It was another grim holiday weekend in Chicago, where the Tribune counted 61 shooting victims from Friday afternoon to Monday night. Eleven were killed and more than a dozen others were in serious or critical condition. Authorities said eight of the shootings had multiple victims, including two double homicides. One was an attack in the East Chatham neighborhood that left two dead and five others wounded, and an attack in the Austin neighborhood left two dead. The violence added to the tolls this year in Chicago, where more than 700 homicides have been recorded with more than 4,000 people shot — a level of violence not seen in Chicago since the late 1990s. Last year, 488 people were killed in Chicago.
Much of the Christmas weekend violence happened in areas “with historical gang conflicts on the south and west side of Chicago,” said Anthony Guglielmi, a police spokesman. He said many of the victims scored high on the department’s “strategic subject list,” a computerized algorithm that assigns a score from 1 to 500 based on such factors as a person’s arrests and the activities of his associates. Those people with a score in the upper 200s or higher are considered in danger of being shot or of shooting someone else. “Ninety percent of those fatally wounded had gang affiliations, criminal histories and were pre-identified by the department’s strategic subject algorithm as being a potential suspect or victim of gun violence,” Guglielmi said.