Chicago on pace to have its deadliest year in two decades

All Blacks loose forwards Jerome Kaino and Ardie Savea outside their team hotel in Chicago. The All Blacks play Ireland at Soldier Field, Chicago. Photo / New Zealand Herald by Brett Phibbs

The All Blacks are in Chicago during an extraordinary wave of violence, new statistics confirm.

Recent days have seen a wave of bloodshed that gave the city still more tragedy and, with it, further reminders of how staggering the violence has been this year.

Over the weekend, police say 18 people were killed, making it the deadliest weekend this year for Chicago, which hosts the All Blacks match against Ireland this weekend.

This violence pushed the city's homicide total north of 600 for the first time since 2003, a figure that comes with two full months left on the calendar, according to police statistics released today.

At its current pace, Chicago could see more than 730 homicides this year, which would be the city's highest death toll in nearly two decades.

There are only two American cities with bigger populations than Chicago - New York and Los Angeles - and even if you combine their homicide totals, the tally still lags behind the Windy City.

The weekend's toll included twin 17-year-old brothers fatally shot during a drive-by and an eighth-grader reportedly killed while helping his father move. Chicago had 78 murders in October alone, police say, a number that most major US cities nationwide did not reach through the entire first half of the year. San Antonio - which has 1.4 million residents, a little less than half of Chicago's population - had 70 murders during the first six months of 2016.

Chicago had more than 350 shootings in October, authorities said, and by month's end, the Chicago police said there have been about 3000 shootings resulting in more than 3600 shooting victims.