Chicago’s surge in gun violence last year rocked the city and brought a lot of attention from politicians and the national news media, some of it not very nuanced. So this year, WBEZ reporters set out to cover shootings and homicides in a new way with a series of in-depth stories and profiles called Every Other Hour.
It’s called Every Other Hour because that’s about how often there was a shooting in Chicago in 2016.
12 a day.
84 a week.
More than 4,300 over the course of the year.
Who picks up a gun, and why?
That was the big question the series sought to answer. And our reporters tackled it in different ways. Some talked to shooting victims.
Others to law enforcement — and to the shooters themselves.
As a whole, the project tried to get beyond the headlines, into people’s lives, and toward possible solutions to a problem that only seemed to be getting worse.
Morning Shift talks to Natalie Moore, Chip Mitchell and Patrick Smith, three of the WBEZ reporters who were central to the Every Other Hour series.