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

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.   

‘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.

‘We often hear opposing 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 homicides are greatly exaggerated and don’t require drastic action,’ del Pozo said.

‘We wanted to use data to explore these claims — and it turns out both are wrong. While most city residents are relatively safe from gun violence, the risks are more severe than war for some demographics.’

An American soldier investigates the scene of a suicide attack at the Afghan-Pakistan border in June 2014. Nearly 7,000 US service members were killed fighting in America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

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

The US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban after the 9/11 attacks, and staged a chaotic withdrawal last year. The US invaded Iraq in 2003 and pulled out in 2011, only for ISIS to launch an offensive that saw US forces redeployed.

Nearly 7,000 US service members were killed fighting in America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this number is dwarfed by the combined number of deaths of civilians, contractors, police, 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, and the rising rate of deaths saw a sharp uptick of 20 percent during the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers say.

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

Gun-related deaths started climbing steadily from 2005, but that upward trajectory has accelerated in recent years, including an uptick from 2019-2021, as Covid-19 led to lockdowns and economic turmoil.

Researchers built heat maps that showed how firearm deaths were clustered in the West of the country in the 1990s, but gradually spread across the nation, with noticeable spikes in southern states

‘Firearm fatalities accelerated dramatically during the Covid pandemic,’ said Eric Fleegler, a Harvard Medical School professor, a physician at Boston Children’s Hospital and co-author of the study.

‘Multiple potential factors have likely contributed to this, including severe economic distress, an erupting mental health crisis, and a significant uptick in the sale of firearms.’

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

Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the researchers built heat maps that showed how firearm deaths were clustered in the West of the country in the 1990s.

But the rate of firearm deaths gradually increased across the nation, with noticeable spikes in 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 fatalities that have ever occurred in the US’ in 2021.

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