Chicago’s murder rate has fallen – so why are dozens of people being killed and injured every weekend?

I’m done, I can’t do this anymore.” Those were the words of Guadalupe Cruz after seeing a young man, Josh, shot in front of her on his doorstep last November. Cruz, known as Lupe, had been coming to see Josh as part of her work on violence prevention in Chicago. She had known Josh since he was a boy, was close to his family.

Calling relatives to inform them of the murder was “the hardest call I’ve ever had to make”, Lupe says, pausing to gather her thoughts. She still feels a deep sense of hurt and loss over the killing, something that cannot be dulled by a decade of working for the group Cure Violence or having informally protected at-risk children for more than 20 years before that.

Stories about the tragedy that shootings bring have grown ever more frequent in the past couple of years – but it is the soul-crushing monotony of the situation in Chicago that is worthy of note. Last weekend, at least six people were killed and 22 were injured in shooting violence. The weekend before that three people were killed and more than 30 were wounded, including children. In Lupe’s neighbourhood of Little Village, a drive-by shooting left one dead and another person injured.