Mayor hardens stand on gun violence after more than 100 people shot in Chicago during long holiday weekend

Mayor Brandon Johnson struck an unfamiliar tone on the heels of a brutal Fourth of July weekend, taking a tough-on-crime stand Monday as he vowed to hold gunmen accountable and decried the toll of Chicago’s pervasive gun violence.

“When this reckless violence ravages across our city at this magnitude, we are losing a piece of the soul of Chicago,” Johnson told reporters at Public Safety Headquarters, flanked by Police Supt. Larry Snelling and other officials.

“But I will not stand idly by, we will not be passive in this moment.” he added. “We need to ensure that we are holding every single individual accountable for the pain and trauma and the torment that they have caused in this city.”

Johnson said he was “heartbroken” over the more than 100 people who were wounded in shootings across the city throughout the long holiday weekend. At least 19 of them died. The mayor insisted the victims “are not just numbers on pages” but “our fellow Chicagoans” whose lives were lost or upended by the violence.

The weekend toll included four mass shootings, including an attack at a home in Grand Crossing that killed an 8-year-old boy and two women and wounded two other children.

The mayor was out of town Thursday evening but joined Snelling Friday to canvas the block where the attack occurred.

“It’s a choice to kill women, a choice to kill children, a choice to kill the elderly,” Johnson noted. “These are choices that the offenders made and they calculated. And I’m here to say emphatically that we have had enough of it.”

The mayor pleaded for help from other officials, noting that he has asked federal authorities “to respond to the mass shootings in the city of Chicago … just like they do in other places in this country.” But he also called on city residents “to step up to say that we’ve had enough [and] to step up and stop this vicious cycle of violence.”

As of Monday morning, there had been no arrests in any of the weekend’s fatal shootings. Snelling could not provide updates on any investigations, but said detectives were “working really hard on these cases, especially these ones that are involving children.”

 Snelling, like Johnson, called for aggressive action against those involved in these attacks.

 “We have to really stop and think about the mindset of someone who will shoot a child, a helpless child, and unarmed mother, and think that that's okay and go about their days,” Snelling said. “Those people have to be taken off the street, they have to be put away.”

Johnson specifically addressed the “unacceptable” weekend violence in Austin, the West Side community where he lives with his family and where at least 20 people were shot.

He recalled an earlier shooting in which he and his wife fell to the ground and crawled to their children’s room as the kids screamed in terror. “We’re just hoping we’re not the headline,” he recalled. “And it can’t be that way.”

Although Johnson took a hard stance against the drivers of violence, he also continued to blame shootings on the accessibility of guns and the “root causes” of crime, such as disinvestment.

And while he acknowledged that shooters must be held accountable, he said his “ultimate goal is to transform this city so we cut off the pipeline of boys between the ages of 10 and 19 being either victims or the perpetrators.”

“It is personal,” said Johnson, a former Chicago Public Schools teacher.

Chicago police will open an Emergency Assistance Center near the scene of a mass shooting that left 8 people wounded over the weekend. The center will open Tuesday from 3:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. at Fresco Park, 1312 S Racine Ave for any Chicagoan who has been affected by gun violence.

With the eyes of the world turning to Chicago ahead of the Democratic National Convention, Snelling said the department has separate plans to secure the convention and respond to protests and to handle neighborhood gun violence.

Snelling noted that Chicago has recently seen demonstrations that haven’t resulted in “violent clashes with protesters. “We’ve had our dust-ups,” he acknowledged, “but nothing that made national news."

Some officers are training specifically for large-scale protests and potential unrest, Snelling said. At the same time, department officials are creating a separate plan “to make sure that we’re not pulling resources that are necessary to keep our neighborhoods safe.”

His comments came after two violent weekend in which police resources were stretched thin by the annual Pride Parade and this weekend’s NASCAR race downtown. Some officers had their days off canceled over both weekends, continuing a controversial practice that Snelling has vowed to curtail.

On Monday, he said the number of days off that have been canceled are down significantly under his watch.

“It’s not canceling days off just to cancel days off,” he said. “It’s to make sure that our officers have enough manpower out there to deal with the situation at hand, and make sure that they keep down the violence.

“It keeps them safe, it keeps everyone around them safe, it keeps the city safe.”