We’re back again, folks. Six shootings in just seven hours across Chicago. Five people dead, four others wounded, including a thirteen-year-old boy. That’s what happened overnight in the city, and the mayor is out on the news circuit claiming his crime-fighting strategy is working.
Mayor Brandon Johnson, whose approval rating sits below ten percent, was on TV yesterday morning promoting the drop in violence. He says the investments are finally paying off. “Two billion dollars on the West Side. Two-point-six billion on the South Side.
Over time, that gap will close between what’s happening and what people actually experience,” Johnson said. That was yesterday morning. By that night, nine people had been shot. The first shooting happened near 69th and Ellis.
Police found a man and a woman in their twenties inside a car, both hit in the head. They died at the University of Chicago Hospital. Investigators found a weapon at the scene. A little over an hour later, gunfire erupted in the area of Hamlin and Adams.
James Gooden, a forty-nine-year-old man, was walking on the sidewalk while a thirteen-year-old boy sat inside a parked car. Two people opened fire. The boy was shot in the foot and taken to a hospital in good condition. Gooden was shot in the head.
He didn’t make it. He was the only victim officials identified all night. Just after eleven, four more people were shot while sitting in parked cars along South Shore Drive. A man and woman in their mid-twenties were in a vehicle when police say a passing car started firing.
The man took a bullet to the stomach and died. The woman was expected to survive. In a separate incident in Uptown, a twenty-one-year-old was sitting in his car when someone walked up and opened fire. He was shot in the neck.
He died too. And these are only the shootings we know about. A person was also stabbed in Humboldt Park overnight. That victim refused to cooperate with police.
We reached out to the mayor’s office for comment after the shootings. He had nothing to say about the deaths. The bigger picture isn’t much better. Chicago Public Schools is bracing for massive layoffs: more than 700 teachers and 800 support staff, nearly 1,500 school employees in total, all losing their jobs.
The district says it’s facing a $730 million budget shortfall and that Cook County owes them $4 billion. The county keeps a chokehold on property tax revenue, which means the schools are left waiting for money that may never come. Homeowners across the county have seen their property taxes skyrocket, in some cases double. The problem traces back to a broken system that Cook County hired a company called Tyler Technologies to fix back in 2015.
That modernization project has failed time and again, causing constant delays in sending out property tax bills. Local governments like Chicago Public Schools are left borrowing just to keep the lights on. Chicago Public Schools says it paid $30 million in interest and penalties last year alone because of the delayed payments. This year, the county reduced their disbursements by another $250 million from the first installment.
“Every dollar spent dealing with these administrative stumbles is a dollar taken directly from the education budget for students,” a district spokesman said. Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer says Tyler Technologies has missed deadline after deadline and bears responsibility. An inspector general’s report blames the company, along with the county’s own offices. Jim Thompson, the county’s director of assessment and tax policy, insists everyone is close to fixing the mess and that next year’s schedule will improve by more than two months.
The county has a $300 million loan program for local governments that need to borrow to keep running. Chicago Public Schools doesn’t qualify. Officials say they’re still negotiating a way to help the district pay its bills while they wait for the funds. Tyler Technologies says it agrees with the inspector general’s report and is “fully committed” to finishing the project with Cook County.
When asked why the county doesn’t just sue the company to escape the contract, the answer was blunt: the contract protects them. The project is too far along to back out now. So we have a mayor touting success on TV while his city bleeds on the streets overnight. Nine people shot.
Five dead. Hundreds of school employees getting laid off. The taxpayers are covering the cost of a decade of failure, and the man in charge says business is booming. Maybe his numbers say violent crime is down.
Maybe his spreadsheets say investments are growing. But the thirteen-year-old who got shot in the foot isn’t seeing it. The family of James Gooden isn’t seeing it.
The 1,500 school workers about to lose their jobs aren’t seeing it either.
