier than in the previous four years. At this same point last year, there were about 600 shooting victims, and in 2014 at this same point, there had only been 483.
The 1,000th gunshot victim this year was a 16-year-old boy, who was wounded in the knee on Chicago’s South Side.
If current trend persists, Chicago is likely to top 500 homicides for only the second time since 2008. Through Sunday, the homicide total was 64 percent higher than last year’s number, as it jumped from 98 to 161.
Though the violence is incomparable to the 1990s, when homicides in Chicago peaked at more than 900 yearly, shootings in the city are outpacing those in New York and Los Angeles.
In New York, a city three times the size of Chicago, 246 people have been shot through April 10. And in Los Angeles, which has more than 1 million more people than Chicago, there were just 328 shootings through April 16.
The rise in violence is not the only thing Chicago has been grappling with in recent months. The city is still recovering form the fallout of the release of the video of the police shooting death of Laquan McDonald.
The Justice Department is currently investigating the Chicago Police Department since the video’s release last November, which led to the firing of police Superintendent Garry McCarthy.
