Police React As Chicago Gun Violence Spills Onto Expressways

[Purveyor]

By Don Babwin | AP May 27 at 3:45 PM

CHICAGO — The violence gripping many Chicago neighborhoods is apparently spilling onto its roads, and police will be out in force over Memorial Day weekend amid a spike in expressway shootings.

There have already been 20 shootings on area expressways this year, compared with 12 over the same period of 2015. Illinois State Police Director Leo Schmitz said at a news conference Thursday that he would be sending out more troopers in marked and unmarked vehicles over the holiday weekend and would have planes overhead ready to radio down about signs of gun violence.

The Chicago Police Department said it will dispatch detectives to every expressway shooting scene to assist state troopers in their investigations — an acknowledgment that gangs are taking their violent clashes from the city streets to the expressways.

“A lot of these expressway shootings go from verbal confrontations that happen inside the city and then the folks involved get on the expressways and go after each other,” said Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson.

Schmitz, who said the two departments will step up efforts to exchange information about their investigations, agreed that the rise in shooting incidents on the expressways is tied to the gang violence that plagues parts of the city. And the numbers mirror what has gone on in Chicago, where the police department had registered 232 homicides and 1,167 shooting incidents in 2016 as of Thursday, compared to 153 homicides and 772 shooting incidents over the same period of last year.

MORE...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/police-react-as-chicago-gun-violence-spills-onto-expressways/2016/05/27/645d0300-2443-11e6-b944-52f7b1793dae_story.html

[Eleanors38]

1. Wonder how much of this is style-driven...

...an amalgamation of the clearly celebrity-boosting car chase with cops, and the desire to create mayhem in a new & different way, when compared to the usual street killing. More certainly, the gang culture is well out of control and prospering in terms of trend-setting actions. As alluded to in the post, expect the style to spread.

[scscholar]

2. With "1,167 shooting incidents" already this year, ....

we need to go door to door to solve this problem.