ArcaMax

Cities have multiple personalities. I am reminded of that with bracing clarity by what some Chicagoans are calling the "weekend from hell."

It was the weekend in which the mammoth Lollapalooza festival drew tens of thousands of music fans to make joyful noise in downtown Chicago while some of the city's lowest-income and highest-crime neighborhoods endured the worst weekendlong surge in shootings in at least two years. Why?

Just when things were looking up for the city's efforts to shed its Dodge City-meets-Mogadishu image, after more than two years of enduring more homicides than New York and Los Angeles combined, the violence felt like a soul-crushing setback.

Through Aug. 5, Chicago police had recorded 327 homicides, a 20 percent decline from 411 homicides a year earlier and exactly 300 fewer shooting incidents than the 1,426 at this time last year. But that weekend, in which 74 people were shot, 12 fatally, marked the worst violence of any single weekend in the city, according to Chicago Tribune data, since 2016 when homicides reached their highest mark in two decades.

Most of the weekend's violence occurred in familiar zones, just four of the city's 22 police districts, on the West and South sides, police said. Many were the result of random shots fired indiscriminately into crowds. One victim was shot while riding his bicycle. Another was waiting for a bus. Others were shot while attending a funeral repast, at block parties or just standing outside, trying to beat the summer heat. Six of the attacks injured four or more people.

Compounding the tragedy was the sluggishness of law enforcement. As of Friday, only one arrest (in one of the nonfatal shootings) had been reported in connection with the weekend violence, although police said they had promising leads.

Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson and Mayor Rahm Emanuel issued earnest pleas for members of the public to come forward with any information that could lead to arrests. "The offender in almost every situation ... is known by somebody," Emanuel said. "They have a moral responsibility to speak up."

Yes, they do. Unfortunately the clearance rate of crimes in Chicago -- cases in which a suspect is identified, regardless of whether the person is ever charged -- fell to about 17 percent last year, according to data collected by the Tribune, partly because of the lack of cooperating witnesses.

Issues of trust get in the way. A U.S. Department of Justice report last year found long-simmering resentment of police, largely as a result of widespread civil rights violations particularly in African-American communities. Efforts to improve police-community relations, outlined in a proposed consent decree, are just beginning.

But I did find some good news from Gary Slutkin, the University of Illinois at Chicago epidemiologist who founded Cure Violence, formerly known as CeaseFire, an anti-violence program that has been adopted by more than 20 other cities, including New York and Los Angeles.

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