24 Shot, 2 Killed In Weekend Violence

Police tape lines the outside an apartment building in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Tim Boyle/Getty Images)

In the Saturday and Sunday preceding Labor Day, 24 people were shot across Chicagoland, two fatally.

Jeffrey Smith, 38, of the 5100 block of South Marshfield Avenue, was found dead in the driver's seat of his vehicle parked near Warren Elementary School around 3 a.m. Sunday, CBS Chicago reports.

About two hours later, 45-year-old Yolanda Holmes was found shot to death in her Uptown apartment at Broadway and Montrose, according to WLS. A man with lacerations to his face was also in the apartment, but no one is in custody in connection with Holmes' or Smith's shootings.

Twenty four people were injured in shootings around the city, including a robbery attempt in River North where a 25-year-old man was shot in the leg, and an apparently gang-related shooting in Belmont Craigin that left a 22-year-old in critical condition, authorities told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Around 10:45 p.m. Sunday, four people, including an 11-year-old girl, were wounded when a gunman opened fire on a family party in Pill Hill on Chicago's South Side, the Chicago Tribune reports. The girl suffered a graze wound to the left calf, a 51-year-old woman was wounded in the buttocks, an 18-year-old man was struck in the right elbow and a 16-year-old boy was shot in the back. All were hospitalized, but were listed in good condition by 3 a.m. Monday.

Not included in this weekend's tally was the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Jalen Stogner Friday afternoon. The teen was shot in the back in front of a laundromat on the South Side after an altercation with another man in the parking lot escalated to violence.

At least seven people were wounded in shootings citywide Friday evening into early Saturday in Chicago, NBC Chicago reports.

Earlier Friday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy announced that 50 federal agents will be joining Chicago police and the Department of Justice to expand the city's violence reduction initiative. Emanuel and McCarthy say the new initiative has already been effective in two of Chicago's most crime-ridden police districts.

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Are Younger Cadets To Blame For Recent Spate Of LAPD Violence?

LOS ANGELES -- A spate of incidents in which Los Angeles police officers are under investigation for use of excessive force is threatening to erode the Police Department's hard-won efforts over several years to bolster community relations.

Video in recent weeks has captured officers punching a handcuffed suspect and slamming a restrained woman to the ground. In the third case, a woman stopped breathing in the back of a police car and later died.

The incidents come after years of reforms by the LAPD to improve its officers' conduct.

The efforts, undertaken under a federal court order, have yielded results: The city's crime rate is the lowest in four decades, and police are getting praise from communities, including minorities and gays, that had historically complained about mistreatment.

The recent incidents remain in the early investigative stages and none of the officers involved have been charged.

But they underscore that for some police officers on the street, the line on acceptable use of force remains blurry.

"There's been a real effort to change the culture," said Joe Domanick, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who is writing a book on the transformation of the LAPD after the Rodney King beating. "It takes a long time for a culture to change, for things to trickle down."

Andrea Ordin, president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, the department's civilian oversight panel, said it's too early to tell if a trend toward overaggressive tactics is developing.

"We are seeing community groups coming to our meetings and talking about the changes in the Police Department and that they appreciate the better communication," she said. "At the same time, we're seeing these incidents. Each of these has to be investigated thoroughly."

In one incident, Alesia Thomas died in a squad car July 22 after struggling with officers trying to arrest her on suspicion of child endangerment. She had left her two children at the police station where they told officers their mother didn't want them, and they had not eaten for several days, said Cmdr. Andrew Smith.

During the struggle to get Thomas into the patrol car, a female officer was captured by the car's video camera threatening to kick Thomas in the groin if she did not obey, and then she made good on the threat. A short while later, Thomas stopped breathing. The coroner has not determined what caused her death.

Police Chief Charlie Beck has reassigned the five officers involved and ordered an investigation.

On Aug. 21, registered nurse Michelle Jordan was pulled over for holding her cellphone while driving. She got out of the car and did not comply with an officer's demand to get back in the vehicle. The 5-foot-4-inch woman was slammed to the ground and handcuffed by at least one officer. While being led to the patrol car, an officer slammed her to the ground again.

The incident was captured by a surveillance camera at a nearby restaurant.

The officers involved were removed from patrol duty pending an investigation, and their supervising captain was transferred. Beck said the videotape raised serious concerns and ordered it shown at officer roll calls throughout the department.

