A chilling investigation found Black women made up nearly 30 percent of Chicago’s crime victims last year. Mind you, they only make up 13 percent of the city’s population.
Chicago isn’t foreign to crime against Black women. There’s been a years-long campaign launched by local activists and families to resolve the cold cases of missing and murdered Black women and girls. However, a CBS 2 investigation found Black women are even more susceptible to being crime victims than we thought.
In 2022 alone, the report found up to four Black women were victims of a crime every half hour.
The largest categories of crime yielding the most victims were assault, battery and criminal sexual assault. Through public records, CBS Chicago pooled together victim profile data and found over 67,000 of the nearly 270,000 crimes reported in the city happened to Black women.
So, what can be done?
The report says various organizations and activists have taken initiative on how to tackle the issue. Legislation was proposed to create a task force specialized for crime against Black women, activists are promoting awareness through merchandise and signage and organizations like the Urban League are pulling together the victims of these crimes and community stakeholders.
One of those stakeholders is Mayor Brandon Johnson who, according to a scathing editorial from The Chicago Tribune, isn’t doing enough to address public safety concerns.
Read more from The Tribune:
Politically, Chicago comes across to much of the rest of the country as a city that’s off course, focusing not on the issues at the top of residents’ priority list (public safety, jobs, public transit, for example) but on progressive to-do lists. Not only are Johnson and his City Council allies choosing to spend their time and political capital on issues the majority of Chicagoans view as less than pressing, they’re doing a poor job even when it comes to their own priorities.
The Root reached out to the mayor’s office about whether Johnson was aware of the CBS investigation or had any plans to address public safety. The office did not respond immediately to the request.
For now, it seems grassroots organizers have been carrying the movement to promote to the safety of Black women on their backs...and will continue to.