A wave of shootings across Detroit kicked off a tragic beginning to the New Year as police responded to six shootings on the first day of 2021, three of them fatal. A 31-year-old man involved in a dispute with a woman, a 27-year-old woman leaving a party, and an unknown man found lying dead with a gunshot wound were all shot and killed Friday as the city struggled with a surge in violent crime. Elsewhere across the country, police in Chicago reported 10 shootings and two murders over the holiday weekend and Milwaukee suffered six separate nonfatal shootings in the first hours of Friday morning. Violent crime is still down across the country relative to peaks in the 1990s, but murder rates in America were up nearly 15 percent in the first half of 2020, according to the FBI.
