The Cook County Medical Examiner’s (CCME) officer recorded 1,087 homicides in 2021, 836 of which happened in Chicago.
Gun-related homicides made up 1,002 of those homicides.
The CCME has not handled this many cases since 1994:
Blacks accounted for 80 percent of the county’s homicide victims, with Latinos accounting for more than 14 percent of county-wide homicide deaths in 2021. Men accounted for 88 percent of the county’s homicide victims.In 2021, 86 homicides were recorded with victims under the age of 18. Of those, 12 were under the age of 10.
The Chicago Police Department said 797 were killed in the city. The number did not include those killed on the expressways since the Illinois State Police handles those crimes.
But when you include those homicides the number goes up to 836. Chicago saw 4,300 gunshot victims. The number includes those who died and were wounded.
Overall, CCME had 12,618 cases in 2021. 2020 set the all-time record with 16.047 cases.
The office attributed COVID to 4,497 deaths in the county.
The CCME is still waiting for toxicology reports, but the county might also set a record number of opioid deaths. Right now it confirmed 1,488 overdoses. The examiner predicts 600 to 700 of the pending cases will be because of opioids.
The record for opioid overdoses is 1,840 in 2020.
Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown said the majority of gun-related homicides happen between rival gangs. He tried to find positives in the details:
He said, for example, that the department cleared 400 homicides – a total that was higher than in any year in nearly two decades. Saturday’s news release did not specify how many of those cleared homicides were committed in previous years but reported that the clearance rate for the killings was just under 50%.The department, which says it takes more illegal weapons off the street than any other local police force in the United States, said that it took a record 12,088 guns off the street in 2021. That total coincided with the creation of a Gun Investigations Team that has focused on interrupting the flow of illegal guns into the city.While homicides soar, the department did add that the city saw it’s lowest number of burglaries since the mid-60s.
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