Crime, shootings, and police killings - doesn't all of it matters

     I was horrified last week to hear that a 13 year old boy was shot and critically wounded in the 2100 block of Touhy Avenue in the West Ridge/West Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago where I grew up until the age of 12, just blocks from my childhood home.  That same weekend, I saw a news item that a very beloved middle school math teacher was killed near the Morse Avenue Red Line train station in the same Rogers Park neighborhood while she was walking with her husband.  At the same time, I had read an article saying that Republican were misrepresenting the crime rate in Chicago and blowing it out of proportion for political advantage. 

     According to the Washington Post, there have been 782 fatal police shootings this year already.  Broken down by race: 378 White, 183 African American, 150 Hispanic, 27 other, 44 unknown race.  By gender, it is 746 male, 35 female, and 1 unknown gender.  The way the media and certain celebrity elitists report it, I would think that these statistics would be very different. Compare those 782 fatal police shootings in the entire US to the 564 fatal homicide shootings in the city of Chicago so far this year.  To me, every life killed matters.  When I read an article about a police officer in Minnesota who had arrived in the United States as an immigrant from African, who killed an unarmed immigrant from Australia from the confines of his police squad car, when she had called the police for help in response to cries of distress on the street that she had heard, it shows how many of these situations can be very complicated and very messy. The family and friends and loved ones of this Australian woman still have not received any answers and to why this could have happened, even though it is now October and this homicide happened in July. I myself have been the victim or witness in some very violent crimes, though not homicides.  I saw someone shot point blank by a pistol to the head on the streets of the village where I lived as a missionary in Ecuador.  I was mugged with a knife to my throat on the streets of a busy city, where those who witnessed this crime taunted me and laughed at me, even though I had just seen my life flash before my eyes.  I have had an apartment broken into and robbed 5 different times, my house broken into once, and our parish offices broken into and robbed, even taking the chalice I use as a priest. Was I affected by those violent crimes - you better believe I was.  I just think that we can often misinterpret reality and statistics for our own personal agenda, making those statistics fit our agenda.  Why are we taking sides?  Shouldn't we all work together for a better neighborhood, a better community, a better world?