Chicago: 'The police aren’t the ones out there doing it.'

Even with 600 more officers on the street, nearly as many people were shot in Chicago over the weekend as earlier this month, when a spike in violence prompted the boost in deployment.

At least 58 people were shot in the city from late Friday afternoon through early Monday, and seven of them were killed.

They included two boys, 16 and 17, found shot to death in a Far South Side field days after their mothers reported them missing; three men wounded during what witnesses said was a peace picnic at the Near North Side’s Seward Park; a woman and four men hit by gunfire hours after a Sunday afternoon softball game near a South Side grade school; and seven shot Friday evening in West Englewood, including a 3-year-old boy hit in the shin.

Two weekends ago, at least 74 people were shot. On that Sunday, Aug. 5, more people were shot in a single day since at least September 2011, when the Tribune began tracking every shooting in Chicago. At least 47 were hit by gunfire, 40 of them during a seven-hour period.

The bloodshed brought demands from community leaders for action, and the city responded by sending in more than 600 extra police to neighborhoods hardest hit by the violence.

A clearly frustrated police Superintendent Eddie Johnson acknowledged Monday that his department “can only do so much.”

“Crime isn’t just about what the police do,” he said at a news conference at police headquarters to talk about the weekend violence. “Crime is about what the criminals do."

“Let’s not forget the police aren’t the ones out there doing it. We can only do so much,” Johnson continued. “We cannot be on every street corner ... every moment of the day. We just can’t. That’s an impossibility. It’s unreasonable. There’s no police department in this country that can do that.”

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