Math Time!

CWB spent a bit of time in the weeds and come up with this humorous article about the obscurities in the City budget filings:

• Are missing women falling prey to a serial killer in Chicago? How many shell casings do Chicago police officers pick up in a year? If someone calls 311 but only speaks Yoruba, does the city have a translator to help them?

  Those are just a few of the intriguing questions that Chicago aldermen have asked city department heads during annual budget hearings in recent years. And all the answers can be found in memos the department leaders sent back to the City Council after doing their research.

  Many of the questions and answers are real yawners. Every once in a while, though, there are some gems. Here are a few of our favorites.

And they go through a couple of the amusing trivial BS that politicians then use in campaign ads and to show their voters that they're "keeping an eye on the details!" when they run for reelection.

But this was our favorite, and unfortunately, it happened during The Hiatus:

• As of October 2021, Chicago police officers had picked up 69,290 shell casings that year, an increase from 59,183 in 2020, the department said. For 2021, that breaks down to 303 shell casings per square mile or about 4.74 per block.

We want to have fun with this!

• If we project the 69,290 over 10 months in 2021, we can estimate that for the year, there were 80,835 shell casings recovered by CPD;
• That works out to 6,736 per month;
• 221 shell casings per day
• meaning that in Chicago, there are about 9 shots per hour, all year long

And that's just the RECOVERED shell casings. there have to be thousands more that get lost in the dirt, overgrown lots, sewers, etc. We have many follow-up questions:

• what's the breakdown by caliber?
  
• how do these recovered numbers compare to pre-Shotspotter years?
• what does this work out to in pounds of brass? nickel? aluminum?
• compare these recovered numbers to the numbers of gunshot woulds showing up in hospitals - what's the hit percentage? how many shots does it take to get a single fatality in Chicago?

That's a lot of math, but we'll take a guess that the hit percentage is measured in fractions of a single percentile and the number of bullets it takes to get a single murder is many many hundreds.