Chicago City Wire

The astonishing findings of a 25-year study, recently published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), showed that 50 percent of city residents witnessed a shooting by the time they reached the age of 40.

Broken down by race: 56.34% of Black respondents witnessed a shooting; 55.75% of Hispanic respondents; 25.53% of White respondents.

The study, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, tracked over 2,000 Chicago residents for 25 years from the 1980s up to middle age.

Co-author of the study, Charles Lanfear, an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology, told Chicago City Wire in an email that “exposure was surprisingly high within the sample, but also not out-of-line with what has been seen in some other samples of children in other data sources and cities.”

“Most exposure occurred, of course, when children were coming of age in the late 1980s through mid-1990s when ages of high exposure risk (i.e., adolescence) aligned with high rates of gun violence, so this doesn't speak to the exposure of the current children of Chicago.”

On average, according to the study, the age for an individual to witness a shooting was 14 years old.

In addition, 7.47% of Black respondents reported being shot by age 40, as well as 7.05% of Hispanic respondents and 3.13% of White respondents.

Males were found five times more likely to be shot than females by age 40, according to the study.

When asked about researching the percentage of witnesses to gun violence in other cities, Lanfear said that the study is “not easily replicable in other cities as the data source.”

The project, he said, is a multimillion-dollar effort that has been running for more than 25 years.

“Our research on life course exposures to gun violence work was possible only due to having already followed a representative sample of Chicago's children for 25 years.”

Joseph Giacalone, an Adjunct in the Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration Department at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told Chicago City Wire that he would expect to see the same kinds of numbers in other large urban settings.

“Take NYC for instance, over 95% of shooting victims are Black or Hispanic,” Giacalone said. “The shootings are also heavily concentrated in certain blocks and neighborhoods.”

“A lot of politicians, academics, and police reformists,” he added, “like to discuss the disparity in policing and call it racist but never want to discuss the racial disparities in homicide victims, let alone put forth solutions to mitigate them. In a war between ideas, it’s the people in the middle that get killed.”