AS has become the norm, I cannot go for a fortnight without writing something about gun violence in America.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Chicago’s 500th homicide of the year happened over Labour Day weekend.
That number carries a lot of weight for the city – not just in quantity, but in meaning: 2016 is now the deadliest year in two decades.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, September 6 2016, Chicago police superintendent, Eddie Johnson, said his department is doing all it can to combat violence rooted in ‘impoverished neighbourhoods’ where ‘people without hope do these kinds of things’.
Johnson pointed to increases in gun arrests this year over last year – and more than 6 000 illegal gun recoveries so far in 2016 – as evidence that officers are out on the streets, working.
He acknowledged the fallout from last year’s release of the Laquan McDonald video, and the amplified distrust between the police and African-American community, does not make it easy for his officers.
In late August, Governor Bruce Rauner approved a law that imposes a stiff penalty on anyone without a gun-owner identification card who brings a gun into the State of Illinois to sell.
That felony now carries a prison sentence of four to 20 years or up to 30 years for repeat offenders.
Before this new law was passed, gun owners caught for the first time without the proper ID were charged with a misdemeanour and got less than a year.
Repeat offenders would get up to five years.
There is a deeply rooted distrust of Chicago’s police force.
The city’s police department has been under review for months in the wake of high-profile officer-involved shootings, including that of Laquan McDonald.
An independent task force has accused the police department of institutional racism, saying officers ‘have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of colour’.
Homicides in Chicago this year have risen to levels not seen since the 1990s, when killings peaked at more than 900 annually.
The 92 homicides in August were the most the city had seen in a single month since July 1993 when 99 people were killed.
Homicides and shootings in Chicago continue to far outpace both New York and Los Angeles, both bigger cities.
According to official statistics through late August, the most recent publicly available, New York and Los Angeles had a combined 409 homicides, well below Chicago’s total.
The racial make-up of the city in 2010 was 32 percent black, 45,3 percent white (31,7 percent non-Hispanic white), five percent Asian and three percent from two or more races. 
In 2015, there were 399 homicides in the African-American community in the city, 80 percent of Chicago’s total.
There were 3 046 shootings.
Over 80 percent of the victims were African-Americans.
Forty-eight percent of African-American children under 17 years are living in poverty; 21 percent of all African-Americans, 16 years and older, are unemployed; 47 percent of African-American men aged 18 to 24 are unemployed or not in school and in 2014 the white-to-black earnings ratio was 1 to 1,4.
In 1980, it was 1 to 1,23.
In terms of development and progress, the black community is going backwards instead of forwards.
In May this year, The New York Times and the Kaiser Family Foundation published an opinion poll which was quite revealing for what it says about the very different experiences in Chicago of blacks and whites, who, because of largely decades-old patterns of segregation, largely inhabit separate sides of the city.
Whites and blacks offered bluntly different responses to many questions.
Sixty-three percent of blacks said they thought the biggest problem facing the city was crime, violence or gangs; just 35 percent of whites said the same (they are more likely to cite economic and budget issues).
Forty-six percent of blacks said they had made changes to their daily routine as a result of the recent rise in violent crime; only about half as many whites report having done so.
Twenty-three percent of blacks said they believe they have been denied housing they could afford because of their race.
Two percent of whites said the same.
Likewise, whites and blacks feel the children in their neighbourhoods have very different life prospects.
More than half of blacks say they believe it’s very likely a typical young person in their neighbourhood will go to jail.
Just one in 10 whites say the same.
The city’s gravest problems – violence, struggling schools and concentrated poverty – are disproportionately experienced by blacks. In fact, it’s possible to live in some North Side neighbourhoods and remain entirely untouched by them.
The difference between these two realities is the city’s biggest challenge yet.