ILLINOIS – The already high level of crime and violence in Chicago experienced a serious uptick during the Fourth of July weekend, as the Windy City saw at least 82 people shot – with 14 of those shootings being fatal – causing a city councilman to declare the area a “war zone” and blaming the chaos on local leadership, according to reports.
Current Chicago Alderman and former police officer Anthony Napolitano spoke to “Fox & Friends First” on Monday, where he was highly critical of Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and her alleged inability to control crime in the city.
“We are averaging over 6,000 people shot over the last 18 months,” Napolitano said on the wave of violence holding Chicago firmly in its grip.
In contrast, at a recent press conference, Lightfoot – despite statistics showing otherwise – clashed with a Newsmax reporter who had asked her if violent crime was keeping Chicago businesses closed and asking for her response to criticism that she had “lost control of the city.”
“Crime is not out of control in our city,” Lightfoot said in a contentious exchange with the reporter. “In fact, crime is on the decline. All of our major indices show a decline in our crime and our homicides and our shootings year over year are down; that’s a fact, sir.”
However, in comparison to the 82 people shot and 14 killed just this past weekend in Chicago, 68 were shot and five killed over Independence Day weekend in 2020, reports say. In addition, almost 1,500 people have been shot so far in Chicago in 2021, representing a 12 percent increase from 2020 and a 59 percent increase from 2019, according to the Chicago Police Department.
In reaction to this weekend’s shootings, Lightfoot claimed that the violence was a “manifestation of systemic problems” and blamed the shootings on the city being surrounded by suburbs and states “that have very lax gun laws,” something that Napolitano called “pure nonsense,” and said that Chicago has “the strongest and the strictest gun laws in the state, if not the country.”
Napolitano also blamed the city’s spiking violent crime rate on Cook County State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx, who he called “by far the worst in the nation,” saying that she “wants to prosecute nobody.”
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