It was another bloody weekend in Chicago over the Independence Day holiday as criminals took to the streets killing seven, including a seven-year-old little boy. Forty people were wounded from gang violence. More from CNN:
"We need to repair a broken system," Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy told reporters Sunday. "Criminals don't feel the repercussions of the justice system."
Take, for example, the death of 7-year-old Amari Brown. McCarthy said the boy was the unintended victim of bullet meant for his father, a ranking gang member.
The system failed Amari, the police chief said. Amari's father, who has been arrested 45 times and has a lengthy criminal record, should not have been on the streets, McCarthy said.
At a vigil Sunday for Amari, family friend Michael Singleton told the media that unless real changes are made, the cycle of violence will continue.
"All of you all will be back out here next week, on another corner, filming the same thing, from somebody else, saying exactly what I'm saying," he said.
Naturally, McCarthy also blamed the "flow of guns" into the city for the repeated problem of gang violence on the streets.
Last summer, which was more deadly than summer 2015 so far, McCarthy was accused of cooking the books on reduced violence to make his police force look better.
"City leaders manipulated crime statistics to create the appearance of a rapidly decreasing rate of crime," Chicago Magazine reported last year.
In the meantime, violent Chicago gangs aren't the only major problem in the Windy City. Mexican drug cartels running the streets pose a major problem and fuel the mayhem.
"Sinaloa Cartel traffickers sit on the top of the pile, and they feed down all the way to the street level dealers,” Dennis Wichern, special agent in charge for the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Chicago field division, told Fox News Latino.
The drug trade in Chicago has helped fuel pervasive gang violence that has resulted in a quickly rising homicide rate. Chicago ended 2014 with 425 murders, and this year the city had seen 30 slayings by the end of January.
Indeed, something has to change in Chicago. They should start by repealing their highly restrictive guns laws and go from there.
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