In a third incident, college student Ronald Weekley Jr. was stopped Aug. 18 by officers for riding his skateboard on the wrong side of the street. A bystander's cellphone video appears to show that an officer punched the 20-year-old in the face while he was on the ground being handcuffed with four officers on top of him. He said he suffered a broken nose and cheekbone.

Weekley was arrested on suspicion of resisting arrest. Police have launched an internal investigation to determine whether excessive force was used, but the officers involved remain on duty.

"These are unarmed, handcuffed suspects. It's a disturbing, growing trend of police brutality throughout Southern California," said Najee Ali, of the South Los Angeles civil rights group Project Islamic Hope. He noted two other nearby cases that outraged citizens: The police killing of two suspects last month in Anaheim, which sparked a riot, and the July 2011 fatal beating of a handcuffed, homeless, mentally ill man in Fullerton.

Smith, the LAPD commander, said use-of-force incidents are not on the rise. The department records about 1,600 such cases annually, a number that has remained constant in recent years.

"That's out of the millions of contacts we have with the public and the tens of thousands of arrests. Because there's videotape in these incidents, they get a lot of media attention," Smith said.

Los Angeles Police Protective League Tyler Izen urged the public and the department not to judge the involved police officers before all the evidence is heard.

"Police officers perform a tough and dangerous job every day," Izen said in a statement. "Officers often need to make split-second, life-or-death decisions. Like everyone in this great country, they deserve the benefit of the doubt."

Officers are permitted to use "reasonable" force to make an arrest, prevent a suspect's escape and overcome resistance. "The question is, is it objectively reasonable? If it isn't reasonable, we hold them accountable," Smith said.

Officers are also extensively trained to verbally persuade people to do what they want without resorting to force, said Richard Weinblatt, a former police chief and police consultant who is a dean at Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana.

Police academy trainers, however, notice that younger cadets, who grew up communicating via text messages and email, and in an era where schoolyard fights are not tolerated as they once were, often lack verbal communication skills and experience in dealing with physical aggression, Weinblatt said. At the same time, criminals are more violent than ever.

"Officers are just plain scared," Weinblatt said. "They don't have the communication skills or physical confidence of previous generations. They're jumping higher and quicker on use of force because of that fear element."

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Is Gun Violence A Social Disease?

MILWAUKEE -- Is a gun like a virus, a car, tobacco or alcohol? Yes, say public health experts, who in the wake of recent mass shootings are calling for a fresh look at gun violence as a social disease.

What we need, they say, is a public health approach to the problem, like the highway safety measures, product changes and driving laws that slashed deaths from car crashes decades ago, even as the number of vehicles on the road rose.

One example: Guardrails are now curved to the ground instead of having sharp metal ends that stick out and pose a hazard in a crash.

"People used to spear themselves and we blamed the drivers for that," said Dr. Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine professor who directs the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis.

It wasn't enough back then to curb deaths just by trying to make people better drivers, and it isn't enough now to tackle gun violence by focusing solely on the people doing the shooting, he and other doctors say.

They want a science-based, pragmatic approach based on the reality of a society saturated with guns and seek better ways of preventing harm from them.

The need for a new approach crystallized last Sunday for one of the nation's leading gun violence experts, Dr. Stephen Hargarten. He found himself treating victims of the Sikh temple shootings at the emergency department he heads in Milwaukee. Seven people were killed, including the gunman, and three were seriously injured.

It happened two weeks after the shooting that killed 12 people and injured 58 at a movie theater in Colorado, and two days before a man pleaded guilty to killing six people and wounding 13, including then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, in Tucson, Ariz., last year.

"What I'm struggling with is, is this the new social norm? This is what we're going to have to live with if we have more personal access to firearms," said Hargarten, emergency medicine chief at Froedtert Hospital and director of the Injury Research Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin. "We have a public health issue to discuss. Do we wait for the next outbreak or is there something we can do to prevent it?"

About 260 million to 300 million firearms are owned by civilians in the United States; about one-third of American homes have one. Guns are used in two-thirds of homicides, according to the FBI. About 9 percent of all violent crimes involve a gun – roughly 338,000 cases each year.

