Delphine Cherry knows as well as anyone how intractable violent crime is in Chicago. In 1992, her teenage daughter was gunned down in one of the city’s tawniest neighbourhoods a bystander caught up in a gang shootout. Twenty years later in a suburb just south of the city, it claimed her son.
You don’t think it’s going to happen twice in your life, she said.
Chicago has been bracing for weeks for President Donald Trump’s promised deployment of National Guard troops to the nation’s third-largest city. Although Trump said the troops would help fight crime in a city he described as a hellhole, his administration has been tightlipped about the operation’s details, including when it would start, how long it would last, how many troops would be used and what role they would play in civilian law enforcement.
Trump has also veered back and forth on sending troops to Chicago at times insisting he would act unilaterally to deploy them and at other points suggesting he would rather send them
