Gun killings: Chicago and Philadelphia deadlier for young men than Afghan war, says former NYC cop

Young people from the worst neighborhoods in Chicago and Philadelphia are more likely to be shot dead than those who fought on the bloodiest fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq, a new study shows.

Brandon del Pozo, a former New York City police officer and now a Brown University scholar, says gun deaths among youth in that city’s ghettos are worse than those seen by troops deployed in the America’s War on Terror.

Del Pozo, who started out patrolling the streets for law enforcement in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, called her research an “urgent wake-up call” to address gun crime and murder rates in the world’s most dangerous cities.

Your study It comes as a 25-year-old security guard was shot and wounded at a liquor store on Chicago’s South Side, and a 24-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman were shot and killed in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, both on Thursday.

“Working as a police officer, I witnessed the toll of gun violence and how detrimental it was to families and communities,” del Pozo said.

‘It struck me that the burden was not distributed evenly by geography or demographics. Some communities felt the brunt of gun violence much more acutely than others.’

According to del Pozo’s study, published in JAMA Open Networkyouth in Chicago’s most violent ZIP code were three times more likely to be shot dead than soldiers sent to Afghanistan.

Those in the most violent area of ​​Philadelphia were nearly twice as likely to suffer that fate.

The former law enforcement officer also studied Los Angeles and New York City, finding that young men in the worst areas of those cities were respectively 70 and 91 percent less likely to experience gun deaths than Afghan war soldiers.

Chicago police investigate a gang drive-thru on Chicago’s South Side. The gun death rate among young men in the worst parts of the city is more than three times that of soldiers sent to Afghanistan.

Brandon del Pozo, a former New York City police officer and now a Brown University academic, calls the study an “urgent wake-up call” to address gun crime.

His team investigated data from 2020 and 2021 in those four cities, focusing on shootings involving nearly 130,000 men ages 18 to 29.

They grouped them by ZIP code, so the US Census data could be used to study demographics in those areas.

The research team, which also involved the University of Pennsylvania, compared gun violence data from those cities to combat-related deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, from 2001 to 2014 in Afghanistan and from 2003 to 2009 in Iraq.

Black and Hispanic men accounted for 96 percent of those fatally shot and 97 percent of those wounded in a shooting, said del Pozo, an assistant professor of medicine at the Brown University Warren Alpert School of Medicine in Rhode Island.

“We often hear conflicting claims about gun violence that fall along partisan lines: one is that big cities are war zones that require a severe crackdown on crime, and the other is that our fears about homicide are wildly exaggerated and don’t require drastic action.” ‘ said del Pozo.

“We wanted to use data to explore these claims, and it turns out that they are both wrong. While most city residents are relatively safe from gun violence, the risks are greater than war for some demographic groups.’

A US soldier investigates the scene of a suicide attack on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in June 2014. Nearly 7,000 US service members died fighting in the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Major US cities in August saw a shocking number of deaths in a single weekend, with at least 82 people shot and 13 killed in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City alone.

The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban after the 9/11 attacks, and conducted a chaotic withdrawal last year. The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and withdrew in 2011, only for ISIS to launch an offensive in which US forces redeployed.

Nearly 7,000 US service members died fighting in the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this number is dwarfed by the combined number of deaths of civilians, contractors, police officers, enemy combatants, journalists and aid workers.

Gun deaths: 1.1 million in 30 years

Guns have claimed more than 1.1 million lives in the US in the past 30 years, with the rising death rate seeing a sharp 20 percent increase during the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers say .

In one of the most comprehensive assessments of firearm deaths in years, researchers from Emory University and Children’s Hospital Boston showed that 1,110,421 people died from firearms between 1990 and 2021.

Gun-related deaths began rising steadily since 2005, but that upward trajectory has accelerated in recent years, including a spike between 2019 and 2021 as Covid-19 triggered lockdowns and economic turmoil.

The researchers created heat maps showing how gun deaths clustered in the West in the 1990s, but gradually spread across the country, with notable spikes in southern states.

“Gun deaths have dramatically accelerated during the covid pandemic,” said Eric Fleegler, a professor at Harvard Medical School, a physician at Boston Children’s Hospital and a co-author of the to study.

“Several potential factors are likely to have contributed to this, including severe economic problems, an erupting mental health crisis, and a significant increase in firearms sales.”

Researchers have previously described “panic buying” of firearms during the pandemic. One study showed that between January 2020 and April 2021, some 5.1 million Americans became first-time gun owners.

Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the researchers created heat maps showing how gun deaths in the West country clustered in the 1990s.

But the rate of gun deaths gradually increased across the country, with notable spikes in the southern states.

Chris Rees, an assistant professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at Emory University School of Medicine, lamented reaching the “highest number of gun deaths ever to occur in the US.” in 2021.

Young black men experience the highest rates of firearm homicide deaths, at 142 per 100,000 for those in their early 20s. The highest rates of death by gun suicide are in white men in their 80s, at 45 per 100,000, the researchers said.