After a Fourth of July weekend that saw more than a dozen homicides, including the death of a 7-year-old girl, the city’s top cop railed against a criminal justice system that, he said, has let too many people of out jail without adequate monitoring.
“That is not sustainable, and many of these people come right back to the very communities where they’ve committed their crimes to commit more crimes,” Chicago Police Supt. David Brown said Monday, talking to reporters at the police department’s Education and Training Academy.
Brown was referring to the major drop in the jail population since 2017 — from about 7,000 to 4,700, according to Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle’s office.
Brown urged the “decision-makers” to rethink the Cook County electronic home monitoring system.
“We cannot allow this to be normalized in this city,” Brown said, singling out the death of 7-year-old Natalia Wallace, struck and killed Saturday night while visiting her grandmother in the Austin neighborhood. “We cannot get used to hearing about children being gunned down in Chicago every weekend.”
Brown said there were 87 shooting victims from 6 p.m. Thursday through midnight Sunday in the city, with 17 of those victims being killed. In that same period, 173 guns were recovered. The Chicago Sun-Times’ weekend tally, from 5 p.m. Friday through 5 a.m. Monday, was 79 people shot, 15 fatally.
“On behalf of the Chicago Police Department, I extend my deepest, deepest condolences and sympathies to all of the families,” Brown said, noting 13 other shooting victims were “young people.”
Brown said one of his young officers was at Natalia’s side as her life ebbed away.
“I can’t help but put myself in the place of this young officer, who did what we train to do,” Brown said. “Just visualize the 7-year-old shot, bleeding to death while the family is there, highly emotional as expected ... and he loses his effort to save [her].”
Brown said the officer was having a “hard time with this, obviously.”
Police said they had one person in custody in connection with the girl’s shooting, which occurred in the 100 block of North Labrobe Avenue. Brendan Deenihan, chief of detectives, said of the shooting in the 100 block of North Latrobe: “Guys get out [of a car], they just start shooting — discharging toward the house, obviously without any care for who is out there.”
As those who’ve come before him have said, Brown stressed that police can’t be the only solution in communities dealing with extreme poverty.
“We’re not going to be able to police our way out of it, but in the short-term, we’re likely to spend more overtime to put even more officers in this small area of Chicago — West Side, South Side,” he said.
Speaking later Monday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the high toll of weekend violence “feels personal to me. ... Sorrow is not enough. What it says is, we need to do better as a city.”
The Cook County sheriff’s office released a statement: “The sheriff is committed to combating violence and has always believed individuals charged with gun-related or violent crimes should remain in jail while awaiting trial to ensure the safety of the public. Decisions about bond amounts and conditions of bond — including which individuals are placed on electronic monitoring — rest solely with the judiciary.”
A spokeswoman for Cook County Chief Judge Tim Evans referred a reporter to an opinion piece Evans wrote that appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times in July 2019. In the piece, Evans said criticism of pretrial justice practices in Cook County is “misleading because pretrial defendants released on bond are not driving the weekend crime statistics. In fact, 99.8 percent of felony defendants released on bail do not receive charges of new gun-related violent crime while their cases are pending.”
Contributing: Fran Spielman and Rachel Hinton
