Child and Family
Dismantling families
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Parents struggle for housing security when children get into trouble.
Boystown brutality gets all the publicity
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The news: Englewood resident Rubin Robinson, a gay black man, was attacked July 3 by a group of black people in the predominantly white Boystown neighborhood. Behind the news: The stabbing in Boystown prompted significant media attention and backlash within the community. The incident prompted a community meeting, attracting 800 attendees, a YouTube video of the stabbing, which got more than 40,000 views as of Aug. 7, a Facebook page with 3,700 likes as of July 18 and more than a dozen stories in the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune alone within the first two weeks of the incident. But there were hundreds of other crimes that day of varying degrees of severity that didn’t garner the attention that the Boystown stabbing did.
Some areas see drop in crime
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The news: Crime in the city is down 7.1 percent in the first three months of this year. Behind the news: The most significant reductions took place in two notoriously high-crime districts. From January through March compared with the same period last year, District 7 on the city’s South Side saw a 17 percent drop in overall crime, while District 11 on the West Side experienced a 15 percent drop, according to Chicago Police Department data. But other areas of the city aren’t faring as well. Districts 2, 5, 12 and 20 all recorded rises in crime from last year, with District 12 on the West Side reporting the biggest increase at 10 percent.