NATIONAL USA TODAY NEWSPAPER: At end of bloody year in Chicago, too few murders solved - It's not all the lawless Negroes murdering & shooting people...It's the police that is at fault....

CHICAGO — Just before Christmas, Tywone Lee dialed the Chicago Police Department detective charged with investigating the murder of her 18-year-old son, who was gunned down in July just blocks from their West Side home.

She’s called police more than 20 times since her child, Keyon Boyd, was fatally shot in the chest and two of his friends were wounded July 26 as they walked to play basketball at a nearby court in the city’s Austin neighborhood. Most of her attempts to get information about the unsolved case ended with her leaving messages that rarely were returned, she said.

On this day, she catches the detective, but receives no substantive information about the status of the investigation.

“There is just no accountability,” said a frustrated Lee after ending the call. “I understand they have a lot of cases, but this is what they are paid to do. They need to find and hold responsible whoever killed my son.”

Boyd was one of more than 750 murder victims killed in Chicago in 2016, which will end as the bloodiest year the city has seen since at least 1997, when 761 people were killed. The murder toll was up 58% as of Christmas Day, with the city tallying 275 more murders than the same time last year.

Nearly as unnerving as the number who have been killed in Chicago this year is how few of the assailants have been arrested.

The department’s murder clearance rate — the calculation of cases that end with an arrest or identification of a suspect who can’t be apprehended — has hovered at or below 30% for the past three years. The national clearance rate stood at 61.5% last year, while Chicago’s clearance rate was 25.6% last year, according to data compiled by the Virginia-based Murder Accountability Project.

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