Mass shootings don't seem to be on the rise, but not all police agencies report details like the number of victims per shooting and reporting lags by more than a year, so recent trends are not known.

"The greater toll is not from these clusters but from endemic violence, the stuff that occurs every day and doesn't make the headlines," said Wintemute, the California researcher.

More than 73,000 emergency room visits in 2010 were for firearm-related injuries, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.

At the same time, violent crime has been falling and the murder rate is less than half what it was two decades ago. And Gallup polls have shown support for stricter gun laws has been falling since 1990. Last year 55 percent of Americans said gun laws should remain the same or become more lenient.

Dr. David Satcher tried to make gun violence a public health issue when he became CDC director in 1993. Four years later, laws that allow the carrying of concealed weapons drew attention when two women were shot at an Indianapolis restaurant after a patron's gun fell out of his pocket and accidentally fired. Ironically, the victims were health educators in town for an American Public Health Association convention.

That same year, Hargarten won a federal grant to establish the nation's first Firearm Injury Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

"Unlike almost all other consumer products, there is no national product safety oversight of firearms," he wrote in the Wisconsin Medical Journal.

That's just one aspect of a public health approach. Other elements:

_"Host" factors: What makes someone more likely to shoot, or someone more likely to be a victim. One recent study found firearm owners were more likely than those with no firearms at home to binge drink or to drink and drive, and other research has tied alcohol and gun violence. That suggests that people with driving under the influence convictions should be barred from buying a gun, Wintemute said.

_Product features: Which firearms are most dangerous and why. Manufacturers could be pressured to fix design defects that let guns go off accidentally, and to add technology that allows only the owner of the gun to fire it (many police officers and others are shot with their own weapons). Bans on assault weapons and multiple magazines that allow rapid and repeat firing are other possible steps.

_"Environmental" risk factors: What conditions allow or contribute to shootings. Gun shops must do background checks and refuse to sell firearms to people convicted of felonies or domestic violence misdemeanors, but those convicted of other violent misdemeanors can buy whatever they want. The rules also don't apply to private sales, which one study estimates as 40 percent of the market.

_Disease patterns, observing how a problem spreads. Gun ownership – a precursor to gun violence – can spread "much like an infectious disease circulates," said Daniel Webster, a health policy expert and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore.

"There's sort of a contagion phenomenon" after a shooting, where people feel they need to have a gun for protection or retaliation, he said.

That's already evident in the wake of the Colorado movie-theater shootings. Last week, reports popped up around the nation of people bringing guns to "Batman" movies. Some of them said they did so for protection.

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Associated Press writer Pete Yost in Washington contributed to this report.

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Rev. Peter Laarman: A Sacred Duty: Ending The Injustice Of Gun Violence

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Rev. Peter Laarman, Imam Jihad Turk and Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater GET UPDATES FROM Rev. Peter Laarman   Like GET UPDATES FROM Imam Jihad Turk   Like 2 GET UPDATES FROM Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater   Like 28 A Sacred Duty: Ending the Injustice of Gun ViolencePosted: 08/01/2012 10:37 am React Amazing
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In a thoughtful Los Angeles Times op-ed published earlier this month, Michael Kinsley asked readers to consider which of the injustices we accept today will seem utterly and unthinkably outrageous to people living 20 years from now.

We are convinced that today's too-easy access to lethal weapons will be seen by future generations as one such outrageous injustice. This is because the absence of meaningful gun control in our time so clearly reflects the arrogant and disproportionate power of just one group -- the gun lobby -- riding roughshod over everyone else's right to a modicum of public safety.

The Aurora shootings were big news, understandably, but we should never forget that each new day brings an average of 80 gun deaths in the United States, most of these occurring in poor communities. Eight of those killed each day are children. If there were any other public health crisis that killed eight children a day we would most likely mobilize as a nation to stop it. Yet in the face of this daily pile-up of corpses (not to mention a vastly greater number of woundings and maimings) most Americans have grown resigned to suffering under the boot of the NRA. It doesn't have to be that way. Unjust power, especially unjust power with so much blood on its hands, can be challenged and overcome by a sufficiently outraged public. After all, it was an outraged public that finally curbed Big Tobacco's power and that put a big dent into drunk driving through years of concentrated effort. The gun lobby will say it has the Constitution on its side; so did slaveholders and defenders of Jim Crow in eras past. The public, far more than any given Supreme Court, ultimately decides what the Constitution means.

