At least 85 people were shot between Monday, April 30, and this past Sunday, including a 4-year-old girl, a 12-year-old boy, a 15-year-old on a CTA bus, a young mother, several other young teens, a federal agent and two relatives of a gunshot victim waiting outside a hospital.
Of those shot, at least nine died.
The city had been averaging about 42 shootings each week this year, according to Tribune data. With last week’s shootings, the average rises to almost 45 people a week. The least violent period was the week of Feb. 5, when 16 people were shot in Chicago.
Nearly half of those shot in the last week were hit by gunfire in three police districts that have long been troubled by violence: Harrison, Ogden and Austin.
At least 25 people were shot in the Harrison District, bounded roughly by Division Street, Roosevelt Road, Western Avenue and Cicero Avenue. One shooting last week wounded five people, including a young mother who was killed. There were two double-shootings within five hours on the same block of Madison Street over the weekend. A 12-year-old boy was seriously hurt.
Another nine people were shot in the Ogden District, which borders Harrison on the south. They included two women wounded Saturday evening outside Mount Sinai Hospital while waiting to hear about a relative who had been shot earlier in the day.
Five people were shot in the Austin District, which borders Harrison on the west, including a 16-year-old boy critically wounded Wednesday afternoon.
In the Grand Central District, which borders Harrison on the north and extends into the Northwest Side, at last six people were shot, according to Tribune data. They included a man and a woman who were hit while driving down Cicero Avenue Saturday morning.
The rest of the week's shootings were scattered among 11 other police districts across the city, including five shot in the Englewood District on the South Side and five in the Calumet District on the Far South Side.
Police Department supervisors in the Harrison, Austin, Ogden and Grand Central districts have been analyzing shooting data in real time through a computer program called HunchLab to quickly determine where to best deploy patrol and tactical officers.
The deployments are integrated with ShotSpotter gunshot detection technology, which tells officers in the field where gunfire is coming from on their work-issued smart phones.
The technology is used at Strategic Decision Support Centers, where police district personnel analyze data projected on large TV screens displaying crime maps and surveillance video footage from police cameras in neighborhoods.
The recent burst of violence brings the number of people shot in the city this year to at least 804, according to data kept by the Tribune. That's below the previous two years, when violence hit record levels. Last year at this time, 1,087 people had been shot. In 2016, the number was 1,199. But this year's numbers are still substantially higher than other recent years.
Homicides have followed the same pattern, with at least 161 this year. That compares to 198 this time last year, and 205 in 2016, according to Tribune data.
