A hot summer of shootings led to an increase in homicide cases in Cleveland in 2011, reports the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The city had seen 88 slayings as of Thursday, up from 77 last year but the number had reached beyond 300 in some years in the 1970s. Police Chief Michael McGrath said “statistics are a sensitive issue.”
A summer of shootings in Cleveland led some city leaders to call for a new approach to approach gun violence. From June 9 to Oct. 5, there were 30 homicides. McGrath said homicides generally happen more in the summer because more people are on the street, and hot weather flares tempers. “You’ll also find that felonious assaults with handguns also occur more in the summer,” he said. “They parallel each other.” Violence — youth violence in particular — was addressed at a November summit which called for the problem to be considered a public health issue.