From The Chicago Citizen – February 27. 2019
The City of Chicago is known for many things: cold temperatures, towering skyscrapers, deep dish pizza and unfortunately, gun violence.
Although the Chicago Police Department announced in their 2017 Annual Report that homicides were down over 15 percent from 2016 to 2017 and shooting incidents were down 22 percent during that same time period, people living in the most at-risk areas of the city still don’t feel 15 to 22 percent safer.
“When I think about what New York and LA, which we are often compared to, have done in the space of addressing violence, they have drastically reduced their violence by far more than what we are proposing right now,” said Eddie. Bocanegra, senior director of Heartland Alliance READI Chicago. “It is going to take an entire community and an entire village to address this issue, but I think that it’s a very realistic goal and [I] think that if we didn’t shoot for this, we would be selling ourselves short.”