Chicago neighborhoods with most killings by police
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Campaign Zero's "Mapping Police Violence" analysis of Chicago. Photo: Courtesy of Campaign Zero
Black residents of Chicago are 31 times more likely to be killed in police-involved shootings than white residents are, a new Axios analysis shows.
Driving the news: The analysis of neighborhood-level data from civil rights nonprofit Campaign Zero suggests aggressive policing in areas with significantly higher percentages of Black, Latino and Native American residents is leading to more killings by police.
- For example, the data shows that from 2013 to July 23, 2024, Black Americans were 2.9 times more likely to be killed by law enforcement in the U.S. than the general population.
What they did: Campaign Zero's "Mapping Police Violence" database examines any incident where a law enforcement officer, whether off-duty or on-duty, uses lethal force, resulting in someone's death, regardless of whether the death is ruled "justified" or "unjustified."
Zoom in: The data indicates that specific Black neighborhoods in Chicago and St. Louis face massively high proportions of these killings.
- In Chicago, the city's greatest number of police shootings occurred on the South and West Sides, with heavy concentrations in Lawndale and Garfield Park.
- Outside Chicago, the county's most frequent occurrences happened in south suburban Calumet City and Dolton.
Between the lines: The Chicago Police Department, which remains under a federal consent decree to improve its use of force and accountability, has been roiled by multiple high-profile police shootings, including those that killed Laquan McDonald and Dexter Reed.
- The issue re-emerged last month after the police killing of Sonya Massey in Springfield.
By the numbers: The database found that law enforcement killed an average of 1,147 people per year during that 10-year period, with Black Americans accounting for 28% of those deaths nationally.
- The average age of a person killed by law enforcement in the U.S. is 37 years old — 33 for Black people and 44 for White people.
- Since 2013, law enforcement has killed at least 112 people in Chicago and at least 53 people in St. Louis.
What they're saying: "For the first time, we will be able to talk about neighborhoods in a way that we've never been able to," Campaign Zero executive director DeRay Mckesson tells Axios.
Neither the Fraternal Order of Police nor the Chicago Police Department responded to Axios' requests for comment.
Go deeper: New map unveils the deadliest neighborhoods for police killings