Gun killings: Chicago and Philadelphia deadlier for young men than Afghan war, ... trends now
Young men in Chicago and Philadelphia's worst neighborhoods are more likely to be shot and killed than those who fought on the bloodiest front-lines in Afghanistan and Iraq, a new study shows.
Brandon del Pozo, a former New York City cop and now Brown University scholar, says gun deaths among young men in those city's ghettos are worse than seen by troops deployed in America's war on terror.
Del Pozo, who started out in law enforcement patrolling streets in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, called his research an 'urgent wake-up call' for tackling gun crime and murder rates in the grittiest cities.
His study comes as a 25-year shot and injured a security guard 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.
Researchers examined data from 2020 and 2021 in four major US cities, focussing on shootings involving nearly 130,000 men aged between 18 and 29 and compared them with combat-related deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan
'Working as a police officer, I witnessed the toll of gun violence, and how disruptive it was for families and communities,' del Pozo said.
'It stood out to me that the burden was not distributed evenly by geography or demographic. Some communities felt the brunt of gun violence much more acutely than others.'
According to del Pozo's study, which was published in JAMA Network Open, young men in Chicago's most violent ZIP code were more than three times as likely to be shot and killed than soldiers sent to Afghanistan.
Those in Philadelphia's most violent area, were nearly twice as likely to suffer such a fate.
The former lawman also studied Los Angeles and New York City, and found that young men in those city's worst areas were respectively 70 percent and 91 percent less likely to suffer gun deaths than Afghan war soldiers.
Chicago police investigate a gangland shooing on Chicago's South Side. The gun death rate for young men in the city's worst areas is more than three times higher than for soldiers sent to Afghanistan
Brandon del Pozo, a former New York City cop and now Brown University scholar, says the study is an 'urgent wake-up call' for tackling gun crime
His team probed data from 2020 and 2021 in those four cities, focussing on shootings involving nearly 130,000 men aged between 18 and 29.
They grouped them by ZIP code, so US Census data could be used to study demographics in those areas.
The research team, which also involved the University of Pennsylvania, compared those cities' gun violence data with combat-related deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan — from 2001 to 2014 in Afghanistan and 2003 to 2009 in Iraq.
Black and Hispanic men accounted for 96 percent of those shot and killed, and 97 percent of those injured in a shooting, noted del Pozo, an assistant professor of medicine at Brown University's Warren Alpert Medical School in Rhode Island.