In the wake of the Aurora shootings, Senator Dianne Feinstein has called for the renewal of her signature assault weapons ban, the ban that expired in 2004 and was not renewed by Congress. We join her in that call. We also call for serious consideration of other legislation that will make a significant contribution to the reduction of gun violence. This is not a partisan issue: this is an American issue of basic justice and of basic human decency.

We religious leaders frequently and publicly lament the ongoing bloodshed in Afghanistan, Syria and other parts of the world. Each of the three Abrahamic traditions we represent has at its core the belief that every life is precious and sacred and that each person bears the image of God. But consider this startling fact: As of 2008, some 655,000 United States military personnel had lost their lives in all of this nation's foreign wars. Yet, during the course of the past 30 years there have been more than 1 million gun deaths in this country, most of them preventable, because we have not yet marshaled the public will to enact reasonable and sensible gun control legislation.

We implore leaders of all faith communities to speak out and encourage discussion of this crisis within their congregations and denominational groupings. We urge and invite each person of faith to contact their elected representatives at all levels of government to tell them they must now take action that will provide reasonable control over the accessibility of guns and ammunition. We call upon those officials themselves to begin to put their own moral convictions at the center of their decision making on this matter. Yes, the gun lobby will come after them -- and so what?

In the book of Deuteronomy, the assembled people hear these words: "I set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live." We and our elected officials face this same choice today. We and they must act with courage and with the kind of resolute determination this crisis requires. If we don't, we can be sure our descendants will wonder how we could passively witness the blood-drenched injustice of so many lives snuffed out and shattered by gun violence when it was within our democratic power to stop it.

Rev. Peter Laarman, Imam Jihad Turk and Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater are founding members of Abrahamic Faiths Peacemaking Initiative (AFPI), a Southern California-based coalition created in 2004 that works to promote peace, justice and interreligious understanding.

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of our newest badge: Community Curator. View AllFavoritesBloggers Recency |  Popularity jbecker19170 Fans 1 hour ago ( 4:46 PM)Great Piece! Taken to the extreme, the self defense argument could also be used as a rationale to make your lawn into a minefield. It think we are already almost there when someone can buy two pistols and a semi-automatic weapon in a short span of time without raising an eyebrow. Event if we follow the pretext that owning guns is a "right" that does not mean that this "right" cannot be expressed within reasonable limitations, intended to keep more people from needlessly dying.jbecker1917: Great Piece! Taken to the extreme, the self defense argumenthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/jbecker1917/History |Permalink |Share itThis comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… HUFFPOST BLOGGERRabbi Joshua Levine Grater142 Fans 5 hours ago ( 1:12 PM)Brian--I don't think we disagree. One doesn't need an AK-47 or AR-15 with 10,000 rounds of ammunition to protect yourself in self-defense.hp_blogger_Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater: Brian--I don't think we disagree. One doesn't need an AK-47http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/hp_blogger_Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater/History |Permalink |Share itThis comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… Ohio9115 Fans 5 hours ago ( 1:09 PM)"The gun lobby will say it has the Constitution on its side; so did slaveholders and defenders of Jim Crow in eras past. The public, far more than any given Supreme Court, ultimately decides what the Constitution means."

Well I hate to disappoint you guys, but the public is on the side of the "gun lobby" too.

http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2009/03/08/rasmussen-75-of-americans-believe-second-amendment-guarantees-individual-right-to-firearms/

It's not the mythical "gun lobby" that ensures continued respect for gun rights in this country. It's the fact that us gun rights supporters outnumber your side by so much. Live with it.Ohio9: "The gun lobby will say it has the Constitution onhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Ohio9/History |Permalink |Share itThis comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… Brian Bender45 Fans 5 hours ago (12:32 PM)In the past 30 years there have been over 36,000,000 incidents of people in the United States using a gun to protect themselves from crime or injury. You won’t find the “public will to enact reasonable and sensible gun control legislation” because Self Defense is a fundamental Civil Right.Brian_Bender: In the past 30 years there have been over 36,000,000http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Brian_Bender/History |Permalink |Share itThis comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments…    new comment(s) on this entry — Click to refreshLoading comments… FOLLOW US Connect with your friends Check out stories you might like,
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