CPD: More than 300 arrested in 3-day crackdown

August 26, 2012 (CHICAGO) -- Chicago Police arrested 300 people in a targeted drug operation in which several guns were recovered.

Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy thinks actions like this could reduce the number of shootings.

Over 100 guns were recovered as a result of a three-day long drug crackdown by the Chicago Police Department.

"It's a part and parcel of an overall balance reductions strategy," McCarthy said. "It was a little different change in tactics."

The crackdown came during another violent weekend in the city.

Seventeen-year-old Lucian Dreux was among nearly a half dozen people killed between late Friday afternoon and Sunday.

At least 16 others were wounded in attacks.

This latest enforcement effort spanned 10 police districts and several different department units, which conducted street level narcotics buy and bust operations on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in problems areas like Gresham's 6th District.

"Narcotics is not just an innocuous type of activity," said Police Chief Nick Roti. "It fuels street gangs, it's what they fight over most of the time, the distribution points of narcotics."

Police say they cleared the West Side corner of Laramie and Maypole in the 15th District, which was controlled by drug dealers, while making more than 300 operation-wide arrests.

More than 1,500 grams of pot, heroin, cocaine and crack cocaine was also taken off the streets.

And while police officials maintain gun violence revolves around the narcotics trade, community activist Andrew Holmes says conflicts break out between loosely organized gang factions and cliques over far less.

"Every shooting and killing out of here may not, and is not about, drugs, it's about some domestic," Holmes said. "Until we reach deep in the neighborhood and grab a hold someone who's willing to talk, they will give up fully the information about what happened," Holmes said.

The weekend narcotics crackdown ends just as police officials announce arrests in two longer drug investigations on the city's South Side.

Officers arrested 15-offenders in the Englewood and Wentworth neighborhoods, basically shutting down two gang controlled drug markets.

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