CHICAGO _ On a recent Saturday morning at Springfield Avenue and Wilcox Street, residents wearing masks walked dogs past blooming red tulips. A family stepped onto their porch with laundry bags stuffed with clothes to start a day of chores, just as a neighbor across the street arrived home with sacks of groceries.
Even with a blue and white Chicago police squad car idling nearby, it was hard to tell in that still, quiet moment that the neighborhood is at the crossroads of two massive public health crises.
By the end of April, gun violence and the COVID-19 pandemic had claimed nearly the same number of lives in the West Side ZIP code. Eight men and one teenage boy had been shot and killed, while 11 others, mostly men, had suffered deaths blamed on the coronavirus.
A Chicago Tribune analysis of crime and COVID infection data by ZIP code over roughly a month showed the highest rates of infection are happening in communities that also have high rates of crime and violence, such as Garfield Park, Austin, West Englewood and Lawndale.
"It's prostitution. It's drugs. Gun violence, and it's the COVID-19," said West Garfield Park resident Sylvia Hardy, who over 28 years has lost all of her three sons to violence and, recently, a 15-year-old grandson, who was shot and killed in April.
"If that don't take out a community," she said, her voice trailing off. "I mean, you looking the devil in the eye when you see all this. A person don't have a chance."
The spread of the virus, of course, launched a sweeping public health response: Social distancing and stay-at-home requirements were imposed. Masks were distributed, along with public information flyers on how people could protect themselves.
Politicians, academics and experts describing violence as a preventable disease is hardly a new concept in Chicago, and perhaps to some the overlapping of ZIP codes was tragically predictable. But some are hopeful that the efforts to protect Chicago from a global pandemic can also spark a similar public health response in the city around violence.
"Chicago needs to take a public health approach to the problem of violent crime," former interim Police Superintendent Charlie Beck wrote last month, amid the COVID-19 emergency. "Just as we universally sought to halt the progression of COVID-19, the people of Chicago should take the same approach to ending the gunfire that plagues too many of its neighborhoods. Violence in Chicago is everyone's problem, just as COVID-19 is not just the concern of the elderly or the sick."
